Long story short - on 19th May we fell victim of a hacking attack originating from the Russian Federation territory. The attackers gained control over some key elements of our infrastructure and tried to escalate their privileges. Hopefully we managed to stop them, but…

Cleaning after the hack was another story — it took us a while to make certain that attackers did not leave any surprises and that the environment is clean. Hopefully it seemed like a "generic" attack and the attack pattern was very clear — get root access to the servers. The motives are still unclear, but we thing it's probably ransom. Thankfully we stopped them in time so that not only no data were lost, but the hackers did not seem to gain access to any private data — yep, your private sites are still private, and your personal information is still safe with us.

But what matters is that we're back online, and it's something we are really happy about!

New hardware, new software, stricter security

The hard decision to make was: are we going to just re-launch Wikidot ASAP or spend some extra time upgrading software, hardware and revising our security policies. We chose to play it safe, which turned into 3 days of insane work which included re-writing large portions of code we've build over the last 16 years :-) The good think Wikidot now runs on new hardware and software.

Unexpected bugs

Originally we were planning to launch on Monday, but just hours before the re-launch we realized our database was not really well. Somehow it was not finding some of the data — in particular, some of the sites seemed to be missing. We nailed the problem to a very specific (and yet unpublished?) issue with the database software. Yep, we tried 4 different backup restore strategies from 3 different sources.

So, that's the story. This is the very first time we've been hacked to this extent. And I strongly believe we did what we could to stop such things from happening in the future.

Things still to do

Now, there are two things that are still missing: one is site search and the other is email notifications. We'll keep working on bringing them back too.

Wikidot will not be available in Russia nor Belarus

There is another aspect to this story — the origin of the attack.

We cannot stay quiet about the fact that over the last years we've seen numerous abuse and hacking attempts of Wikidot services originating in Russia territory. Now, since the start of war in Ukraine, these incidents increased in numbers and started posing a real threat. We cannot accept the fact that such attacks on foreign companies and institutions are silently approved or even encouraged by the Russian state.

As a result we've decided we cannot provide services in countries that do not respect common human values and at the same time pose a threat to Wikidot itself.

Although we believe there are many open-minded and rightful people in both Russia and Belarus, our decision to block Wikidot is a direct result of recent abuse and hacking events and state-level policy of these countries.

And some closing thoughts…

The whole thing has been tough for us, but all the time we had in mind that Wikidot is a service used by YOU. Thank you for your patience, understanding, your Twitter reactions, kind words and entertaining GIFs :-) It made our days much brighter!

Thanks for staying with us!

Michal and the Team

by michal-frackowiak

this year we're launching a Black Friday special offer that let's you save 40% of any account upgrade.

As usually, the discount applies if you want to buy a new upgrade or prolong your existing one. If you already have an upgrade and it ends in a few months — you can also purchase a prolongation now at the discounted price and it will extend your account for an extra year.

Thanks for using Wikidot!

Michal and The Wikidot Team

by michal-frackowiak

All prices are 40% off till Thursday, 30. November. The discount applies to both new upgrades and prolongations. So even if you current upgrade ends in a few months, you can purchase an upgrade for the next year now for the discounted price.

As usual you can save additional 15% if you chose "Bitcoin" as a payment method.

Upgrading takes just a few minutes. Or even less. Take a look at the upgrade panel. The new prices are already there.

Happy Black Friday price hunting!

— The Wikidot Team

by michal-frackowiak

The root cause of this outage was Amazon S3 failure. Wikidot, as well as millions of other websites all over the internet, rely on S3 for hosting files. S3 is exactly where we keep the files you upload in your wikis, but it's also where we keep JavaScript and CSS files required for displaying our web pages in your browsers.

Till now S3 has never failed before to this extent. It sure was not a small failure and it took down several other Amazon services. It also affected all services and websites that use Amazon Web Services. It's not just Wikidot alone: Trello, Travis CI, GitHub and GitLab, Quora, Medium, Signal, Slack, Imgur, Twitch.tv, Razer, Apple's iCloud and several other websites could not function properly (or were not reachable at all). A significant percentage of websites all over the world relies on S3 and only now we learned what happens when it's down.

