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.

Moving your wiki from Wikia to another host (off-Wikia)

You've just started a new wiki at Wikia. Congratulations. After a while, the community grows and there will be many editors. The bigger the wiki, the better, right? Most likely so. But with great articles comes great problems. Wikia's many software updates — at least things like Wikia's New New Style, which are purely political and motivated by the need to gain more revenue — can cause problems. What's the solution? Well, Wikia most certainly isn't going to stop applying software updates and writing new code. Would your community like to have a bit more space? There is a solution for your problem(s) — moving to another wiki host.

But moving off-Wikia to another, non-Wikia host is everything but simple and straightforward. Wikia usually refuses to close down the existing Wikia wiki; while it's true that they have every legal right to keep the Wikia site open, it's just not very fair or courteous towards the editors and administrators — the community of the wiki. In the worst case, administrators of the Wikia site may lose their rights on the Wikia site and the Wikia site will still exist and be editable by the world.

History knows of some fine examples. A Transformers-related wiki was started at transformers.wikia.com a long time ago. When Wikia's New Style — that is, forcing the Monaco skin down the users' throats — was introduced over two years ago, many wikis considered moving off-Wikia. This wiki was one of them. The wiki moved to TFWiki.net. Autonomy and total control of the wiki and no problems, right? Wrong. Wikia refused to close down the Wikia site and as an added "bonus", a high-ranking Wikia staff member, along with another staff member, removed the admins' and bureaucrats' rights on transformers.wikia.com, the log reason stating that these people have "moved to tfwiki.net". Well, it's the truth, you can't doubt that. What's noteworthy is that Wikia has no problems using the content created by these people. Sure, free content, but the current transformers.wikia.com is basically an unwanted and outdated fork of TFWiki.net.

Another case study: GisleWiki. This wiki was started at Wikia, but the founder (who, btw, pretty much built the site all by himself) didn't like Wikia's way of doing things, so he moved the wiki to its own domain, at GisleWiki.com. Wikia re-opened the Wikia site and look at it now: no edits for a long period of time and GisleWiki.com has more articles, obviously, because that wiki is being actively maintained by its founder. This didn't stop Wikia staff members from not only removing the founders' rights on the Wikia site, but also calling him a vandal. That's right folks — administrating a community, if you're not doing it as Wikia wants, is VANDALISM!

A more personal example is Jedipedia, the Finnish-language Star Wars wiki. I'm the co-founder of Jedipedia, along with Ufsark. In late July 2010, the wiki held a vote — at my initiative — to move to another wiki hosting service. The vote passed with nine (that's right, 9) people supporting and no-one opposing. Pretty much every active community member voted in the vote. Tells you something, eh?
The Jedipedia community and the administration team knew that Wikia wouldn't let the wiki go just like that, so we inserted a piece of JavaScript code into the site's JS. This JS code redirected the old Wikia site to the new location.
But on August 31st, a Wikia staff member discovered that we had moved and were using JavaScript to redirect the old Wikia site. This said person then proceeded to remove the JS code from our site. JouMan206, a long-serving bureaucrat and administrator of Jedipedia who later resigned at his own free will, reverted the Wikia staff member's action. The next day this Wikia staff member removed JouMan206's bureaucrat and administrator rights on Jedipedia. I must say that this certainly reminds me of the real-life historical event known as Prague Spring...

Moving on, currently there are two Finnish-language Star Wars wikis named Jedipedia: one has a community and is not hosted by Wikia, and the another one which is hosted by Wikia is practically empty in terms of people and activity. But it's not over yet. Dubček was taken to Moscow when the Warsaw Pact forces entered Czechoslovakia and I was about to receive my punishment for...for...for being an innocent bystander who had a solution for the community's problems.

04:58, 2 September 2010 I was blocked on a Wikia-wide scale by another Wikia staff member for "malicious use of javascript"^[sic]. I was naturally quite shocked as I hadn't done anything on Wikia for a rather long while. So I sent them a short message; copied and pasted my block message and added "Please explain." This is what Wikia replied to me:

Jack, you were redirecting Wikia sites to your wiki farm, with code that
hid the effect from staff/helpers/vstf.  I can (with effort) believe
that others using the code weren't aware that this was a problem, but
I'm sure you were aware of our likely reaction.

It seems it's time for you to move on from Wikia.

Here's a challenge for you, my dear reader: can you find a diff where I added "malicious javascript" to a Wikia-hosted wiki? I tell you that you'll be having difficulties with that task, as there are no diffs because I never added any malicious JavaScript to any Wikia-hosted wiki. Nevertheless, I can say that I saw this coming. All Wikia needed was an excuse, and finally they found a suitable one. Still, this isn't the proper way to treat people who did a lot of volunteer work for you, at least in my humble opinion.
What do you think? Please share your thoughts on this issue with me in the comments section.

