Forum:This site has serious issues
Forums: Index → General discussion
Sorry if what I'm about to say is opinionated and there may be those who disagree, but ShoutWiki, as a whole, is nothing but an absolute dumpster fire of a wiki hosting service. Why do I say that? There are very few wikis that peak my interest except for Weirdcyclopedia, but everyone knows what happened to the place. Speaking of which, the staff are horrible at communicating with users on this site and they let bad users ruin wikis and because of that, Leerdoman74 and the Weirdcyclopedia vandal were never punished for ruining the wiki's reputation and will forever remembered as some of the most threatening and dangerous users to have ever walked any wiki, and none of ShoutWiki's staff members even bothered to stop those sadistic users from causing harm to others, despite me making statements about its downfall numerous times on the ShoutWiki Hub.
Additionally, this site is slow as hell, and a lot of times can be unresponsive when I try to log into my main account, which often forced me to create additional accounts in case my main one is inaccessible. Not to mention that so many features on the Hub don't even work anymore like the wiki creator one, which has been broken for at least 4 years and it's gonna hurt the chances of more new users coming to this place or more new wikis being added.
I'm really not sure if I should continue contributing to any of the ShoutWiki wikis anymore because of how awful the service is or if I should leave and stick to Miraheze and Telepedia because at least on those sites, the staff members there actually do try to fix the problems said sites have and they at least try to punish bad users for the damage they create even though they don't always make decisions you agree with.
If the issues of ShoutWiki aren't addressed soon enough, then the whole place will continue to collapse and disruptive users will come and destroy the rest of the service due to the poor communication from the staff, which makes it seem as if this whole place is now officially abandonware.
If you think everything I'm saying about ShoutWiki is BS, then go ahead and disagree with me. Heck, block me, if you want, I don't care. I stand by all the statements I've just made about the ongoing issues this whole service is suffering from, so there. Have a good one. --SuperStreetKombat (talk) 01:10, 19 September 2024 (UTC)
- @SuperStreetKombat: You're more than entitled to your own opinion, and ShoutWiki was, after all, formed around the very core idea of expressing yourself.
- Now, let's address your points...
- Assessing a wiki hosting service based on "what I like" is neither objective nor accurate. You may not like a particular site but someone else might find it very fascinating. Naturally you're allowed to have your preferences, but saying "ShoutWiki sucks because it doesn't host my favorite wiki(s)" is just wrong.
- Per the ShoutWiki terms of use, specifically section 10, "User Disputes", which is one of the shortest sections of the ToU: "You are solely responsible for your interactions with other ShoutWiki users. We reserve the right, but have no obligation, to monitor disputes between you and other users." If someone is making unlawful threats against you, please get in touch with your local law enforcement agency.
- I've not had any issues with logging in and my account is literally the oldest one here. Make sure you try to log in to the same wiki that you previously logged in.
- Just like you, I also don't like the situation with CreateWiki (ShoutWiki's Wiki Creation Wizard). Hopefully we can get that fixed sooner than later, but I do want to stress this: unexpected changes to MediaWiki's core internals are what broke it. CreateWiki was and is, obviously, using all the correct APIs, but upstream developers decided to change the way certain things, namely cross-database operations, work. They feel that extensions should not even try to make cross-database operations; we at ShoutWiki feel the opposite because a lot of things depend on some form of cross-database communication, e.g. the "report a problem" feature (ProblemReports extension) has only one, centralized place where the reports are stored (which is literally ShoutWiki Hub's database). Whenever you report a problem via that feature, no matter what wiki you're on, it will query ShoutWiki Hub's database. This is, in essence, necessary for performance: querying two databases is after all way less expensive than querying hundreds if not thousands of databases; and having the reported problems centralized is a must because otherwise no-one's gonna action on the reports made against dormant wikis.
- I'm sorry to hear that you're not satisfied with our service level, but that said, I must refer you to the terms of use once again.
- We hope to address communication issues in the future, but I'll say this much: for something that some people keep calling "abandonware", ShoutWiki has to be the most developed "abandonware" I've come across to date. Don't take my word for it, instead look at some of the recently merged code changes I've submitted, for example. We have a tiny team so we're always busy working towards the next relevant MediaWiki release, because MediaWiki releases happen more frequently these days than what they used to, and breaking code changes are the "new normal". You'd be shocked how many people only care about Wikipedia and the features used on Wikipedia. We have to care about a bit more than that, and we do care.
