Template:Latest news
January 3, 2017:
2016 had its share of ups and downs for many, and the same holds true for LIMSwiki. From a web attack to dealing with time constraints, it was all about resources, resources, resources. As the wiki has grown over the years, more time has been required for weekly, monthly, quarterly, etc. maintenance tasks. Despite this, however, a few new projects sprung up on the wiki. Though not complete, we made significant headway on a directory (with external links) of U.S. government- and/or self-certified Small Business Administration (SBA) entities offering custom software development and general IT services under government contract. (The idea was those seeking laboratory and scientific informatics implementations could also investigate SBA providers for their service needs.) Developing and adding content for book format was also a goal in 2016, including topics such as medical implants, chemistry, health and biomedical informatics, and web application security, among others. And of course we had smaller updates, such as adding LinkedIn URLs to vendor pages, to go along with long-term maintenance and content addition goals like expanding our open-access journal articles on a weekly basis. Finally, development of a huge education-related project took up a significant portion of the latter part of 2016; details will appear here in the news in the coming month or so.
We hope in 2017 to continue adding useful content while striving to find balance with the increasing number of maintenance tasks. Happy wikiing, and Happy New Year!
Shawn Douglas (talk) 17:43, 3 January 2017 (UTC)
February 12, 2016:
LIMSwiki suffered an unfortunate web attack about two weeks ago. I'm not privy to the exact tech details, but as I understand it no user information (usernames and passwords) was ever compromised. The intent seems to have been to take down the site, possibly using malicious code. I understand the tech team has restored the site, though they had to make necessary upgrades to the MediaWiki install as well as other server-side software. This unfortunately had a side effect: we lost our page view counting data. Well, it's not technically lost; it could still be retrieved I believe from the backup file. However, I'm not sure it could be successfully imported into the current build. The attack aside, it seems MediaWiki unceremoniously ditched its built-in counter functionality starting with version 1.25. While an extension was developed to reintroduce that functionality, it apparently involves a very specific upgrade process in order to retain that count data. I'm not going to ask the tech team to go back and redo the upgrade and fix from scratch. We'll begin tracking page views again with the new extension and start anew. However, you can still view the historic Top 30 pages (by page view) from April 2012 to January 2016 on the history page of the associated template. Simply click on the "prev" link of an edit on that page and scroll down to see the listing as it was for that date.
In the meantime, we carry on with our work, including the addition of some new forensic-related content in the next day or two. Happy wikiing!
Shawn Douglas (talk) 19:44, 12 February 2016 (UTC)
