Miraheze-4-year

Today, July 22, 2019, is a special day for the Miraheze project: Miraheze celebrates its fourth birthday! A special day deserves a special treatment so let's celebrate this together. We have asked our volunteers to tell something about their experiences with Miraheze. :)

John Lewis
John is a system administrator and steward for Miraheze.

Four years. You've got to wonder where the time goes, it feels like yesterday I was paying for a sever to host a redirect to our kick start funding campaign and then investing in a proof of concept. I've taken a few steps back and forth this year, starting the year off as a regular member of Operations to now actively employing my management skills to lead a team of independent but strong thinking individuals and letting them have the freedom and confidence to do what they think is right for the service. ManageWiki, CreateWiki, Wiki analytics and an assortment of other tools have been my priority over the past year - we've had a real slow down in development and I decided to commit my time to fixing that to allow communities to grow.

After 4 years, I want to give a special mention to certain volunteers who have stuck around, grafting away to shape this amazing project from near enough day 1. Reception123 get the first special mention - as an active community member and Operations member, he's the face you'll likely encounter if you contact us on most occasions. Secondly, NDKilla - he might not be as active as he'd like to be but he's around when its needed and still plays a vital role in keeping Miraheze running.

As we begin working towards our 5th year of running, Miraheze is well placed to be a strong competitor in both the wiki farm world but in general the web hosting world. Financial stability is our main concern but hopefully we can start working on promoting the finer details of how Miraheze is ran, operated and survives to garner more interest from every single user of our service. We still have many more years of fighting left in us, we now just need to show the world what can offer next year.

Paladox
Paladox is a system administrator for Miraheze.

Miraheze has come a long way in 4 years, ManageWiki being the main one that had a huge improvement. Miraheze has also had a huge increase in the number of visits we gained in the last year! We've also upgraded our file system so that we could be able to expand as needed. Finally we've gained new members to the meta community which is great! Happy Anniversary!

Reception123
Reception123 is a system administrator for Miraheze.

It's now been 4 years since Miraheze was created, that's a pretty long time. This last year, thanks mainly to John, we've seen some new ManageWiki features (such as ManageWikiPermissions and ManageWikiNamespaces) as well as analytics for all wikis which had been requested by many of our users. I think it's great that Miraheze is still doing very well, and hope that with the help of our staff and volunteers we'll continue to develop new features for users. If you have any issues or any questions you would like to ask, please feel free to contact me at any time, and I will be happy to help you. Happy anniversary!

Southparkfan
Southparkfan is a system administrator and steward for Miraheze.

Uh oh, I don't write huge essays that often.. where do I have to begin? Oh hi, I'm Southparkfan! One of the volunteers here.

Seriously, I am glad to be part of Miraheze's fourth anniversary. I have been around here since day 1 and it's a pleasure to see the progress Miraheze has made over the last years. It is amazing how six people (+/-) and their $50 helped to give Miraheze shape. Today we are just a few people in a community of almost 3,000 wikis! Running a non-profit project is not an easy task, given the financial and time constraints you have. Every spent dollar is important: while you may not see direct benefits (about 99% of our funds go towards servers, and we're likely doing it right if you don't see the effects of a new server in our setup), everything we pay for offers extra value to the community. Be it more storage space for your creativity, more processing power to make your wiki run blazing fast or assigning extra capacity to keep your wiki free from downtime, even when stuff breaks.

I would like to thank everyone here. Your dedication towards this project (be it by contributing to wikis, providing help to all those people out there in the community, ensuring we can pay the next invoice of our server providers, developing new features for thousands of people on the wikis, or anything else!) is the only reason behind Miraheze's success. Let's go for the fifth year!

A community project...
Miraheze depends on its community to keep the project running. Wondering how you could become part of Miraheze?
 * Edit: The easiest way to help out is to find a wiki you're interested in, click the edit button, and start contributing. Write as much as you can: the only limit is your imagination!
 * Create: Want to start a wiki of your own? Request a private or community wiki here on Miraheze, all features available free of charge! Creating your own community has never been easier.
 * Code: Are you known for your great technical skills? Do you like tackling bugs and introducing new features? Check out our [//github.com/miraheze GitHub repositories] and [//phabricator.miraheze.org Phabricator issue tracker]. You can find more information at Contributing and Miraheze Vacancies!
 * Donate: Running thousands of wikis requires many servers. Our ability to pay the bills depends on the generosity of our donors! If you would like to support us, consider a donation to Miraheze through our PayPal account. The amount is fully up to you!

Finally...
Share your own thoughts and stories about Miraheze on the discussion page. Your comments are very valuable and deserve to be heard. You can find the (very detailed!) survey !