Pin Eight:Site news

2016
Want to make sure snoopers don't accidentally see your password? Starting 12-22, Pin Eight offers experimental opt-in HSTS, which sets a flag in your browser to automatically translate  URLs to use   for the next month. Subdomains are not included yet. Try it now: Enable HSTS

As of 12-02, our domain-validated TLS certificate is through SSLs.com by NameCheap, a Comodo reseller. I didn't go with Let's Encrypt because I felt not having to log in to WebFaction's control panel and upload a renewed certificate 5 times a year was worth $5 a year. At least it's an improvement from WebFaction's old certificate installation method, which required filing a support ticket.

This weekend, Saturday 06-11 through Sunday 06-12, MediaWiki may be upgraded to version 1.26. Off-and-on wiki downtime may be expected during this period.

2015
The TextExtracts and TwitterCards extensions were installed on 2015-06-08. These extensions generates an Open Graph description and a Twitter summary card for each page from the first words on the page. You may want to exclude text from this description, such as a disambiguation link or a quotation. To do so, wrap it in  or.

There is a known problem reaching Pin Eight with Firefox 37, which entered the release channel on 2015-04-04. StartSSL is having OCSP issues reported by more than one customer. (This cleared up after a day.)

As of 2015-01-03, we are now running MediaWiki 1.24. One new "feature" in 1.24 is that by default, you'll follow edits to every page you edit. Registered users may want to change their Special:Preferences to disable this behavior. Let us know if anything else breaks.

Happy New Year! It took a few months, but as of 2015-01-02, the interwiki prefix "trope:" is no longer in use. It's been changed to point at All The Tropes, the free literary analysis wiki. I also plan to upgrade MediaWiki this month.

2012
On 2012-12-05, Pin Eight moved to WebFaction. Some services are running on Go Daddy; those will be moved over the course of the next week. MediaWiki has been upgraded to 1.20.2.

And as of 2012-06-26, we are running MediaWiki 1.18.4. I decided not to install MediaWiki 1.19 right away because mediawikiwiki:Special:ExtensionDistributor is broken after Wikimedia moved MediaWiki's repository from Subversion to Git. A day later, I discovered that the version of ConfirmEdit distributed with MW 1.18 was broken. I applied the fix seen here and all appears well so far.

The second upgrade out of three, a dump-and-restore into MySQL 5, happened on 2012-05-05. Editing was shut down for about a half hour.

As of 2012-05-03, Pin Eight has been upgraded to a hosting plan including a shell account. Unfortunately, a side effect of this migration was a rollback that lost about a day of edits. For the next two planned upgrades, including an upgrade to MySQL 5 followed by an upgrade to MediaWiki 1.19, I will make sure to make the wiki read-only during the transition so that nothing is lost.

To stem bot registrations, as of 2012-04-26, reCAPTCHA is replaced with QuestyCaptcha, which deals trivia problems related to literature that I've read. Each question links to a page with the answer on it, a page that generic spambots and non-English-speaking members of CAPTCHA solving farms in developing countries probably won't be able to parse. So far, I've added fewer than a dozen questions, which shouldn't hold up against a targeted attack like the sort of attacks a huge site like Wikipedia gets, but I have an inkling that these attacks really aren't targeted.

2011
There was a problem with determining autoconfirmed status of a user account that was fixed in the middle of 2011-08. Main namespace spam should be slightly less common, except for the few spambots that know how to confirm e-mail addresses or create sleeper accounts.

Sometime in 2011-05, we installed an ABUSE filter to evaluate actions by users, such as edits. Learn more at Pin Eight:ABUSE filter. Also more bad news about SVG support on Go Daddy:  doesn't work at all.

2010
As of 2010-10-13, SVG thumbnailing (the process to convert SVG to PNG so that IE can view pages that use SVG) is kinda-sorta working. But the rsvg version on Go Daddy's servers is still nowhere near perfect; this image looks much better when displayed natively in Firefox than it does with rsvg. There's also bad news: we got our first link spammer.

As of 2010-10-12, Cite.php has been installed. Editors can now use  and   as on Wikipedia. In addition, I have enabled .ogg uploads and turned off reCAPTCHA for emailconfirmed users.