The issue was so severe that even Amazon could not update their status board to let us know about the problems. It was probably hosted on S3 as well… It looks like engineers simply assumed that S3 would be available no matter what.

Wikidot infrastructure design relies on a certain assumption about S3 as well. We simply assumed everything can break, but not S3 itself. Even our backup site (in case databases and servers fail) is hosted on S3.

I guess today several admins and developers (especially from services affected by the S3 outage) try to find a way to loosen their dependencies on S3 and protect their services against similar events. We are going to look at this too — the data you keep with us is our top priority.

Thanks for your understanding and I am sorry for any trouble our outage might have caused.

Michal and the Wikidot Team

by michal-frackowiak

PS. I also hope at least some of you will see some snow on Christmas :-)

by michal-frackowiak

All prices are 40% off till Tuesday, 29 November. They apply to both new upgrades and prolongations. You can save additional 15% on top of the discount if you pay with bitcoins (simply choose "Bitcoin" at checkout).

To upgrade, simply visit the upgrade panel. The new prices are already there.

Happy Thanksgiving Day and many good deals on Black Friday!

— The Wikidot Team

by michal-frackowiak

pieterh

There is no exaggeration in saying Pieter was the single most influential person in the Wikidot history — his hyperactivity resulted not only in dramatic changes at Wikidot, but also gave birth to several sub-projects. There was a time we have been working together night and day to make Wikidot better, talked about the future, what's waiting for us. These moments were inspiring and we will remember Pieter as someone who can devote himself completely to make something happen.

Pieter was one of the first persons that helped Wikidot become a truly global project — he was the first one to invest in Wikidot, which allowed us rent an office and hire first developers. He spent months in Poland away from his family to work with us. And to eat pizza with ketchup and mayonnaise :-)

It's not only Wikidot that Pieter left behind — he is pretty well known for work on ground-braking ZeroMQ, various protocols and software projects, his involvement with FOSS movement, but also as a writer. Even a quick look at his Twitter profile shows how many people he inspired and how enormous gap his absence will leave.

It's not fair to say Pieter is gone — his work is still here and will keep inspiring people. I believe the projects he started will be around much longer than lifespan of a single human. But still I can't help the sadness and emptiness after his death.

by michal-frackowiak

Here's what should be faster now:

Selecting by tags

There are several large sites on Wikidot that depend on tags for categorizing pages. Take Wikiwealth for example. It uses tags to associate numerous data with appropriate market instruments and then invokes ListPages to render useful information to the visitor. The data is so large that every time we had been checking database status there had always been a few queries related to WikiWealth hanging around.

We have basically re-written parts of Wikidot engine that deals with storing tags and selecting pages by tags. We have created new fields on page tables in the database and built indexes on it. As a result the queries that used to take 0.5 seconds now take 0.002 seconds to execute.

Our own issue tracker, built on tags, works much nicer too. It selects pages by tags, e.g.

[[module CountPages category="issue operation support packaging" tags="_wip"]]

Our main page contains 15 ListPages and CountPages modules. After the database redesign its content is rendered significantly faster.

If your site uses any complex ListPages or CountPages construct that selects pages by tags, you will likely see an improvement too.

Selecting by custom fields

If your site contains form-enabled pages and you use custom field selectors in ListPages or CountPages or you order results by custom fields — there are several improvements too. We have decided to store all page attributes in a separate table using database type designed to store flat key-value data (HStore).

Selecting pages by custom fields has never been optimized since its introduction a few years ago.
One of the new sites that take advantage of form-enabled data is DarkSouls3 wiki. It uses data-enabled pages to categorize game items. For example their Weapons page uses several ListPages modules to list all items (pages) categorized as Axes, Bows, Swords etc. The database optimizations we've done reduced specific query times from 0.8s to 0.008s. It makes a huge difference when working with the content or viewing it.

Any changes in user interface?

No, the changes are limited to backend only. No changes should have been introduced that would affect results returned by ListPages nor CountPages. If, by any chance, your site displays results other than you expect, please let us know. Although we've extensively tested the improvements there might be a few quirks we missed.

