User blog:Klow/We are leaving

After having spent 5 years on Wikia, Combine OverWiki is leaving to a privately owned host, CombineOverWiki.net, which is ad-free with more flexibility. The community is grateful for everything Wikia has provided over the years for free, but its new changes and policies towards wiki communities have made us think for a while about leaving.

We have finally taken action, and are currently working on moving our data to the new host, fixing bugs and setting up convenient skins. But do not fear, everyone will be able to continue editing the new wiki, with the same username, watchlist and contribution list intact. (see below)

Moving will give us as much as freedom as we want. Total control over our content, over our policies, over the site's design, and we hope more credibility towards the community. I guess most of the protagonists of the Half-Life and Portal universe would agree about our quest of freedom. We also spend too much time and energy trying to revert Wikia's new design changes to what they were (what we consider "good"), and often with unsatisfying, broken results, and we'd rather spend this time and energy on improving our actual content.

Wikia is a for-profit business, who make money by selling advertising on their wikis. We believe that is wrong for them to make money off of the back of volunteer editors, Valve, and the Half-Life community, who give everything to Wikia for free. Whilst we are not at war with Wikia, who are perfectly within their rights to make money, they go against the true wiki spirit, which is to create an open source, free and public encylopedia of everything, that anyone can improve, and we feel that it is best to simply cease our relationship with them peacefully.

When the wiki has been moved, you'll be invited to cease editing here, and resume contributing to the new website, where you'll be able to find your account, with your contributions, watchlist and user page unchanged, and resume editing immediately (see below for details). We plan to inform editors of the move in the form of a site notice on Wikia, however it is likely that doing this will cause the Wikia staff to remove the notice and remove administrator rights from the “perpetrators”.

Notices will also be posted on any Combine OverWiki official external sites, namely the Facebook, Steam, and YouTube accounts.

You can of course continue editing here, since Wikia will not close the wiki. However since we're taking Combine OverWiki's spirit with us, we're taking the name as well, so the Wikia wiki will just return to its original name, "Half-Life Wiki". The new community is then free to come up with the name they want and make whatever they want of the wiki, though we sincerely hope that most editors will agree with our reasons to move and move along with us.

Details of the move
To transfer the wiki's contents, a set of Perl scripts called MediaWikiDumper will be used. These can be used selectively to transfer most of the wiki. The following will be dumped and then reinstalled on the new wiki:


 * All current page text, including talk and user pages (there are over 21,000 pages; this takes the longest)


 * Revision history for every page with revision page text and summaries


 * All current images (deleted images will not be copied)


 * Page attributions, such as editor restrictions


 * User accounts, with contributions and watchlist (note that you will not be able to login again immediately)


 * Interwiki links table

Once these are copied over, the wiki should function much as it did before. However, some changes will be made to remove any custom Wikia content, CSS edits and whatnot that are debris from the old skin.

All pages will be intact, with all thumbnails in place.

Resuming editing
Once the wiki has been opened for editing, you can resume immediately. However, you will have to register a new account temporarily. Accounts from the old wiki will be transferred intact but with random passwords making it impossible to login. Passwords cannot be transferred because they are encrypted.

To resume editing under your old account name, and thus get your user page and contributions back, you will need to first prove your identity. To do this, it is recommended you go to Special:Emailuser/Bramblepath on Wikia and send an email with your new username (the one you registered on the new wiki) and your old username.

An admin will then first merge your old account into your new account, moving all contribution history, etc., and then rename the new account into your old account name, using two plugins. You can then login to the new wiki using your old username and the password you registered your new account with.

Whilst this system is not ideal, after much troubleshooting it seems to be the only option.

Skins
One of the primary reasons for the move is the current Wikia skin used on the wiki. However, on the new wiki this skin will not be available. The default skin will be Vector.

The old Monaco skin will also be available, and we plan to implement several other game-themed skins which can be chosen from. Any help with creating these skins would be appreciated, and if there are any suggestions for other skins feel free to offer them up.

Licensing and legality
The current Wikia license requires that all original authors be credited for their work. By copying page history to the new wiki, this ensures that all original authors are given credit, and so conforms to the license.

Wikia are only able to make money by allowing commercial uses of the wiki content, enabling them to place advertisements on the wiki. However, the new wiki will not allow commercial use of the content, therefore we will not be able to make any money from the content and no other sources (including Wikia themselves) will be able to relicense the content for commercial uses.

Donations
We welcome you to make donations to the cost of the wiki’s hosting. We will make available a donation button in the future for this.

Because the new wiki will not have any advertisements, donations will be the sole source of money to keep the wiki running.