Hi,
"The Wikimedia Foundation servers are currently experiencing technical difficulties. [...] If you would like to help, please donate."
Ok, this happens regularly and we can live with it, luckily Wikimedia is not a commercial company but mostly based on voluntary work, so let's donate some money...
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Fundraising
Unable to connect to 207.142.131.213
Uhm, the problem that people may like to donate when servers are down but cannot do so when servers are down is known for ... years? Why is wikimediafoundation.org still hosted at Wikimedia's own server farm? It's only a small website isn't it? I bet the costs of moving to a reliable, independent webhoster will easily pay off.
Maybe it's that Wikimedia Foundation does not need the money?
with a shake of the head, Jakob
Jakob Voss wrote:
Uhm, the problem that people may like to donate when servers are down but cannot do so when servers are down is known for ... years? Why is wikimediafoundation.org still hosted at Wikimedia's own server farm?
Because it will take a million years to get permission from the board to get additional hosting. ;)
About the donation form issue, please see prior messages about the squid error message.
It's only a small website isn't it? I bet the costs of moving to a reliable, independent webhoster will easily pay off.
Ah, but if Wikipedia is down, the traffic requirements for it will be HUGE. So you can't think of it as a "small website". When we previously tried mirroring the donation page on Angela's site it simply collapsed under the weight very shortly afterwards.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
Brion Vibber wrote:
It's only a small website isn't it? I bet the costs of moving to a reliable, independent webhoster will easily pay off.
Ah, but if Wikipedia is down, the traffic requirements for it will be HUGE. So you can't think of it as a "small website". When we previously tried mirroring the donation page on Angela's site it simply collapsed under the weight very shortly afterwards.
Well, your are right. So we should find a reliable, independent Webhoster that can handle huge traffic spikes - it will still be cheaper than no donation site or running an extra server array. Or we just wait until there are more Wikimedia data centers around the world so the site can be mirrored in a complex way (btw: can you also mirror donations? ;-)
But otrs is only a small website isn't it?
Greetings, fun and thanks for bringing Wikipedia back again, Jakob
P.S: I know that some people will hit me because of publically discussion this, but hey - it's no hidden secret that wikimediafoundation.org was down and that it's hosted together with Wikipedia!
On 4/19/06, Brion Vibber brion@pobox.com wrote:
Ah, but if Wikipedia is down, the traffic requirements for it will be HUGE. So you can't think of it as a "small website". When we previously tried mirroring the donation page on Angela's site it simply collapsed under the weight very shortly afterwards.
Couldn't this go on the Asian cluster?
-- Sam
Brion Vibber schreef:
It's only a small website isn't it? I bet the costs of moving to a reliable, independent webhoster will easily pay off.
Ah, but if Wikipedia is down, the traffic requirements for it will be HUGE. So you can't think of it as a "small website". When we previously tried mirroring the donation page on Angela's site it simply collapsed under the weight very shortly afterwards.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
Is it really necessary to provide the normal donation form? Just put on the error-page itself ( PayPal: donation@wikipedia.org ) and if that is possible make from the email address a link to the website of PayPal to a page where the can donate to the Wikimedia Foundation.
Side note (board/PR remark; I see the donation email address is @wikipedia.org Would it not be better to use @wikimedia.org or @wikimediafoundation.org for that? People give money not to Wikipedia but to the Foundation and also not especaily for Wikipedia.
Walter Vermeir wrote:
Is it really necessary to provide the normal donation form? Just put on the error-page itself ( PayPal: donation@wikipedia.org ) and if that is possible make from the email address a link to the website of PayPal to a page where the can donate to the Wikimedia Foundation.
Please see prior discussion on this subject.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
On 4/19/06, Brion Vibber brion@pobox.com wrote:
Walter Vermeir wrote:
Is it really necessary to provide the normal donation form? Just put on the error-page itself ( PayPal: donation@wikipedia.org ) and if that is possible make from the email address a link to the website of PayPal to a page where the can donate to the Wikimedia Foundation.
