The Comic Vine Wiki: A New Hope

Good News!

First of all, if you haven't seen me around the site or on the forums, Hello! My name is Will and I'm one of the engineers working on Comic Vine. We have some good news about the wiki I’d like to share with you all. As I’m sure you know the current wiki is a bit buggy… well, maybe more than a bit… The code base for the wiki is old and was originally developed within very strict time constraints. As a result it’s complex, tightly coupled together, and really hard to fix. It's also really inefficient and slow, (have you ever tried to edit Spider-Man?) That’s really why the wiki has been so stagnant for so long, it’s a giant monolith that is very resistant to change, fixing problems is a lot like replacing one piece of an increasing complex house of cards.

So we’ve decided to brush that mess aside, start fresh, and build it from the ground up. We're taking lessons we learned from the existing wiki and input from the community to build it better this time. This blog will be a very technical explanation of what we’re doing. We want to be as transparent as possible during this whole process and keep you all involved along the way. At the bottom of this blog you’ll find a signup form for our wiki email list, if you sign up we’ll send you updates as we progress towards our beta, and you’ll be the first access to the new wiki beta site to test and give your feedback.

Please keep in mind that we are bringing you all in very early in the process, because of that the interfaces will be ugly, code may be buggy, and there’ll be a lot of talk about technical stuff. We want you to see our thought process as we develop this thing and give your feedback along the way. With all those disclaimers out of the way let's talk technical stuff (If you're more interested in seeing a preview of the interface skip down to the video below.)

Building in Layers

We are building this new wiki from the ground up with the future in mind. We don’t want the new wiki to be as coupled together as the current one. Currently almost every piece of the wiki relies on each other piece, they can’t be pulled apart and improved upon. The new wiki on the other hand will be built in layers, each layer doing its set of tasks and knowing as little about the other layers as possible. This will allow us to switch layers out, add new interfaces on top of other layers, and generally keep things sane and expandable. So, here’s a quick diagram of where we are with the current wiki and where we’re going with the new one:

As you can see, the new system has a lot more layers which allows us to focus each piece on a single responsibility. It allows us to upgrade individual pieces and fix bugs without the whole thing tumbling down. And as I'll talk about in the next section, the web service based architecture will allow us to open the API up to other developers later on.

Web Services

At the core of our new design is a set of REST web services that handle ALL interactions with the wiki data through simple service calls. This means that our system is easy to interface with and opens up the potential for all kinds of custom interfaces and even the potential for third party apps using our services directly (It will be a while before we’re able to open our services up to third parties, but the potential is there.) The REST services are pretty close to ready for prime time, they can already handle all wiki interactions (viewing, editing, moderation, etc.) In fact we already have detailed documentation for them which will come in handy when we open the services up for outside developers:

New Edit Interface! ***Warning VERY Ugly Prototype Ahead***

Finally let's get to the part you really care about, the new and improved (and working) edit interface. We're trying some new things with the interface this time around, our focus is on speed and reliability (faster editing and less chance of your work getting lost)

Now, the easiest way for me to explain the new interface is to just show you:

What's Next?

As I said above, we are still pretty early in the process and looking for feedback. Please post any thoughts you have about the plan and the interface. If you want to sign up for early access to the beta as well as email updates throughout the development process enter your email address here: http://goo.gl/forms/p0gHXlKEfY

I'll also be posting regular updates on the development process here on my blog so be sure to check back here.

We'd love to hear what you think, and I'll be happy to answer any questions in the comments below.

Thanks for reading!

-Will

If you have any questions feel free to ask!

I'm still pretty ehh and uncertain on the whole gamespot issue, but this definitely looks to be a vast improvement on the Wiki. So good job Will and all the other guys and girls who put this together :)

@wcarle: if you have any questions about the wiki please feel free to ask.

Sounds great.

Eeheehee...

So what say you to all of this, Pika? Seems like you'd be the one around here to ask about it.

@pikahyper: We will be asking you and the other mods for input for sure, right now we are working on mostly back end stuff but once the serious interface design work gets underway we're going to want a bunch of feedback from you all

@just_banter: Thanks! We are really looking forward to getting it out to you guys, I think this is going to be a huge improvement over the current code base

@bumpyboo: I know as much as everyone else, they keep me in the dark about everything now, Rorie barely ever replies to me and the engineers I know barely say anything, one of them even blocked me on twitter for a few months.

I'm not liking the url change but the rest seems good, only time will tell. This was totally the wrong day for the update though, I'm over half a day behind on new releases now and it is not humanly possible for me to finish them by Wednesday.

