Maurice

Hello everyone, Just to let you know that I'm aware that the wiki is currently down. I'm doing everything I can to get it back up. It seems there might be a hardware problem related to the server. It affected the wiki's database (probably because it has become extremely huge + the traffic is big too; and there was a read/write failure). I'm working with support to see what we can do and what are our options. And to make things worse, it seems that because of this issue (partly), the automatic backuping system that I had in place for the database didn't quite work as expected and the last (manual) backup is from December 11th, 2013. You can believe me when I say that I'm extremely disappointed with this situation. I really thought that everything was under control at this point and that the backups were being made as they should have... I hope there's still a way to recover the current database and we'll do everything we can for that but I'd rather be 100% honest with you guys and let you know that the worst-case scenario would be a rollback to December 11th... I'm really sorry. I may have to consider yet another server upgrade. It looks like the traffic keeps increasing and increasing and the hardware sometimes has a hard time to keep up.. In any case, I'll keep you updated as soon as there's some news. I thank you for your understanding! Maurice

If you donate with Paypal (using your Paypal balance or just your credit card - i.e. without creating an account), you can do so in any currency you want. Paypal will automatically convert it for you in dollars.

Hello everyone, This is a post I've been meaning to do for a long time now but never really got around to doing it. I was also on vacations for a while and only came back this week-end. The goal of this post is to expose a bit the "behind-the-scenes" of DCW and be as open as possible regarding the finances of the site and servers. In a way, I would like to sensibilize the community about the resources and money it takes to maintain DCW and keep it running day after day. I'm not sure if you all remember the events of January of this year when the site had some major issues and I've had to make many updates (and upgrades) to put it back up (better, safer and stronger)? If not, see the posts made here: http://www.detectiveconanworld.com/forum/topic/4298-forum-and-wiki-maintenance/ and http://www.detectiveconanworld.com/forum/topic/4357-forum-and-wiki-upgradeupdates/ Besides the software upgrades at the time, I also upgraded the resources used by DCW (due mainly to the increasing traffic of visitors to the site). I also currently pay a third-party service to regularly scan, detect and prevent attacks and potential exploits as they appear. The bill has now come to around $150 per month for a web server and a separate database server + about $10 a month for the security service I just mentioned. This is quite a substantial amount of money in the end (about $1900 a year out of my pocket..). And with $150 a month already, I believe at this point we could eventually push it a little more to reach our dream of getting a dedicated server that we can fully use and benefit from, resources-wise, without any (or barely any) restrictions (i.e. more bandwidth, more memory, more CPU). We should consider at least $200 for a good decent server. This is why I was hoping this post would let you know more about the situation and our priorities and where you could eventually help out in reaching our goal of getting a stable dedicated server as well as helping build the number 1 Detective Conan resource on the web! I would like to thank everyone who donated so far! It's very awesome of you and I am really grateful for the help! It really does help in paying the bills every month. If I make an average of the amount of donations per month and how much they help out I would say that they represent about 5% of the monthly fees. On the long-term, it would be amazing if the server could become self-sustaining with everyone's effort and help! So, even if it's just a little bit, any help is appreciated! Even $1 would be great! Thank you! Some benefits of becoming a donator: - Member of the "Donators" forum group (if you want to). By doing so, you'll let others know of your dedication and support to DCW - No more ads on the forum - The profile page can be customized a bit - More messages allowed in the inbox - If you have more ideas or suggestions, don't hesitate to let me know. Thank you for your contributions and continued support! Always greatly appreciated! Maurice

Thank you everyone!! It's great to see such nice comments! Years go by so fast, it's crazy.. I was only 26 when I started working on DCW.. Ah well, that's how it works eh. Time doesn't wait for you. I hope you guys keep having fun here!

HTTPS is mainly useful when transmitting sensitive information via forms for example. It would only really be useful when registering and/or logging in here. And I wouldn't add it to the wiki cause it would add a very slight overhead to each request and with high traffic this could add up (even Wikipedia doesn't use it). But yeah, I've thought of adding it in the past for the forms here but the SSL certificate would cost something like $100 per year (more or less) and it's not as necessary/important for our needs.

