ArmchairGM is finally open source

Update on 28 August 2013: Wikia moved to GitHub from SVN in late 2012 and as of today, their SVN (at wikia-code.com) appears to be unreachable, so I've uploaded the full ArmchairGM source code to GitHub.
You can browse the source tree at https://github.com/mary-kate/ArmchairGM, but please make sure to read the README file before asking any questions about it.

August 1, 2011 was an important day in the history of open source software. That's when Wikia finally open-sourced the ArmchairGM codebase. You can browse the ArmchairGM codebase or even grab a copy of the ArmchairGM codebase, if you feel like it!

A bit of history

Over a year ago I tried open-sourcing the ArmchairGM codebase, but my idea was met with resistance and travelling to another country just to perform code cleanup — something you can do "online" by grabbing a copy of the codebase and then cleaning it up locally — was just not possible for me.

Later on, Sean Colombo, an awesome open source developer and the founder of LyricWiki, joined Wikia's technical team since LyricWiki moved to Wikia. On July 14th, I decided to e-mail Sean, just for the sake of it, to see if he'd be willing to help me out in making ArmchairGM's codebase open source.
You can believe that I was very surprised when I didn't receive the standard "sorry, can't do" reply that I've gotten used to getting from Wikia in response to my queries, but rather a sincere reply in which Sean stated that he'd be willing to help me out. Over the next two weeks, Sean worked hard to make sure that the ArmchairGM codebase would be ready to be released by removing private passwords and such things. And then, on August 1, it finally happened.
I was amazed that he took my original request — I had asked for a few ArmchairGM extensions and the skin — a couple steps further and open-sourced the entire codebase!

About the ArmchairGM codebase

The ArmchairGM codebase is based on MediaWiki 1.10alpha; the work on MediaWiki 1.10 started on 8 January 2007.
The current development version of MediaWiki is 1.19, the latest stable version is 1.17 and 1.18 will be released soon. So, as you can see, it's a bit old. After all, ArmchairGM was running on that 1.10alpha until early 2011, when it was upgraded to use the standard Wikia codebase.

Most of the interesting things can be found on the extensions and skins directories.

The extensions directory and its wikia subdirectory contain all the extensions used by ArmchairGM and/or created by Wikia developers — including ones that were short-lived, such as Challenge, or never enabled on ArmchairGM, such as LookupContribs.

The skins directory contains all the skins ever developed by the ArmchairGM staff, including the Sports skin used on ArmchairGM from 2007 to early 2011, its earlier incarnation, called simply ArmchairGM, the Halopedia skin and the Gamespot version of it, and plenty more. It should be noted that while this directory has plenty of PHP and CSS files (and even some JS files), most of the images used by custom skins are not there — some are accessible on Wikia's servers if you know where to look for them, some are permanently gone.

What about core hacks? Wikia has done and continues to do core hacks whenever they need to do something that MediaWiki doesn't support out-of-the-box. So far I've come across a few, relatively minor, yet unmarked core code hacks in the ArmchairGM codebase. I'm hoping that I'll have enough time later this year or the next year so that I can build a diff showing the differences between a standard MediaWiki 1.10alpha and the ArmchairGM version.
Needless to say that such a thing will be quite difficult to do, because "1.10alpha" can mean pretty much any version of MediaWiki between r18957 (committed on 8 January 2011) and r21732 (committed on 1 May 2007) — that's 2775 revisions of code, and the ArmchairGM codebase could've been forked from any of those revisions.
Update on 15 August 2011: I had totally forgotten about the existence of the RELEASE-NOTES file. Comparing the RELEASE-NOTES file of the ArmchairGM codebase to the RELEASE-NOTES of MediaWiki 1.10alpha at various points of development allowed me to track down the revision of MediaWiki that the ArmchairGM codebase is in. I believe that it's either r20138 or a revision very close to it.

To generate a patch file showing the differences between the standard MediaWiki codebase and the ArmchairGM codebase, first export a copy of MediaWiki at r20138:

svn export -r 20138 http://svn.wikimedia.org/svnroot/mediawiki/trunk/phase3 MW-r20138

Then export a copy of the ArmchairGM codebase:

svn export https://svn.wikia-code.com/wikia/branches/wikia-ny/trunk NYC

And finally generate the patch:
diff -ur MW-r20138 NYC > diff-between-NYC-and-vanilla-MW-r20138.patch

Some changes are useless, like the change to includes/AjaxDispatcher.php, some are plain weird (like the various API changes to the files in the includes/api directory), and some changes (mostly the ones to OutputPage.php and SpecialPreferences.php) are a bit hard to read — but hey, there you have it, a file showing what changes were done to the core MediaWiki software by ArmchairGM's developers.
Most of the custom functionality that you once saw in ArmchairGM was done via extensions, thankfully, not via core changes; in addition to extensions, the skins also played a part — skins developed by ArmchairGM's developers usually implemented some custom handling for the main page of the wiki, for example, while a vanilla installation of MediaWiki with the default skin treats the wiki's main page the same way it would treat any other page.