- I don't have a "silver bullet" to fix all the issues, and I sure wish I did, but I do want to emphasize this: ShoutWiki is NOT abandonware, and this is something you can easily verify yourself by looking up public code changes etc. — after all, we build quality software that Just Works™ and keeps on working for years and decades to come. Of course, due to factors entirely outside our control, said software still needs some maintenance. --Jack Phoenix (Contact) 11:33, 29 September 2024 (UTC)
- @Jack Phoenix: Here are my responses:
- I'm not saying that ShoutWiki should be based on what I personally like; all I'm saying is that there are very few wikis on it that may be interesting, and I'm sure that plenty of other users would agree that there are barely any wikis here that could gain any universal attraction from others. Perhaps I wasn't clear enough on my first statement of this rant.
- I understand the policy regarding the user conduct of ShoutWiki, but isn't it the job of its staff members to maintain order within this site and intervene whenever a disruptive user causes trouble? I mean, look how much chaos ensued on Weirdcyclopedia back when it was on ShoutWiki; there were so many users that caused mayhem to the place where it was beyond repair without its only admin who abandoned the whole wiki almost 2 years ago. You guys could've stepped in when that demented IP user vandalized pages and created sock accounts to troll me and yet you stood by and let that horrible user get away with their evil. Leerdoman74 was also a user who was responsible for the wiki's destruction because not only did he cause all those neverending edit wars, but he threatened users there, including me, and accused me of all the the horrible things he himself did and, again, none of you staff members even attempted to punish Leerdo for all the heinous things he did to the wiki. I even asked you to block his FighterMortalHyper account on all wikis on this site but you didn't even do that: https://www.shoutwiki.com/wiki/User_talk:Jack_Phoenix#FighterMortalHyper_needs_to_be_globally_blocked_from_all_wikis_on_ShoutWiki
- I actually did have an issue logging into my main account one time and that was last year in September and said issue continued for about a month or 2 at the time until it was randomly fixed. I even tried creating an alternate account to see it would work, but I couldn't even log into my alt at the time, either.
- Why is it taking you exactly 4 years to fix the wiki creation tool? Since the tool's been broken for that long, this whole site doesn't seem to be growing much because of its lack of growth regarding new wikis, and, like I said before, it's not gonna attract a lot of new users and will only continue to hold ShoutWiki back.
- And now to address your final two points: if this place isn't abandonware, then why didn't anybody, including you staff members, even remotely respond to the important topics I made like these ones? https://www.shoutwiki.com/wiki/Forum:Regarding_the_ongoing_drama_on_Weirdcyclopedia https://www.shoutwiki.com/wiki/Forum:-abigblueworld-_has_returned https://www.shoutwiki.com/wiki/Forum:Does_anybody_know_what_happened_to_Salarvander%3F https://www.shoutwiki.com/wiki/User_talk:Lcawte#-abigblueworld-_has_struck_yet_again https://www.shoutwiki.com/wiki/Forum:Is_it_possible_to_add_a_comment_section_extension_to_ShoutWiki%3F You guys could have very easily addressed these topics, and yet, none of the staff members even cared enough to take part in these conversations. Heck, I even made a suggestion about a comment section extension and yet you didn't even respond, making it unlikely that ShoutWiki will ever have comment sections on any of its wiki. Not to mention that Lcawte, a member of the ShoutWiki staff, has been really mean to me and seems to be devoid of any respect towards me whatsoever. Not to mention that he outright insulted me when Hamzat was harassing me on my own talk page on this Hub, and Lcawte, rather than warning Hamzat to stop, was extremely hostile towards me and told me to get off this site. All of this proves that you guys are awful at communicating with other users and aren't even competent in the slightest, no offense. If you really do hope to address communication issues, then you guys really should do so soon before things get bad enough to the point where disruptive users cause trouble on all of ShoutWiki until it gets shut down for good. --SuperStreetKombat (talk) 05:13, 1 October 2024 (UTC)
- See? Right there: this proves that you guys don't know how to respond to the simplest topics because whenever I bring up something extremely important, you people never respond to them despite how easy it is to do so. This whole site is collapsing because of the staff members' lack of communication to its viewers and sooner or later, evil users will raid this whole place and vandalize it until it gets shut down in the next few months, because you guys do nothing to keep things in order and just ignore other users' requests or suggestions and you all just stand by and let ShoutWiki burn to ashes. You guys are gonna lose a lot of users because of this. --SuperStreetKombat (talk) 18:42, 10 October 2024 (UTC)