Hi all, Following the recent events with the website warnings and all that, I'll be conducting a series of code checking and upgrading. The forum and wiki will eventually be updated to their latest versions (even though that could take some time). I'll update this post as soon as an update day and time is determined. Note that during the development and testing of the new version of the wiki, the latter may become unavailable at times because that version is built on top of a different version of PHP (i.e. scripting programming language commonly used for web development). Because of that, I have to switch back and forth between the different versions to perform the necessary tests and modifications. I apologize for the inconvenience. It shouldn't be as tricky for the next update since differences in PHP versions should not have such a big impact in the future. I thank you for your patience! Hopefully, all this will make DCW much stronger and better! Thank you for your support and have a good day! Maurice

Actually, it wasn't the Google ads. It seems that some rogue script was used to exploit a weakness in our system causing some pages to contain some malware that could potentially generate ads or do other kind of spyware-like activities. Nothing bad in the end but surely annoying and invasive. I'm dealing with the issue right now and because of my work (and thus lack of time), I'm getting support from a security team to handle this. They've cleaned it up for now but it could happen again if I don't upgrade everything right away (such as MediaWiki and the forum) which is hard to do. Just be sure that we're working on it!

For some reason, I really thought I replied to this topic already but I just re-read it and it seems that I didn't. So first of all, happy birthday DCW!!! I remember, it was back in 2009. I actually had some time on my hands and was really really into the world of detective conan and would watch lots of episodes and even listen to the openings and closings lol. And as a web programmer, I was a bit disappointed by the amount of resources about DC on the web back in the days. One of the only great sites I recall was DCTP. But one thing I just couldn't find at all on google was a nice and complete wiki on the series. And being a wiki fan and advocate, that's when I thought I had to do something (mainly because I could -- thanks to my knowledge and experience in web development). Hence what CarpetCrawler described in his post: the creation of the tiny site, forum and wiki. Very basic site indeed and I remember working on the wiki practically every day cause, well, it was totally new and empty! Although I did spend a lot of time adding tons of contents, my main concern has always been about trying to set the standards for the wiki with templates, layouts, plugins, colors, categories, infoboxes and more. Having managed two big wikis in the past, I had a lot of experience and really knew what I was doing (even to the point of coding our very own wiki plugins (as well as the maps extensions)). I thought that if there was a skeleton, people wouldn't be overwhelmed by the wiki syntax and structure and it would be a much simpler task to add the "meat" to it. It's all about working with examples: if there's an example of a way of doing something, it shouldn't be very hard to duplicate its core frame and fill it with content. And in 3 years, wow, the wiki has become soo big and great and awesome, I can't even find words to describe it! The contributors have been amazing and coming up with awesome articles, pages and filling the wiki with more accurate and up-to-date content by the day. I will not give names (since it really is a team effort), but some people have been working tiresslesly since joining DCW, it's quite incredible! I would like to thank everyone who dedicate their time into making the wiki the one single most resourceful site about everything Detective Conan-related. It's really inspiring and I'm really happy to have the honor of working with you guys! The podcast folks have been amazing as well. The idea itself was great and I totally loved it since day 1. I remember implementing the studio section of the site not too long after and improved it even more this year to make updating it a breeze for the team. The podcasts have really become the DC "news channel" (all while also involving the community). Just awesome! The forum too has grown much faster that I ever expected! The first year only, there was barely a couple hundreds posts. Now we're close to 280K posts. Wow. Great community of fans! And what makes it so special is that everyone's into DC and sharing our love, passion and interest about DC has never been as easy, motivating and fun! This has always been one of DCW's goals: to create a common gathering place for fans to talk about DC and hang out. And last but not least, the two translated chapters DCW worked on was really a great achievement for DCW. It once again showed how motivated the community was and how much we love the DC universe! As CarpetCrawler said, I may not be as active as before (I moved to Quebec City a while back and have a new job, etc..) but I still drop in to check on things. I'm definitely still around and I even make updates when I can (like the studio updating mechanism). I also try to check the wiki as much as I can cause I just love to see what new progress is being made as they are being made. I'll join CarpetCrawler in thanking you all for your immense support and hope you keep enjoying the ride and having fun! And once again, happy 3rd, DCW!

Congrats Chelsea! Welcome to the team.

Thanks a lot guys! I really appreciate it! I'm happy DC is still keeping me young somehow haha.

Studio updated!

Sorry for the little delay. Studio updated!