Mailing List Archive

Jakob Voss wrote:
> Uhm, the problem that people may like to donate when servers are down
> but cannot do so when servers are down is known for ... years? Why is
> wikimediafoundation.org still hosted at Wikimedia's own server
> farm?

Because it will take a million years to get permission from the board to get
additional hosting. ;)

About the donation form issue, please see prior messages about the squid error
message.

> It's only a small website isn't it? I bet the costs of moving to a
> reliable, independent webhoster will easily pay off.

Ah, but if Wikipedia is down, the traffic requirements for it will be HUGE. So
you can't think of it as a "small website". When we previously tried mirroring
the donation page on Angela's site it simply collapsed under the weight very
shortly afterwards.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

Brion Vibber wrote:

>> It's only a small website isn't it? I bet the costs of moving to a
>> reliable, independent webhoster will easily pay off.
>
> Ah, but if Wikipedia is down, the traffic requirements for it will be HUGE. So
> you can't think of it as a "small website". When we previously tried mirroring
> the donation page on Angela's site it simply collapsed under the weight very
> shortly afterwards.

Well, your are right. So we should find a reliable, independent
Webhoster that can handle huge traffic spikes - it will still be cheaper
than no donation site or running an extra server array. Or we just wait
until there are more Wikimedia data centers around the world so the site
can be mirrored in a complex way (btw: can you also mirror donations? ;-)

But otrs is only a small website isn't it?

Greetings, fun and thanks for bringing Wikipedia back again,
Jakob

P.S: I know that some people will hit me because of publically
discussion this, but hey - it's no hidden secret that
wikimediafoundation.org was down and that it's hosted together with
Wikipedia!
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On 4/19/06, Brion Vibber <brion@pobox.com> wrote:
> Ah, but if Wikipedia is down, the traffic requirements for it will be HUGE. So
> you can't think of it as a "small website". When we previously tried mirroring
> the donation page on Angela's site it simply collapsed under the weight very
> shortly afterwards.

Couldn't this go on the Asian cluster?

--
Sam
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Brion Vibber schreef:
>
>>It's only a small website isn't it? I bet the costs of moving to a
>>reliable, independent webhoster will easily pay off.
>
>
> Ah, but if Wikipedia is down, the traffic requirements for it will be HUGE. So
> you can't think of it as a "small website". When we previously tried mirroring
> the donation page on Angela's site it simply collapsed under the weight very
> shortly afterwards.
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

Is it really necessary to provide the normal donation form? Just put on
the error-page itself ( PayPal: donation@wikipedia.org ) and if that is
possible make from the email address a link to the website of PayPal to
a page where the can donate to the Wikimedia Foundation.

Side note (board/PR remark; I see the donation email address is
@wikipedia.org Would it not be better to use @wikimedia.org or
@wikimediafoundation.org for that? People give money not to Wikipedia
but to the Foundation and also not especaily for Wikipedia.

--
Contact: walter AT wikizine DOT org
Wikizine.org - news for and about the Wikimedia community

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Walter Vermeir wrote:
> Is it really necessary to provide the normal donation form? Just put on
> the error-page itself ( PayPal: donation@wikipedia.org ) and if that is
> possible make from the email address a link to the website of PayPal to
> a page where the can donate to the Wikimedia Foundation.

Please see prior discussion on this subject.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

--- Walter Vermeir <walter@wikipedia.be> wrote:
> Side note (board/PR remark; I see the donation email address is
> @wikipedia.org Would it not be better to use @wikimedia.org or
> @wikimediafoundation.org for that? People give money not to Wikipedia
> but to the Foundation and also not especaily for Wikipedia.

Yeah, that annoyed me a bit too. But we are stuck with the account name that we already have since
changing it would be very non-trivial and give us very little benefit. In the end, this is a
fairly minor thing.

-- mav

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On 19/04/06, Jakob Voss <jakob.voss@nichtich.de> wrote:
> Uhm, the problem that people may like to donate when servers are down
> but cannot do so when servers are down is known for ... years? Why is
> wikimediafoundation.org still hosted at Wikimedia's own server
> farm? It's only a small website isn't it? I bet the costs of moving to a
> reliable, independent webhoster will easily pay off.

As Brion said, we used to have an "offsite" donation page, which
worked for a while then Wikipedia grew so big that even the tiniest
downtime would overload almost any outside site we linked to. We had
to remove both the offsite donation page and the offsite status page
from the error page because our error-spawned traffic was crushing
their servers.

On 20/04/06, Walter Vermeir <walter@wikipedia.be> wrote:
> Is it really necessary to provide the normal donation form? Just put on
> the error-page itself ( PayPal: donation@wikipedia.org ) and if that is
> possible make from the email address a link to the website of PayPal to
> a page where the can donate to the Wikimedia Foundation.

That could work. Then all we'd have to do is shut down the servers
once a week and we'd get enough revenue to feed a large African
country. ;)

~Mark Ryan
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On 4/19/06, Brion Vibber <brion@pobox.com> wrote:
> Jakob Voss wrote:
> > Uhm, the problem that people may like to donate when servers are down
> > but cannot do so when servers are down is known for ... years? Why is
> > wikimediafoundation.org still hosted at Wikimedia's own server
> > farm?
>
> Because it will take a million years to get permission from the board to get
> additional hosting. ;)
>
Just hide it in Jimbo's travel expense budget. ;)

Seriously though, if you can serve a page which says "The Wikimedia
Foundation servers are currently experiencing technical
difficulties.", then you can serve a set of pages which provide enough
information for people to find out about the organization and lets
people make donations. There's no reason a donation page has to be
dynamic.

Anthony
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On 4/19/06, Brion Vibber <brion@pobox.com> wrote:
> Walter Vermeir wrote:
> > Is it really necessary to provide the normal donation form? Just put on
> > the error-page itself ( PayPal: donation@wikipedia.org ) and if that is
> > possible make from the email address a link to the website of PayPal to
> > a page where the can donate to the Wikimedia Foundation.
>
> Please see prior discussion on this subject.

This response would be more helpful if it gave some hint
toward finding the prior discussion.


Walter's suggestion seems a good one.

I just went to PayPal and told it to send $10 to donation@wikipedia.org;
it tells me that the money (less their cut) went to a Verified Business Account
belonging to "Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.", which has the URL of
http://www.wikimedia.org/ and the email address of donations@wikipedia.org.
That looks like a successful transaction to me.

If to the static page we now serve for an error
we added a static mention of donation@wikipedia.org (or donations@)
and a static link to PayPal, it seems likely a good flow of money would open up.

So what am I missing (and Walter, and Anthony)?
What's in that past discussion -- or where can it be found?

Greg
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Gregory Price wrote:
> On 4/19/06, Brion Vibber <brion@pobox.com> wrote:
>> Walter Vermeir wrote:
>>> Is it really necessary to provide the normal donation form? Just put on
>>> the error-page itself ( PayPal: donation@wikipedia.org ) and if that is
>>> possible make from the email address a link to the website of PayPal to
>>> a page where the can donate to the Wikimedia Foundation.
>> Please see prior discussion on this subject.
>
> This response would be more helpful if it gave some hint
> toward finding the prior discussion.

The same place it was before; on this list and/or wikitech-l.

> If to the static page we now serve for an error
> we added a static mention of donation@wikipedia.org (or donations@)
> and a static link to PayPal, it seems likely a good flow of money would open up.
>
> So what am I missing (and Walter, and Anthony)?
> What's in that past discussion -- or where can it be found?

The problems with getting the error page have been resolved as of yesterday;
I've shown a sample error-page-with-form to mav and am reworking it per
feedback. Should be up soon.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)