[Raion]

With the immediate problems of the forum upgrade out of the way, I was currently weighing options today about what to do about the wiki. 

Dokuwiki was a well-intentioned suggestion by a community member who saw how I was pulling my hair out regarding our old MediaWiki setup. However, in three areas it's been a downgrade:

1. User engagement went down the tubes. 
2. People who tried complained its syntax was too hard, and they missed the WYSIWYG Mediawiki features
3. Theming and look and feel have been sore points. I try to not make things look generic.

I am also not thrilled about the GPL licensing it and Mediawiki require. I'll explain this shortly. 

However, all this time was a solution sitting under my nose:

Tiki Groupware CMS, formerly TikiWiki. 

I had shied away because this is a very complex piece of software, on par with the likes of Horde (for those who've been around the e-mail block). 

Tiki is, like MyBB, LGPL. 

However, I found it's not so bad. It's far from perfect, but in about 5 hours I went from this:

   

to this

   

and finally, where I stopped for the night:

   

My goal is to not get an exact replica, but to get it close enough. For those wondering, I'm trying to merge our look and feel as much as possible. It's not feasible to bridge the user tables between the forums, wiki, silicon image, and external services like Gitea for IRIX CE, but we can at least get our theming for the core services more coherent. Tiki won't look exactly the same (I'm proud of how close the forum and front pages look together!) but it'll be recognizable. 

For those wondering, the process is all manual. I am going to move things over manually, as I did when i reconstructed the Nekochan Image archive. Tedious? yeah. Hard? not really?

You will need to sign up to use Tiki, but it isn't super painful, trust me. I will make sure it's ready to go when we finally move over. 

On licensing, yeah I know "Raion hates GPL" is pretty much a meme now. But I see it as a real thing that I can stand behind. LGPL addresses my main frustration, which is the virality clause. The idea that your software is so infectious that it turns other things GPL that are shipped with it... it's kinda gross? Gallery3 is GPL, MariaDB (the database server that runs most of our services) is GPL, and there's plenty of build and PHP extensions that are GPL. That doesn't bother me as much, simply because Gallery3 is the best we have for now. I'm not opposed to having something replace it down the line though!

I should note, I find it funny that a lot of web software is GPL,  and not Affero GPL. The latter closes what's commonly called the ASP loophole, which makes the license more in-step with GPL policies over a network. You can't close off your SAAS, moreorless. 

Once MyBB 1.9 is released, and we migrate to that, I plan to fork it. I'm more confident in PHP nowadays, so a customized fork of a modern forum that allows us to remove code we don't need, better utilize our interfaces and avoid the cancerous features introduced by Xenforo and VBulletin 5, the better. What I'm talking about is the replacement of PMs with "conversations" (hybrids between chats and PMs) and reactions and other anti-features. These are as annoying as Brokenstones/Gazelle style Reputation systems.  I've not decided on what that customized software will be, but it'll definitely be pretty nice. Maybe even will make it possible to do retro-styled forum sites easier, who knows? 

Anyways, that's all for now on technical shit. 

In other news...

User defaultrouteuk deserves a medal. He has been a bro. You won't be able to notice on the surface, but with his help we moved our file storage operations over to a much faster and smoother box. Additionally, we will be consolidating some services, like usftp, into this, and we'll also have UK and US IPs alike in the mix. This will hopefully, for non-forum services to start with, help you get your disc images and such faster!

On top of that, much cheaper. He's singlehandedly pushed our finances to where I'm not dumping in $40-80/mo to just keep all services lights on and reliable! He asked me to hold the thanks, so instead I'll make sure he's recognized!

[Raion]

Wiki is now live. I am going through links on the forum with a script to ensure we don't have dead links.

[Raion]

Most links checked out. There should be no further need of the old wiki, but I have backed up the data for safe keeping.

Edit: New accounts will need to be created. I did not attempt to migrate over user data.

[Raion]

I had a question posed to me just now I think is important:

Yes, the wiki has the ability to switch themes. No, I did not make a light version of the theme.