Tags and custom fields in data forms can now scale much better as sites grow. If you plan on creating sites with structured data, even storing thousands of items, I suggest you should give data forms a try.

Read more at:

• Selecting pages from ListPages module doc
• Selecting and sorting pages by data form fields — a blog post
• Selecting & Sorting by Data Form fields — from the data forms docs

by michal-frackowiak

On behalf of our team I wish you all best in 2016 — may this year be full of joy, success and everything you wish for! Warm wishes to all our supporters, users, friends!

by michal-frackowiak

This year we keep it simple — no lengthy blog posts, just facts — upgrade your account to any of our Pro plans or prolong your current plan at 50% off the regular price.

No small-print, no catches, no extra requirements. Moreover, if you upgrade now and after a while conclude it's not-as-cool-as-advertized — remember we have the 30-day full-refund policy.

To upgrade check out the Pricing page and go directly to the Upgrade panel.

The deal lasts the whole week till 4 Dec 2015.

Shop smart!

Michał & The Wikidot Team

by michal-frackowiak

[[div_]], [[span_]] — no extra <p> nor <br/>

A number of users pointed out that [[div]] and [[span]] elements often force additional line breaks and paragraphs when compiled into HTML. This is OK when creating text documents but it's asking for trouble when composing layouts where uncontrolled whitespace can ruin the effect. This is especially true with Bootstrap layouts.

Here is a short illustration of the change:

[[span]] [[a href="#"]] example link [[/a]] [[/span]]

<p> <span> <br> <a href="#" target="_blank">example link</a> <br> </span> </p>

[[span_]] [[a_ href="#"]] example link [[/a]] [[/span]]

<span> <a href="#" target="_blank">example link</a> </span>

See the difference? Cleaner output and more control. The carousel like the one you can see above is now much easier to type — the parser should not surprise you with extra newlines nor paragraphs now, provided you put underscores to div and span elements.

Logical and mathematical operators — [[#if, [[#ifexpr, [[#expr

When creating dynamical pages, e.g. using ListPages module it was really hard to perform manipulation on numerical values. Some of our users pointed out they could do some great stuff if we added an extra processing layer on top of the parser. So we added three new simple constructs that work like this:

[[#expr abs(-100) ]] [[#expr min(4, 1, -4, 6, -10) ]] [[#expr max(4, 1, -4, 6, -10) ]] [[#expr 2*4/12-4+66%2 ]] is [[#ifexpr 2*4/12-4+66%2 < -3.5 | less than -3.5 | greater than -3.5 ]] [[#expr 2*(2-1) ]] [[#if true | display if true | display if false ]]

Sure these expressions are of little use in static pages but they become really useful when combined with ListPages. You could then dynamically add elements (HTML classes, page elements) based e.g. on data forms attributes! See the example below how it's used to add the "active" class to the first carousel element.

Interested? Read more on our doc pages.

[[head]], [[body]] and [[foot]] in ListPages

[[head]], [[body]] and [[foot]] replace prependLine and appendLine parameters with one huge advantage: they can capture blocks of code instead of just one-line values. Here is how they work:

The new code has the form:

[[module ListPages wrapper="no" separate="no"]] [[head]] [[ul]] [[/head]] [[body]] [[li class="list-item"]]%%title_linked%%[[/li]] [[/body]] [[foot]] [[/ul]] [[/foot]] [[/module]]

This is equivalent to the previously known form:

[[module ListPages wrapper="no" separate="no" prependLine="[[ul]]" appendLine="[[/ul]]"]] [[li class="list-item"]]%%title_linked%%[[/li]] [[/module]]

Note that prependLine and appendLine are inline parameters and can only contain a single line of code. The newer form, although requires more typing, allows several lines of wiki code in header and footer of ListPages. Both appendLine/prependLine and foot/head will continue to be supported, so if you are fine with one-liners you do not need to change your habits.

For more details see ListPages reference docs.

