Ludism.org wikis are back up

[Ron Hale-Evans <rwhe@...>]

The wikis hosted at Ludism.org went down on 9 May 2009 because of a
hardware failure. These included the Mentat Wiki, Piecepack Wiki, Game
Design Wiki, Glass Bead Game Wiki, and Seattle Cosmic Wiki. As I write
this, 31 May, they have been restored with most of their functionality
(and some they didn't have before). They are accessible in the usual
ways, including the Ludism.org front page (http://www.ludism.org/). To
the best of my knowledge, no data has been lost.

All of the wikis have migrated from MoinMoin software
(http://moinmo.in/)  to OddMuse software (http://www.oddmuse.org/).
MoinMoin served us well for several years, but it is an overly complex
package and was very difficult to maintain, upgrade, and -- as it
happened -- restore from backup.

OddMuse is simple, robust, easy to upgrade, and has excellent antispam
measures. It can do just about everything MoinMoin did and more,
including importing our old wiki pages, unchanged. No one I know who
has ever migrated from MoinMoin to OddMuse has regretted it.

The wikis now use a combination of the old MoinMoin markup styles
(http://www.oddmuse.org/cgi-bin/oddmuse/Moin_Markup_Extension) and the
Wiki Creole standard
(http://www.oddmuse.org/cgi-bin/oddmuse/Creole_Markup_Extension).
Translation from the old sites isn't perfect, so  individual wiki
users will have to touch up pages here and there, as will I.

One of the new antispam measures is QuestionAsker, which requires you
to answer a question before you can save your edits to a page. These
are very simple questions that wouldn't fool a human using the wiki,
only a spambot.

I hope that most of the changes are simple and transparent, but there
will probably be some things to discuss. I intend to add some
documentation about the transition to the wikis, but please feel free
to ask questions on whatever wiki you're using, or email me at
rwhe@.... The OddMuse Wiki itself also has plenty of relevant
documentation (http://www.oddmuse.org/).

Thanks go to Alex Schröder
(http://www.oddmuse.org/cgi-bin/oddmuse/Alex_Schr%C3%B6der), the
creator of OddMuse. Alex and OddMuse have so far been a dream to work
with.

Thanks for your patience and understanding. I hope the Ludism.org
wikis are now even more fun and useful than they were. Please spread
the word that they're back up.

Ron Hale-Evans
Maintainer, Ludism.org

--
Ron Hale-Evans ... rwhe@... ... http://ron.ludism.org/ ... (206) 201-1768
    Mind Performance Hacks book: http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596101534/