@pikahyper: Well that sucks. Kinda seems like a counter-productive move on their part, since you are pretty much the wiki around here. Would improve user morale a lot too, to have a mod in the know who could keep them up to speed. I dunno. You seem to use it more than anyone. Doesn't make sense to me.

Ooof, yeah, did consider it being the middle of the week. Not like we were just down for a couple of hours or with much warning, either.

@pikahyper: Apologies for the downtime, we had some unforeseen server issues. As far as the lack communication, sorry about that. I'm going to do my best to keep everyone up to date on the wiki changes. I'm going to be posting a regular blog entry every couple weeks or so and I'm going to do my best to keep you and all the other mods and users involved

@bumpyboo: They like saying they appreciate my contributions but talk is cheap, I'm a valuable resource that they waste and seem content on using me as a work horse until I'm dead or quit, just look at BR I retired from that now it is dead no staff ever post in it and regular users are left to throw noodles at the wall to see what sticks. You are right though it is counter-productive, I actually mentioned how the secrecy is completely unproductive just this morning to Tony, at least judging by this blog post the secrecy I've been complaining about since the buy out is potentially going out the window.

Ya 16 hours is no joke for downtime, Thursday night would have been the perfect time plus the final 3 or so hours of the downtime wasn't even the maintenance it was problems with the CDN (Content Delivery Network) that kept the site down.

@pikahyper: You know, I don't wanna get too positive too soon, but that did occur. It makes a nice change to be let in on the process, this blog was a pleasant surprise in that respect.

I wasn't around all that much last night, was there some kind of pre-shutdown announcement or anything?

@bumpyboo: yep like Ren said there was a warning and it started about an hour before maintenance started, site went read only at 11pm, right when I woke up from a quick nap.

@wcarle: You guys have been hurting me pretty much since the buy out and killed my faith/hope for the future of this site but your transparency and goals have potential, I'm going to show a little faith and compile a wiki wishlist this weekend. Careful with my faith though as this may be the last time I give it.

Do you have any kind of estimate when this new system will be complete/live? like summer? winter? maybe this year? the last wiki platform update was slated for release two years ago.

sounds pretty good to me. I'm all for anything that will make this site better

@pikahyper: I'm sorry about all that, I really am. I'm going to do my best. I would like to see that wishlist, we actually have a wishlist that we've compiled from various sources but any additional input you have would be great.

As far as a final release date we don't have one yet because it really depends on the feedback we get from the beta. As far as the beta itself our goal is to have something ready by the end of February, if anything changes we'll keep you posted.

@renchamp:You're right, we sent out a pre-shutdown announcement, but we were down for longer than we expected. Things were really on fire for a while here, again sorry for the downtime.

@bumpyboo:Thanks, I really do want to turn things around. I've been here for almost a year now and now that I feel comfortable with the codebase (it's been a steep learning curve) I want to start getting more involved with the community and keep you guys up to date with everything we're doing.

@wcarle: Well good on you, that's very nice to hear.

@wcarle: well it is about time we had someone that cared about the site as much as the users :) CV has been the abused red-headed stepchild for way too long so it is nice to get some attention for once and I look forward to seeing your achievements. I dunno if any of the other engineers have mentioned me but I've been a freelance web designer, programmer and tech for well over a decade and have taught at multiple colleges so I am a very useful resource, especially when you add in the fact that I know this site better then any staff member/engineer.

I love how the old ways has a picture of a new laptop, and the new ways is about an old computer XD Genius!

Stock photos are great aren't they?

I for one do all my development work on a 386 :D

I am not much of a wiki editor, but it seems as though there are certain safeguards in the system right now which presumably would need to stay in place. For instance is there any need to have the name change built into the wiki for regular users? I can see this being used in a few ways - if the character actually changes their name; some fanboy or diehard fan wants to change the name for fanboy reasons; or just to mess up the wiki. In most cases wouldn't this just be a waste of the wiki moderators time? They probably would be as aware or more aware of the need for name changes as anyone else.

As far as allowing name changes by regular users that's something we can talk with the mods about. I don't think there's a technical reason to restrict it, but I can see why it's a thing we don't want to do very often, it could cause a lot of confusion

@wcarle: The ability to rename pages is something that has never been allowed for regular users in all the years I've been here and for very good reason, abuse and to a lesser (but important) extent SEO. There are a handful of things we don't allow users to do, I actually compiled a list of them yesterday and added it to the end of the wishlist I am going to send you, basically a section of things that should not be changed/forgotten, I figured it was good to lay those all out to make sure nothing goes live that shouldn't as we've had that type of problem in the past, for example when the issue moving feature was added it was allowed for all users and more then a few took advantage of it and it took a while to lock it down.