Current events archive

News Archive

For news that is no longer relevant or out-of-date

Offline

Apologies for the massive downtime for the past week or two. Suddenly everything went blank - and I'm still not exactly sure why. This has hopefully been more or less fixed with upgrading the wiki software again - hopefully not breaking too much. Great crash landing into our first birthday (which I believe is sometime in March)! I will fix the backup version to be more up-to-date and editable in the future. Sorry again, Clizard

Caption Competition - Appeal

We are now looking for good photos to put on the Caption Competition page! If you have any entertaining photos which could be suitable, please send them along to

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and we'll make a decision.

Just a couple of notes:

• Please do not directly upload photos to the Caption Competition page as we need to make sure they are suitable first!

• They don't necessarily have to be of teachers, but make sure the subject doesn't mind appearing

Chris ^{talk - mod} 09:24, 16 February 2007 (UTC)

Adbots

The wiki has recently started being visited by adbots. If you see any page with adverts on, please tell us on either Moderation Requests or the Community Portal. Also, if you're blocked and the reason is 'adbot'; then your IP address corresponds to one. Try to use a proxy server to get around this.

The Moderators

MySpace and the Wiki

We'd like to point out to all of our users that this isn't for making MySpace-style pages about yourselves or friends, but a fact based website. Unacceptable content involves such things as "personality tests", personal tributes and anything else to that effect. Basically, it needs to be kept in the third person, ("He has done... and likes...), and the use of full English is once again required please!

Examples of what we're looking for include the pages for Heskey, Doc Rob and so on. Please have a good look at these and get some ideas! Of course, there is nothing stopping you from linking to your personal MySpace page from your wiki entry if you want, but bear in mind it will then be viewable to everyone who visits this site!

The Moderators

The New Year

This year, we intend to help the Wiki grow even more, and over the coming weeks we will hopefully be establishing new sections, and listening to requests made in the Wiki Discussion section. If you have any ideas as to how we can grow further, please tell us!

Also, as the new term begins at BRGS, we hope our current users will spread the word about this wiki, but please ensure that any new edits conform to our editing guidelines. We would once again like to emphasise that "txt spk" is instantly deleted, so take your time to write out your entries in full English!

Finally, we hope you all had an enjoyable Christmas holiday and are looking forward to a great 2007!

The Moderators

Traffic in 2006

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Clizard 5th January 2006

Update

The wiki continues to grow with the Main Page passing 10,000 views and the database currently holding 1 articles. However, this increased popularity means that we are now a bigger target for vandals. If you see any vandalism (which includes blanking pages), please at least report who did it on Moderation Requests; even if you revert the vandalism yourself, so that we can judge whether they need a ban. Thank you!

The Moderators

A note on "poking fun"

It is currently our policy that if you add something "poking fun" at someone, we have to view this as a derogatory comment that the person in question would not see the funny side of.

This is unfortunate, but we cannot check up on everyone's sense of humour. To be on the safe side, any comments of this nature will be deleted, or at least edited. Therefore, please ensure your comments cannot be viewed as offensive, even if that is not how they are intended!

Chris mod 16:30, 1 December 2006 (UTC)

Accounts

We strongly recommend that you create an account if you haven't already done so, as this gives you several more options to play with. It's completely free and takes roughly ten seconds...

Chris, 18 November 2006

Meeting

Sadly, due to technical issues and time constraints, the planned meeting for wiki users has been abandoned. However, we would very much like to hear your views - so check out the Wiki Discussion page and tell us what you think!

The Moderators

Caption Competition

New photo now up! Have a go here.

Furthermore, uploads now work again! Well, sort of..

Chris ^{talk - mod} 23:18, 13 December 2006 (UTC)

November Report

November has been a busy month for the wiki. It was migrated to brgswiki.org from clipse.co.uk/wiki, with a few relatively minor hiccups and one major one. Most have been resolved, however image uploads will be fixed shortly (as this requires more time), as well as user permission fine-tuning. Search engines have picked up the new site (Google, Yahoo et al) on searching for “brgs wiki”, which is a step in the right direction. The move was to increase speed during evenings and to have a proper domain, which I believe has been successful.

Traffic has been comparable to October, though my impression is that fewer new people have visited than then. It has also picked up in the second half of the month, indicating a possible upwards trend through into December. The wiki was also offline for quite lengthy periods during the middle of the month, which certainly has contributed to the less-than-exponential growth this month (although growth will be more steady in future). You can review the full statistics at stats.brgswiki.org.

In terms of moderation, there has been concern at the decline in quality of articles, with mainly the addition of student pages which add somewhat of a 'fun factor' to the site. These however are very open to malicious edits, which can be 'upsetting' towards students. Measures have recently been taken to remove offending pages and to ensure that this happens as little as possible in the future.

