Sarna’s 50,000 Article Celebration!

Courtesy of Eldoniousrex

Sarna is ringing in the new year with a bang. We’ve been working hard all year long to bring you this extravaganza celebrating 50,000 articles. That’s 50,000 articles on the finer points of Clan mating behavior all the way to demonic possession of Marauders, and everything in between.

According to our own milestone tracker, Sarna actually surpassed 50,000 articles way back in November, but it takes a little while to set up a celebration of the kind Sarna deserves for such a momentous occasion. It also takes a while to get Nic to emerge from his techno-cave to discuss the finer points of operating a wiki, which involves many blood sacrifices to the Blesses Blake himself. 

In between the strangled yelps of goats being decapitated, I managed to ask him a few questions about where Sarna has been, where he sees Sarna going, and how he plans to get us all there. Spoiler alert: it’s technical. Enjoy.

Sean (Sarna):  I just had a few questions to kind of celebrate the fact Sarna has now hit 50,000 articles. Did you ever think that Sarna would become this enormous? 

Nic (also Sarna): No, no, not at all. You know, the website itself started out just as a fun side project, frankly. A way to learn how to build HTML pages and, you know, also share in BattleTech.

Eventually, when the site was converted to a wiki format, I was like, oh man, maybe some other people might want to help out, you know, the other people can contribute. And a couple of other people have turned into a couple hundred to thousands of individuals who have contributed at this point over—I don’t even know how many edits at this point.

But yeah, the fact that we’ve reached 50, 000 unique articles is just beyond anything I could have imagined.

Sean: And the Discord’s pretty huge too, from what I hear. 

Nic: To be honest that’s one of the best things that I think has happened to Sarna. It’s really brought the community together to have more fluid conversations, evolve it positively, and get real-time feedback.

MediaWiki, the software that runs Sarna, it’s great for a shared document, but it’s not the best for a conversation, right? Like the threads that you can do with text comments that you add—they can be hard to follow and the formatting is not the best. So a real-time thing like Discord has, in my mind, really brought the community to the next level over the last year.

And that’s thanks to the moderators, that’s thanks to all the admins joining and changing the discussions. We have over 2,000 people there right now and it’s awesome. It’s really awesome. 

Sean: Alright so let’s get a little bit technical. How many servers does it take to keep Sarna online now that it’s reached 50, 000 articles? 

Nic: So I can answer that in two ways. The first answer is one. The other answer is thousands.

Sean: That’s very zen.

Nic: Right? Okay. There is a single dedicated server that hosts—it’s extremely beefy—in a data center somewhere on the U. S. East Coast, and that server handles all the computing needed for just the day-to-day dynamic nature of Sarna. My answer of a thousand is I depend on content delivery networks, CDNs, to deliver the images and the assets. All the things that make Sarna fast are because a lot of that content has been pushed locally towards the person visiting and that’s where all the content is fetched from. So I would not have been able to scale without a CDN, but the dedicated compute for it is just relying on a very, very beefy server and data center. 

Sean: Since we’re talking about servers, do you have a favorite “the servers are on fire” story? Honestly, I can’t think of a single time Sarna has not responded to a request, for me at least.

Nic: That’s good. I’m glad that you’re experiencing positive. Sarna has had downtime. It is just me as the admin. Part of that is just because it interests me, and part of that’s because I’m a bit of a control freak. Part of it is just because I enjoy the challenge of keeping the server running, but I’m not perfect, and I’ve made many mistakes along the way. 

So there have been times of scheduled downtime. About every other year or every two or three years, we upgrade to something beefier. We’re on the fifth one right now. Those migrations can take a few hours. I usually do 20, 30, 40 hours of planning ahead of time and preparing and stuff. I focus on low-traffic times and then try to get everything switched over real quick—minimal downtime for the people who notice. But it happens—it’s just part of the business, especially when you are running it all on a single server. You don’t have backups and load balancing that you can do. 

But I’ve also made mistakes. I have accidentally deleted the entire database. Probably just once that I can remember, but maybe twice. Once that I will admit to. 

Sean: Oops. 

Nic: We’ve been hacked, too. It’s been quite a while since I’ve had a security incident—maybe 10 years ago or so? There was somebody who got in through some exploits on the server, got shell access, and did a lot of damage. So we had to restore from a backup, but it has a lot of backups. Backups and backups and backups and backups. 

Sean: Always have backups.

Nic: Backups of your backups and backup those backups to backups. I would say it’s triple or quadruple redundant in the way it’s set up now.

And on top of that, I’ve shared with the admins the backups’ contents in full, in case anything were ever to happen to the single point of failure then they would be able to keep it going in some other form. 

And again, I’ve tripped over things in the past, but you know, it’s usually just a few hours if I do need to restore it entirely from scratch.

Sean: From my experience, it’s been perhaps the most consistent wiki I have ever been to.

Nic: Man, that warms my heart. 

