Forum:Board Meeting - April 11th, 2020

Forums: Index > Board Meeting - April 11th, 2020

This page or section is an archive. Please do not edit the contents of this page. This thread was archived on 16 July 2020 by Elessar2.

General Meeting Minutes April 12

Hello wikians, the board had its second meeting of the year on April 11th at 17:00pm UTC and ran for almost exactly 2 and a half hours. Topics discussed at the meeting included wiki retrospectives since the last meeting, COVID-19 effects and concerns and Site Stability. We had full attendance from all Board members. There were no resolutions presented or passed at this meeting.

RuneScape Wiki Retrospective

Archaeology was a huge in-game update for RuneScape, the first few months of the year were relatively quiet update-wise however. Archaeology was a huge success for RSW as a whole and was made significantly easier thanks to prep work from some of the Admins based on information provided by Jagex.

Archaeology content itself was great for the Wiki in the way of mysteries and the plethora of items, location and caches players needed to research to effectively train the Skill and partnership with the Archaeology Discord is in the works and is going well for fleshing out and adding some specialist information to strategy and main articles to help make them as thorough as possible.

RSW has seen a 7 and a half year traffic high due to Archaeology. There are more registered users, more 10+ edits a month users, more 100+ edits a month users; things are definitely going well. Archaeology's release was also surprisingly good timing due to COVID-19 in addition to the quality/success of the update itself which likely contributed to the increased pageview numbers we see below:

The Social Feed has also been implemented since the last meeting, aiming to collate relevant news and posts from Jagex’s numerous social media outlets in one place for players. The project was headed by Admins Star, Merds, Jayden and Elessar and has seen resounding success in terms of usage and community perception. Below is a graph of Social Feed clicks by link type:

For context below is a graph of interactions with the other widget added a few months ago, the Events Interface:

Keep in mind however that these numbers are users that do not use Ad Blocking software and that real-world usage is likely 1.4 to 1.6 times higher than the numbers listed here.

The API backend for the Social Feed is very easily translatable to OSW, the only thing missing from adding it straight to OSW are Social Curators to actually add the News objects so watch this space!

Doogle Maps have also been launched for RSW with a huge number of NPC Map images being replaced with Mapframes since its rollout, with other map images being transitioned to frames over the next few months. Special shoutout to User:Mejrs for their monstrous map work.

Elessar2 also recently proposed and received community approval for working on adding portables locations to the Events interface based on the crowdsourced data from Portables FC so expect to see this information soon.

RSW has seen 3 RfA’s since the last meeting, two of which were unsuccessful: Shaunypwns and Dalek Sec, and one currently in-progress: Habblet. We also welcome RobbotRS to the Events Team and many, many users to the Wikian Title; Thank you to IsobelJ for the continuous talent scouting.

OldSchool Wiki Retrospective

OSW has also seen an uptick in users/pageviews due to COVID-19 as well as the Easter and April Fools events. The on-wiki April Fools event was a huge success and saw approximately 250,000 pageviews over the related articles (Wise Old Man, etc.) for the duration and numerous new registered Users. Was less of a hit on Reddit than expected but was popular on Twitter and Jmod Social Media.

We welcome several new OSW Admins to the team: Towelcat, Jeljo, Legaia2Pla and a returning Admin, Brok Enwings. OSWF tasks have been a bit thin in the past 3 months, we’ve had good engagement with them but inconsistent in terms of how often they’re run, but we’re likely to see an uptick in OSWF tasks due to the new Admins.

OSW also now has access to a 3D model renderer thanks to the Runelite team. What’s particularly neat about this fact is that we can now render from old caches as well, so have images for old events/etc. that we missed out on and could never render before.

The DPS Calculator is currently in hiatus due to the developer’s (Gau Cho) workload--He’s a COVID-19 Champion okay--but is likely to make an appearance later this year. A huge amount of work has been done on it so far but the finishing touches are difficult to implement as the remaining efforts focus on niche mechanics and processes. Hard data is required to work out some of the special attack/misc mechanic documentation which is out of scope for just one person. Tentative plans to remedy this include making a public post on social media for more information/contributions or alternatively reaching out to the OldSchool Gear Discord for help.