P.S. The JS that this post has mentioned a few times is posted here, in case you need to redirect your Wikia site to a different URL address:

if ( wgUserGroups === null || typeof( wgUserGroups ) != null && wgUserGroups.join(' ').indexOf( 'staff' ) == -1 && wgUserGroups.join(' ').indexOf( 'helper' ) == -1 && wgUserGroups.join(' ').indexOf( 'vstf' ) == -1 && wgUserGroups.join(' ').indexOf( 'sysop' ) == -1 && wgUserGroups.join(' ').indexOf( 'bureaucrat' ) == -1 ) {
 window.location = 'http://URLofYourNewWiki.example.com/wiki/' + wgPageName;
}

Idealism is dead

Back in January, I had an idea. A good one, I thought. Wikia operates ArmchairGM, a sports wiki where the social tools originated. My idea was to improve some of the unreleased tools, such as sports network tool. To do that, I needed to access the source code. Here's the catch: these tools are unreleased. Thus they cannot be found on Wikia's SVN.

What to do? On January 20, I emailed Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia and co-founder of Wikia, about this issue. My email was quickly forwarded to Gil Penchina, the CEO of Wikia, Inc. Long story short, I was asked to come to Wikia's office, either Poland or United States one, and sign a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) in order to gain access to the ArmchairGM source code and be allowed to clean it up. Wikia even offered to pay for the expenses and meals.
I wouldn't have minded signing a NDA, but flying to another country is just not possible for me, at least not anytime soon. I thought I had found a solution: I have a friend who lives in Poland and also is a programmer, so I thought that he could go to Wikia's office. I informed Wikia about this idea, and their reply to this was, "Sure". A few days later they inform us that "I can't let some "guy off the street" we've never met or built a relationship with get that sort of access to our internal systems".

Now, here's the thing: my friend's not just some guy off the street, but a smart programmer who's more experienced in programming than I'll probably ever be. He has a Master's degree and he's trusted in many different places, both offline and online. The major difference between him and me is that I once had global administrator rights on Wikia and he didn't. Big whoppin' deal.

My motive in this whole deal was to help out the greater community -- other users of MediaWiki and fellow MediaWiki developers. So that they'd have the largest possible pool of code to choose from. ArmchairGM's social tools are truly unique, as is its skin. I believed that I could change the world -- just a little, but for the better. Apparently that was a stupid idea. Should I just scrap my skin system rewrite project then, too?

Because Wikia thinks that ArmchairGM is a failed project, they aren't willing to clean up the code themselves. This means that a great skin and many great extensions have been lost forever...unless a developer in Poznań or San Francisco area is willing to negotiate with Wikia. Anyone up for a challenge?

Bugs

Bugs. Bugs are annoying. And no, I'm not talking about the real life bugs that bug you when you're trying to write a blog about Wikia bugs.
What is the proper procedure when you find a bug on Wikia? Where do you report them? Wikia used to have a Bugzilla for tracking bugs... but a very smart person must have decided it wasn't needed back in 2007 or so. Currently only Wikia staff are able to use Wikia's bug tracking system, when in the past everyone was able to use the Bugzilla. Since July 2008, Wikia's open company test page has stated that Wikia doesn't have open bugtracking yet. Now, we have two options left:

One of these options is Special:Contact, a feature I dislike using because it takes days before you finally get a reply and the reply you get usually says that they're looking into the problem and then you never hear from them again.

The other option we have is IRC, #Wikia on freenode to be precise. And this is where we reported a bug that was caused by the recent move of Wikia Central to community.wikia.com. A number of users have userpage templates to for use all around Wikia, these templates are located on Central (now moved to community.wikia). These templates stopped working after the move. Once I found out they were no longer working, I went to the Wikia IRC channel and asked if anyone knew what the problem was. The first person to reply referred me to a Wikia forum, now, there is nothing wrong with that. But, on the forum it says my bug had been reported 4 days before I reported it, and the forum also makes it very clear that Wikia does not care about fixing this bug. No, they are to busy moving Central around and creating bugs to actually consider fixing them. Now, I know it's more fun to play around while creating bugs and that fixing bugs is not really a fun thing to do, but, the normal users like me would surely appreciate it if bugs like that would be fixed as fast as possible.

