Hi MD friends! Here’s what’s new with the wiki and why this will likely be the last update for a while.
As shared on Reddit [*] a few weeks ago, I'm shifting focus to other projects and the MD Wiki will be in “hobby mode” for the foreseeable future.
This means it's up to you, the community, to continue adding new pages, correcting data, and otherwise being champions for the format we love so much.
The social media links on the front page have been removed, as both of us who maintained them are no longer doing so. The stresses of posting on several services, answering repeat questions, and difficult personalities were major factors in deciding to move on.
The wiki speaks for itself as the product of 5+ years of hard work by so many people and will continue to grow and serve everyone interested in MD.
Shortly after announcing the above, the site started experiencing outages which needed manual restarts of the web server. How ironic.
The issue appears to be AI scraper bots overwhelming the server. We experienced this once before and started using CloudFlare to block scrapers and other attackers. They now offer new protections which we've enabled and the trouble is behind us again.
CloudFlare itself has issues with false positives and inconveniencing normal users who may be using rarer web browsers or shared internet connections, but compared to daily outages due to scrapers, its the lesser evil.
While troubleshooting, the entire wiki software stack was upgraded to the latest versions of FreeBSD, PHP, and Dokuwiki. MD may be over 30 years old, but our infrastructure is modern and maintained.
MD’s kindest and most talented person, asivery [*], has updated Web MiniDisc Pro with bug fixes and improvements. Work is ongoing with the standalone ElectronWMD [*], so be sure to keep tracking updates on GitHub and support his Ko-Fi donations link [*] to thank him for such incredible work!
And with that comes the end of this update post and update posts in general for some time.
Please continue to contribute data and pages like so many others have before. This has always been a community effort and wouldn't be what it is without people like you who read these updates and work on the wiki.
Full site backups are still available [*], and we will keep accepting donations to cover hosting costs. MD will never die, and neither will what we've created together!