Technical Team Doomsday Manual - Outline
- Quang Vo
- aismallard
This is a document outlining a potential manual to serve as a fallback/comprehensive knowledge base of all the Technical expertise and decisions we’ve made, or should make. Ultimately, the goal is to preserve all institutional knowledge accrued over the years.
More dramatically, a guide on how to survive when all of Tech Team get hit by a bus, and you are a fresh member.
Key Responsibilities
Hub link: Technical Team Hub - O5 Command
IRC link: https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/chat-guide , #site11
The Technical Team is the branch of the SCP Wiki concerned with implementing and maintaining the technical assets of the site and implementing new features. Additionally, the team is in charge of fixing any issues that arise, or reporting any site-wide bugs to Wikidot. More specifically, the Technical Team's responsibilities are:
Maintaining technical aspects of the site (such as the site template and core site components).
Providing and/or implementing software expertise and assistance to other teams when necessary (such as contests and components).
Fixing bugs on the site or contacting Wikidot about major issues that may arise.
Running tech-related operations, such as site tools (e.g. Helen Bot) and the creation/deletion of tags (implementation of tags is the responsibility of MAST).
Determining and implementing policy on technical aspects of the Wiki.
How to operate effectively
Know how to use Jira and Confluence [Expand more here]
We have a GitHub [how to use Git and GitHub]
Sigma-9
Current site theme, is maintained with GitHub. GitHub - scpwiki/sigma: The Wikidot Sigma-10 theme, which is the default for the EN SCP Wiki.
To be replaced with Sigma-10 eventually? https://scuttle.atlassian.net/browse/TT-44 All things considered, rather than a straight upgrade, Sigma-9 would likely undergoes iterative, incremental updates.
Comment Signatures in forums
Is currently hidden under Site Theme. Forbidden content are embedded iframes - should any user do that, delete all their comment and emergency revoke [expand here]
Black Highlighter
An unofficial alternate base theme created and maintained primarily by Woedenaz, and currently the only other theme whose source code is hosted on GitHub.
Its widespread use and direct improvements in many areas over Sigma-9 makes it an item of interest.
Themes and Components
Link:
https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/css-policy
https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/technical-content-policy
[Who can approve these]
[Where to answer those seeking approval]
[The technical nitty-gritty of what to avoid or reduce in a component/theme, e.g. duplicate CSS]
Tech has purview over themes and components whose creators have been banned.
Categories
Page categories in Wikidot are delimited by a colon (:) in the URL. A page at peanut:butter would be in the peanut category, for example.
Sometimes URL are generated with a colon, which would potentially put it in a non-existent category. We rename the URL to avoid this, should it comes to be. Example - one:two-three to one-two-three.
Wikidot does not support multiple categories. A page called one:two:three is considered to be in the category one, with its page name as two:three. Because of this lack of support and the false impressions these URLs can give, it is strongly recommended to only use standard single-colon categories.
Here are all the currently existing categories:
Category name | Date created | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
| N/A | Wikidot default |
|
| For pages that no longer serves functional purposes, and is retained for historical or backlinks reason |
|
| A category to put artworks in. Although all arts are supposed to be put in this one, all the old artpages are grandfathered in |
|
| To be included onto many pages as an add-on. |
| Feb 2020? | Extension category of |
| 2018 | Put a page into stasis, effectively, preventing changes through edits, voting or comments. Currently only one non-function page is in this category (SCP-2721). |
| March 2021 | Created to offload author-created navigation links/footer to a more reusable template. |
Tags
The addition of tags to articles is primarily handled by the Tagging subteam of MAST, but the implementation of new tags is handled by the Technical Team.
[When to create new tag request thread, where]
Use the Tag Manifest tool to implement new tags: http://05command.wikidot.com/tag-list-manifest
[Extensive instruction here]
[Announce to INT in relevant channel for every new tags]
HTML/Iframe
Used to achieve more complex operations not normally possible with pure Wikitext and CSS, but is sandboxed, as to be expected for an iframe.
Tech has a passive duty to minimize the number of used [[html]] blocks (and replace with native Wikitext equivalent) due to performance issues. Make sure to notify the author of this decision.
[]
Interwiki
[Croq weigh in here pls]
Poisoned Slots
Due to Wikidot’s general lack of maintenance, hard deletion of a page can lead to the page at that URL to become inaccessible. See here for more information:
https://scuttle.atlassian.net/l/c/fMtr3HZz
This process is to be communicated with the Deletions subteam of MAST
Wikijump
The, as of writing, planned and in-development successor to Wikidot as the SCP Wiki’s new host platform.
[Link here]
Security Issues/Reporting
Until Wikijump can finally get off the ground, we’re stuck with Wikidot, an old and mostly unmaintained platform in terms of patching security holes (or listening to bug reports, or adding new features, etc.)
With this limitation alongside our inability to directly effect backend updates, Tech Team operates under a security-by-obscurity policy, keeping vulnerabilities under lock-and-key so as not to devastate or jeopardize the SCP Wiki, or its host platform.
Vulnerabilities are typically only disclosed to Wikidot or INT’s Tech Trust. Tech Team maintains a direct communication line with Wikidot through the Master Administrator’s (DrEverettMann at the time of this writing) Pro Plus premium support email, but the success rate has been fairly limited.