Our hosting provider, Techmight, will be closing down the server used for the MyPaint wiki shortly, and we need to find a new home for the useful subset of the wiki content. We have no firm drop-dead date, but it has been approaching for a couple of months already, and I would like to get this sorted within the next two weeks (our existing hosting provider has been kind enough already, let's get moving)

This will not affect web hosting of the MyPaint home page or the forums because those are hosted by a different provider.

I've been discussing this migration over email with @jonnor, @martinxyz, and our current awesome hosting provider as represented by @SikhNerd who's been very helpful and tolerant of my laziness and ignorant questions so far.

Here's the rough plan nobody objected to, slightly expanded:

Migration plan

I would like to migrate some (but not all) of our wiki's content to Github. Since the rest of development activity has pretty much moved to github already, this would allow us to coordinate things better.

I'm (still) not that familiar with mediawiki hosting, and have always considered keeping the thing spam-free something of a chore. However it is used by our users (decreasingly of late) as a point for distribution of brush packs, and as a place for writing and maintaining user documentation. In particular, we link to the wiki from within the app to allow users to download brush packages, using the URL http://wiki.mypaint.info/index.php?title=Brush_Packages/redirect_mypaint_1.1_gui.

• The brush pack .zip files are all hosted externally, although their preview images seem to be hosted on the wiki. A custom 404 page with a manual or JS redirect to a real page for the above case should work around a lack of PHP, allowing us to use any web host we like for the old brushpack download URL.
• User documentation can and should be migrated piecemeal to another wiki, and perhaps the Brush_Packages page should live there too. I'm intending to move content to the main MyPaint repo wiki, https://github.com/mypaint/mypaint/wiki, for this: currently it's unused.
• Those I think are the remaining interesting uses of the old wiki. I'm sure we'll find more.

(To be honest, brushpacks could be distributed quite sensibly as a separate github repository too. But that would require coordination with the authors, and discussion about licenses.)

I'm already taking steps to migrate DNS hosting for the mypaint.info and mypaint.org domains, and will thus be able to point them at some Github Pages hosting I guess. The docs say that custom domains are possible for these things.

Checklist

1. Lock down the existing wiki
2. Announce the move, making it clear that some data will disappear, so that users can retrieve any artwork that would otherwise be lost
3. Back it up, both files and database
   • Copy the backup privately (@achadwick has it stashed and backed up)
   • Bring up on a private mediawiki instance (needed?)
4. Begin writing pages & wiki transcriptions on github, preserve the content we need.
5. Switch over the NS records for the domain in consultation with the existing registrar and hosting provider. @jonnor will retain ownership of the domain initially, and I'll be seeing how I get on with the DNS provider I've selected (mythic-beasts.com)
6. Allow the old hosting to expire gracefully.
7. Complete any late-stage migrations from those backups.