New feature: Achievements

There is a pretty new feature on Wikia that’s a lot of fun: Achievements. I’m going to turn them on now since I keep seeing them on the test wikis and being jealous that I can’t play too ;).

Basically, if you do certain things you get badges – edit a certain number of times, upload images, there is even a track of Achievements for how many days in a row you edit. Achievements show up on your user-page and there’s a Leaderboard to see what other cool badges other LyricWikians are earning. It’s fun! 🙂 However, if for some reason you don’t like them, you can go to your Preferences page (‘Misc’ tab) and turn them off for yourself.

Achievements have the ability to have the icons and names customized per-wiki, so we’ll probably get on that pretty soon to make them more LyricWiki-ish.

Hope you enjoy the Achievements!
–Sean Colombo

LyricWiki and MusicBrainz integration!

LyricWiki and MusicBrainz are two community-powered sites about music which share some of the same passionate users. LyricWiki contains song lyrics and MusicBrainz contains metadata (detailed info) about music.

As of today, the two projects are going to be able to work together better than ever. Now that LyricWiki has obtained licensing, MusicBrainz can now link to song lyrics without worrying about legal issues. LyricWiki has given explicit permission to MusicBrainz to do so and MusicBrainz has added LyricWiki links (as an AR type) to their standard.

Linking from LyricWiki to MusicBrainz	Linking from MusicBrainz to LyricWiki
To link to an artist, track, or release on MusicBrainz, put “musicbrainz= [UUID]” into the footer (ArtistFooter, AlbumFooter, or SongFooter) template. For [UUID], put in the MusicBrainzIdentifier. This has been available for quite a while, but hopefully there will be many more links now that we’re working more closely.	To link a release or a track to LyricWiki, copy the LyricWiki album or track URL and then navigate to the proper release or track page in MusicBrainz. Be sure to be logged in and then click on “Relate to URL” link. Follow the instructions on the next page to add the LyricWiki URL to MusicBrainz.

This is an exciting opportunity for the two projects to be more closely linked together. We’re looking forward to it!

– Sean Colombo & Robert Kaye

Wikia is back

LyricWiki and those other Wikia which aspire to be as cool 😉 are all back up.

Here is the technical description of what went wrong as I currently understand it: http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/AAAAAAAAA.

And for good measure, a random factoid… did you know LyricWiki has a list of the lyrics for the Top 100 songs?

Wikia (including LyricWiki) is down

Something crazy is going on in our primary datacenter… two smart ops guys jumped in separate cabs and raced down to the datacenter and are sorting things out as we speak. Will update when more info becomes available.

Huge news!

http://lyricwiki.org/LyricWiki:Wikia_Migration_FAQ

Back from outage this morning

There were several hours (about 5) of downtime this morning. We’re back now.

The problems don’t appear to have been serious and were simple to fix, the reason the downtime was so long was just that I was asleep and the texts to my cellphone didn’t wake me up.

Although this hasn’t been a problem until now, it’s certainly not the type of error that should be allowed to repeat itself. Here are some of the plans to prevent this from happening again:

• Remove the false-positives: The system has been sending some pages in the middle of the night for other non-urgent things for about a week. Those unneeded alerts will be cleaned up so that I’m not used to getting unimportant pages.
• Auto-recovery: This was a pretty simple fix, and there are a few types of problems that could be fixed automatically. If I have some time today, I’ll be working on a system that will look at a bunch of info across the servers and see if a problem is easily automatically fixable and try to fix it if I haven’t responded to the first two pages (ie: after 15 minutes of downtime).
• Ringtone change: The reason ambulances switch up their sirens is that people notice when things are different. The false-positives got me used to sleeping through that tone, so I’ve changed it to another (conveniently, far more annoying) tone.

Hopefully, we’ll be back to uptime-nirvana again.

We’re back!

For the few ppl who read this blog… you may now return to your normal lives: http://lyricwiki.org 😀

Should be back soon…

All of the servers are moved now, just trying to get things to work again.

Scheduled downtime Apr. 26th, 2009 at 7am EST

We delayed the previous datacenter move and adjusted it to a better time of day: 7am EST on a Sunday.

The outage should be between 30 minutes and an hour if everything goes smoothly and indefinitely longer if it doesn’t go smoothly!

Some additional info that hasn’t been on the blog: we were generously given two more servers by a local company that was upgrading (thanks!) and have ordered gobs of RAM for them. Once that is in, we will be upgrading LyricWiki‘s setup once again. We currently have 6 servers, this will bring us up to 8! That’s a significant increase and hopefully will make LyricWiki even faster.

Scheduled downtime: March 21, 2009 at 3pm EST

Our webhost is moving to a new datacenter right down the street from the current datacenter.  We’ve scheduled with them to move the LyricWiki servers at 3pm tomorrow, March 21st.  It will take slightly under a half an hour to actually move the servers (during which time the site will be down completely), then we will try to get everything back up and running as soon as possible.

If there are any major problems, we will post about them here.  For more up-to-the-minute info, you can follow the @lyricwiki twitter account or join us on the #LyricWiki IRC channel on quakenet.