On 12-22-10, WiKirby experienced a server glitch. The glitch erased all of our changes over the course of 1 month. You can read the report I sent our hosting provider:
Customer Service-We're Uberpissed
When Mr. Moody informed me that we needed to upgrade our hosting plan from shared hosting to a node 4 VPS plan; the WiKirby staff and I interpreted it as an accomplishment. We were thrilled to have reached that point in our first year. The plan for our hosting budget had always been to upgrade incrementally to ensure we weren't under-served nor overpaying.
Our first month on VPS seemed to be off to a rocky start, as pages were loading extremely slowly or not at all. We convinced ourselves that the caching we enabled should ease this issue in time. Our focus became less on whimsical cosmetic improvements to the site and more on a goal to reach 600 articles before New Year's Day. As of 12-22-10, we were at 595. Then the glitch that took the website down occurred and during my review of the submitted technical tickets and responses; I noticed the issue still hasn't been clearly explained. All we know is that we didn't make the site crippling change in the cpanel.
Once the site came back online, all of the editor's work done since the move to the VPS plan has disappeared. The database seems to have been wiped to just before the move took place. So basically, I paid $47 for a month of work that we didn't even get to keep. Insulting to say the least. All previous times this was worked around by using our the database backup restore from our cron job. Immediately we attempted this and discovered that our cron job schedule was deleted from the cpanel, leaving us with absolutely no up-to-date backup. The technician handling the tickets I submitted seemed to either avoid admitting data was lost or was unable to grasp that my site has a permanent hole blown in it's history from 11-25-10 to 12-22-10, which is exactly our time on VPS.
One such edit lost in the time on TMD's VPS was done by a frequent WiKirby visitor. A young girl made a list of her favorite things in life. Much to our surprise, at #3 she listed WiKirby and this was the only website on her list. In my view, it isn't the customer (me), nor WiKirby staff that TMD failed, but the undemanding regular visitors that hold WiKirby in such a high regard. She clearly would not understand what is and isn't in our control and may believe we callously deleted her expressed feelings towards the site.
While I'm paying for the next month of service, out of inconvenience with the amount of time between the bill and time needed to move; I'm sure the WiKirby staff, editors, and visitors could agree while the latest server glitch wasn't the largest, it was the most devastating. We and our affiliated network of MediaWiki sites (http://niwanetwork.org/) may not see a future with TMD
Given that they've yet to explain how this happened, and seem to avoid acknowledging that data was lost, I'm forced to draw my own conclusions. I'm guessing this was the result of extreme ineptitude on their end, and not a deliberate design to sabotage our work. But it still hurts us as WiKirby's history is now missing a huge chunk!
We can turn this around, mind you, we can make it so that the missing piece is not the heart and spirit of the editors, but just some number of views, dates and times in the creation logs. The 70ish articles can be rebuilt. Many of them are temporarily existing in Google's cache. If anyone has any free time to find even one thing lost, and resubmit it to WiKirby, you have my appreciation. The casual reader or occasional wiki editor may not fully understand what a server glitch is and how that's out of our control. I fear they may believe we made the deletions or something. It's up to the NIWA elite to show WiKirby will still be vibrant.
Also, NWiki, Strategy Wiki, and Smash Wiki offer great potential for strong cross-wiki ties. We haven't been able to fully work as we were trying to get Kirby's Epic Yarn content covered. If any one of you can document one Kirby Game on NWiki and link to WiKirby, or even document one console and link to NWiki-You can help both of these wikis. Create a Strategy guide for your favorite Kirby level and link to WiKirby, or offer the link to levels covered on SW in WK articles. Implement SmashWiki links to indepth Smash Bros content in relevant pages on WiKirby. All of those things can help other Kirby fans find WiKirby and the associated wikis. Our staff team has primarily been me and Vellidragon so we haven't been able to do those things ourselves as much as we'd like.