GuildWiki:Transition to Curse

The new server at Curse will be ready for us on Monday. The purpose of this page is to document the steps we will take during the transition process.


 * Starting Friday evening, a dump of all article revisions will be performed. This will take approximately 40 hours.
 * During this time, the "move" feature will be disabled on this wiki. This is because moving a page causes all of that page's revisions to be reassigned to a new page ID, and this would invalidate the backup.  Although this could be corrected by updating the page ID within the backup, that isn't exactly easy to do when you have to parse 1.5 million revisions, so it's simpler to just prevent any problems in the first place.
 * Unless anyone has a better solution, this will be accomplished by editing MediaWiki:Movepagetext to the following:

The move feature has been temporarily disabled while a full backup of the wiki is performed.

For details, see Project:Community Portal/Transition to Curse. Thank you for your patience.


 * When complete, the backup file (which will be close to 10 GB) will be split and compressed to facilitate uploading to the Curse server. (gzip compression of text files usually results in a ratio of around 7%, meaning the actual upload will be significantly less than 1 GB.)


 * On Monday, after we have access to the server, a number of processes will run in parallel:
 * The rest of the backup scripts will be run from the new server. This should take less than an hour, at which point we can begin loading the data into the database.
 * The file backup script will run. This will take around 6-8 hours.
 * The text backup files will be uploaded to Curse and decompressed. The backup script will be run once more to "catch-up" any edits that occurred since Friday, then everything will be loaded to the database.
 * Extensions for the wiki will be installed, and other general wiki configuration will be performed.


 * After all data is loaded, a script will be run to populate the users table with all usernames that had ever edited the wiki. This will also migrate all block and group settings for each user.  An extension will be installed to allow users to "reclaim" their accounts (the same one that is being used by Wowpedia).


 * The maintenance scripts rebuildall.php, SMW_setup.php, ans SMW_refreshData.php will be run to build all utility tables. Note for whoever does this: must set  in LocalSettings.php before setting up SMW.


 * Assuming everything goes according to plan, we will announce that the new site is ready!