News:English WikiFur moved to en.wikifur.com
- The English WikiFur has moved to a high-bandwidth server hosted by French WikiFur administrator Timduru
- All articles and image data have been transferred; you must login to migrate your account
- The new site should be faster, adds several useful features, and eliminates the ad column
- You can help by changing existing WikiFur links to use
en.wikifur.com, and by creating new ones
- Why did WikiFur move?
Our prior host, Wikia, is a for-profit company funded by venture capital. They have been able to expand rapidly as a result, and provide both technical and community support. This has usually been beneficial to WikiFur.
However, there comes a time when every business has to start making money. To increase revenue, Wikia applied new adverts which intrude into the content area, pushing aside existing content. We believe this significantly detracts from the design of these pages. To date, WikiFur readers have been spared the worst of these - see Wookieepedia (without an ad-blocker) for an example of what it would be like.
Wikia also imposed major changes to the user interfaces of hosted wikis, in a deliberate trend towards a branded look. They wish to be seen as an integral part of the site, rather than the providers of a hosting service to separate communities.
The changes mean that Wikia's service no longer met our needs, so we decided to part company.
- Where has the English WikiFur moved to?
The English WikiFur is now hosted on a high-bandwidth server offered by French WikiFur administrator Timduru.
This server is currently used to stream the Funday PawPet Show and FursuitTV. It also hosts a variety of fursuit and animal-related websites and galleries, including WikiFur's other language projects. Its resources (network bandwidth, CPU time, memory and storage) are not taxed by its current operations; there is plenty for the English WikiFur even in the middle of its streaming duties.
(For geeks: The server is a Conroe 3040 dual-core system with 4GB RAM, 1TB+500GB+250GB disks, a 40Mbit/sec+ transfer rate and a 3TB/month maximum bandwidth usage, of which about half is currently available. It runs FreeBSD 7.1, and is hosted by ThePlanet in Austin, Texas.)
Several other options were considered, including commercial shared web hosting and virtual machines. The use of an existing dedicated server under the control of a WikiFur administrator won out, for reasons of easy administration, features, cost, and potential for future expansion.
- How does this affect me?
Hopefully, not much! We've tried to make the switch as smooth as possible.
You should be able to login with your existing username and password, and all of your preferences will be imported. Note that email-based features will not work until you do this.
Unfortunately, we were not able to agree on terms for a redirect, so you'll have to change your bookmarks. On the plus side, the ad column to the right will be gone for the foresseable future.
WikiFur should feel snappier than before, particularly when editing. Our prior hosting was hardly slow, but our new server has plenty of spare capacity, and excellent connectivity. This means we can add things that might once have been infeasible. There are already several new features.
Our priority has been to get an up-to-date version of WikiFur online and editable. The site might go down for short periods for upgrades or other modifications, especially within the first few weeks. However, most potential issues have been solved through testing over the last year.
- What about furry.wikia.com?
Wikia is legally able to host the text of furry.wikia.com, using a different name for the site. We've arranged for them to close the site instead, which has now occurred.
If you've linked to WikiFur from a website or profile, please change your links to use the domain name en.wikifur.com immediately, as otherwise they will break. If you were just linking to our front page, try linking wikifur.com instead.
- I want to help . . .
The best way to help is to edit WikiFur. We can always do with new contributors - and we'd be glad to see some old ones drop by, too! There's plenty of articles to improve, and the growth of the fandom produces new topics every day.
The next best way is to promote WikiFur. If you find the site useful, add a link to wikifur.com. If you have a forum or journal, drop a note on there about our new home. The more furs who use and edit WikiFur, the more use it'll be.
Lastly, there's money. Timduru's offer of hosting was made without strings. However, he faces significant hosting costs (around $2000-3000 a year, albeit not just for WikiFur), and as he's helped setup our new site, we'd like to help cover them. If you feel like expressing your own thanks in cash, I'm sure he'd appreciate it. Just don't send us your retirement money. :-)
If you donate to Timduru on WikiFur's behalf, please indicate this in the optional note field on the second page of the donation, and forward a copy of your donation notification (along with your fan name) to GreenReaper so that it may be properly recorded in our ledger and on our supporters page.
Related news[edit]
- WikiFur moves languages to new server (June 8, 2009)
- WikiFur reaches 10,000 articles; adds portal to highlight multilingual efforts (October 13, 2008)