Let's put it together — a dynamically created carousel

The above changes should allow creating much more advanced constructs, e.g. using the Bootstrap carousel. The example below uses three new features, namely:

1. [[div_]] to create block elements with clean layout,
2. #ifexpr expression to add the "active" class to the first pane and #expr to bind nav elements to panes,
3. ListPages with [[head]] and [[foot]].

We will use DataForms to provide content for carousel panes too.

To manage the carousel we created a simple page at http://forms.wikidot.com/carousel:_template containing the following code:

%%form_data{source}%% ---- [[button edit text="Edit" class="btn btn-primary"]] [[button delete text="Delete" class="btn btn-danger"]] ==== [[form]] fields: source: label: Source/Description type: wiki active: label: Active type: select values: yes: yes no: no [[/form]]

One could set the category as private which would allow only admins to modify content of the carousel. This would prevent other users from seeing the pages. Actually they do not need to — their content will only be displayed via the ListPages module.

To make viewing and adding new content easier we created an extra "management page" at http://forms.wikidot.com/carousel:_manage

[[module ListPages category="carousel"]] %%title_linked%% (active: %%form_data{active}%%) [[/module]] [[module NewPage category="carousel" button="Add"]]

Next we put a few pages to create content to work with.

Finally we created a new page at http://forms.wikidot.com/carousel:_example and pasted the following content:

[[module css]] #u-carousel .carousel-inner { background: #888; border-radius: 20px; } #u-carousel .item { text-align: center; height: 200px !important; } #u-carousel .carousel-control.left { border-radius: 20px 0 0 20px; } #u-carousel .carousel-control.right { border-radius: 0 20px 20px 0; } [[/module]] [[div_ id="u-carousel" class="carousel slide" data-ride="carousel"]] [!-- Indicators --] [[module ListPages category="carousel" wrapper="no" separate="no" _active="yes"]] [[head]] [[ol_ class="carousel-indicators"]] [[/head]] [[body]] [[li data-target="#u-carousel" data-slide-to="[[#expr %%index%% - 1 ]]" class="[[#ifexpr %%index%% == 1 | active ]]"]]@<&nbsp;>@[[/li]] [[/body]] [[foot]] [[/ol]] [[/foot]] [[/module]] [!-- Wrapper for slides --] [[div_ class="carousel-inner"]] [[module ListPages category="carousel" wrapper="no" separate="no" _active="yes" order="random" limit="5"]] [[div_ class="item [[#ifexpr %%index%% == 1 | active ]]"]] [[div_ class="carousel-caption"]] + %%title%% %%form_data{source}%% [[/div]] [[/div]] [[/module]] [[/div]] [!-- Controls --] [[a_ class="left carousel-control" href="#u-carousel" role="button" data-slide="prev"]] [[span class="glyphicon glyphicon-chevron-left"]]@<&nbsp;>@[[/span]] [[/a]] [[a_ class="right carousel-control" href="#u-carousel" role="button" data-slide="next"]] [[span class="glyphicon glyphicon-chevron-right"]]@<&nbsp;>@[[/span]] [[/a]] [[/div]]

That's it! Try it yourself — just go to http://forms.wikidot.com/carousel:_example to see the carousel in action. You can also add new elements at http://forms.wikidot.com/carousel:_manage. The carousel will display content random from five pages.

Hopefully the new improvements will allow even more advanced layouts and content. Take care!

Image credits: Mikael Miettinen, Barron Fujimoto and Hubert Yu, licenced under CC-2.0.

by michal-frackowiak

Here is the full story. Since the beginning of the year we can see increased interest in protecting wikis with SSL certificates. Wikis can be then available through secure HTTPS protocol, not only encrypting the transmission between a browser and a server, but also validating the identity of the website itself.

But there was a problem: if you wanted to use secure access (HTTPS) to your wiki, you could enable it in the admin panel (a Pro+ plan is needed anyway), but our default certificates can only secure wikis within the .wikidot.com domain. If you tried to access you wiki through a custom domain, you could see an error like this one:

This is because your browser requested content for a custom domain (e.g. example.com), but the request was received by web servers handling the .wikidot.com domain.

