Hey @Francis, I’ve got some disappointing news. The Digibutter Wikia/Fandom Wiki was silently removed due to inactivity a few months ago. It’s not like anyone was using it anymore, but it’s still a bit disappointing. I was able to get a full XML database backup, but the images seem to all be gone. I have a few images from the wiki saved on another computer, so not all was lost. There were probably ~200 images total on there, though a lot of them were junk, or at least meaningless to any of us modern users. Plus, I suspect you may have a copy of some of the original files like the old user ads from NERR 1.0. Some of those were pretty funny. By the way, was the wiki originally on another platform? The Digibutter Wiki was one of Wikia/Fandom’s oldest wikis, and it looks like some of the data was originally imported from somewhere else.
Let’s take a moment to bid farewell to the Wikia site. Maybe the Wiki can come back in another form someday.
Here’s all the images I had saved (on this laptop, at least). NerrOn and Party Bleck are my favorites. (NerrOn has always been poorly cropped to my knowledge.)
cleaning up and resurrecting the digi wiki could be a fun community project (though admittedly i don’t know how much new content would be added for it to really be warranted in the first place, nor if anyone would really participate in that)
i still love the dropdown spoiler box
also we should totally bring the trees back for this year that would be awesome
No warning ever reached me (an email to all associated accounts would have been nice ). I think there might have been a banner at the top of the home page because that’s what Fandom purportedly does 30 days before closing a wiki, but I cannot confirm or deny whether they actually did that. It appears that all of the images have all been removed from the Fandom CDN, so that should mean that the wiki was closed at least one month ago.
The XML backup is a complete database of everything but the images (& videos if any. I don’t think so), so while the Wayback machine has some pages archived, I don’t think they’re really useful in addition to the backup. Let me know if you want me to send it to you btw. It’s 48MB uncompressed but only 850KB compressed.
@Francis What do think is the best course of action moving forward? I see three possibilities.
I apply for wiki creation on wiki.gg (new platform that aims to be like Wikia pre-Fandom). Kind of the easy way out. Downsides are lack of control and opening the wiki up to this same problem again. Plus, we’d have a banner at the top of each page.
You create and host a MediaWiki instance. Probably the best solution if you have the time to set it up. You would be able to import all of the data.
I create and host a MediaWiki instance. Pretty much #2, but I do the work for you.
Have a look for the old wiki page on TheWaybackMachine website. It lets you see any webpage as it was in certain points in the past. Idk, you might be able to salvage some stuff you may have lost, like pictures, etc.
There was a lot of junk and vandalism on there last I checked, so it may take some diving in to pull out the useful bits. And even then it’s mostly just nostalgia for those who were around in those first few years.
So I’m not sure we need a whole wiki at all but I’m open to it. Technically we can have wiki posts here so we could have a whole area dedicated to that instead of using a separate site.
Each page’s page history is contained in the backup, so reverting defaced pages to their last “clean” state shouldn’t be too much work. Back when I used to visit the wiki, most of the major articles were fine, so either I never went deep enough to find most of the defaced ones or there might have been some moderation between your last visit and mine.
No, we really don’t need the wiki, but I figured we might as well put was on it back up. I don’t think Discourse has the ability to import an existing MediaWiki backup, so that’s probably not an option.
I don’t have the time to set it up now, so restore it to wiki.gg or your own instance if you want. Maybe we’ll copy some of the content into posts here if it’s worthwhile.
Alright everyone, I present to you the newly unsank Digibutter Wiki! Setting this up was much easier than I had expected. It’s an exact copy of the Wikia/Fandom wiki without most of the images (aside from the main page and whatever was pulled from WikiMedia Commons). An account is required to edit anything. I might take care of some of the vandalism at some point. Feel free to help out. I guess I’ll manage this until Francis decides to take over hosting or import into here should he ever want to.
As a side note, the wiki was definitely taken down at least one month after the release of Nerr 4.0 and possibly a month or so after that.
Thanks for doing this. The plain mediawiki layout feels so much nicer than fandom. Actually I went back in time and found it was originally created at edithis.info and amazingly still exists!
No way! That’s awesome! That makes wonder why the wiki was ever moved to Wikia in the first place. Probably since it was cool and new around that time and more themed towards gaming/media.
I think I’ll try importing the images saved there into my wiki sometime soon. This is also probably a good source to cross-reference if we ever attempt reverting any old vandalism.
Also, I’m curious about this page now. I had thought it was wrong because it says the wiki was originally created in February 2006, but neither digibutter, SPM, nor the Wii had even existed then. However, the edit history on this original wiki actually confirms this. Were you Admin/EliteNerr on the wiki, and if so, did you originally have different plans for the wiki? Was it just for fun?
Furthermore, how did you find this? I never got any hits to it on any search engine before. Did you find the backup on the Internet Archive? I just realized that I’ve seen that before, but I didn’t know what editthis.info was at the time. I thought it might have just been some random website file like a sitemap.
P.S. Did you know that the only other digibutter-related media on the Internet Archive are your old NerrCasts? They’re pretty cool little time capsules.
I found an archive of the forums which had the old link to the wiki in the header. Look at the history on the editthis page (maybe you can merge it in?). Looks like it was setup July 18th 2007 and I think the 2006 stuff was just based on how the wiki was created from an existing snapshot so it brought along that unrelated history.
It was moved to wikia when one of the founders, Angela, offered to migrate it over. Editthis was slow and had very low storage limits.
). I think there might have been a banner at the top of the home page because that’s what Fandom purportedly does 30 days before closing a wiki, but I cannot confirm or deny whether they actually did that. It appears that all of the images have all been removed from the Fandom CDN, so that should mean that the wiki was closed at least one month ago.
had that idea first. I have a copy of all but the images, and the Internet Archive only had the Tipi logo saved. Good idea, but already tried that.