tldr: Roguebasin has been migrated to its own Virtual Machine at DigitalOcean, and upgraded to MediaWiki 1.36.0 + PHP 7.4.3. As a result, it’s currently running MUCH faster and hopefully will not have any downtime.
January 16, 2005. I set up the first version of roguebasin using a long-gone service called swiki.net, imagine it being a predecessor of wikia / fandom.com, only much less stable and feature-full. It soon went down and become unreliable as the people of r.g.r.d. jumped in to contribute, but it worked well enough to gather the attention of the community.
January 26, 2005. I got an email from DarkGod where he offered to host roguebasin at tome.net’s server. “The basin is a good idea, and I’d hate to see it fade away, the RL community needs something like that!“. He alongside “Pav” set up the first mediawiki installation, the foundations of the current roguebasin.
August 2, 2006. After being battered by spambots for a while, the wiki was no longer accepting new user accounts except thru a cumbersome manual process. We decided we had to change how it was operating so someone could take better care of the technical setup of the wiki. It was finally moved to roguelikedevelopment.org, the domain of the long-time roguelike developer Björn Ritzl, who would host it for almost 15 years.
June 19, 2011, RogueBasin was moved by Björn to a new and more reliable webhost and the roguebasin.com domain was set up by myself.
By 2021, there had been many reports of the wiki being too slow or going down sometimes. I contacted Björn and he agreed to hand over the hosting to me. I noticed we were still using MediaWiki 1.19 from 2012, probably due to having to stick with PHP5 on Björn’s hosting account so my first priority was changing that as well as getting it to its own more private hosting where we could scale resources as needed.
June 17, 2021. After almost 10 years of the last server movement, Roguebasin has been migrated from roguelikedevelopment.org hosting to its own Virtual Machine at DigitalOcean, and upgraded to MediaWiki 1.36.0 + PHP 7.4.3. As a result, it’s currently running MUCH faster and hopefully will not have any downtime. We also will be able to address the spambots situation with more modern weapons.
I also restored the logo, which was actually the result of a small contest we ran at r.g.r.d, the winner was Radomir “TheSheep” Dopieralski, who used to be very active on the roguelike community back then.
I also took this opportunity to update some of the front page content to the roguelike reality of 2021, because times have changed.
Coming up for roguebasin:
- HTTPS setup
- User list cleanup (not as easy as it sounds with thousands of spambot accounts)
- More community things!
Slashie's Journal 