Definitely not something you want your visitors to see. In order to solve this you would need a certificate for your own domain. You could buy it from a number of companies and we could install it. Until recently however we had to charge an extra yearly fee for creating and maintaining an extra endpoint for your wiki. We actually had to rent an extra IP address and install your certificate on a web server associated with this new IP address. Not only it required extra work on our end, but the growing number of certificates made the infrastructure difficult to maintain.

Last November we upgraded our webserver infrastructure. We unified some of the endpoints and started using the SNI (Server Name Identification) to handle multiple SSL certificates by single endpoints.

SNI enables our web endpoints to handle multiple SSL certificates we need for Wikidot to work. What's more we can now use SNI to serve our clients' certificates from the very same endpoints! Adding extra certificates for custom domains no longer requires huge amount of work and can be easily completed within minutes.

Last month we were able to install first customer certificate and it works great so far.

So if you have or want to have a Pro+ account, want a secure wiki with a custom domain, we can install your SSL certificate free of charge. Just contact us at moc.todikiw|troppus#moc.todikiw|troppus, we will help you with the process!

The awesome LEGO figure and image courtesy of Pascal from Flickr.

by michal-frackowiak

What I particularly like about such events is that they are beneficial not only for participants who end up with experience gains, new connections and (hopefully) great time spent but also for everyone involved. During the three days I met awesome people, possibly started a fruitful cooperation, had a chance to see old friends. It's a win-win for everyone.

At Startup Weekends everyone can bring an idea for a startup. The only issue I find it that when there are no constrains on the category it results in pretty generic and honestly poor ideas. As a result, all ideas were targeted towards consumers, many involved user-generated content and online communities, many concentrate on mobile apps. Sure, the success depends on many factors, execution to be one of the most important. But honestly I would expect either a bit more crazy, non-schematic ideas, or projects that try to solve real problems.

Do not take me wrong — Startup Weekends are great opportunities to validate an idea, pitch it in front of audience, test one's skills and try to reach the goals in a sandbox environment. Most importantly, one can fail (and people do) without any real consequences. Knowing how to fail and not being afraid of it is an awesome skill and it's so much better to learn it during a 3-day marathon than after having spent months of work and tons of money.

What's most important — everyone had fun and learned something. Despite the fact that the jury (and audience) had to chose winners, I think every single team was a winner. Congratulations!

Wikidot was one of the sponsors of the event. We awarded the Audience Award winners — The Fridge Challenge — with Pro Plus accounts.

Big thanks to the organizers, all participants and guests! It's been great time!

PS. Be sure to check the #SWOln hashtag on Twitter and the event Facebook page.

by michal-frackowiak

Despite the new ruling we are keeping things simple. We decided to keep the gross prices same for everyone in EU, regardless of their country of residence. No changes here. Behind the scenes, we apply VAT rates for your country and alter the base net price.

Nothing changes for EU-VAT registered companies as they always pay the net price (except for companies from Poland).

Nothing changes for non-EU subscribers as they are not subject to EU VAT regulations.

If you are upgrading your account or prolonging your subscription, all the details should be clearly stated on the order pages and in your invoice.

Best,
Michal

by michal-frackowiak

Thanks for the 2014 — the year that was a bit difficult for us. Thank you for your activity on community sites and helping us run unique wiki-related services! But I am always most thankful for each wiki you have built on Wikidot! (except for spammers, sorry.)

We are looking at 2015 to do some great things. We will definitely do our best to keep Wikidot a top wiki platform in 2015!

Best,
Michal

by michal-frackowiak

Anything can be improved. The strategy that (almost always) works is: If something is good, double it. It should be even greater. It applies to rainbows for sure. We are no magicians to control weather for sure, but there is something we can do…

I am glad to announce that we have just doubled storage space for all premium accounts. From now on you can enjoy twice as much space for your uploaded files. The new storage amounts are:

It's not a time-limited promotion nor an exclusive offer. We are increasing the space for all current users and all future upgrades.

As you likely remember, none of the wikis have a limit on number of pages — Wikidot gladly hosts both large wikis and small ones.

