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Comment by BugsJustFindMe | Hacker News Reader

> ...long term sustainability problems, financial situation...

Weird, because https://meta.miraheze.org/wiki/Finance says they have more money right now than they had at the start of the year and twice as much as they had the same time last year.

> Owen and Alexander are fully committed to seeing the sustained growth of Miraheze

> Compared to where we were before 2019, Miraheze is in a much better financial position, has drastically improved its legal standing and compliance and has taken strides to improve the technological stack behind the project through the right levels of investment being open for technical volunteers to harness.

So, which is it? Are you shutting down or fully committed to sustained growth? Are you now unsustainable or better financially than ever before?

Nothing about this announcement makes sense to an outside observer who has no idea what "taking into account recent events" means.

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My impression from reading their Discord server yesterday is this:

- Volunteers from Miraheze planned to create a paid wiki hosting service to supplement Miraheze called WikiForge

- Several of those volunteers left Miraheze to start a free wiki host called WikiTide

- The remaining volunteers were burnt out already and decided to call it quits

- There are some talks of handing off Miraheze to another group of volunteers

FWIW I had a horrible experience using Miraheze last year:

- September: I created my wiki

- November: Miraheze had an error with a drive and over 25% of their wikis were lost. It took them weeks to admit the extent of this error and that they had no plans to use a professional recovery service

- Early December: I recreated my wiki and rewrote it (250+ articles)

- Late December: Miraheze recovered the back-ups they thought they had lost and said they would merge the new and old versions of recreated wikis. Somehow, due to 'someone unplugging a hard drive', they lost all of the content I'd written since November.

I've since learned my lesson about making local back ups, but come on. It was clear there had been tons of technical and communication problems for a long time.

Here's something of a summary, with links, of the more admin-drama angle: https://meta.miraheze.org/wiki/User_talk:Raidarr#c-Dmehus-20...

Particularly:

> earlier today Owen had assigned himself checkuser and suppressor rights for "auditing use of permissions" and left Raidarr a talk page message regarding an important email; sometime after that, Raidarr removed all advanced user rights from every wiki in which he held them before removing his local Steward group and making the log summary you're inquiring about. I assume it was the email or maybe a resulting conversation that caused Raidarr to resign; however, this is just speculation

And this specific Discord conversation: https://discord.com/channels/407504499280707585/615786602454...

Which help in translating these otherwise cryptic board minutes: https://meta.miraheze.org/wiki/Board/Policies/20230607-Minut...

in which the dissolution is discussed as an alternative to training volunteers on legal compliance with the UK Data Protection Act:

> OB clarified both proposals are mandatory under Information Commissioner’s Office advice – we need to ensure we train people appropriate and audit their access and usage of personal information inline with Data Protection Act 2018.

> TH raised a counter proposal of dissolution of the company.

My wiki also got affected by the harddrive. They send out a message with everything they knew pretty much immediately even to people not affected by the error and continued to update as they learned more. Not sure why you seem to think it took "weeks". For a volunteer-run service they've actually been quite on top of it and compassionate in my experience

You're right, it was 10 days, not quite weeks. It's not important but here are some of the miscommunications and apologies:

November 18: "The cloud server which hosts one of our database, db141, experienced a disk issue. As a result, a small number of wikis hosted on db141 are unavailable. [...] While cloud14 has been reinstalled, we will have to send the affected disks to professional data recovery. The earliest ETA for having wikis restored is potentially early next week. [...] Our number #1 goal is to restore the data on the disks affected so that wikis are restored versus using a backup which could be various days old"

November 24: An update to the situation was embedded in an unnecessary meeting on Discord: "Our Miraheze Meeting is starting now! Join us while we talk about everything Miraheze, such as recent policy proposals and we'll be providing an update on the db141 issue We'll answer any questions you have and will listen to any comments or concerns."

