Today I upgraded J-Ongaku to Mediawiki 1.6alpha, which allowed us to use the new Vector theme. Vector is the same theme that will eventually become Wikipedia’s default, so I decided to jump on it.
If you find any problems, please let me know here. Thanks for continuing to support J-Ongaku! 
glowlydays informed us via the comments of spam users infiltrating J-Ongaku. I’ve banned the four spam users and added reCAPTCHA to the registration process. Hopefully that’ll keep the spam users out.
If you have any problems with the new registration system, please let me know and I’ll get right on it! Thanks!
I just noticed, that I can’t edit any articles. I logged out, logged in again. Nothing. I’m concerned, ’cause I’ve been doing these DVD pages, and I’m in the middle of one of them x”D
Weird, I thought I fixed that problem. Alright, it SHOULD bee fixed, but let me know if you continue to have any problems. 
sorry to other ^^’ it’s working now ^^
I’m having trouble loading J-Ongaku, sometimes it doesn’t load and sometimes appears a 502 error.
Is it just me? 
Hi PrivateSky, we’ve been tracking this issue ever since we moved hosts. I haven’t gotten any answers from our new host yet, but I’ll be sure to press them about it. It is definitely an annoying error and something that shouldn’t be happening with this kind of setup.
J-Ongaku is back and on a new host. We profusely apologize for the downtime and any inconvenience this has caused anybody. We came into this wanting to improve the reliability and availability of the wiki and this past week has been a mark against that. We will do everything in our power to make sure it never happens again.
Again, thank you for your support!
there are problems with logging in x3 and I can’t see a j-ongaku logo ^^]
Whoops! I forgot to port my hack to allow for lowercase usernames. Let me know if you still can’t log in. Sorry about the trouble! Although, I can see the J-Ongaku logo. Maybe that’s a cache thing.
now I can log in, but I can’t edit anything : / “data is lost” or sth : /
Ah, alright. Another setting I forgot to migrate. ^_^; Everything should be working now, but let me know if things don’t work as expected.
it’s okay now, but tables are strange-looking, they’re all white, and they’re not clear ^^’ if you could see what to do with that ^^’
there are four (I think) spam users… could you delete them? ^^’ it’s just annoying…
Hi J-Ongaku-ers! I apologize for the downtime you may or may not be experiencing. We’re having some billing troubles with Slicehost at the moment which we are in the process of clearing up. We’ll work to get J-Ongaku up as soon as possible. I’ll be keeping you up to date here, so stay tuned.
Thank you for supporting us!
Update: I won a year of free hosting from WebFaction so I decided to move J-Ongaku there, so stuff like this won’t happen again. The DNS for the domain is resolving as we speak, so hang tight!
so… how long do you think this downtime will last? ^^’
Just to be clear, it’s purely a billing issue. ^_^ No data has been lost nor will be (just in case you were concerned about that). Anyway, it should be cleared up this week at earliest on Monday or Tuesday. I’ll blog again if that doesn’t happen.
Many many MANY apologies.
okay, thanks for answer… I was worrying, because I used to enter and change the page like 10 time s a day x”D
Yep, I recognize the name. It’ll be up as soon as we clear all this mess up.
God, I’m so sorry for being impatient… but so many happened in j-music world… x”DDD
Just a quick notice that we moved the J-Ongaku blog from http://j-ongaku.org/blog/ to http://blog.j-ongaku.org/ which is now hosted on WordPress.com. This is in case you’ll have some place to go in case J-Ongaku does go down. Didn’t make sense to host a blog on the same server as the wiki. 
That is all. Thanks for your continued support!
We had a few hours of downtime starting at about 2:30 PST today. The problem arose due to our database server becoming unresponsive. Thankfully, Slicehost was able to take care of that problem but I didn’t find out about the site being down until about half an hour ago.
Everything seems to have been fixed, and I profusely apologize for the downtime! Thank you for your support!
We had a few hours of downtime starting at about 12PM PST today. The problem was narrowed down to a DNS issue with our company’s MySQL server, which took down the blog and our tracking software, Mint, which (unfortunately) can only run on MySQL.
The problem seems to have been fixed, but I shall keep monitoring the database to make sure nothing else funky happens. My apologies for the downtime!
Are you guys aware of the XSS and HTML injection vulnerabilities in MediaWiki 1.13.2 (which j-ongaku appears to be running)? http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/32844
The wiki didn’t recognized my user so I had to register myself again :/ also the tables are looking different, there is no j-ongaku logo and the redirect pages aren’t working :/
Thanks for the heads up. I was not aware of these and will be upgrading the site to 1.14.0 tonight at midnight PST.
