UESPWiki:State of Things/November 2006

This is an overview of the state of the site, its current status, and possible future changes. This is mainly for discussion of large scale and longer term changes and not minor issues.

Current Status
Traffic
We received the expected spike of traffic at the release of Oblivion and a slow decline since then. Future traffic should be pretty much steady with a possible increase with the PS3 release of Oblivion in 2007 sometime. The addition of the online Oblivion map in August increased bandwidth a good amount, around 100 GB a month or 40%. Total monthly usage is still only 200-300GB of the current 1000 GB soft limit.

Compared to other ES sites the UESP is close to the top of the pack. Comparing Alexa traffic statistics the only other ES related sites with comparable traffic are TESSource.net and the official ElderScrolls.com. Both receive similar traffic to the UESP although lately we've been even exceeding the official site in rank. Its definitely an honor to beat the official web site of a game so we're certainly doing something right.

Server
The server is working well with no major issues. There is a minor issue with the web server not reusing some connections over time which eventually leads to site slowdowns over the course of weeks. Currently I'm simply restarting the web server every week or so as needed. A Wiki upgrade may possibly fix this although the exact cause is uncertain. 

Server reponse time is generally very fast and there's no immediate need to consider server upgrades of any sort. If traffic does increase significant, however, a simple fix is to just add more RAM (currently only 512MB). The server is almost entirely memory bound at the moment (CPU usage is very low) so increasing the RAM to 1GB would effectively double its capacity (25USD per month for a 512MB RAM upgrade).

Content
Oblivion content was added very quickly and while slower now there is still a good number of edits per day. Other sections of the site have also been active too which is good to see. 


Future Changes
Overall there's not a huge lot of things to consider changing or adding in the future, other than continuing what we're currently doing.

Server
On the server side there are few things to consider in the future:
:* Automatic backups still aren't working and need to be implemented ASAP. Currently they are done manually and not nearly often enough.
:* Reduction of logged errors. Looking at the web server log recently shows a huge amount of unnecessary errors which should be correct (already started as most of the errors were only due to a few scripts).
:* Upgrade to PHP 5 and Wiki 1.8. The main concern is breaking the site when upgrading PHP but I'll attempt this shortly.

Wiki
On the Wiki administration side:
:* Allowing anonymous edits was brought up recently. I don't mind enabling it if the rest of the Sysops agree. Worst case is it doesn't work well and I simply have to disable it.
:* Get an improved search working, both in terms of interface and and features. The current search is ugly, difficult to use and only allows very simple searches.

Content
:* Much of the recent work has been to create a more consistent style over the entire site, mainly through use of templates. This is going well I think and should continue. I think it is important, however, to remember the site is content oriented. It is entirely possible to add so much style overhead that the content disappears.
:* Another thing to consider is when a user visits the site (particularily a new user) how quickly/easily can they find the information they are looking for. There are a few ways to make this better including an improved search (as previously mentioned), organization of top level pages, and the maximum link depth of pages (how many 'clicks' it takes to reach any given page on the site).