Talks of in-game character and Wiki linking/information sharing are still in the works, likely going to have to sidestep any Jagex implementations as little desire from them due to being a significant level of work to expose certain account values in a way usable for the Wiki. We hope that we may be able to use 3rd Party Clients to export player varbits to a file of some kind which can then be imported to a Wiki account or non-registered userstorage for use in Quest Tracking, Calculator usage, etc.

Pt-Br Wiki Retrospective

PTBR Archaeology launch went surprisingly well; there are still many articles and useful information missing but editors definitely came in to help on release; PTBR surpassed 5000 articles due to Archaeology! Activity on PTBR is up due to COVID-19 and Archaeology but there hasn’t been a corresponding increase in new users even after the fact.

There are still issues with Grand Exchange information but the process of porting over GE Modules from RSW is still in-progress as translation issues make it difficult for those that understand the modules to put them where they need to be. An alternative to this is to allow unsafe transclusion across wikis to help with the process and reduce the doubling up of GE Modules in-case of changes.

Interactive maps are currently working on PTBR and are present on a few pages but the potential to add them is there so expect many more in future. There are talks for whether or not PT-BR OSWF is something that the community would be interested in; feel free to contact Yuri Nikolai for more information on this front.

Project Updates

The move to Google Cloud Platform is still progressing. It is a mammoth undertaking but progress is good thus far but no more news just yet. New Media formats have been semi-implemented on the wiki in the way of webm’s, there are still some issues in terms of how they function and look but the basic functionality is there; expect to see these on articles sometime soon.

The previously mentioned Community Newsletter is still in the process of determining its relevance as between these meeting summaries, the yearly review and general Discord discussions, they may not be useful or relevant. Please reach out in the discussion here if you feel the Newsletter is something you want as we are still gauging interest.

Community concerns

This is a section dedicated to responding to community questions and concerns brought up before the meeting, if you have concerns about the overarching processes of the wikis or Weird Gloop in general, feel free to comment on this discussion or any future meeting agendas so that we may respond.

Site stability

There have been a couple of instances of site downtime, the first of which was ~4 hours due to OVH issues but our aggressive caching position meant that ~95% of pages didn’t even see this if you were logged out. A more recent instance was ~12 minutes but with an unknown cause at this point. The move to GCP should likely result in--after the early teething period--a more stable service.

Users are also experiencing issues with images having black backgrounds on transparent/translucent images. This is likely an issue with Cloudflare settings turning images from .png to .webp and how Cloudflare is encoding this. There was no change on our end and is very likely something changed on Cloudflare's end. Cook is already in contact with Cloudflare regarding this and is just waiting on a response.

COVID-19

While the COVID-19 tragedy is affecting businesses and markets globally, we are not seeing many negative effects of it as we are majorly an online platform and are actually seeing a number of benefits including increased traffic and usage. Finance wise there have been no slow-down in payment schedules from Jagex and no concern of it in future as they are likely seeing an uptick in traffic and usage also.

External services

There are some concerns as to whether or not we should be investing in external services to assist with some of the server/processing workload, particularly on the Chisel services we run however the cost of Chisel is very low and can be easily expanded if necessary. There are also discussions as to whether or not Video/Stream Transcriptions are viable and something that the wider community would want and take advantage of; Transcription software would likely be used as a first pass with Editors double checking the work for errors. Feel free to reach out to IsobelJ on this topic as we are still gauging interest.

Miscellaneous

The Weird Gloop Article on Meta Wiki is planned to have a bit of a tidy up as well as some curation to the main page on Meta to help link to some of the important articles and documentation found on there. New users in the community have questions about how Weird Gloop works as a whole and these changes are meant to highlight this information and make it easier to access.