Everything is working now Thanks
Hey cutting_edge, sorry for the trouble with your account. I fixed the login issue and merged your two new accounts with your original “cutting edge” account. Let me know if it doesn’t work. Table styles should be fixed too.
I’m all for this project! It’s great. I read a few post of Theppn journal and not to be a jerk or anything but it seems like they’re not gonna do jack about it.
If you guys need any bandwidth delegation I could help out a little (I have a hosting service w/ surpass).
Other then that I’ll start contributing to Ayaka’s Disco~ of what I have anyways.
Hi all!
There was some downtime last night as I changed our web serving software from Apache to a lighter, faster and better-on-memory one called, nginx. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, no problem, just know that the site should be responding a lot faster now. :3
I’ll be tweaking it over the next few days, since I’m a bit new to serving web pages in this manner.
The history on the alice nine. page was treaked by me, the headers may be similar but the bulk of the information was rewritten and corrected from the wikipedia article.
thanks for contacting us, Sir REDulin! :]
comparing it to the Wikipedia article again, i see what you mean. but it was so similar that the difference wasn’t obvious at first, and this makes me a bit uncomfortable. it’s not the same word-for-word, but it is sentence-for-sentence, know what i mean? xD
i’m thinking from the perspective of a writer and what they may consider copying to the point that it would bother them. think of like what would be acceptable for an English essay. certainly using references like Wikipedia is fine, but this in particular is less writing from reference and more adjusting existing writing.
i hate to be this picky, but i really want J-Ongaku to be a place that people can respect and acknowledge as legitimate in itself, so i have to be picky in order to uphold that. ^^;
i’ll leave it up for another day should you decide to do something with it, but if it’s not changed by then i will have to remove it. sorry!
As the other half of J-Ongaku, I’d like to personally offer my thanks to everybody that have helped us grow over the past few weeks!
After Jen and I decided to start J-Ongaku, I made a vow to make sure we would be completely transparent about everything we’re doing. On Jen’s end that would consist of connecting with the community and make sure that we’re helping you produce the best content possible as easily as possible. On my end, I’m tasked to make sure that the site only goes down when it has to and to fix any problems before they become something that can take down the site.
With that in mind, I thought I’d take a minute to talk about what powers J-Ongaku. First off, J-Ongaku is a project of Revyver, a company that Jen and I have been spending our waking hours taking care of. Revyver owns a grid of 7 severs at Slicehost, a developer-focused host based in St. Louis, Missouri. J-Ongaku is spread on two of those 7, running a PostgreSQL database back-end on one and PHP on the other. Without getting too geeky, there are two benefits.
I’ve gone as far as I have because I’m a bit OCD when it comes to servers, even though I’m a designer by trade. Again, with all the ups and downs that have happened lately, I wanted to take no chances. Finally, you’ll see that I’ve added an uptime graph to the blog. This’ll show our uptime for the last 30 days courtesy of the awesome monitoring service, Pingdom. When it comes to downtime, you’ll always find out about it on this blog, or on the wiki itself.
I’m committed to making sure that you’re comfortable spending your time helping us build J-Ongaku. Please don’t hesitate to contact either Jen or I if there’s anything else we can do.
Thanks for the update. I hope this site becomes very successful, please continue to help this site^-^
If anyone needs track-listings for some albums or singles, Discogs.com has a lot…
Your OCD is an upside.
Thanks for the update.
To feed your OCD a little more, can I ask what backup solution you are using and how often you test the backups (i.e. do a restore to verify the backups are good)? As a sysadmin with 10 years experience, I can be pretty OCD sometimes too.
Hey Scott, I’m using a few backup solutions. Slicehost provides a nightly and weekly backup of the whole slice. I have cron jobs doing PostgreSQL dumps on both my local PC and on another slice running nightly.
As for testing, I’ve had a routine of testing backups once a week which I’ve been doing since before J-Ongaku’s time.
Hope that answers your question.
As a recent contributor, I’m happy to see your backups sound reasonable (I’ve also worked as a sysadmin for about 8 years). Is the Slicehost backup off-site? Always good to have stuff stored in separate physical locations.
At the moment the internal Slicehost backups aren’t off-site, but since they just opened a new data center, we’ll soon have the option to store our backups there.
