Contents

Community portal

Welcome to the community portal. This is the place to find out what is happening on BoroondaraWiki. Discuss its operations, policies, design, and areas for improvement within the site.

If you were looking for...

Past discussions: see the archives.
Help: see Help:Contents.
A place to ask a specific user something: please use the appropriate user's talk page.
A list of BoroondaraWiki's Staff: see BoroondaraWiki:Staff.
A Sandbox: see the BoroondaraWiki Sandbox.
Information on when to nominate something for deletion: see the deletion policy.
A place to request something of an administrator: use the administrator's talk page.
Somewhere to see the wiki's ongoing development and tasks: see the Trello board

Introduction

BoroondaraWiki is a growing wiki on topics related to Boroondara, with a total of 645 pages. However, many articles are stubs, or otherwise need attention and need your help!

Cleanup projects

Things to do

Patrol new pages and new images.
Expand short pages.
Change links to disambiguation pages
Respond to talk page comments and deletion candidates giving your opinion.
Create wanted pages, files, categories and templates.

Discussion

Please start new threads under a level-2 heading, using double equals-signs and an informative title: ==Informative title==. If a thread is related to an ongoing discussion, consider instead placing it under a level-3 heading within that discussion.
When posting, please sign and date all contributions, using four tilde characters "~~~~", which is translated into a signature and a time stamp automatically.
If discussion is already ongoing at another page, or there is another page which is a more natural location for a discussion, please continue the discussion there, and only put a short note of the issue, and a link to the relevant location, on this page.

Related resources

Telling Tales –	Official local history wiki of the City of Boroondara Library Service containing some limited information
Balwyn Historical Society –	Local historical society for Balwyn and its surroundings.
Camberwell Historical Society –	Local historical society for Camberwell and its surroundings.
Canterbury History Group –	Local historical society for Canterbury and its surroundings.
Hawthorn Historical Society –	Local historical society for Hawthorn and its surroundings.
Kew Historical Society –	Local historical society for Kew and its surroundings.
Surrey Hills Neighbourhood Centre history collection –	A collection of historical images, materials and other information about Surrey Hills.
Boroondara Council history resources –	A part of Boroondara Council's website dedicated to information on selected parts of the city.

Click here to start a new discussion thread

New domain!

An update as of today - BoroondaraWiki has evolved from its temporary .xyz domain name to the permanent .org domain. The old boroondarawiki.xyz will still continue to redirect to the current site for the foreseeable future. If this has broken anything or caused any issues, please let me know. Philip (talk) 13:41, 10 July 2016 (UTC)

Influx of spam

If anybody has been keeping an eye on Special:RecentChanges recently, you will have seen the wave of spambot registrations recently. I've just added a DNS blocklist so hopefully this will help to cut down on their numbers. We'll see how it goes... Philip (talk) 13:09, 27 July 2016 (UTC)

Well that clearly didn't work... I'll be working on a number of other strategies for the long-term. In the meantime, I have temporarily disabled registrations until I can implement these measures and make sure that they are configured properly. Philip (talk) 01:06, 1 August 2016 (UTC)

I have just re-enabled user registration after introducing a raft of new measures, including forced HTTPS, enhanced CAPTCHS at user registration and new anti-spam blacklists. I guess we'll see how this goes... Philip (talk) 15:53, 27 April 2017 (AEST)

Upgrade to 1.27

As of today, the wiki is running on the latest MediaWiki software, version 1.27.1 (https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.27). I postponed upgrading until the first minor release came out to help address any security/other issues before they arise. Everything should be working fine, but in case it isn't, please let me know. Philip (talk) 05:16, 22 September 2016 (UTC)

Trello board

If anybody is interested in seeing the ongoing maintenance and development tasks for the wiki's backend, check out the Trello board (now public!) https://trello.com/b/PLFLOs5T/boroondarawiki-development Philip (talk) 09:25, 28 December 2016 (UTC)

HTTPS

For everyone's information, SSL has now been enabled by default across BoroondaraWiki. All pages should now read:

https://boroondarawiki.org/wiki/PAGENAME.

If you encounter any issues, please let me know. Philip (talk) 22:04, 6 February 2017 (AEDT)

Server migration

After months of below-par load times, BoroondaraWiki is moving to a new server. This will necessitate disabling editing for at least 12 hours to avoid file conflicts, DNS conflicts and losing edits. I will post again here when the migration is completed. Apologies for any inconvenience. Philip (talk) 10:31, 26 September 2017 (AEST)

Thank you for your patience - the migration has been completed! There doesn't seem to be anything wrong, but in case you find something, please let me know on my talk page. Philip (talk) 15:35, 27 September 2017 (AEST)

I might just add that this has improved our server load time by almost five seconds from 11.7s on the old server to 7.0s on this new one. Hopefully this is a noticeable improvement! Philip (talk) 15:38, 27 September 2017 (AEST)

Upgrade to 1.30.0

To keep up with changes in extension compatibility, I have upgraded the wiki to the latest version (1.30.0) today. Please let me know if anything is not working. Philip (talk) 21:43, 17 February 2018 (AEDT)

Apologies for the issues with the mobile frontend. It seems that the extension makers initiated a wiki-breaking change and hid it into the release notes. Should all be fixed now. Philip (talk) 19:43, 27 March 2018 (AEDT)

Upgrade to 1.41.0

After many steps of upgrading incrementally from 1.31, we are finally here at the latest release. I'll do my best to keep on top of things now.

Unfortunately it seems that Mediawiki changed permissions to edit Mediawiki.js and a bunch of other files as usual buried in some developer page which got me stuck for a while. Now there seems to be a problem with the Scribunto extension, possibly related to now needing execute permissions.

I've disabled it for now which means that none of the templates or other stuff that depends on lua works. I'll fix it as soon as I can. If you have any questions, please ask here. Thanks for your patience. Philip (talk) 22:48, 9 January 2024 (AEDT)

Update: it's fixed! Turned out to be a PHP function turned off by the webhost. If you encounter any issues, please let me know. Philip (talk) 21:40, 10 January 2024 (AEDT)

Skin change from Vector to Citizen

I've just changed over the default site skin from Vector to Citizen. While I love Vector and its classic look, Citizen makes the site a bit more user-friendly. It is also mobile responsive natively which is a huge help. Vector is still available to choose in user preferences if you wish. Any feedback welcome. Philip (talk) 15:00, 11 January 2024 (AEDT)