For your viewing conveniece, here's a list of core MediaWiki files (81 in total) which differ between the ArmchairGM codebase and revision 20138 of MediaWiki:

extensions/README
includes/AjaxDispatcher.php
includes/AjaxFunctions.php
includes/api/ApiBase.php
includes/api/ApiFeedWatchlist.php
includes/api/ApiFormatBase.php
includes/api/ApiFormatJson.php
includes/api/ApiFormatPhp.php
includes/api/ApiFormatWddx.php
includes/api/ApiFormatXml.php
includes/api/ApiFormatYaml.php
includes/api/ApiHelp.php
includes/api/ApiLogin.php
includes/api/ApiMain.php
includes/api/ApiOpenSearch.php
includes/api/ApiPageSet.php
includes/api/ApiQueryAllpages.php
includes/api/ApiQueryBacklinks.php
includes/api/ApiQueryInfo.php
includes/api/ApiQueryLogEvents.php
includes/api/ApiQuery.php
includes/api/ApiQueryRecentChanges.php
includes/api/ApiQueryRevisions.php
includes/api/ApiQuerySiteinfo.php
includes/api/ApiQueryUserContributions.php
includes/api/ApiQueryWatchlist.php
includes/Article.php
includes/AutoLoader.php
includes/Database.php
includes/DefaultSettings.php
includes/DifferenceEngine.php
includes/EditPage.php
includes/Export.php
includes/GlobalFunctions.php
includes/Image.php
includes/LoadBalancer.php
includes/memcached-client.php
includes/MemcachedSessions.php
includes/MessageCache.php
includes/OutputPage.php
includes/ParserCache.php
includes/Parser.php
includes/QueryPage.php
includes/Sanitizer.php
includes/Skin.php
includes/SkinTemplate.php
includes/SpecialAllmessages.php
includes/SpecialConfirmemail.php
includes/SpecialContributions.php
includes/SpecialExport.php
includes/SpecialListusers.php
includes/SpecialLog.php
includes/SpecialMovepage.php
includes/SpecialNewpages.php
includes/SpecialPage.php
includes/SpecialPreferences.php
includes/SpecialRecentchanges.php
includes/SpecialSearch.php
includes/SpecialUndelete.php
includes/SpecialUpload.php
includes/SpecialUserlogin.php
includes/SpecialVersion.php
includes/SpecialWantedpages.php
includes/templates/Userlogin.php
includes/Title.php
includes/User.php
includes/WebStart.php
index.php
languages/messages/MessagesDe.php
languages/messages/MessagesEn.php
maintenance/deleteDefaultMessages.php
maintenance/dumpBackup.php
maintenance/generateSitemap.php
maintenance/postgres/tables.sql
maintenance/runJobs.php
skins/common/ajaxsearch.js
skins/common/common.css
skins/common/wikibits.js
skins/monobook/main.css
skins/monobook/rtl.css
skins/MonoBook.php

Ending Notes

Sure, the ArmchairGM codebase is old and plenty of stuff needs to be rewritten so that it even runs, let alone works properly, on modern versions of MediaWiki.
That being said, I'm glad that the ArmchairGM codebase is now open source — better late than never, as they say.

Status update on SocialProfile for Q1/2011

This is the first quarterly update about the SocialProfile extension for MediaWiki, from January 1, 2011 to March 31, 2011.

Fixed bugs

• Bug #26588 — image converting code should use $wgImageMagickConvertCommand instead of hardcoded "convert" (fixed in r79662)


• Bug #28251 — SQL error in user profile pages (fixed in r84806)


• Bug #27032 — new EditProfile special page to edit other users' social profiles

Other notable things

• Work towards bug #27732 has been made — see especially r84803 and r84804
  


• Internationalization and localization updates, courtesy of translatewiki.net


• There may be a SocialProfile-related Google Summer of Code project, for which I will be the mentor (see my student's proposal and the MediaWiki.org page about Summer of Code 2011)

Plans for the future

• Fix all open SocialProfile bugs — currently there are 6 open bugs; most of them aren't too complicated, so it should be possible to get them fixed by the end of the year


• Improve and release other social tools — Comments, QuizGame, PictureGame, Video...there are plenty of awesome social extensions that need to be cleaned up and released

Do you have a wiki running SocialProfile? What features would you like to see incorporated in SocialProfile? Have some other thoughts, ideas or comments? Please let me know in the comments section.