November 28: "I understand the frustration, and we have not yet given up hope on data recovery, so you can still wait if that is your choice. But I also don't want to give people any false hope. It is not looking super great for data recovery. I won't completely rule it out yet, and I can't say anything definitively. Venues will be opened shortly for requesting that wikis be recreated from scratch (with images at least still intact) if that is your wish [...] in the recent Miraheze Meeting it has been brought up that our communication has been less than ideal, and some feel some questions have been dodged and/or ignored. I have gone back and looked at our responses to some questions, and I can see how this could be assumed [...] I would like to clear one thing up now. Something that seems to keep being brought up is that we sent the drives to a data recovery service. This was not true [...] Owen currently has the drives and has for a few days. They are not at a data recovery service. This was due to some internal miscommunication within SRE, and is something that is being addressed [...] Once again we apologise for this miscommunication and we are working to resolve our internal communication problems [...] Indeed, over the last few days, it would appear that information was not properly being relayed within our own team which led to some breakdowns in communication. Clearly, different members had different insights and views on certain topics. This has led to a strain in communications and we are working to rectify that."

I don't think it was ever explained how the data was recovered.

My guess is that they used some of the XML dumps we of WikiTeam keep at https://archive.org/details/wikiteam , that not everyone at Miraheze was necessarily aware of.

Oh man, thanks for providing those wikiteam tools, they’ve been a huge help in a large fork off of fandom!

Do they have the private wikis too?

It was your bog-standard disk crash as I understand it. Pros were (eventually) brought in for data recovery. But I also understand the backup for the wikis on that server (like mine, one of the dead ones) was on the same server, which doesn't sound like a very good plan. If a backup was stored elsewhere, the dead wikis would have been restored in a very short time. Lesson learned, I hope.

I got most all of my data restored, but there was a temporary problem of deleting and replacing files that the server programming thought still existed. That was fixed quickly.

One job! This sounds like an adversarial attack against those who would host wikis on their site.

There's some further context at https://meta.miraheze.org/wiki/Community_noticeboard#Stateme... -- specifically:

> To clarify a bit on the reason behind this choice, the technical team behind Miraheze is currently 3 people (5 if you include two unprocessed resignations). Two of those three people (myself include) are currently burned out on the project and wish to step away.

There's also some discussion of possibly handing over the project.

Also seems to tie together with the last bullets on these minutes: https://meta.miraheze.org/wiki/Board/Policies/20230607-Minut...

I had figured it was not exactly technical burnout in running Mediawiki installs but regulatory burnout in following Euro GDPR/cookie banner/bullshit-of-the-now requirements. Some of them are easy but the rest phase in once you reach a certain scale of users (which it sounds like they probably have).

It clearly says technical burnout. Why do you have to blame GDPR? If anything it was the best thing to happen to the open internet

Yeah, speaking as a European tech lead; GDPR was a pain in the butt a few years ago when it was introduced - and all client websites had to be retroactively fitted with cookie systems, routines had to be implemented, stuff had to be learned, etc.

Once sites are planned with it in mind from the get go it's really no big deal, and huge for the end user.

For a wiki farm like Miraheze, GDPR/CCPA/etc compliance is fairly easy. MediaWiki collects fairly little personal data about users, and there are well-defined methods for the site operator to export or delete that data if a user requests that they do so.

Besides, that all kicked in years ago. It's not a new concern.

Cookies were regulated by the ePrivacy directive back in 2009. The case raised above is about someone who had access to see the users' IP address. Handling training and authorisations for people with access to personal data is an ongoing job, not something you do once and forget.

Certainly it is hard to make it gel on the money side.

From their frontpage:

> If 550 of Miraheze's 300,000+ users gave only £12 (16.35 USD) once a year, Miraheze would exceed its budget requirements.

So not for want of £6,600 / year, presumably?

Labour's of love like this can just burn you out. Building the right sustaining community is hard, but it also seems like they're too big to just fizzle out like this? A shame.

Yeah what is up with that...

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