News/20090217

2nd birthday
PvXwiki will soon celebrate its 2nd birthday. For me it has been very exiting years. Without money or in depth knowledge of MediaWiki we got together and started PvXwiki. And it quickly became valuable and popular source of Guild Wars builds. We did an amazing job; even few did truly believed in our Wiki.

Potential move
One of the people who recognized PvXwiki early on was Gil from Wikia. Attempts were made to discus potential move to Wikia without ever coming to a conclusion. You may ask what makes it different now?

Babysitting
First of all, my daily job as senior web-developer makes it hard for me to find time to baby-sit wiki. With cheap server, no serious backup solution and only 2 techadmins it need constant maintains. There has been a few night with phone calls to hosting company in Canada at 3 AM, and I no longer have time to do this.

Money
This leads to my second reason – money. Websites do cost money and anyone who ever tried to run one knows all about it. Taking out $50 of your pocket each month is maybe okay, but it became painful when that number grew to several hundred dollars per month. When we started I had a second job just to pay hosting bills. And after 20 month of constant bill payments – I feel that I have done my part.

Security
Third and most important reason for me is security and feature of the website. With single webserver and only backup stored on server located in same server farm it is miracle that it did survive as long as it did. Unfortunately there is no guarantee that our luck will continue for years to come. With an old server, outdated MediaWiki and code that has never been properly tested it is only matter of time before something very big and bad happens.

Wikia
In order to preserve all the knowledge stored in PvXwiki and make sure it will grow, we need stable and secure solution. Personally I believe that currently Wikia is the only company that can provide such solution. It takes out hosting problems, has finances in place and makes sure that each word of the wiki will be stored and preserved for many years to come. Wikia is buying the domain to ensure no links will be broken to the new site. For community it means people, money and server independent Wiki to enjoy. As always, the data itself is owned by the community and freely available for download at any time.

I hope everyone will see the big picture and all the benefits. I feel like we did prove that we can be strong outsiders and we did it great. Now its time to keep and safe all the hard work, money and nerves that went down building PvXwiki.

FAQ
You can find answers to most common questions in this detailed FAQ. Bugs can be reported to Wikia staff via Special:Contact. Known bugs are listed on the talk page.