UPDATE: i have made a page on the wiki where i can organize the rules better, and where people can use the discussion page to ask questions, make suggestions, etc. (to each other as well as to me)! please check it out, and be sure to chime in if you have something to say! i would like J-Ongaku’s members to help shape the regulations of this wiki. :]
first of all, i apologize for my inability to explain things efficiently. xD; i ramble a bit and tend to make things sound more confusing than necessary, so feel free to re-write these in a more efficient way (since these will have to go on the wiki at some point). in fact, i encourage you to! the more comprehensive the rules sound, the better.
while these rules are not 100% final and i am open to discussion about them, i am also aware that no matter what i do or don’t do, i will not make everyone happy. so feel free to make your argument for/against (in a constructive and civilized manner.. comments like “that sucks” will not be helpful to you or to myself), and i will weigh them with what other people think and come to a conclusion after weighing both sides fairly. that means that some people won’t be happy, but please keep in mind that my job is to go with what will work better for the majority, which is not necessarily the most vocal group (so polls may be implemented at some point).
that being said, here are the rules that i’ve come up with so far:
1. Discography tables should have the same categories. that is: number, title, first week sales, total sales & oricon ranking. this is for consistency, and encouraging members to fill in information where there is none. this is for main discographies, things like digital singles and miscellaneous types of releases need not include the categories that obviously don’t apply.
2. romaji text should come before Japanese text. this is because most visitors are not fluent in Japanese, so it doesn’t make sense to have to go down a list reading what’s written at the end of a line. that is not to say that the Japanese title is not important, just not what the visitor should see first. having the romanized title written first makes it easier to skim down a list.
3. on a CD’s page, the Track List should be the first section after the description. it is the most important information and the one most people are looking for when they visit the page, so all other information should be placed *after* the Track List.
4. something i always loved about ThePPN, capitalization of titles should be copied from the official romanization used in Japan (when applicable). this means that titles written in all uppercase or all lowercase on a PV or CD cover, for example, should be reflected as such in the Discography & Track list sections (though not in paragraphs such as History/Information sections, where ease of reading should take priority).
5. when romanizing Japanese text, the first letter of important words should be capitalized. Katakana should NOT be written in uppercase because this rule is not followed consistently. it does not do to pick and choose when to write a Katakana word in all caps, and therefore it’s better not to follow that rule at all.
6. First/Last names in Kanji should not be separated by spaces. if you need help figuring out where a family or given name starts/ends, i suggest using Jim Breen’s WWWJDIC Translate Words section. it’s very helpful!
7. translations of Japanese text should be included on its most specific page (for example, on the Single’s page instead of on the Discography page), so that the more general page(s) doesn’t get crowded with too many words.
8. single songs should not have their own page unless there is sufficient information to include on the page. for example, the composer/arranger information is not enough to put on a song’s page, since that information can be included on a single/ablum’s page. only if a song has history, or many versions that need to be listed, or has been covered by many artists, etc, should a song have its own page.
since J-pop is my main thing, i realize that a lot of other categories (actors, dramas, etc.) may need rules that i wouldn’t think of including. so feel free to let me know about things that!
oh, also. some general CSS will be implemented to help keep a consistent look on things like tables. while i don’t want to give SO MANY rules that it drives people crazy just trying to remember them, i do want to aim for a consistency that is usually hard to find in wiki’s, wherever possible. but this will mainly depend on contributors and trusting them not to make things different just for the sake of being different, so i’ll talk about that once we’ve gotten somewhere with the actual rules.
anyway, discuss and suggest away! and remember to keep things constructive. :3 and err, suggestions should have a purpose, obviously. xD; “it should be this way because of these reasons” will hold more water than “i like it better when it’s..” lol.
I think you should do something before your website become a J-Idols wiki. Here are my opinions, just mine:
1) I don’t think discography table need all of this. 1st week sales or totals sales isn’t main information. And we don’t have all information, there are a lot of missing data that editors can’t fill them all. I always think that kind of table is for idols only, I don’t know why too. Is it because of wiki.theppn’s idols editors always use this kind of form for them and I came up thinking this form is for promote idols only. But I think keeping total sales is nice.
2) I think you should make a title rule like wiki.theppn. Example: MiChi’s ChaNge the WoRLd’s page should be “Change the World (MiChi)” instead of “ChaNge the WoRLd”. It will hep readers to search the page and do not confuse with other artists releases with a same name and spelling.
3) I don’t agree with things about tracklist before information. For me release information always has to be first, just like an opening for an episode of drama of anime.
4) A rule for categories. I don’t think a “Morning Musume Singles” is a better idea than “20xx Singles”.
5) You must find someone to help you arrange things before it become a big mess. Someone don’t care about haters to reformat those exist pages.
w00t, thanks for the thoughtful input! :3 let me address them by point so we can keep it organized.
