2015 Shutdown Notice

The wikispot.org service will be shutting down on April 1st, 2015. Please see below for some more information.

Yes. Please email philip@localwiki.org before April 1st, 2015. Your email must include the URL of your wikispot.org site and be sent from the email address associated with your account. The export will be in the following XML file format:

http://www.projectsycamore.org/Export

Oops! We should have already migrated the data, but it sounds like we forgot to. Please email philip@localwiki.org with the name of the wikispot.org instance and we'll fix things up.

A variety of reasons:

• We are a tiny non-profit organization, and we have shifted all of our attention to our new project, LocalWiki (https://localwiki.org). We have been dedicating most of our resources to the LocalWiki project for several years now.

• All locally or otherwise geographically-oriented data on wikispot.org has been imported into the LocalWiki project (https://localwiki.org). This data accounted for the vast majority of the usage on the wikispot.org service. URL redirects have been put in place, and no old URLs have been broken.

• Very few people continue to use the wikispot.org service. Continuing to run the service requires non-trivial resources. The software powering the wikispot.org service hasn't been touched in years and years, which makes running it an increasing security threat.

We've been slowly phasing our the wikispot.org service for years, so none of this should come as a surprise.

April 1st, 2015.

No promises here, but time permitting, the wikispot.org service will be set to be a 100% static site, meaning some of the material will remain accessible for an indeterminate period of time. Editing and account creation will not continue to work, nor will viewing private or otherwise protected pages.

If you search around for "wiki hosting" or "wiki farm" you can find some traditional options.

If you have a small group (e.g. a small co-op), consider simply using Google Docs to manage your organization's information. If you need publicly-facing information, consider using Google Sites or some other website-builder service.

How you might do this will depend on what service you choose, how much information you have, how much you care about moving it elsewhere, and your personal technical chops. We can't provide technical assistance here, but we can provide a structured XML export of your data (see first question, above).

For a small amount of information (< 1000 pages), simply copying and pasting your information into a new provider will probably work great, and will be the fastest and least expensive all-around option for you. Search for "All Pages" to find the index of all pages in your wiki.

For a large amount of information, you may need to write a computer program to automate the transfer of the data, and you may need to make use of the export file we provide you. We cannot provide technical assistance here.

There is a converter to Mediawiki format here: https://github.com/labster/sycamore2mediawiki This software is now production ready. This software can also extract files if you're planning to move them to another wiki software, or for using Mediawiki as an intermediate format to convert to a third wiki format.

Yes, in theory. You can find some information about the open-source software we wrote to power the wikispot.org service here:

http://www.projectsycamore.org/

However, we cannot provide you with technical assistance, so you're on your own here. We also strongly recommend migrating to a new service instead of running the old wikispot.org software.

You are a responsible admin who has a backup plan — you don't need to scare all of your users! Just add this to your layout.css file (on the CSS Settings page of your wiki):

body > div:first-child { display: none }