[January 2025 post about Wikijump]
It's been a year! So, what happened?
Like your uncle with prostate cancer, Wikidot continues to slowly creep towards death. The website is a fighter, but having a total yearly budget of 20 złoty and a dream is starting to catch up with it. To quote a very helpful and knowledgeable SCP developer:
The reason this was determined is that we find Wikidot becoming more broken over time, the most recent example is the PageByTag module becoming non-functional for SCP sites (although the writing was on the wall — it was marked as deprecated in the Wikidot docs since forever). We see that the Wikidot developers (whatever’s left of them in this day and age) simply do not have the capacity to fix bugs other than the most serious security vulnerabilities, and instead prefers to disable non-critical parts of the site, perhaps also out of cost-saving reasons.
The organs are shutting down one by one, and everyone awkwardly looks at the hospital bed, knowing that there's not much time left. It won't be too long until Wikidot goes the way of Neocities, with both the wiki itself and the forum shutting down for good.
Oh, and Iraqi insurgents have started to DDOSD it. Finally putting those weapons of mass destruction to good use. If you're wondering why every page takes five seconds to load now, this is why.
So, what is the SCP foundation doing to address that? Let's dive into this and take a look at the official blog, hosted over at
www.wikijump.org. (Sweet domain!)
Oh, there's a 10 month gap between the post in December 2024 and the next one. That's not good. So, did they reach any breakthrough?
This time around, we are adjusting our plans to prioritize having a read-only platform ready as soon as possible, such that we can import data from Wikidot with minimal changes, and have the pages be mostly readable. The reason this was determined is that we find Wikidot becoming more broken over time [...]
Everything is on fire, and it's starting to dawn on people that Wikidot is really about to shut down for real, very soon. All pretenses of developing an actually functional platform have been scrapped, and they reduced scope to what could essentially be accomplished via a WordPress template. For a project that has been in development since 2018.
If people actually read new SCPs, this would be a massive issue, but with the website essentially acting as an archive for 2011-era content, this would be an acceptable stopgap.
So, how's progress looking on that custom Web 1.0 project? Luckily, the radio silence has ended, or so I was told.
So in the future, we plan to put out some short and less-polished blog posts that conclude what features are being merged in to Wikijump, without much commentary, but at a steadier pace such as by month.
Monthly posts? That sounds great. Let's take a look at what the boys and girls (boys) accomplished during the month of December.
We’re into the new year now! Here are the updates that happened in the month:
Wikijump updates:
Restructure development.md to prioritize main items
Use JSONB instead of JSON in schemas
Add option to translate call to strip Fluent control characters
Remove invalid test case
Rename special_action -> runtime_action
Rename “special error” -> “basic error”
Hide JSON data behind debug view
[WJ-1337] Add navigation page support
Rename “special page” → “blueprint page”
Disable unique IDs when rendering nav pages
Display navigation bars in framerail
Use new WikitextMode:: PageNav when rendering nav elements
Add additional filters to seeder
FTML updates:
Ensure no IDs are generated for nav pages
Change element type for navigation renders
Remove wrapping element
Other than the general housekeeping items, we now have customizable navigation bars to display to users visiting site pages.
The ableist slur "special" has been removed from the codebase. Progress has been made, one line at a time.
But don't worry, the dev team also achieved some real and meaningful successes - the site now has a customizable navigation bar!
I'm not a programming socks kind of guy, but that does not sound like the hard part of building an entire wiki from scratch. That sounds like something explained in a handy
three step tutorial shorter than your average new SCP.
But who knows, maybe it's some ultra deluxe navigation bar that took dozens of hours to get right. Let's not be too quick to judge. The site still lacks an open beta or even alpha, so all we can do here is imagine how it might look like in the eventual future.
See you next year for another progress update. Surely, I'll have a lot more to talk about. Surely.