KeenWiki on a new server

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Malvineous
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KeenWiki on a new server

Post by Malvineous »

Hi all,

Just a heads up after a two year hiatus I have finally finished moving the KeenWiki over to a new server. If you notice any problems please let me know. All the old links should continue to work and will just quietly forward you on to the new server, but from now on you should use links starting with https://keenwiki.shikadi.net/ rather than the old http://www.shikadi.net/keenwiki/

The change in domain may mean your browser forgets your password so hopefully everyone remembers theirs. I get the occasional bounce from someone who has forgotten their password and tried to reset it, but they aren't using that e-mail address any longer either, so probably a good opportunity to make sure the e-mail address in your KeenWiki user profile is current.

For anyone interested in the technical detail the server has been moved from Linode over to Amazon AWS, as it seems to perform a bit better there and is a bit easier to maintain. It's now hosted in a Docker container running on Amazon ECS so I'm hoping that will make it easier to do future MediaWiki upgrades.
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Re: KeenWiki on a new server

Post by Quillax »

Whoa, it looks the voting system has finally been fixed! Woohoo! :D

I noticed that the view counts found in the bottom of each page have been taken away. Is that because of the server change? If so, is there is a way to bring them back? I always thought they were neat.
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Re: KeenWiki on a new server

Post by Nisaba »

That's great news!
I think I can say on behalf of the community that we are all very grateful to have you as a host for the KeenWiki.
This website is one of, if no the most important source of information for the community, and it is formidable that this service has been running stably and reliably for so many years. Thanks so much for all your time and effort!
out now (link) : Image
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Re: KeenWiki on a new server

Post by TheBigV »

proYorp mentioned to me that some mod download links on KeenWiki are broken. We first thought that it was the URLs that started with "www.shikadi.net/wiki/files/Mods/" instead of "files.shikadi.net/keenwiki/mods/" but after closer examination, I found that it's actually just downloads with the "/mods/" part of the URL being capitalized regardless of the prefix. It seems as if something on the server needs to be fixed so that it's not case-sensitive.

Also, since KeenWiki's move, it seems to be missing some formatting code, because it's taking the brackets in the patches literally instead of making it change the coloring.
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Malvineous
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Re: KeenWiki on a new server

Post by Malvineous »

Thanks for your kind words!

I hadn't touched the voting system but it would've been upgraded to the latest version so that's good to know it works now. I think the latest version of MediaWiki removes page counts because they aren't very accurate. Most sites run caching servers in front of the web servers so the value doesn't get incremented on each visit anyway. Having it there increases server load quite a bit so I imagine that's why they removed it.

It looks like the redirect on the download links stopped working when I used the Amazon CloudFront service to enable HTTPS. It seems this sends requests direct to the S3 bucket for files.shikadi.net (not via HTTP), so the HTTP redirects set on the bucket are ignored. There doesn't seem to be an easy way to solve this as most web servers can't be made case-insensitive, so I have done a bulk update on the mod pages to change the download URL to the working version. If you spot any more broken URLs that follow a pattern like this let me know and I will update them too.

Thanks for pointing out the formatting issue with the patches, I hadn't considered that. The old syntax highlighting code is no longer compatible with the new MediaWiki version so I had to replace it with a more widely used syntax highlighter, but evidently that doesn't support the brackets. I will have a think about how to handle this, but I'm not sure it will be an easy solution.
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Re: KeenWiki on a new server

Post by proYorp »

The mod downloads seem to be working now! I had to clear my browser cache for the new URLs to show up.

One other thing I noticed: like a month or so ago when I happened to end up on a dead link it took me to a cool-looking random ASCII 404 error, but since discovering this widespread download issue, broken links just go to some kind of XML error.

For example: http://files.shikadi.net/keenwiki/mods/fakemodlink
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Malvineous
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Re: KeenWiki on a new server

Post by Malvineous »

Thanks for confirming! I forgot about the custom error page, I've set that up again now too. The source code for it is on GitHub.
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Re: KeenWiki on a new server

Post by Quillax »

Whoa, that's a custom error page!? All this time, I figured that's what my browser pulls up when you access a broken link to a .zip file. That's really cool, Malv! It really fits KeenWiki!
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Malvineous
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Re: KeenWiki on a new server

Post by Malvineous »

Haha thanks, it's supposed to mimic what could sometimes happen under DOS when a program crashed. It would occasionally write random data into the memory used for what was shown on the screen so you'd get random characters of random colours all over the screen and some of them would blink. You knew when you saw that on the screen you'd be reaching for the reset button...
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Re: KeenWiki on a new server

Post by Quillax »

You're welcome! Ha ha, that's very interesting information!
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Re: KeenWiki on a new server

Post by proYorp »

What is going on with KeenWiki right now? It looks like the last day or two a bunch of spambots joined (which I haven't seen happen on KeenWiki before). They're all called "Anonymous" now, but yesterday when I looked there were several accounts with names that sounded like human first and last names (does anyone else notice that the vast majority of accounts with human-sounding names seem to be spambots? :confused ).

Most importantly -- all the mod pages are broken! Every mod page I've tried to look at in the last day gives some hash, a timestamp, and an error:
Image



P.S. gonna quote myself here since this is related to KeenWiki:
proYorp wrote: Mon Jun 07, 2021 9:20 Speaking of kids playing mods, every so often I think KeenWiki should have a content rating system of some kind. Some of those mods get pretty dark, or explicit. It's especially relevant to me since I have experience having to check and filter them for younger siblings and strict rules.
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Re: KeenWiki on a new server

Post by Lower IQ than 314 »

I noticed that database error thing, too. It's been a problem since last Friday. I figured it was something that would've been fixed pretty easily, so I didn't bring it up here, but it sounds like it's a bigger deal than I thought.

EDIT: The errors are fixed now.
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Re: KeenWiki on a new server

Post by Malvineous »

Sorry all, Grandy02 sent me an e-mail to let me know of the database error. I'm not sure why that happened, but when I did the last MediaWiki upgrade a couple of weeks ago, the way some permissions worked was changed, and the sign-up page was no longer blocked. Normally it's blocked to force people into using the registration page which blocks 99% of spambots, but the change opened it up again so spambots could sign up without approval. When I realised (after seeing all the spam account appear) I upgraded the MediaWiki extensions to fix this, but for some reason that seemed to cause a database change that the Semantic MediaWiki extension didn't like, causing the error message. I re-ran the post-upgrade script that's supposed to ensure the database tables are all up to date, and this fixed the database error. I'm still not sure why it happened as I didn't change the MediaWiki or SMW versions, but the Docker image did get rebuilt when I did the deploy so something must've changed in there, maybe the PHP version or something.

Either way it should be fixed now, at least until the next upgrade! Luckily the spambots were unable to make any edits (although two accounts did try), because of the CAPTCHA that comes up when you add a link to an external site. Seems they hadn't accounted for that so the edit was never saved. If they'd tried to make an edit without including a link to an external site it would've been saved.

I used an extension to "delete" the spambot accounts, which works by changing them to an 'Anonymous' user (since it is very difficult to delete users in MediaWiki if they've made edits which people have then reverted, because you can't delete a random edit without breaking every edit that came after it). The Anonymous user doesn't really exist, it's just a placeholder for these deleted spambot accounts. Anywhere the accounts did appear, they would've been replaced by Anonymous (which is why it now looks like Anonymous signed up for a new account a bunch of times).

If you do see any outages like this in future, send an e-mail to malvineous@shikadi.net with "KeenWiki" somewhere in the subject as that's the quickest way to alert me to the issue.
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