The “How to edit” pages on all Wikis are also a bit out of date as Isobel wrote those “quite a while ago” and are planned to be overhauled in the near future, making them more clear and relevant to current day processes.

As a final note we would like to push for non-member input into General Meetings by way of community concerns and questions for us to answer. Expect an increase in reminders of upcoming meetings in future in all channels to help gather input and please feel free to post any issues or concerns you might have regardless of how big or small.

Discussion

Comment - very cool thank you. Some thoughts:

• It would be nice to bring the social feed over to OSW. I'm unsure if they would want a thread about it (to gauge interest and/or recruit potential curators), or if they'd prefer to sort it out in Discord discussions instead.
• Appreciate the charts on gadget usage - possibly somewhat surprised to hear the numbers described as 'resounding success' (although that is good to hear)? I don't think we really had a number in mind when going into the project, with the only somewhat-comparable thing being the Events interface (which would obviously gets more usage, with the direct in-game relevance & useful features for dailies). Happy that the community received it well and it's getting some use.
• I like the idea of a newsletter, however the board notes definitely read somewhat like one, lol. Comparing to the yearly review the newsletter would arguably be more detailed, and wrt Discord discussions not everyone sees them and often there is *a lot* to traverse through. I could see the benefit in making it in a more visually appealing format, and available to a wider audience (outside of the wiki community)
• First time I've heard about the possibility of video/stream transcriptions, sounds neat
• fuck webp
  STAR the coolest bean (talk 2 me xoxo) 19:32, 26 April 2020 (UTC)

Edit: extremely sad, angry, and disappointed about RS3 April Fools not getting a mention. Same as OSRS, ours was not super popular on Reddit either, but people seemed to enjoy it on Twitter and Discord. Here is a nice spike on the weirdgloop.org pageviews thanks to https://weirdgloop.org/book/# page :)

STAR the coolest bean (talk 2 me xoxo) 19:51, 26 April 2020 (UTC)

Question - The move to Google Cloud Platform is still progressing. Is it possible to expand on this some? Is this what we're shifting from OVH on? Cloudflare? Just some basic explanation would be appreciated. Thank you! Legaia 2 Pla ^{ᴛ · ʟ · ᴄ} 00:34, 27 April 2020 (UTC)

Answer - This was originally brought up at the last board meeting, and information can be found in the Janurary meeting minutes at Forum:Board Meeting - January 19th, 2020#Technical position. This is a planned move from OVH to Google Cloud Platform, and we would still heavily rely on Cloudflare caching for most requests. BigDiesel2m (talk) 00:59, 27 April 2020 (UTC)

Follow-up - Ahh right! Thanks! Would there be a disruption during the move? Legaia 2 Pla ^{ᴛ · ʟ · ᴄ} 01:12, 27 April 2020 (UTC)

TLDR: For editors yes, for regular visitors no. Since Cloudflare already handles our DNS and proxies our domains, changing servers won't affect the resolved IP addresses, so that wouldn't be noticeable to visitors and makes rolling back if something goes wrong much easier. However, editing will be disabled for several hours in order to perform the final, up-to-date backup of our current platform; then that must be synced with the new platform; then several, long-running database migrations performed as we will be moving to the upcoming MediaWiki 1.35 LTS release; finally, Cloudflare will be switched to direct traffic to the new platform and editing re-enabled. - TehKittyCat^{Talk Wikian-Book} 02:04, 27 April 2020 (UTC)

Is there a checklist of things to do for this migration? I'd have thought it was pretty complicated by itself ignoring the mw upgrade, so in progress but no updates is a bit surprising. cqm ^talk 12:45, 28 April 2020 (UTC)

Cqm has agreed to discuss this directly with kitty who is working on the migration. Elessar2 (talk) 08:01, 16 July 2020 (UTC)

Closed - Closing this as the next meeting is coming up, to see the agenda or suggest topics please see Forum:Upcoming board meeting July 2020 - Elessar2 (talk) 08:01, 16 July 2020 (UTC)