1. hmm, can you put into context for me why 1st week sales would not be good information for non-idol artists? i always thought 1st week -> total sales comparisons were a good way to find out which releases have music that appeals to the masses (you will see a larger gap between 1st week and total sales when the music itself drives more than just the fans to buy a single/album).
i made the rule because i thought requiring the categories would make pages a) look more consistent, and b) provide information that might be more interesting/useful than people would have thought. also, the information about sales numbers is available online for all releases that have appeared on the oricon rankings. artists that this information doesn’t apply to (i.e. they don’t rank on oricon, like indies, less popular groups, or groups from countries that don’t provide a good resource for sales/ranking information) are of course not required to include those categories. :]
2. ooh, that is something i hadn’t thought of. good point! does strange capitalization make it harder to search for something? would there be a disambiguation page in those cases? how do i know what songs need their name following the song title? for example, Tommy heavenly6 has a song called “Lollipop Candy BAD girl”, so the capitalization may be hard to remember, but it’s also not a song title that is likely to be used by other artists. what would be done in that case?
3. release information is included in the description of the article, so it does come before the track list. :] just no “sections” (ones marked with ==Section Name==) would come before track list.
4. hmm, i see your point. too many categories, and something like MM Singles is pretty unnecessary. i only did it because i saw it being done on ThePPN and thought people would want it, but it could easily be taken out. ^^ thanks for bringing it to my attention!
5. yes, once the “ground rules” are established more solidly, i want to encourage people to edit pages to follow them. so far i have been doing some of them myself, but already there’s too many pages for only me to edit. xD; in the future i’ll hopefully get official staff to help, but first thing is first: we must continue to discuss and adjust these rules so they can become official!
Hi, I’ve been contributing to the wiki for these days and I have this question in my mind: Is it okay to post the CD rankings in other countries like Taiwan, since they have a stable website (http://www.g-music.com.tw/GMusicBillboard0.aspx) such as Oricon in Japan?
Japan -> Oricon (Album and single charts are separated)
Taiwan -> G-Music (Album and single charts are one)
hi, thank you for your contributions! ^^
yes it is absolutely okay to posts Taiwan rankings, but the real question is where they should go. xD off the top of my head i would think on the single/album page (instead of on the discography) for non-Taiwanese releases, and on the discography table for Taiwanese releases? because i think the country of origin’s rankings are the most important, but it’s nice to have more information on a page where there’s more space to elaborate.
i’ve made a discussion page on the wiki in the hopes that more people will see it/post in it, so feel free to post about this there if you’d like to hear other people’s input, or if you just want to discuss it further!
http://j-ongaku.com/wiki/Talk:J-Ongaku
(i revised and organized the rules on that page also, which are still up for discussion)
i don’t fancy myself a wiki expert, so my reasoning could easily be overlooking something. xD that’s why i encourage discussing of these matters before i make them final~ that way people can bring things to my attention that i perhaps haven’t thought of.
Quincy are discussing. 
PrivateSky, and 
glowlydays are discussing. 
Douten, 
cutting_edge, 
Sir REDulin are discussing. 
coax, 
scott and 2 others are discussing. 
cutting_edge, and 
Quincy 1:57 am on September 25, 2009 Permalink |
I can’t create an account there at all. it gives me an error message. Also, when I tried to log in to an older account, it said it didn’t exist… even when using the proper password. I don’t know if anyone else has had that issue, but if so, it would seem nobody can edit the info right now, which is a shame since there were tons of articles I wanted to create/edit… just a heads-up.
Bryan 2:22 am on September 25, 2009 Permalink |
Hi Quincy, sorry about the trouble. This seems to be an error from the last time I upgraded, so I’ve gone ahead and fixed that. Mediawiki seems to dislike lowercase usernames, so we hack it to make it like them. Unfortunately that hack seems to be missing every time we upgrade.
I’ll make sure that this never happens again.
Quincy 1:30 pm on September 25, 2009 Permalink
Alright, just so you know, attempting to create an account brings up this message repeatedly: “Could not create account: ”
(That’s attempting to create one with any sort of casing – uppercase, lowercase, or mixed.)
Quincy 1:30 pm on September 25, 2009 Permalink
Errr, “Could not create account (missing or incorrect confirmation code)”, I mean. I think I accidentally gave the second part HTML tags.
Bryan 6:23 pm on September 25, 2009 Permalink
That’s most likely caused by the reCAPTCHA extension that we use to keep spammers out. I turned it off for now, as it probably doesn’t work with the upgraded Mediawiki. Let me know if you’re still having trouble and apologies for the inconvenience.