Sean: How often does Sarna partner with Catalyst, PGI, or any other BattleTech creators and do you have any good stories of any partnerships with BattleTech creators? 

Nic: I would say we have unofficial partnerships with a lot of the BattleTech community. A lot of that is just because we share a common interest and we’re friendly with the people behind them. With CGL in particular, a lot of the folks over there are very great people that I’ve known for quite a while at this point. 

I haven’t done anything officially for them, BattleTech-wise. I was doing some contract work for some Shadowrun website stuff back in the day and then helped with some other technical stuff, but nothing on the BattleTech side. They don’t sponsor ads or anything like that. I think that’s fine because I think it kind of keeps a nice clear delineation of how Sarna runs in its unofficial capacity today.

Same thing for Harebrained when they were working on the BATTLETECH game. We had a very friendly working relationship. We would write about them a lot and talk about them and went to their offices once or twice to kind of check on what the latest set was going on.

But it’s all unofficial. Just cordial relationships with all these other companies. Hopefully, we’ve built up good enough relationships that we can tackle any challenges that come ahead. If there are any questions around any concerns with content or anything, we’ve been lucky that other people want to work with us and be on good terms.

Sean: I think it’s just because it’s such an astoundingly good resource, nobody wants to shut it down because that sort of means they’d have to take it over. And that seems like a big endeavor. 

Nic: Yeah. In the Catalyst era, my first connection with that team was with Brent. He reached out at one point years ago, let’s say, 12, 13, 14, 15 years ago at this point. It was just chatting and saying that they were sending some of their artists every once in a while to the site to get more content for backstory, stuff like that.

I eventually ended up moving out to the Seattle area and fairly close to the headquarters out there. So we’d start playing games with them every once in a while and connecting more closely. We’ve had a really good communicative relationship over the years. I think that’s helped with concerns about IP infringement or about any of those other legal things that may affect the fan community. We’ve had a good resource to be able to chat with to make sure we’re okay. 

Sean: Sarna has good guidelines to avoid copyright infringement and that sort of thing too. 

Nic: I would say our editors and moderators have done a really good job just on their own, as a group, coming up with the right guidelines to try to keep us safe.

Nobody’s perfect, and sometimes we have to deal with incidents as they arise or as there are concerns. But I feel like we have a fairly good basis for us under fair use to get a lot of this content up there and help the community and bolster the BattleTech product line itself.

And hopefully, that is feeding back into the sales of the companies that we really want to stay around so that we get more BattleTech in the future. 

Sean: Would you say that Sarna is sort of this interesting focal point between official BattleTech and the fan community? 

Nic: It is, and there is some confusion. I’ve come across people who have assumed or believe that Sarna is an official part of Catalyst or the BattleTech community. It’s nice to, nice to know that people think that we are good enough to be, but we’re not. We’re 100 percent fan-driven, made, created, and edited.

Sean: Well, speaking as a fan, what is the BattleTech product you’re looking forward to most coming into 2024? 

Nic: Great question. The lore of BattleTech is always the thing that excites me. So anytime we get more sourcebooks that are just describing the future or more history or whatever, I just eat those up.

I look forward to those coming out every year. I still have a stack on my nightstand of things that I need to work through and find time to read, but that’s kind of a testament to the increase in quality and quantity that Catalyst has been pushing out. They have a really good pipeline of products coming out in the next few years. And the Kickstarter, I can’t wait for those products to arrive at our doorsteps at some point in the future. 

Sean: Looking forward to that as well. So what projects does Sarna currently have on the go that you’re excited about?

Nic: There are always smaller projects going on that are driven by some of the editors and admins. A lot of that stuff is around consistency and cleaning up things and making sure that all the articles are covering the right bases and stuff like that. I’m always happy to see people putting their energy into just making the wiki a more reliable resource.

On the big picture side, I still really love the planets and systems content that we added a couple of years ago—how we’ve shown the era maps over time. That stuff, I don’t know, for some reason I’m a map geek as well. I can just look at them forever. It’s been fun to be part of that effort. 

I’m just a busy guy, so I don’t have a ton of time to focus on individual things. I dedicate myself to keeping the server up and running reliably.

Sean: Well, then what can fans look forward to in Sarna in 2024? More of the same? 

Nic: I mean, I think that’s a good thing, right? If the fans like it today more of the same more content, more articles, and more evolutions of it. I think we’re going to have a lot of releases this year, and we will disseminate that information through the wiki as appropriate. 

There are somewhat larger projects around, kind of revamping the look or the feel of the site a little bit. It’s been five or six years, I think, since our last facelift on the site. We might be due for one at some point soon. So I’m looking into that a little bit, even if it’s just kind of an evolution. Nothing dramatic, that’s for sure. 

Sean: Well, that’s fair. Change is scary.

Nic: Here’s what I’ll say: at this point, a lot of the things that I will prioritize and focus on are driven by the community. I’m here to support the community and keep the site going rather than adding content. I just don’t have time or energy with all the other stuff that I focus on.

