Wiki Migration Has Begun
THE "Upgrades and Migrations" are still ongoing. The latest is the wiki, which goes back about 14 years and contains many thousands of edits (maybe over 10,000 in total; I've been doing this since my 20s!).
The time seems right to note why we're doing this, other than security issues (PHP and databases, for instance, can invite unnecessary trouble). Performance and efficiency are underrated aspects, quite sadly.
What we had last month was a wiki targeted by many bots, serving perhaps a million pages per week rather than the usual ~100,000 pages per week. On average, at some periods of time (for a period of hours at a time), the wiki would get about 500 requests per minute. Of course those requests were not legitimate (not from humans) and they just hit the database again and again. It's bad enough if this happens for a day or a week. Imagine this happening for 520 weeks (10 years) or more. This can cost a lot, potentially corroding underlying data, set aside the price of electricity. Depending on the time and place, one could study the waste associated with wiki-based sites where the wiki back end is barely essential (caching is not possible for every unique request). In fact, some research into cost per cycle can yield a rough estimate of the true (complete) cost of using wikis in sites... rather than settling on or going for a static page and text editor for the given page. This is a subject I never saw discussed anywhere in relation to wikis.
We're planning to write more about it when we "walk the walk" and have completed the migration. It'll be a suitable time to "talk the talk" and maybe others will follow... recognising that they too rely on some wiki software that is no longer needed because new edits are scarce and small (sometimes the number of editors is one). There have been many articles in recent years about "how to reduce your clown computing bills"; maybe we can contribute to this.
Generally speaking, conflating "electric bills" with "success" is "crypto bro" mindset. It should be noted that Microsoft and "open" HEY HI adopted this mindset, as we noted the other week. █