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Dwarf Fortress Wiki:Improvement Drive

From Dwarf Fortress Wiki
Revision as of 14:06, 29 September 2009 by Briess (talk | contribs)
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Here's some information about the traffic on the wiki. How can we improve the site for players, both new and old? ( I will update these traffic information shots weekly)

  • Advertisements
    • No one likes advertisements, but they are a necessary evil. Hosting this wiki costs approximately $60 a month out of my own pocket, which is paid for by 6 ad clicks / day. Currently the average is 1 click / day. Not a huge deal if I loose money on this, though.
    • How can we improve placement / filtering so the ads are not as intrusive, yet we get 6 clicks per day so I'm not taking from my ramen budget?
  • New Player Experience
    • Perhaps the tutorials should be reworked a bit, and made more prominent on the main page. Agree / Disagree?
    • Should we include a link to Mayday's graphical compilation on the main page? The default tileset can be more than intimidating for some.
  • Overall Site Improvements
    • What should we improve?

**To increase the speed of page loads, I can migrate the database to PostgreSQL (this server setup has been optimized for Postgres previously, and not mySQL). However, this would require some downtime (between 0-3 hours, most likely). Thoughts? Migration will occur this weekend.

    • I moved this site from the original (vps) server it was hosted on due to PHP stack issues.
    • I have been thinking about updating the captcha plugin to recaptcha, and then re-enabling page edits for unregistered users. Thoughts?
    • There may be odd kinks to work out still on the website, as I do not program / have experience in PHP (Ruby on Rails is what I do my web programming in).


Server Information

  • Centos 5 LAMP stack
  • MediaWiki 1.15.1
  • PHP 5
  • memcached 512m daemon
  • 4 core 2.33ghz processor
  • 8g ram

This server is also the memcached server for my company's up and coming applications. These applications are using 6g of memcached space, leaving 1.5g available for apache and php processes.

Hosting cost for the server is $750 a month including my company's applications.

Recent Fixes

  • Favicon replaced. 23:16, 18 September 2009 (UTC)
  • Caching enabled. 09:11, 24 September 2009 (UTC)
  • Compression enabled. 09:11, 24 September 2009 (UTC)
  • Captcha plugin 'upgraded' to reCaptcha, which is a stronger captcha than what we were using. 01:46, 27 September 2009 (UTC)
  • Anonymous user edits enabled - we'll see how this goes. 01:46, 27 September 2009 (UTC)
  • We have block templates, woohoo! 10:28, 28 September 2009 (UTC)
  • SVG images are now enabled. Caveat: the on the fly svg -> png converter is stupid when it comes to transparent backgrounds.10:34, 28 September 2009 (UTC)