WikiFur

A brief update: Russian furry editors have made significant progress since 2013, adding over 2,000 articles in three years. Поздравляю!

Meanwhile, the English WikiFur just topped 19,000 articles, with activity at ~30 edits/day. New pages are added roughly once a day - mostly people, as usual, but also new websites and events. Many of the latter are on the Furry Convention Map, which has grown to epic proportions.

We've had regular upgrades since our 2014 migration and MediaWiki refresh - we're now on MediaWiki 1.23.14, Apache 2.4.23, PHP 5.6.23 and MariaDB 10.1.14, sharing a quad-core Xeon E3 1225v2 with 16 GB RAM, 2x2TB drives, and a 100Mbps connection.

WikiFur remains well-read as we enter our twelfth year of operation, with over 200,000 monthly visits to our English edition, and 64,000 to the Russian version. Let's make it a baker's dozen, and keep the flame of furry knowledge alive!

WikiFur curator EarthFurst will be hosting a session introducing VancouFur 2016 attendees to the website on Saturday March 5, noon to 1PM.

While the panel is at an introductory level, any editors attending are welcome to drop by!

Going to ConFuzzled 2015? WikiFur will be there, sharing table 68 with Inkbunny, Flayrah, and Drawpile. Drop by for a chat - or collect your complimentary WikiFur contributor card or keychain carabiner, all the way from the USA. Supplies are extremely limited, so don't be late!

In honour of WikiFur's upcoming ninth anniversary, we're now on a shiny new server, with both new and upgraded software.

What this means:
* Faster loads, more readable diffs, high-DPI support, and various upgrades from MediaWiki 1.18-1.23. (1.18 - 1.19 - 1.20 - 1.21 - 1.22 - 1.23)
* New extensions and gadgets - most notably popups, reference tooltips, and lightboxed images (The maximum size is determined by your image size limit. We're skipping Wikipedia's new media viewer for now, in part because there's still kinks to work out.)
* A bunch of new skins, including Bento Fluid, Cavendish, Erudite, Foreground, and Nimbus. (I'm a fan of Modern with the "remove menus" gadget.)
* Lua scripting, useful for template imports from Wikipedia.
* Apache 2.4, MySQL 5.6, PHP 5.5, all on FreeBSD 10
* MediaWiki security updates until mid-2017, and improved HTTPS support.

Due to the scope of upgrades, timduru had to to keep the old server around for longer than other sites hosted on it; he's too polite to ask for money, but if you feel like helping out, I'm sure he'd appreciate it! (You can donate to our other costs there, too.)

---

While we're here, it's time to bring up a touchy issue - declining editing activity. While visitor counts are down only slightly - the English WikiFur gets half a million pageviews a month - there are just over one thousand edits, and 2/3 of these are from just two or three curators in any one month. While their resolute efforts are appreciated, this is not an ideal situation.

This decline is reflected on Wikipedia (and its WikiProject Furry). In part, it's good that that few feel the need to fix errors or improve coverage - but a lack of new, eager editors puts WikiFur at risk. The editors of today are the curators of tomorrow.

How can we fix this, and remain relevant to today's furry community?

• Technology may be part of the solution - the VisualEditor shows promise, though it's still working towards maturity.
  
• Part is culture: we need to be open to less-than-perfect edits (and editors); to convert good-faith contributions into acceptable content (throwing them out is rarely positive), and always explain clearly what we're doing and why.
  
• We need to think about whether we're delivering what our readers need, in the ways they want it. Several updates are targeted towards this (e.g. lightboxes, reference tooltips, popups), but we could all do more content-wise as well.

These are some big questions - but right now, what'd help most is a few hands to help keep WikiFur up to date. So if you're reading this and haven't edited recently, please drop by recent changes and the Community Central and see how you can contribute!

I'll be at Anthrocon next week; I hope to see some of you there. Remember, be bold!

Today WikiFur (and Flayrah) were down for roughly seven and a half hours due to a transient software fault (a stuck spinlock in APC). No data was lost or at risk, just access to it.

Apologies to anyone trying to use the sites during that time!

While i'm not going to argue with you putting up a page about me on the furwiki I do not approve of my personal accounts being placed on there or being banned for deleting said information.

As the person the page is about you either give me the right to my privacy or you delete my page entirely.

I do not care that there is controversy on my page but I would like you to respect my private life and not place my personal social media names on the page. If people cant find me by my company name or my fursona name then they dont need access to those social media outlets my name is connected to.

It's that time, again. Both WikiFur and its affiliated news service, Flayrah, have been nominated for the 2012 Ursa Major Awards.

Flayrah won last time, while WikiFur came second to dark horse candidate Equestria Daily - beating both FA and Inkbunny.

EQD is not in the running this year, and we have an excellent chance of winning both awards - so please vote! (While you're there, check out the other nominees, and those on the recommended list.)

Need some justification? WikiFur's reasons for winning are still valid, while Flayrah has doubled its output over the past year.

In other news, the Italian WikiFur has seen impressive growth - in part through a free-content partnership with Italian furry portal furrymania.it - with editing led by Valery91Thunder and Escofal. Italian is now the sixth fourth-largest edition of WikiFur, with over 250 articles on a variety of topics. Our English edition recently topped 16,500 articles (including over 9000 people), while Russian editors are approaching 3,000.

Greetings!

I'm working on a television show featuring FURRIES. I would love to talk to and meet some great local furries! Potentially we would bring you in for an on-camera interview for the show at our casting office in Encino next week.

If your interested please shoot me an email at tschermetzler@asylument.com.

Thanks!

When will all this sillines stop.

WikiFur, Flayrah and the Yerf Historical Archive are currently down due to a Distributed Denial of Service attack which started Friday evening U.S. time.

Our front-end cache is able to filter out most low-level attacks. However, the level of traffic (728 MBit/sec, about 2000 times what we typically serve, let alone receive) is such that our hosting provider has removed access to our server to protect its other customers, including timduru's sites.

This attack has not damaged the server or its data, which we have backups of, nor do we believe any user information has been accessed. We are working with our hosting provider to get the server back online as soon as possible.

Update: As of Monday morning, our hosting provider has restored service.