Time spent was a lot of hours, but I don’t know how much. I pretty much spent ALL my free time on the project for a couple of months, just hyperfocused on getting it set up and working with two others to get it ready. But to be honest, a decent amount of the time was spent trail and error with learning sysadmin type stuff, figuring out which platforms were best (finally settling on nodeBB and MediaWiki), and then a decent amount of time actually setting up the platforms.

The most difficult and time consuming was probably setting up the MediaWiki, since I ended up doing a decent amount of scripts and plugins to get the functionality where I wanted it (after a lot of redoing my efforts with trial and error if how we wanted the layout to work). Then of course the actual page content on a lot of the wiki pages like our vision, ethics, etc.

I’m just going to copy paste a reply to another post for why I gave up:

"I (sort of) explained it a bit on the actual forum, but mostly it’s just a personal limitation:

• I don’t have the time or desire to spend the required amount of time to manage the server, promote and grow the community, and maintain the various little extra things that come with it.
• the community never took off to get enough members/traction - mostly because no of us were/are good at promoting and sharing the community consistently and efficiently.
• technically speaking, I think I’m in a bit over my head, and I was learning as I went, but little issues would require a lot of time and effort to learn to fix, and mostly just lead to burn out.
• I simply am not one that does well well with the long term commitments, and was hoping to build a community that was largely self managing after it started to grow, but 1. The community never actually got enough members 2. I bit off more than I could chew with sysadmin so it required more maintenance in the long term than I initially expected.

So in short, it’s mostly just a personal shortcoming. It might also be that the community never grew simply because the idea/implementation was poor, but I like to think that if I had done enough diligence in promoting and finding members it would have eventually gotten some traction."

I (sort of) explained it a bit on the actual forum, but mostly it’s just a personal limitation:

• I don’t have the time or desire to spend the required amount of time to manage the server, promote and grow the community, and maintain the various little extra things that come with it.
• the community never took off to get enough members/traction - mostly because no of us were/are good at promoting and sharing the community consistently and efficiently.
• technically speaking, I think I’m in a bit over my head, and I was learning as I went, but little issues would require a lot of time and effort to learn to fix, and mostly just lead to burn out.
• I simply am not one that does well well with the long term commitments, and was hoping to build a community that was largely self managing after it started to grow, but 1. The community never actually got enough members 2. I bit off more than I could chew with sysadmin so it required more maintenance in the long term than I initially expected.

So in short, it’s mostly just a personal shortcoming. It might also be that the community never grew simply because the idea/implementation was poor, but I like to think that if I had done enough diligence in promoting and finding members it would have eventually gotten some traction.

Thanks for the support and kind words :)

Currently its hosted on a very small and cheap VPS (although I think potentially due to the small size of the VPS, scrapers and bots would overload the site as they navigated the wiki pages and crash it, leading me to turn on Cloudfare “under attack mode”…which could potentially cause other issues? Obviously I am a bit over my head with this sysadmin stuff, and is one of many reasons why I am a bit overwhelmed and closing)

The VPS is running Cloudron, which allows 2 apps to be run for free, which is running the wiki (mediawiki) and the forum (nodeBB). The great thing about Cloudron is that I can just save a backup and you can load the backups into your cloudron server and pretty much be instantly up and running (In theory, I haven’t done it before).

As for actual maintenance of the apps themselves, nodeBB is pretty easy to navigate and configure - just running through the admin page and changing settings as you need (and they have a good forum to ask questions of their responsive staff). The Wiki is where it gets more complicated, as I have a bunch of addons and javascript scripts that are being used to create the structure of the wiki. It should all be working, but with time obviously bugs will appear and will need fixes and such.

I know that I am not good at sticking with things and my motivation and effort I put on projects starts at lik 500% and then after I burn out it quickly fizzes away and I often move to another project (or at least take a long break) - and I knew this would be an issue in the long run to maintain this platform, so I set it up with the hopes that the wiki and community could essentially self regulate and build the platform together (sort of similar to wikipedia, in a small sense). Of course, this requires actually building up a community of active members first, which was neither mine or the other staff members strong suites. But all that to say, if the community actually becomes the vision I had saw, you will hopefully have a community to help you manage the wiki and forum.

Anyways, that’s the quick and dirty rundown - but obviously if it’s something you or anybody else is genuinely interested in, then I would be glad to elaborate more if needed. Regardless, I appreciate the interest. Thank you!