wiki.dlang.org: How about replacing MediaWiki with a Git repo?

[Vladimir Panteleev]

On Monday, 3 August 2026 at 21:01:55 UTC, Mindy Batek (0xEAB) 
wrote:
> Looking forward to hearing your feedback! :)

Hi Mindy,

First, thank you for taking the time to share your suggestion for 
improving the project's infrastructure. It is indeed occasionally 
useful to revisit previous decisions and re-evaluate them in 
light of recent circumstances and developments.

Before I address the specific points, I would like to mention 
that a lot of personal time and effort has been invested into 
keeping the current wiki running and mostly clean, and I continue 
to do my best to maintain it to the best of my ability. I thus 
feel like the tone of your message could have been a bit more 
considerate; that said, I am going to assume good faith going 
forward.

#### On replacing the wiki with a Git repository:

The main thing to understand is that if we move the content to 
Git + static site generator, it will no longer be a wiki. The 
defining property of a wiki is that *anyone* can edit it - even 
if they don't have an account on some other platform, and even if 
they live in a country where creating a GitHub account is not 
possible. This also defines the moderation model: if a bad actor 
engages; we restore the desired state by rolling back bad edits 
after the fact, rather than gate-keeping every edit before it 
lands.

We already have a static website backed by a Git repository: 
dlang.org. The wiki exists specifically to be the complementary 
thing: a place for community contributions which anyone can edit.

#### On spam:

Thanks for flagging that page. For context, this was one extant 
case out of many hundreds: shortly after installing the new 
CAPTCHA, we did a mass cleanup (with help from other users from 
the community Discord, IIRC). That one, we missed.

I should note that, all things considered, our wiki is doing much 
better in this regard than most other wikis out there following 
recent developments and increases in spam attacks; over the past 
few years, many projects' community wikis have been either locked 
down much more drastically (such as requiring accounts to be 
approved by a moderator after displaying some proof of intent, 
humanity, or identity), or have much bigger spam problems. I'm 
quite happy that we have figured out a solution that did not 
require such drastic compromises.

#### On the CAPTCHA:

Sorry for the trouble. It is indeed custom, and here is why it's 
necessary: over the past year, the wiki has suffered massive 
DDoS-scale traffic from scraper bots (plus the usual spam bots), 
causing repeated downtime. The standard MediaWiki CAPTCHAs didn't 
work. Cloudflare bot protection didn't work. Standard Anubis 
didn't work. The current solution is a quick and imperfect 
compromise, made necessary as LLM-powered bots recently became 
mainstream. I'm hoping that with time, better solutions will 
emerge, and we will be able to follow other projects' lead. So, 
no, it cannot simply be removed; but, I'm happy to discuss 
specific improvements.

Regarding the technical issues you describe: I tested the custom 
challenge on mobile devices before launching it, and testing it 
again now, it seems to work fine here, including zoom. I would 
suggest trying another device / OS / browser; if it works there, 
that would help identify what the problem is with the original 
one. I'm happy to continue the discussion and fix any real 
specific issues we identify.

#### In general:

I think that any serious proposal to move the wiki's content to 
something else needs to:

- come with a comparison of what other similar projects are doing;
- have a plan for how to preserve authorship;
- have a plan for how it will be maintained;
- have a plan for how it will be moderated;
- have a plan for how to redirect all existing URLs;
- be done in a way that's respectful of the effort all 
contributors have invested into the content.

#### On moving to a hosted platform (GitHub or any other):

I'm not against it, especially if there is the DFL is in favor, 
but we should consider it carefully. We would lose sovereignty 
over our content, and platform functionality can be taken away 
(deprecated and then removed) at any time. The above 
considerations should be taken into account as well.

Hope this helps,
Vladimir