D minus one day and counting...

These daily blog posts will not continue after the hard launch. They're just a thing I've been doing over the last ten days before the hard launch, largely to motivate myself to put in work on the Wongery every day. I plan to make one more blog post tomorrow to coincide with the hard launch, and then the posts' frequency will likely drop back to once a week or so.

So, mostly what I've been doing on the Wongery over the last day is writing articles and making templates, mostly in the new namespaces (and specifically mostly in the Game:RPG space). I haven't done anything on the site redesign. I don't know if I'm going to do anything on the site redesign. I don't know if I'm going to have time to do anything on the site redesign. Maybe the site staying as it is now a while longer won't hurt anything. I don't know.

But there's one other thing I said I'd do in my previous post that I've also now done. I've started migrating the site to a different server.

The site hasn't finished migrating to the new hosting plan. I'm getting this post up slightly earlier in the day than I have the last few posts, because I'm not sure exactly when the actual migration process will kick in and the site will go down, or for how long it will be down. I'm desperately hoping it will be back up on the new server before the time of the hard launch tomorrow. If I was going to move the site to a different hosting plan, I really should have done it sooner. I am an idiot.

But let me start at the beginning.

So in preparation of the server move, I downloaded all the files from the site and exported all the MySQL databases. Before doing the latter, I wanted to see if I could thin them down a bit; the MySQL database for the Wongery included a lot of tables prefaced with "phpBB:", some of which were enormous—the largest, "phpbb_posts", clocked in at more than a third of a gigabyte. I suspected that these may be vestiges of the old, defunct Phpbb Single Sign-On extension that the Wongery had once used, but had been replaced by the newer PHPBB_Auth extension, and that what was taking up so much space in the database was copies of all the spam posts on the forum that had existed when that extension was in use (this was, of course, long before I'd cleared out all the spam posts and set up the anti-spam Q&A). But before removing those tables, I wanted to make sure I wouldn't break the wiki by doing so. So I first tried removing them on my local copy of the site... so far so good. Then I took the plunge and removed them on the server... moving them into a new, temporary database rather than just deleting them outright, in case something went wrong and I'd need to put them back. But it didn't, and everything worked fine without those tables, and the Wongery database was now much smaller and easier to export.

I also reduced the size of phpBB database a bit by rebuilding the search tables, which were bloated with words from the thousands of spam posts that the forums had once held.

I then went ahead and did one other thing I'd been meaning to do: I moved the forum into the directory "/forum". The link to the forum had always pointed there, but all the files themselves were in the directory "/f". I'd attempted to use the .htaccess to redirect to the actual directory, but I could never get that to work correctly, so I'd made an actual "/forum" directory with a Meta refresh tag in it. But that was clunky and suboptimal, and I'd long hoped to figure out a how to get the redirection working. Well, I finally came to terms with the fact there was really no reason to have that "/f" directory in the first place, rather than just having the forum code in the "/forum" directory. I think I'd set it up that way because that was the way the wikis were set up; the Central Wongery files are actually in the directory "/w", and the Public Wongery files in the directory "/p", and I guess I saw aesthetic appeal in having the forum files also occupy a one-letter directory to which the more user-friendly URL redirected. But that didn't really serve any purpose; if I wanted the forum to work correctly without the meta refresh, it made much more sense to just put the files in the actual directory I wanted the URL to go to, and not bother with redirection. So I did.

What I didn't anticipate, but should have, was that this broke the wiki login, which went through PHPbb thanks to the aforementioned PHPBB_Auth extension, and which was still looking for PHPbb in the old directory. But this was easily fixed with a small edit to the LocalSettings.php files.

Anyway, then I went ahead and initiated the migration. And when I say I initiated the migration, I mean I... opened a chat with a representative of the company I had my hosting plan through to see what my options are. At first the agent I was chatting with brought up the possibility of just buying a dedicated IP address for the one domain, which seemed like an attractive option, but then it turned out it was an option the company no longer offered. I was just going to get another, separate cloud hosting plan, but the agent eventually talked me into getting a VPS plan instead—and said that while if I upgraded to a VPS plan, the company would help with the migration. (The company also offered dedicated server plans that seemed like they would be great but were way beyond my budget.) I was told to await an email from the "admins" and that the migration should be complete within 24 hours.

Our chat was ended before I had confirmed everything had been resolved, however—so abruptly that I wasn't sure we hadn't been disconnected—and so I opened another chat to check that everything was in order. I'm glad I did, because it turns out I'd made a significant mistake. The second agent I chatted with confirmed that the migration was in progress and that I would be receiving an email from "the Admins" (that was how this agent put it, complete with the capital A), but also listed to me the domains that were to be migrated... and wongery.com was not among them. Oops! When the first agent had asked me to verify that I wanted to migrate only that domain, I'd initially confirmed that, but then reconsidered and thought maybe I should migrate some of my other domains to the VPS account as well. I'd listed the other domains I wanted to migrate... but didn't mention wongery.com again, since I'd already named it, and apparently it got left out of the list. Anyway, the second agent amended the ticket to include wongery.com, and... as far as I know everything is in progress. I hope everything is in progress. I really, really hope this is all complete before the time of the hard launch, and with enough time left for me to check that everything's working and make any necessary changes to the configuration files. I really, really should have done this earlier.

Anyway, I did receive the email from the fabled Admins about an hour and a half before I posted this blog entry—it had actually been sent three and a half hours before that, but I had been asleep at the time. (My sleep schedule over the last few days has been extremely irregular. I'll try to get back to a more reasonable schedule after the hard launch.) I replied confirming that yes, those were the domains I wanted migrated, and... I hope it's in progress? If it really does get done within 24 hours of my making the request as I was told would be the case, it should be fine; that'll be well before the hard launch, and I'll still have time to make sure everything's in working order. Even if it gets done within 24 hours of my reply to the Admins, that's still before the hard launch, though it'll be cutting things close.

(Yes, yes, I know I could just move the hard launch. But for reasons I've explained before, some of which are utterly illogical but still unwontedly compelling to me, I really don't want to do that. I really, really want to have the hard launch on January 1, 2024, at 10:22 p.m. UTC, exactly eleven years, eleven hours, and eleven minutes after the "soft launch" back in 2012 (and fifteen years to the day after the Central Wongery wiki was first set up). I really hope that the migration is completed in time for that to happen. I really hope I can make myself stop using the word "really" so much.)

So. Assuming the migration is completed soon enough that I still have time to put in a bit more work on the Wongery, what else do I have to do? Write and edit articles, mostly. I have a lot of that to do. I still do want to revamp the website layout, but realistically I don't think I'm going to have time to do that before the hard launch. We'll see. Mostly at this point I'm just waiting with bated breath for the migration to complete. (Okay, and also still writing some articles in the meantime, because I generally write my articles in Notepad++ before copying and pasting them into the wiki, so I can still do the writing when the site isn't accessible.)

D minus one day and counting...