And this is when the conversation in #Wikia really picked up, more and more people started to have their say (nothing wrong with that, right?). Well, if you think like that you have clearly not been around #Wikia lately. We were kindly requested to take our conversation to #Wikia-social, and no, this request did not come from Wikia staff because they're not around during the weekend. It was another user who suggested we take BUG REPORTS to a SOCIAL CHANNEL because the main channel is not for "complaining" as he called it.

The discussion then evolved into a heated argument about the fact that Wikia staff doesn't seems to care about bug reports. A shame really, cause all I was looking to find was the answer to a set of simple questions:

1) There is a bug, has it been reported yet?
2) If it has been reported, what is being done to fix it? If it hasn't been reported yet, how soon can someone look at it?

Although I did get an answer to both of my questions (1: yes 2: we don't care, so go bug someone else), I find the way I got them ridiculous. And what's even worse, another question has come to my mind: How the hell are we supposed to report bugs on Wikia?

By the time someone replies to an email sent via Special:Contact the bug has probably already gotten bored and fixed itself. If you go to the IRC channel you'll be met with hostility and accused of "complaining". In the end we'll just have to realize that there is no way to report a bug on Wikia, and even if there is, Wikia does not care about bugs and they care even less about users. We will just have to wait for bugs to learn how to fix themselves.

Answers, answers...answers?

It seems that Wikia is not very willing to discuss when they will release the missing parts of answer.wikia codebase — if ever. Wikia's contact form a.k.a Special:Contact is more or less of an alias to /dev/null. It's a shame, really. In my opinion, it's important to allow the users to participate if they want to do so. Now all the users can do is provide feedback and make suggestions. Surely it'd be better if the users could just take a look at the source code and fix the bugs they've found?

I've probably said it before, but I'll say it again just to make sure: it's not my problem if you're running your site(s) on a collection of hacks and quick patches. I've already offered my help and I know when it's not wanted. I just thought that it would've been nice to have an open-source answers platform for MediaWiki (since WikiAnswers is not open source) and it would've helped Wikia too, allowing better internationalization and more bug fixes.

Also, Merry Christmas to my readers — have an open-sourcey Christmas. ;-)

Wiki autonomy...or then not

Back in 2007, I adopted a Wikia wiki named WarWiki. I revived it, imported a fair bunch of articles from English Wikipedia (with attribution, naturally) and so on. Then I moved on to work on other things (such as being a Wikia janitor, but that was quite a while ago) and didn't have so much time for that wiki.

WarWiki was relatively quiet, only a couple edits per week, mostly from random anonymous users. I decided to clean the wiki up a bit, and started by disabling Wikia's Welcome Tool (HAWelcome extension); don't get me wrong, HAWelcome is very nice extension, at least from a technical point of view, but some wikis prefer to do welcomes "old-school" style — that is, to have real users welcome other users instead of bots. I find it quite annoying when the welcome bot leaves a "Hi, thanks for your edit" message to a spambot. No wiki needs any more of those!

So, I disabled Welcome Tool, deleted some old IP talk pages, and also Welcome Tool's user page and its talk page. A couple of days after this, I gave sysop rights to a couple friends of mine, as I thought that they could help me revive this wiki. What a fool I was. The next day, a Wikia staff member undeleted Welcome Tool's user page and talk page and re-enabled the Welcome Tool. So much for that wiki autonomy.

But wait! This story isn't over just yet...

After this stunt, my fellow co-administrators disabled Welcome Tool once again and re-deleted its user and talk pages. Guess what this earned us? Mass-deoppings, that's what. I lost my bureaucrat and sysop rights, and all the people I had promoted to admin status a couple days earlier lost their sysop rights. For a while, WarWiki had only one (inactive) bureaucrat and two inactive admins. All active admins had lost their rights...and for what? Hmm, that's a good question. You see, we were never told the reason! Last time I checked, there was a box on Special:UserRights labeled "Reason for change".



The above is a screenshot of Special:UserRights special page on MediaWiki.org...do you see the box I'm talking about? Yeah, I see it there too.

A page I had deleted earlier, related to Wikia's new "blog" feature, was also undeleted by the Wikia staff member in question. I don't feel that blogs are appropriate for every wiki, and that's exactly why I had deleted the page earlier on.

After a relatively long and painful discussion with another Wikia staff member, I got my sysop rights back — of course, after I had been suspected of "doing a subtle troll". I haven't edited WarWiki since that, because I feel that their behavior towards me was at least highly questionable, if not more.