Please see prior discussion on this subject.
This response would be more helpful if it gave some hint toward finding the prior discussion.
Walter's suggestion seems a good one.
I just went to PayPal and told it to send $10 to donation@wikipedia.org; it tells me that the money (less their cut) went to a Verified Business Account belonging to "Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.", which has the URL of http://www.wikimedia.org/ and the email address of donations@wikipedia.org. That looks like a successful transaction to me.
If to the static page we now serve for an error we added a static mention of donation@wikipedia.org (or donations@) and a static link to PayPal, it seems likely a good flow of money would open up.
So what am I missing (and Walter, and Anthony)? What's in that past discussion -- or where can it be found?
Greg
Gregory Price wrote:
On 4/19/06, Brion Vibber brion@pobox.com wrote:
Walter Vermeir wrote:
Is it really necessary to provide the normal donation form? Just put on the error-page itself ( PayPal: donation@wikipedia.org ) and if that is possible make from the email address a link to the website of PayPal to a page where the can donate to the Wikimedia Foundation.
Please see prior discussion on this subject.
This response would be more helpful if it gave some hint toward finding the prior discussion.
The same place it was before; on this list and/or wikitech-l.
If to the static page we now serve for an error we added a static mention of donation@wikipedia.org (or donations@) and a static link to PayPal, it seems likely a good flow of money would open up.
So what am I missing (and Walter, and Anthony)? What's in that past discussion -- or where can it be found?
The problems with getting the error page have been resolved as of yesterday; I've shown a sample error-page-with-form to mav and am reworking it per feedback. Should be up soon.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
--- Walter Vermeir walter@wikipedia.be wrote:
Side note (board/PR remark; I see the donation email address is @wikipedia.org Would it not be better to use @wikimedia.org or @wikimediafoundation.org for that? People give money not to Wikipedia but to the Foundation and also not especaily for Wikipedia.
Yeah, that annoyed me a bit too. But we are stuck with the account name that we already have since changing it would be very non-trivial and give us very little benefit. In the end, this is a fairly minor thing.
-- mav
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On 19/04/06, Jakob Voss jakob.voss@nichtich.de wrote:
Uhm, the problem that people may like to donate when servers are down but cannot do so when servers are down is known for ... years? Why is wikimediafoundation.org still hosted at Wikimedia's own server farm? It's only a small website isn't it? I bet the costs of moving to a reliable, independent webhoster will easily pay off.
As Brion said, we used to have an "offsite" donation page, which worked for a while then Wikipedia grew so big that even the tiniest downtime would overload almost any outside site we linked to. We had to remove both the offsite donation page and the offsite status page from the error page because our error-spawned traffic was crushing their servers.
On 20/04/06, Walter Vermeir walter@wikipedia.be wrote:
Is it really necessary to provide the normal donation form? Just put on the error-page itself ( PayPal: donation@wikipedia.org ) and if that is possible make from the email address a link to the website of PayPal to a page where the can donate to the Wikimedia Foundation.
That could work. Then all we'd have to do is shut down the servers once a week and we'd get enough revenue to feed a large African country. ;)
~Mark Ryan
On 4/19/06, Brion Vibber brion@pobox.com wrote:
Jakob Voss wrote:
Uhm, the problem that people may like to donate when servers are down but cannot do so when servers are down is known for ... years? Why is wikimediafoundation.org still hosted at Wikimedia's own server farm?
Because it will take a million years to get permission from the board to get additional hosting. ;)
Just hide it in Jimbo's travel expense budget. ;)
Seriously though, if you can serve a page which says "The Wikimedia Foundation servers are currently experiencing technical difficulties.", then you can serve a set of pages which provide enough information for people to find out about the organization and lets people make donations. There's no reason a donation page has to be dynamic.
Anthony
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