Wikidot

Wikidot is a social networking service and wiki hosting service (or wiki farm) operated and owned by Wikidot Inc., founded by Michal Frackowiak. It's the world's third-largest wiki farm with over 1 million active users, hosting over 12 million pages. Wikidot serves both private and public sites.
Wikidot has export/backup tools, however they are extremely limited. It is not possible to restore a site from a backup, a significant amount of metadata is lost (most notably votes and page revisions), and forums are entirely omitted.
This tool is in the security tab of the wiki.wikidot.com/_admin page, for wiki administrators only. The request is placed in a queue and produces a .tar.gz file with contents like
 
 ./source/convention.txt
 ./files/supercon/History.pdf
 ./files/help_editing-pages/sulphur.png
Wikidot has been on life support for years. Active development ceased some time ago, no official communications come from the company's social media channels. The company apparently has only one employee, its CEO, who makes infrequent appearances to fix egregious bugs. More graceful degradation of site services are ignored, for instance a new bug which causes some deleted pages to become irrecoverably corrupted (example here), requiring users to utilize workarounds. The support forum has no official representation, just one unofficial volunteer. Complaints about unresponsive management, even for paid accounts, are frequent and unaddressed. The site is seemingly fixed only for the purpose of maintaining ad revenue from its handful of high-volume sites, with all other considerations ignored.
Search stopped indexing new content mid Dec 2019 and the anti-spam bots aren't running. The site was put up for sale in a Bitcoin forum in February 2020.
There are no good conversion tools from Wikidot to other formats. Wikidot's syntax in particular is very unique and has a large number of caveats and edge cases which makes faithful reproduction challenging.
There is a Wikidot to Mediawiki python page conversion tool, and a bash/sed partial solution. The Wikijump project has ftml, a Rust library which aims to parse and render Wikidot-compatible source.
On May 19, 2022 at around 12:15 UTC, Wikidot servers experienced a total outage due to a Russian cyberattack. All data on the site is "intact", according to Wikidot. On May 24 at 21:20 UTC, the site came back online and has blocked access from Russia and Belarus in response to the attackhttps://twitter.com/wikidot/status/1529212260136230912.
== Fancy Downloader ==
FancyDownloader is an old Python program to maintain an offline version of a Wikidot site.
== Grab Script ==
June 12, 2021, someone came into #archiveteam-bs and described how Wikidot had been showing warning signs, most recently that "a few days ago tags were completely wiped across the entire platform". (Wikidot repaired the outage and tags were restored after a few days.) A grab script, not yet deployed, has been written, and can be found at GitHub. It is structured into two item types, user: and wiki:.
== SCUTTLE ==
Daniel Tharp (aka bluesoul) has created SCUTTLE, a comprehensive backup suite which can update a series of Wikidot sites as they are changed, storing pages, revisions, forum comments, and votes. However, setup may be difficult, as you need to set up the 2stacks jobs on AWS Lambda via SQS.
== Crom ==
The Crom API (main site) is usable as a replacement API, as interfacing with Wikidot directly is non-trivial. It is not a backup tool, and is not well-suited to mass data retrieval, but is noted for its relevance here.
Category:Wikis