Thanks for everyone's contributions and support, and enjoy the festive season.

Clizard 1st December 2006

Vandalism

Following a complaint, a massive "purge" has taken place on this site. We think that the majority of insulting comments have been removed, but if we have missed one please TELL US.

EDIT: Furthermore, DO NOT think that using the school IPs makes you harder to block and thus allowed to vandalise - it doesn't, as you will soon see.

Chris

Updated Pages

Several pages have been updated by Chris: this page, HowToEdit and the community portal have been changed and/or cleared out. Please take the time to read the new guidelines on the wiki. These sorts of "dynamic" pages now also have archives attached to them - go to the page concerned for a link.

We have also created a new page at Moderation Requests for normal users to request moderation services and to report vandalism.

Finally, we encourage all users to get an account! This has several benefits attached to it; and also means you can take credit for any contributions under that name.

Jonny

Policy on Banning

Due to a small amount of "vandalism" a new policy on bans has been introduced. Please read this so that it is clear what's acceptable and what doesn't!

Also, to emphasise a point, if you make a mistake and something "weird" happens, please tell us by writing a note in the Community Portal. Accidents happen, and we won't mind if you tell us if and when you mess up!

Chris

Updates on Uploads

It appears that uploads will not be working again until mid-December. Watch this space.

Chris

Legends

A new legends area has been developed. It is now divided into three categories - Teachers, Students, and "Other". If you would like to nominate someone for "legend" status, please discuss it in the community portal if you want to gauge reaction to your plan.

Chris, 23 November 2006

Pages to be deleted

The category "pages to be deleted" has been tidied out - that is, all the pages within the category have been removed. Please do not just create blank pages for the sake of completion, only if you are planning to put some content on it.

Chris, 19 November 2006

Uploads

Are sadly not working at the moment, by the looks of it. Clizard promises this will be fixed soon....ish

Chris, 17 November 2006

Finishing Off The Move

This will take place over Sunday 12th November. Unfortunately it's not quite finished yet. Old colours and statistics will be added and any missing elements of the wiki will be addressed over the next day.

Clizard, 12 November 2006

Moving to new Host

Over the weekend (very very early Sunday), I'll be moving the wiki onto new hosting which should improve speed or at least improve the uptime of the BRGS Wiki. I'm going to try and do this as quickly as possible but there are lots of images to transfer, which will likely take up the bulk of my time. Once available this site will forward to the new address which is www.brgswiki.org. All page links should forward correctly to the new site and most, if not all elements of the site will be saved. The MediaWiki software is also being upgraded at the same time to the latest release version.

Hopefully this'll go without too much of a hitch, but I may have to turn off the wiki for some of Sunday to get everything shifted over. By all means continue to edit the current site. All content will be saved and transferred.

Clizard, 8 November 2006

Important Note

Unfortunately, we have been plagued recently by certain acts of vandalism, such as deleting the entire content of a page and replacing it with "such a person is a ****."

This will not be tolerated!

All changes are logged in Recent Changes along with your IP address, so we know who has changed what - please bear this in mind! By all means, edit any page you wish to, but keep it clean, informative, funny, and in line with the Guidelines.

Enjoy!

Chris, 2 November 2006

New Proposals on Rules for Moderation

Thanks for all your edits, viewing and support over the last couple of months. The site grew over 50% in September, in page hits and is looking to do so in unique hits too, according to our statistics page. As the site grows, it is inevitable that a wider audience will come along. Searching for something related to BRGS, like "fuller brgs" returns results from certain UK search engines to pages here.

Therefore, we now have a responsibility for a minimum level of quality - by making sure spelling and grammar is mostly correct and that articles are not offensive, nor rely on using swear words. To bring all current and future articles to this standard, a new proposal for the editing guidelines has been submitted and now features on the front page. We'd appreciate constructive feedback and edits on the draft.

There will be no punishment for users not following the guidelines, with the exception of anyone who is here just to vandalise the site by, for example, replacing an entire page with a derogatory comment. You will be banned if you do this!

Clizard, 25 September 2006

The To-do list

If you ever have a spare 20mins or so, or would like a section added and don't have time, the Community Portal now plays host to the to-do list.

New Colours

To give BRGS Wiki a more BRGS-esque theme, we've been experimenting with the colours. Hopefully they'll all work and are better (or at least more unique) than the defaults.

It begins From Myspace

So, the BRGS Wiki MySpace profile has been up and running for a few days now, and I'm pleased to report that you seem to be flocking to join up and help support the site. Better still, the Wiki itself now has some extra features, including a detailed statistics link at the bottom of the page that will take you to all the information you could possibly want about the site, and- perhaps more importantly- show you how many people access the page every day and see your work.

Now all we have to do is work out a way to appeal to the masses... any ideas?