Two days ago, I accidentally wiped out all of my philosophy wiki content and users. As I was trying to troubleshoot some issuues people brought to my attention about the roundedblue skin, I realized I could not change the skin in my wiki. When I would try to change the skin in my preferences, I would get an error page. Some googling brought up three hits about other people reporting the same error, all of them experiencing the error for the first time after upgrading MediaWiki to version 1.9.3, as I had recently done. I could only find one response to these public pleas for help. This response was the suggestion to delete or rename LocalSettings.php and then go to the wiki’s index.php page and go through the same steps as if installing MediaWiki for the first time. After following these steps, it appears I’ve lost all my data. I did not write down the exact error message that started this whole mess, and I can’t find it again, even after over twenty minutes of googling for it.

Fortunately, I didn’t have much content yet, and I had just made a decision to change the whole framework of the wiki, anyway. I feel worse about the loss of users. I only had three besides myself, and of those, only one had contributed. If you had an account with my philosophy wiki, please accept my apology. I didn’t delete your account on purpose. You are welcome back at any time.

Ironically, it will now be easier to proceed with my recent decision to redo the whole wiki to make it entirely fictional in nature. Yes, it sounds weird, but I have decided to make the entire DreamFishery.com website a fictional site. Squirrel Tao will be the only exception. It will continue to be my blog, and its topics will be the same. As for the rest of DreamFishery.com, it will be as if Alice Mountolive, the narrator of The Myth of Merula, is also the narrator of the philosophy wiki and the webmaster of the whole Website.