Rant Roasters/Miraheze

'''This is a critique (actually, roast would be more accurate) of bad reviews relating to Miraheze. This might actually be popular enough to start its own wiki.'''

Typical Reception Wiki Rant
"MIRAHEZE I HATE YOU AND YOUR SHITY OPINIONS FUCK YOU AND GO JUMP OF A BRIDGE ANGRY FACE ANGRY FACE ANGRY FACE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! >:( >:( >:( >:( >:( >:( >:( >:( >:( >:( >:( >:( >:( >:( >:( >:( >:( >:( >:( >:( >:( >:( >:( >:( >:( >:( >:( >:( >:( >:( >:( >:( >:( >:( >:( >:( >:("

'''Notwithstanding the fact that the average age of someone who writes this type of "review" is 9, Miraheze has nearly 6,000 wikis, almost all of which don't cause problems such as this. But you know what the best part is? Miraheze themselves responds to these types of angry ranting disguised as reviews. And they do it way better than counter-ranting ever could: by calmly responding and saying that they're wrong.'''

You Get What You Pay For (D.C., Trustpilot)
"This is my personal experience using Miraheze since September 2022.

My initial experience was mostly positive: completely free, no ads, customizable. Plus a few negatives: slow-ish load times, lots of downtime, a large and unnecessary Miraheze announcement banner, limited MediaWiki extensions."

'''Okay, good so far. Uh, "limited MediaWiki extensions"? Have you done any research? You can enable more with Special:ManageWiki/extensions. Hundreds, actually. Also, Miraheze is slow because it relies on donations.'''

"But suddenly, on November 16, my wiki went down. Apparently due to an unknown database error, the last 3 months of edits on 1200 wikis—including mine—were lost. The previous backups were from August 2022—before my wiki and any of its hundreds of articles were created. After two weeks of unclear (misleading) messaging, Miraheze admitted that there was little chance of data recovery on November 29. Additionally they had no plans for professional data recovery due to its estimated cost. A few days later, I opted to recreate my wiki on Miraheze from scratch. To make up for lost time, I wrote and rewrote many articles from the information in my local notes. I was making peace with losing the first version of my wiki and was able to improve many pages with more templates and wiki experience. I intended from then on to create my own local backups—but the 'download datadump' feature was disabled temporarily due to other maintenance. I later learned that the feature was re-enabled on December 13."

'''First, Miraheze wasn't responsible for hundreds of wikis suddenly crashing. It was a massive server outage caused by bad disks. Believe me, many people were frustrated when this happened. Second, I don't think any Miraheze volunteer said anything remotely close to there being little chance of recovery. And they never intended to send them to a professional data recovery service, not because of the cost, but because they were actually sending them to an SRE member; it was only said they were being sent to a professional data recovery service because of miscommunication.'''

"A mere five days after I could have created my first backup, the wiki went down again on December 18. The next day, Miraheze announced that—fortunately—they were able to recover the thought-to-be-unrecoverable backups from November. Quote: "We apologise for yet another downtime on these wikis but this incident has helped foment stronger backup procedures to prevent catastrophic disasters from occurring." They told me my old wiki would be merged with my latest edits after they transferred some data. But one week of downtime later, on December 26, they admitted that—and apparently this really happened—someone unplugged a hard drive while in use, and—for wikis alphabetically after "O"—their edits after November 25 were completely lost. No chance of recovery."

'''That's your fault for not creating backups when you could've. And like I said above, the data was never thought to be unrecoverable. It wasn't a fucking Showtime drama about mega-important SSDs that the world depends on crashing and going offline, and suddenly a team of world-class computer scientists figure out some crazy way to recover the data, and it's done, the world is saved, hooray! No. It just took some time to recover the data, that's all. And also, your wiki survived the outage, didn't it? Unless you got so mad that you decided to ragequit on Miraheze and asked them to delete it.'''

"So I've been burned by Miraheze twice. It goes without saying that none of this is remotely acceptable—but the reality is you get what you pay for. No guarantees, no reliability, no accountability. If your wiki is worth more than $50 a year to you then there is no reason to choose Miraheze over a commercial web host. Why is Miraheze the only free wiki farm with no ads? Because you'd be naïve to run one and you'd have to be stupid to rely on one. I was stupid!"

'''So basically, "I hate Miraheze because my wiki crashed, waaaaah!!!" You decided to write this because of one incident that will probably never happen again? Miraheze has been around for over seven and a half years at the time I'm writing this. The database outage was the biggest in Miraheze history. And it only occurred in November 2022. For 7 years, Miraheze has been running fine with little issues (apart from some minor outages). Nearly 6,000 wikis right now (probably not including yours) rely on it for hosting. At least give it another chance. "Why is Miraheze the only free wiki farm with no ads? Because you'd be naïve to run one and you'd have to be stupid to rely on one." No, Miraheze is the only free wiki farm with no ads because it runs on donations. People give money to Miraheze to keep it running. And if people are stupid for relying on the generosity of a free wiki farm, then all 200,000 of us who visit Miraheze daily have the collective intelligence of a rock. Also, you do realize that many people can't afford $50 a year on web hosting, because our economy is collapsing and inflation is going up, right? "I was stupid!" No, you still are, because you wrote this useless rant on a glitch. A fucking glitch.'''

To sum up this rant: "Oh noes database issue and now my wiki ded :(" While it's natural to be concerned for your wiki, it ended up surviving the database outage. You complained about a few edits being lost (unless they were actually a lot and half your wiki's content was lost, like that'll ever happen), but at least your entire wiki wasn't wiped off the face of the earth. Be grateful that you even have a wiki at all. Complaining about technical issues won't help. Be proactive and start backing up your wiki at least once a month.