Wiki Cleanup

As we mentoined in the wiki rebuild and logo contest post. We are looking into rebuilding our wiki.
Part of this process is a clean-up some of the user database aswell.

That’s why we encourage you to create your user page on our wiki. Accounts who do not have a single page edit will be removed. Creation of your user page would be a good first edit. We don’t ask you to build the Eiffeltower. Just tell us something about yourself. How you found us, how you got into OTTD, or whatever you like.

Abandoned accounts without edits will be removed in early January, thus you have sufficient time to make your first edit 🙂

Logo Contest & Wiki rebuild

So remember how I kept saying, one day, I’ll just re-do the wiki from scratch someday?
Well, seems someday has happened. Granted, right now, it’s very early, and we’re currently just planning what and how to build up a new wiki.

Part of that will be building a LOT of templates to structure our wiki much better. We’re also planning to revert the skin back to a more standard look, to allow us to upgrade and add things much better, and as such, it’s finally time for a logo. Yes, we’ve been at this for… what? 5+ years? and still don’t have a proper formal logo.

This is where you lot come in, we’re holding a logo contest.
Submissions should be 135 x 135px and ideally have “#openttdcoop” somewhere.
Contest will run until February 29th.

Read the rest of this entry »

Wiki Image Reset

Today I deleted the complete wiki/images/thumb folder leading in complete removal of all thumbnails generated by the wiki.
The Reason
The thumbnail folder had an impressive size of 472 Megabyte! Most of the thumbnails were bigger than the original files. That’s not good for the visitors with low bandwidths, because they have to wait ages to load an image and not good for us because it uses a lot of our traffic and disk capacity.
The Solution
I changed the method of converting images, instead of converting them to 48bit or higher or whatever images, we now convert them to png 8bit images with:
$wgCustomConvertCommand = "/usr/bin/convert -resize %wx%h %s PNG8:%d";
The Disadvantages

  • This may cause trouble with cached pages, if you don’t see an image, please append ?action=purge to the URL.
  • Converting images takes more time due to higher compression
  • Pages with a lot of images could time out on the first request. Do a second one in this case.

If there occur any problems, please contact me.