What does this remind me of? It certainly reminds me of this blog post by Mikko Hyppönen, the Chief Research Officer of F-Secure (English Wikipedia's article on F-Secure). His blog post has a link to Michael Krigsman's Project Failures Analysis regarding Mikko's problems with Twitter; I suggest checking it out. I think this quote sums it up nicely:

”	[...]this situation offers a case study example of immature customer service and suggests problems with the organization’s corporate culture.	”
~Michael Krigsman [source]

Wiki autonomy

English Wikipedia says the following about autonomy: "Autonomy [...] is also used to refer to the self-governing of a people."
Now, what's one of the largest wiki hosts? Probably Wikia.

Wikia's principles on wiki ownership are, to say the least, interesting. Their ownership page states that "The wikis are owned by the communities. No one user owns any wiki on Wikia. Founders are those who requested a wiki be created, but ownership of that wiki resides with the community as a whole, not only with the founder."
This comment, although not directly related to this issue, by a Wikia staff member is also interesting: "we make those rules, we can break them for our own reasons". (See this page for the source of the quote)

All wikis on Wikia are somewhat autonomous, it's just that some wikis are more autonomous than the others. Like Wookieepedia. It's one of Wikia's biggest wikis. It also has administrators, who block people on the "I don't like you" basis. People like me. See my block log entry there. Now, I admit that I may be a bit controversial sometimes, but if you know me or have read through my MediaWiki.org user page, you're able to tell that I'm not a troll, vandal or spammer. I asked a Wikia staff member to help me with this issue; the person contacted a couple Wookieepedia admins, and after they refused to reply, gave up. To me, that felt like a slap in the face. Or even a punch. I did quite a lot for Wikia before I left the site — thus I believe that they could help me out here. But of course, that cannot be done since "this is a local issue". While my block is indeed unjustified, it's not the subject of this post, I'll be discussing more about it in another post later on.

Darthipedia is one of the wikis where I'm an admin. It is also the largest wiki ^[source]. But some time ago, it was even larger than nowadays. This, naturally, caught Wikia's attention. They proposed a deal to Darthipedia and Darthipedia accepted it (did they have any other choice, I wonder?). Then Wikia sends in their deletion script to delete the "excess" Jax Pavan pages. The bot targets the wrong pages. One of our admins blocks it. Does Wikia respect this? I think the following log excerpt answers that question nicely:

23:03, 10 October 2008 Toughpigs (Talk | contribs) unblocked TOR (Talk | contribs) ‎ (that was not part of the deal... we can talk about it in IRC or on the forum page.)

22:05, 10 October 2008 Pinky49 (Talk | contribs) blocked TOR (Talk | contribs) with an expiry time of 2 hours (autoblock disabled) ‎ (Once you've gone through with your end of the deal, you can delete the articles, but until then, no)

Or let's take a different example. Arkhampedia is a wiki run by the same people behind Darthipedia. To Wikia, this apparently means that local policies can be overridden. Here's the proof, from Arkhampedia's block log:

19:44, 12 July 2009 Uberfuzzy (Talk | contribs) unblocked WikiaBot (Talk | contribs) ‎ (please do not block staff accounts)

18:32, 12 July 2009 Madclaw (Talk | contribs) blocked WikiaBot (Talk | contribs) with an expiry time of 1 year (account creation disabled) ‎ (unwanted changes "invisible on the Recent Changes" without consulting/informing local community. Please contact administration for eventual unblock)

A recent good example is a wiki where I used to be a bureaucrat until a Wikia staffer came along, deopped me and undid many of my administrative actions. I got my admin powers (but not my bureaucrat power) back after a long talk with another Wikia staff member about why I did such actions. Apparently using your bureaucrat powers or trying to opt-out of Wikia's great new features is a bad, bad thing and that makes you a (possible) troll.

Yet another interesting situation where a small wiki has no autonomy is Gislewiki. Gislewiki is a wiki about Gisle Martens Meyer and its URL is Gislewiki.com. Before that, it was hosted on Wikia. The community, however, decided to move off-Wikia at some point.
As you may know, Wikia rarely closes a wikia.com wiki. They didn't close that wiki either, though I'm not sure if it was ever requested. Before September 2009, Wikia's Gislewiki's main page was displaying a notice, telling people to use the new site instead of the old one. Most interface parts were also hidden with some CSS tricks. Then Wikia noticed this and reverted most of the changes. Keep in mind that the founder of Gislewiki did almost everything from content creation to interface customization all by himself, without much outside help. The community was pretty much the founder. So, anyway, back to the "two wikis" situation. The founder of Gislewiki.com noticed that Wikia tried to revive the Wikia site. He made some subtle changes, such as adding a normal link to the new site on the main page, to the Wikia site. To Wikia, that was vandalism so the founder got deopped — on the site he built all by himself! I wonder when they'll block him for vandalism...

I'm not trying to speak against Wikia, I'm merely trying to show you the other side of the coin.