New Doku Wiki is now available

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I’ve just set up a new DokuWiki on a dedicated Digital Ocean droplet. It’s available at http://wiki.fractalfuture.net

You need to register on that wiki to be able to write stuff.

At the moment I’m working on setting up the right extensions, structure, and stuff. It should already be usable while I’m doing all of that.

I plan to write a Quantified Prestige extension for this new DokuWiki. I don’t know how to write DokuWiki extensions, so I’ll have to learn that first. And I don’t know how long that will take, but I think it’s the most promising route to get a useful version of Quantified Prestige running.

If you notice any problems, please contact me.

Have fun with the new Fractal Future Wiki! :smiley:

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The Wiki should be fully functional now. Go and register an account, if you like. Check out the syntax page first, please. There you get all the information you need to understand how to use the wiki. I have installed lots of useful extensions, too. Those which are relevant for you are also linked in the syntax page.

Now something about Quantified Prestige, I have checked out how to make extensions for DokuWiki. It doesn’t look complicated. But on the other hand, there’s not too much of an advantage to going over that route to making a standalone version of Quantified Prestige. DokuWiki doesn’t use a database by default. This is quite cool, because wikis are all about texts and don’t really need a database. With a reputation system things look a bit different. Those would probably get really messy over time without the use of a proper database. It’s possible to use a simple database with DokuWiki, but that would have to be installed manually by the server admins. Which means, a QP extension for DokuWiki probably wouldn’t be really popular. A QP plugin for WordPress would most probably be a much better choice. I still want to make a standalone version of QP, first.

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I’m currently doing maintenance on the mail server of the Fractal Future Wiki, because mail related problems have been reported. During the maintenance it seems that you will probably be able to register an account for the Wiki, but probably won’t get the confirmation email with your password. In that case, I can give you another password manually (which you of course should change immediately), if you contact me about this issue.

Once the maintenance is complete, this measure hopefully won’t be necessary anymore.

Edit (2015-07-18): It seems that the mail server now basically works, but currently mails tend to arrive in the spam folder, because the DNS settings aren’t optimized, yet.

Edit2 (2015-07-19): The mail server now works a bit better, but now DokuWiki has problems communicating with it, which means that the wiki won’t be able to send out emails. So, you basically can still create a new account, but you won’t get any email whatsoever, which means that you need to contact me to get a password, until this error is fixed.

Edit2 (2015-07-19): Ok, I’ve given up trying to get the PHP mail function to work with the exim4 MTA and nginx with PHP5-FPM. I can easily send mails via exim4 now, even with DKIM signature (but strangely my mails still land in the spam folger in gmail – so maybe exim4 isn’t really the best idea; while I used sendmail for a brief period of time it actually kinda worked, and my mail even didn’t land in the spam folder, even though it didn’t have a DKIM signature), but exim4 does not work together with the PHP mail function. It just doesn’t work, and it seems to be a frequently unsolved problem as the corresponding guides indicate. I’ve tried about everything that guides have suggested and there’s still 0 indication that there is any chance that it does anything. So, I’ve got a few alternatives:

  1. Try using postfix instead of exim4. It looks like postfix works a bit better than exim4 in situations like these, but there is by no means any guarantee that it will work.
  2. Use something other than the native PHP mail function which seems to be the root of evil. There are plugins that provide a reasonable replacement. The problem is that those plugins also might not work.

Meh, I’ll probably give postfix a shot, even though there’s a fair chance that it won’t fix the actual problem. Anyway, the problem of the Wiki not being able to send mails will probably persist for a few weeks until I can solve this fix-resistant issue. You can still register new accounts, but you will have to ask me personally to give you a password to log in.

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I’ve resumed maintenance work on the email issue of the Fractal Future Wiki. I’ve switched from exim4 to the postfix mail server, and at the moment it seems to work fine out of the box (after some trial and error and some reinstall) with the PHP mail function, which means that the Wiki can send mails now. However, they will probably arrive in the spam folder, since I haven’t configured postfix optimally, yet. I will try to do this in the next hours. What I’m really glad about however, is that postfix sends mails blazingly fast. This was not the case with the sendmail or exim4 mail servers.

Edit: Now I’ve set up PTR, SPF, DKIM, and even DMARC properly, but mails sent by the Wiki might still end up in the spam folder in Gmail. In that case, please “unspam” those mails and add the email "www-data@wiki.fractalfuture.net" to your contacts lists. Sending mails to that address won’t help, because the mail server is set up only for sending mails, not for receiving them.

Edit2: Perhaps I still need to setup IPv6 PTR records. This might be one of the few remaining reasons why Gmail sees the WIki mails as not totally legit.

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Just to be clear about this: The state of the DokuWiki should be ok now. You can of course register on the Fractal Future Wiki and you will get a registration mail, which might possibly end up in the spam folder, if things go wrong, but that only seems to be a problem with Gmail. If you have any problems anyway, please feel free to contact me!