Miraheze-5-year

 Miraheze celebrates five years! 🎉 🎈 July 22, 2015 - July 22, 2020 🍰  A message from our volunteers

Five years is a long time in any industry, but particularly in terms of survival for non-profit organisations without a consistent and steady funding stream - like Miraheze. This year we took the biggest step forward so far of our adventure, we became a legal entity within the United Kingdom under the name "Miraheze Limited". Registering as a legal entity is something we had on our radar for the past three years but it was never done for one reason or another. Particular thanks for this has to go to Owen who, as an outsider, volunteered his time to handle all the paperwork, take over the organisations finances and provide advice and guidance to us all moving forward covering but not limited to tax, legislative compliance and data protection.

From a technical standpoint, this year also saw us move away from traditional shared hosting in terms of Virtual Private Servers and instead utilise physical dedicated servers (which we currently have 3 of). This has allowed us to theoretically provide a more stable service and all room to grow the number of services we provide and the amount of resources we can offer communities. While we do not provide physical limits on resources one wiki can consume, we do not have an infinite availability of them. Although this process has seen quite a few teething problems, we are confident these will be resolved in the next few months allowing us to provide a much more resilient services to all of our users.

Considering our software development progress, we have made leaps and bounds. Not a lot has happened user-facing but in the backend, we have started rewriting large parts of the code to optimise it, allow more things to be done with it and to make it third-party compatible. In April 2020, we launched a new caching backend which improved the performance of our site by almost 60%.

Looking to what we have planned for the next year, we have a focus to:

- improve encryption, security and privacy of our users even further

- introduce machine learning technology to automate wiki creation

- allow users greater control of configuring their wikis

We are here for the long run and plan to commit to Miraheze indefinitely, the question is, are you?

On behalf of Miraheze, -   Share your own thoughts and stories about Miraheze on our discussion page.