(see VirtualCommunityPlans for information about administrative issues)
What is it?
The idea behind this is to capture two different aspects of a "Community"-- lively discussions and group knowledge. The message board tries to enable the prior, while this Wiki tries to do the latter. Some students were shocked that the department doesn't have good Usenet stuff or any informal "New Student Guides". This is meant to fill that gap.
My view (EHW, the one initially setting this up), is that the message board will be a place to discuss research, entertainment, the city, etc., and provide a place for new students to ask questions in an informal atmosphere. Note that the selection of forums was arbitrary and I'm open to a better split-up if somebody can make a compelling case. The Wiki on the other hand is meant to hold things like how-to guides, event calendars, and similar more long-term shared knowledge that doesn't make sense on the message board. Moderators on the message board (and just about anybody on the wiki) will try to keep the signal-to-nose ratio high.
How does it Work?
I went through about six different message boards before I settled on phpbb2. I think it does a great job, it's mature, stable, easy to install and configure, and customizable. I looked at about four different Wikis, and decided upon phpwiki because it's also in PHP, has the most simple and natural syntax (to me), and was also easy to install and configure. Both run on top of a mysql backend with Apache serving the pages. Everything runs on a Debian GNU/Linux system.
The hard part was getting the email --> forum thing working. The PostDaemon does that part. It's about 750 lines of custom Perl code I wrote. Basically, a dedicated user account on the machine has a .forward set up to go to my script, which uses MIME::Parser and HTML::Parser to read in the mail and get the meat of it, then DBI to directly dump the information into the database for people to read. It tries to be intelligent about attachments, MIME types, and such, and does a couple nice things like logging, email address mangling, etc. It will probably become more interesting as time goes on, if people find it useful.
If you want to check out the future plans, see VirtualCommunityPlans.
Why is the font so small?
It's designed to be compatible with older, small screens. If you want a larger font, you have two options. You can either try the alternate style sheets, or tell your browser to globally increase the font size. In Mozilla (netscape, firefox, ...) this can be done by pressing the CONTROL key and PLUS at the same time (CTRL+SHIFT+=). You can do something similar in IE by going to the View menu, Text size, and changing it in that list.
What's up with different usernames and passwords?
What's up with the wiki spam?
See WikiSpam
Things are broken!
If it's on the wiki, go ahead and fix it. The VirtualCommunityPlans page gives the known list of things that aren't quite right or need to be done. Other comments or suggestions are welcome in the forum or via email to the admin (EricWeigle).
Should this wiki be public?
This was discussed long ago and the decision was "Yes." Unless somebody comes up with a compelling argument otherwise, it will stay that way.