I am really happy that people, companies and organisations constantly find new, creative ways to use Wikidot. I hope the doubled storage will let new awesome applications emerge!

Best,
Michal

by michal-frackowiak

Anytime between now and 3 December if you upgrade or prolong your subscription and select "Bitcoin" at the end of checkout — you will get 40% off the final price.

Why?

Bitcoin again? That's right. We did a similar deal last year, we announced it on Bitcoin Black Friday and got fantastic feedback.

We are huge fans of Bitcoin and we deeply believe Bitcoin is a great step forward in online payments. It's secure, decentralized, fast and reliable. From a geeky currency Bitcoin grew into a powerful financial tool that has a great chance to change the way we think about money.

How?

If you are a total Bitcoin newbie (as I was a year ago), here is great guide at Bitcoin.org. It contains everything you need to know to jump onboard!

The promo will last till 3 December. If you are new to Bitcoin, note that verification might take some time at some exchanges. You can also buy bitcoins locally with LocalBitcoins, find a local Bitcoin community or use a service that sell bitcoins instantly.

Cheers!

Update

The Bitcoin Friday 2014 Promo is over. Thanks to everyone who used it! If you missed it, do not worry, there is a permanent 15% discount when you pay with Bitcoin!

by michal-frackowiak

Thanks to organizers who asked me to mentor the teams. I really enjoyed it (you can see me in the movie too) and I believe the teams benefited from my experience and tips. I am also happy that Wikidot could support this initiative.

Besides, SWToruń was a great opportunity to meet old friends and make new.

There were 15 teams altogether, each working on building a valid product from scratch. 54 hours should be enough for everyone, right? I am impressed how much you can actually do in such short time. But apart from work, there was time for socializing and some fun too :-)

My favorite project (apart from the winning one) was Kuko — a platform that let you buy home-made meals from anyone who wants to sell them. Great if you want to prepare an extra meal and sell it for small profit, but it's even greater if you don't have time to cook yourself!

Last but not least, congratulations to the winning team of InsTicket, an NFC-based public transport ticket system. Using InsTicket you can purchase bus/tramway tickets by simply holding your phone against an NFC tag. The user experience of this solution is simply great and the team put a lot of effort in the project. Congratulations! Wikidot awarded the winning team with Pro+ accounts for each of the team members — remember to collect your prize!

Here are a few links with more photos and coverage:

• Startup Weekend Toruń Facebook page
• #SWTorun on Twitter

by michal-frackowiak

Friday night, a thriller story

Our infrastructure is pretty stable and resilient, so I was hoping to get 100% uptime on November. Suddenly on Friday evening we started getting various alerts, from Pingdom, CloudWatch and other services. Something was wrong. Wikidot was slow — loading a page could take up to a minute, sometimes pages could not load at all. Pingdom alerts acted like crazy — various wikis went down and up radomly.

Any service works, until it doesn't. ELB is no exception.

We immediately jumped to computers. Friday evening, a perfect time for an emergency situation. But everything seemed to be O.K. with our servers. No excessive load, no increased number of connections. Nothing. Even request rate per second was within limits.

It took us hours of experiments, replacing web servers, altering parameters to discover the problem was beyond our control. The issue was introduced by AWS Elastic Load Balancers that distribute web requests over our farm of servers.

Actually we have 6-10 web servers, and over 20 servers altogether.

ELBs are a great piece of AWS infrastructure, with auto-scaling, failover etc. But they are black boxes. Sure you get some metrics, logs, but nothing more. You cannot control critical parameters, you cannot scale it manually, you cannot see what exactly is going on with them when things go wrong.

Client (browser) connections were stuck in SYN_SENT state (the connection was not fully established). It might have been caused by internal resource starvation at balancers, a SYN flood attack or any misconfiguration. Anyway, balancers could not handle incoming connections and we had no idea why.

Yes, we fixed it. Well, kind of.

Eventually we set up a new ELB to handle traffic to Wikidot and, surprisingly, it started working out of a box. Problem solved, we thought. I went to bed at 3 AM believing the issue is solved. AWS support was notified.