The past, the present and the future of the social tools

Social tools is a term which usually refers to MediaWiki's SocialProfile extension. SocialProfile consists of 10 "modules" (which actually used to be separate extensions at some point, ages ago), of which 9 are enabled by default. The only module not enabled by default is UserWelcome, which provides the <welcomeUser /> tag. Here's a quick overview of SocialProfile's modules:

• SystemGifts — award functionality. Awards are automatically given out by the software once the user has reached the specified threshold (i.e. 5 edits, for example).


• UserActivity — social activity feed on user profile pages.


• UserBoard — Facebook-like message boards on user profile pages.


• UserProfile — turns plain old User: pages into cool, social profiles!


• UserRelationship — friends and foes, which will be shown in your social profile.


• UserStats — statistics related to social actions (i.e. friending, sending a board message, etc.). UserStats also contains the point system (User Levels)


• UserSystemMessages — required by UserActivity, stores when a user advanced to the next level


• UserWelcome — a parser hook extension which provides <welcomeUser /> tag, which can be used to display user-specific info to the current user (when used in combination with WikiTextLoggedInOut extension


• YUI — a very simple extension which loads the Yahoo! User Interface JavaScript library (version 2.7.0) on every page load, along with some custom functions.

In addition to SocialProfile and its modules, some other social tools are also available in the official MediaWiki SVN repository, namely:

• RandomUsersWithAvatars — adds <randomuserswithavatars> tag to show the avatars of randomly chosen wiki users who have set an avatar for themselves.


• WikiTextLoggedInOut — adds <loggedin> and <loggedout> parser tags to show different text to anonymous and logged-in users. Most commonly this is used to display random avatars (see RandomUsersWithAvatars extension) to anonymous users and UserWelcome info to registered users.

The past of social tools

Social tools were developed by the founders of ArmchairGM, Aaron Wright, David Pean, Dan Lewis and Rob Lefkowitz. Then Wikia bought ArmchairGM and hired its developers. Soon enough the magazine-style wikis were launched. Magazine wikis were wikis with social tools and each had its own, unique skin. Gaming.Wikia's was the best, no doubt — it was much like ArmchairGM's current default skin, only darker.
In late 2007, it seems that Wikia started pulling the plug on the magazine wikis. By 2008 there were no magazine wikis left, all of them had been converted into ordinary, plain Wikia wikis.

However, the social tools saw a second coming: Halopedia, a wiki about the popular Halo game series, was converted into a social wiki — complete with picture games, polls, quizzes and everything! I remember when that happened; I was helping the ArmchairGM developers in debugging the 'new' Halopedia.

In February 2008, SocialProfile was released, after I had requested it. At this point, it was lacking some essential features, such as the point system and the special page to remove other users' avatars (Special:RemoveAvatar). But...it was there. Completely open-source. You have to remember that back in 2008, Wikia wasn't an open-source project.

After this, a couple other wikis also got the Halo treatment: GamerGear, a wiki about PC and console gaming gear, Grand Theft Wiki, a wiki about the Grand Theft Auto game series and FFXIclopedia, a wiki about the Final Fantasy XI massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG).

The present of social tools

The ArmchairGM developers have either left Wikia voluntarily or been laid off, which, according to Wikia, means that there's nobody who knows the code.

Halopedia, GamerGear, Grand Theft Wiki and FFXIclopedia are still running social tools. Halopedia held two important votes in this January. As a result, polls, quizzes, picture games and social userboxes were turned off for Halopedia. Poll namespace extension is still enabled for Grand Theft Wiki, but it doesn't work — try clicking on one of the options of some poll and you'll see what I mean.

The future of social tools

I'm still the (un)official lead developer of SocialProfile extension, and I have no plans whatsoever to quit. Just yesterday Bryan, a fellow MediaWiki developer, fixed bug #22598 — now users using MediaWiki 1.16 or latest trunk can again upload their avatars.

I'm hoping to have more social features cleaned up by the end of the year. Namely, Comments, FanBoxes (social userboxes), LinkFilter, PictureGame, PollNY and QuizGame.

It will be a time-consuming task, I'm sure of that. But then again, I also believe in open source. I know that the social tools are a succeess, and so do the users. After all, what else explains that there are 4 archives of questions from users regarding this extension? :-)