Jcastle Rebuild 2024

I spent the better part of the last 3 weekends updating and upgrading Jcastle to work with MediaWiki 1.39 and Semantic MediaWiki 4.2. This should solve all my immediate problems, but another year or so down the road I'll have to do another update this big to bring it in line with the MediaWiki 1.4+

Jcastle Rebuild 2024

2024-11-11

I spent the better part of the last 3 weekends updating and upgrading Jcastle to work with MediaWiki 1.39 and Semantic MediaWiki 4.2. This should solve all my immediate problems, but another year or so down the road I'll have to do another update this big to bring it in line with the MediaWiki 1.4+ series and PHP 8. Hopfeully the various extensions and plugins will all be updated and help make it less painful.

A LOT HAS CHANGED underneath the surface of Jcastle. If you happen to notice any oddities at all, please let me know. Down the road I hope to take advantage of some new plugins and features to improve the site for all. A few of them are in testing already...

Even though it's not that big of a change to the average user, I'm actually very pleased with these updates that should make the site more robust, secure, and lean into the future.

Other updates and changes worth mentioning:

Users can now delete their own comments. Anonymous comments have been allowed again.
- Make sure you are logged in or you will become an "anonymous" commenter. If this happens, you can delete your own anonymous comment while using the same IP address. Login again and re-comment under your name if you like.
- I wanted to bring in a new plugin that would allow email notifications of comments and replies but it does not seem possible to import the old comments so they would be lost. If you have any thoughts on the matter please let me know!
There is a new gallery viewer to view photos. Please let me know if you like it or hate it. Leave a comment below, email or FB chat to me!
- It is faster and shows larger photos when available, but it takes you out of the normal flow of the webpage so it may be disconcerting
- Reinstating the old version will take some time to upgrade the code
All images over 2000px wide have been reduced to 1500pixels wide. This saved me 35GB of disk space! (let's not do that again!)
- I cannot check every photo for quality, but I have backups saved of the full image archive. If you see any poorly reduced photos or other oddities please let me know so I can fix it.
- I will disallow photos any bigger than 1500 px in the future
- Any photo loaded for the first time after Nov 11, 2024 will have the thumbnail(s) rebuilt so this may cause latency on some pages for awhile
- As a matter of common sense and good policy, when naming files for uploading please do not use kanji, spaces, diacritics, or other punctuation. Normal alphanumeric chacters only please! Yes, everything can be escaped but it is still bad form.
Cloudflare has been installed to help prevent certain kinds of spam, attacks on the site, and GenAI bots.
- You may see some new places with captcha depending on your status in Jcastle.
- Cloudflare does some caching which saves me up to ~20% bandwidth.
Reducing my image library size and bandwidth will help save me from moving up a tier and paying more for hosting too, for a long time I hope.
- This little upgrade cost me some bucks to get a little help from the webhost and doubling the hosting plan until the end of the year.
- Any support to cover hosting and maintenance fees via buymeacoffee would be appreciated!
- The site actually gets thousands of unique users per week. More than you might expect. Everything I can do to reduce bandwidth does help.
Other changes include:
- Cleanup of unused extensions and plugins.
- Fixed some display oddities that always bothered me.
- Cleaned up the user permission structures.
- Documented/commented most of the settings and plugins to make future upgrades and troubleshooting a little easier. Code markup always seems like a "nice to have" when you are in the thick of things, but as time goes by they are critical!