It did not work for long. Saturday evening the problem repeated. We did a quick trick — since we had the old balancer around (did not delete it), we switched traffic to the old balancer. It helped… for a few hours. We had to launch a brand new balancer, but now we suspected (correctly) the problem would repeat.

Again and again…

The same happened on Sunday and we were really tired of the situation. We were doing everything we could to keep Wikidot online and responsive, but it was not easy and we were losing hope. We were trying to distribute traffic over balancers to mitigate the issue. It helped, but not for long.

The situation continued on Monday. Despite our efforts some users were getting timeout errors, our alerts were indicating performance issues. We have ruled out a possibility of a SYN flood attack, there was clearly something wrong with ELBs.

HAProxy to the rescue!

After unfruitful conversation with AWS support we made the decision yesterday to ditch ELBs and use open source HAProxy load balancers to handle our traffic. Despite we had to configure SSL termination, make HAProxy automatically add/remove web servers and, most importantly, prepare it to handle hundreds requests per second — we did it within hours. By evening we had a working setup and we made the switch.

It's cheaper and it works better.

Guess what, HAProxy is amazing. Two c3.large instances are handling traffic to wikidot.com without sweat. Encouraged by this we added traffic from wdfiles.com (serves user-uploaded files) too (ditching one more ELB). Each HAProxy balancer handles up to 200 requests per second with less than 10% CPU load. Not to mention it's not going spontaneously offline nor exhibiting any strange issues. Rock-solid.

HAProxy gives us much more control over the connection handling — connection timeouts, rate limiting, abuse handling, anti-DDOS settings and much, much more. ELB is great as it works out-of-a-box, but as we learned the hard way, it's not a one-tool-fits-all thing.

Actually, it was not the first time we had issues with ELBs. Twice in the last 2 years we had to call support to do their VooDoo tricks to make ELBs work properly with wdfiles.com. But this time the explanation we got from AWS did not make much sense, nor did anything good at all.

We could not wait any longer for any solution. When I am writing this we still have not got any response apart from saying it's a "scaling issue" and balancers are still broken. I am glad we did not wait, so far HAProxy rocks!

Be up to date, follow @wikidot on Twitter!

We have been reporting critical milestones of the operation on our Twitter account. If you have a critical wiki at Wikidot, want to be the first to know what's going on — follow @wikidot!

Last but not least

If you have experienced problems with Wikidot in the last few days, I am terribly sorry. Things happen, some are beyond our control. One thing for sure — Wikidot reliability is our priority and we always do what we can to keep your wikis online, responsive and secure. We do our best!

Best,
Michal

Update

On Mon I spent a while on phone with David who is managing the ELB team. He confirmed there was a scaling issue and connection saturation problem on our ELB. Indeed we had extra traffic starting 1st Nov of non-human nature and this escalated the issue.

David, thanks for spending time explaining the problem. I highly appreciate it!

Update 2

Since people keep asking me about our HAProxy setup, here is a short post about it.

by michal-frackowiak

There is one special event in Toruń I would like to invite you to. It's Startup Weekend, on 7-9 November.

"Startup Weekends are 54-hour long events that bring entrepreneurs, designers and developers together to form teams and work on startup projects. Beginning with open mic pitches on Friday, attendees bring their best ideas and inspire others to join their team. Over Saturday and Sunday teams focus on customer development, validating their ideas, practicing LEAN Startup Methodologies and building a minimal viable product. On Sunday evening teams demo their prototypes and receive valuable feedback from a panel of experts."

I am really happy to be one of the mentors at the event, on-site. Yep, you can spot it right away on the website :-) This means I will help the teams by advising and sharing my experience, hopefully to build great projects during the weekend.

To make things more spicy, Wikidot is one of the sponsors of the event. Startup Weekend is not just an acceleration event but also a competition. Wikidot will provide top-level Pro+ accounts for all members of the winning team (as selected by the judges on Sunday).

If you are anywhere near Toruń, make sure you get to the event! If not for the prizes, then for fun!

Useful links:

• Official web page of Startup Weekend Toruń
• Global Startup Weekend site
• Get tickets!

by michal-frackowiak