Old Wiki Page Editing Cutoff

[messydesk]

As part of the migration of the wiki (everything on VAMworld but the messages), I will announce a last chance to edit pages here. This will probably be early August, but a specific date will be announced at least 1 week ahead of time.

After the cutoff date, I will set the wiki to read-only and take a snapshot of what's here so that I can then import it into the new wiki. Once the new wiki is fully assembled, I will open it up for edits by people who have signed up for an account on the new wiki. Note that it is a separate account from the message board, and there is no need to have a wiki account if you don't make edits or upload stuff.

Part of the migration will include resizing images to be no larger than 1100 pixels in their longer dimension and no more than 1.5 MB. This is to optimize the storage, the network traffic (with AWS we pay for both of these), and the responsiveness of the wiki. One of the casualties of this will be the very large, composite images, which will become rather narrow in order to fit the size restriction. I highly recommend against uploading these types of images, as long-term maintenance of a VAM page is much easier if the important images of a composite are uploaded individually, such that they can be easily replaced if needed in the future. It's also easier to avoid needless multiple images of the same feature (a recurring complaint of VW users) if composites aren't used.

There are a few other tasks I will be doing between now and when the new wiki is opened for editing. I will need to take include translation of some of the formatting strings that show up on some pages. I'll try to get them all, but since I'm automating this for over 8000 pages, some stuff will slip through. I will also have to make a few page templates, as they work differently with MediaWiki than with Wikispaces. There may also be a way for me to intercept uploads that are too big and resize them automatically rather than reject the upload, but I have to look into that.

[impairedsquirrel]

Not on topic, but, along the lines of an earlier VAMworld discussion, can we get a "What's My VAM Worth?" forum in this neighborhood?

[ChiefRet.]

I agree to a point.
Should this be public or private?

[ChiefRet.]

I'm sorry, but Ebay wants to know.

[vampicker]

It looks like the old home page is now no longer open for editing. I was wondering about doing the VAM of the Week for next week and it seems like its up in the air for now.

[messydesk]

I just unlocked the home page. I may have locked it when trying to disable posting to the message board. That setting was hidden somewhere else.

[vampicker]

Beautiful, thanks JB!

[crabscrape]

Gentlemen,

I am sure with the talent we have around here. Somebody will come up with something GOOD!!!

[messydesk]

The last date to update the wiki on the old VAMWorld will be August 4. I will be locking the wiki (all VAM pages, other pages) sometime on Sunday, August 5, at which point I will download everything, which will probably take most of a day. I will then spend a lot of time converting the downloaded pages and images to the format I need for the new wiki. When I'm sufficiently satisfied that this conversion works quite well (not perfectly, as there are 8000 pages to convert), I will upload everything to the new wiki, and any existing test pages on the new wiki with the same names as those being imported will be clobbered. I'm still figuring out how templates will work, but I expect that I'll handle that at the same time. I'm hoping that by the time I head out to the ANA show, the new VAMWorld wiki will be usable, and that I can get the vamworld.com domain transferred for both the wiki and the forum.

If you want to edit it, you will have to create an account on the Wiki, as it is separate from the message board. I highly recommend that you spend some time and effort learning about editing MediaWiki pages, since that's the platform being used. There is tons of online help for this and also MediaWiki test sandboxes you can play in, which I have mentioned earlier.
If you don't want to do edits, there will be no need to create another account. I will probably have the new wiki locked for edits until I'm fairly satisfied that I won't need to do large scale changes and re-import everything.

[ChiefRet.]

Do we need to delete or cancels our account on the old Wiki?
The reason I ask is they just charged me for another month.

[messydesk]

I'm unaware of anyone ever being charged to sign up to simply use Wikispaces. Be that as it may, accounts there will be useless when they go away.

[ChiefRet.]

From what I understand, I had to, to be able to post on the old site?
I will delete my account and see if that works.

[messydesk]

You had to have an account to post or edit, but you shouldn't have had to pay for it.

[messydesk]

The old VAMWorld wiki has been locked. No further editing will be possible there. I hope to have the new one up and running by August 15.

[PacificWR]

Thanks for the update.