Englipedia Archive Woes

Several people have gotten in touch recently to say that the archived Englipedia site has been inaccessible.

To give some background, Al, the other admin for ALTopedia and Englipedia's last administrator, was running an archived version of Englipedia on his own web hosting. It was an archive, so things like commenting, rating, or activity edits or submissions were no longer working. The idea was that we'd keep the archive running for as long as we could until we were able to transition most of its content to ALTopedia.

I developed an automatic import method for Englipedia activities, but it requires manual clean-up and verification for each individual activity. The process identified something like 1200 activities and I've imported 307 of them so far (which you can see on ALTopedia's Englipedia Archive user account). To be honest, I should have done a lot more of these every day. It's a bit tedious but there's no denying the value of the breadth of the activities on Englipedia.

Al's hosted site went down when he was testing to see what would happen when we get ready to sunset the old archive and redirect the traffic to ALTopedia. The redirect worked, but when Al went to revert it, he wasn't able to get the server to go back to its previous settings. I haven't looked into the technical side of the archived site, but it sounds like it was kind of a complex soup of systems and settings. He's trying to work on getting it back online in some form or another, but fall is a busy time for him so it might be a little while before he can get it working again. At some point we'll need to sunset it completely, but I'll try and give a little warning before that if I can.

I've heard from several users of the Englipedia archive that the one feature they felt was very important to them were the textbook listings. We have those on ALTopedia too, of course, in our "textbooks" section! Recently one user was kind enough to send me the table of contents pages for Total English, so those are in there now too. If you have a textbook that your school is using but we don't have listings for it, I can add it to the site if you send me a screenshot of its table of contents page or any other page that lists which grammar points it's using. A quick phone photo is all it takes!

As for other site news, I'm almost finished with the Activity Link feature, where it will be possible to link alternate versions of activities together. My hope is that it will make it easier to find variations activities that suit whatever your particular needs are. I'm continuing to make some prototypes of a new site layout, but that's much further down the pipe.

Let us know if you have any questions or concerns!