If I can make the page better, more reliable, and more feature-filled, then that’s my goal. 

Sean: So you’re taking pitches is what you’re saying.

Nic: Absolutely. 

Sean: Well, congratulations again! We’ve recently hit 51,000 articles, so that’s given us 10,000 articles in a single year.

Nic: It’s awesome. Thank you. 

And Now, A Partyback Intermission

Courtesy of Eldoniousrex

You didn’t think this would just be a one-and-done party, did you? I also sat down with Frabby to discuss his views on the site’s development over the years. Frabby is perhaps one of the oldest serving admins. He’s the guy you go to for questions about editing the wiki and whether something deserves to be preserved in the site’s database.

Sean (Sarna): Let’s start with the simplest question: what’s your favorite ‘Mech?

Frabby (also Sarna): ARC-2R Archer. A timeless classic.

Sean: Undeniable. When did you join Sarna as an admin? And for that matter, what do you actually do as an admin?

Frabby: Back in the 1980s, I played a lot of Commodore 64 games on my C128 including Crescent Hawks’ Inception. I was a kid and a bit overwhelmed by the game, so I never followed up on the story and I honestly can’t remember if I ever even managed to finish training. I was vaguely familiar with the BattleTech universe. Then in 1992, I was conscripted into the Luftwaffe and of course, our company immediately formed a group of gamers. One guy had a BattleTech board game, I jumped at the chance to finally play the game I had heard so much about. And with so much spare time in basic training, I read through the novels at a breakneck pace. I finished a book every two or three days. A few months later I was GMing a 3025-era mercenary campaign for my RPG group, under the MechWarrior 2nd Edition rules. As GM, I wormed myself really deep into the nuts and bolts of the BT universe.

The group drifted apart after a few years, but by then the computer games had really taken off. I played the heck out of MechWarrior 2 which was also among the first games that we could play multiplayer by networking computers with LAN cables. But after the RPG campaign was suspended, BattleTech tapered out somewhat. I stopped reading the books around the novel Star Lord, and didn’t play MW3 or MW4.

Fast forward to a decade later when I’m moving some stuff around and I find a shelf with my BattleTech books and a 3.5″ disk with some .txt files on it containing notes I had taken, including stuff like a list of DropShips, JumpShips, and WarShips named in the canon. You can see how I’d been doing what is essentially a wiki project back in the 90s before there was a wiki or even much of an internet. 

In any case, one item in this stash of books was Binding Force which I had borrowed from a friend and somehow never read or returned. So I read it and thought it was pretty good. As a Liao fan, it was good to see House Liao depicted as competent, not the cardboard villains from the Stackpole novels. Reading this book rekindled my interest in BattleTech.

That year’s Essen game fair (Spielemesse Essen) I ran across a dealer who sold BT books for one € each, and I grabbed all that I didn’t recognize. It later turned out that these were all from the German-only FanPro novel line, but at that time I had no idea that there were German-only novels. Among these novels was Karma which I consider one of the top three BattleTech novels ever written. So you could say I was back to BattleTech for good, but not so much as a board game player but instead as a reader of books.

It was around this time, with my interest in BT renewed, that I chanced upon Sarna in mid-2007 while browsing the internet for something completely different. Sarna had been a wiki for less than a year by this time and was still very barebones—like, not having a proper article for “DropShip.” I don’t recall if I wrote that article from scratch or just expanded an existing stub article, but given that something so important to the universe didn’t have a proper article yet says a lot about how “early days” Sarna was. (Ok, looked it up in the history section—it was a barebones article that Revanche had put up in 2006, and I vastly expanded it in 2007.)

Anyways, Wolf’s Dragoons of course had their article. These guys always irked me as they could do no wrong. And while browsing the pages I came across the Natasha Kerensky article and felt it was lacking, so I did my first edit there, then as an unregistered IP. But there was so much I could add to Sarna that I quickly registered an account and started tackling issues for real. Not only articles; I also quickly debated organizational issues with Revanche and Scaletail, the two most active main admins at the time.

After around a year, they contacted me and offered me admin status. My initial reaction was lukewarm as I wasn’t interested in the administration aspect of the site. But I was a high-profile user and apparently, the one tackling the biggest issues, like pestering the Line Developer about the definition of canon (and getting an answer that forms the core of Sarna’s and also CGL’s canon policy to this day) and, perhaps most importantly, purging fanon from Sarna to turn it into a proper BattleTech wiki with reliable content.

So, what do I do as an admin? Not quite sure how to answer that. I have “adopted” Sarna as a personal pet project because I had so much input in its formative years, but I was always primarily interested in content. “Administration” in the sense of admonishing users is not something I enjoy, though my training as a lawyer apparently helps in mediating disputes and making judgment calls when necessary. I do these things out of necessity so that the Sarna project can grow and flourish. As the years went by, I became the oldest active admin on the site. My impression is that I’m not special, but have been doing this for so long that people seem to regard me as the senior editor now. This is a bit unfair because I’m doing far less here now than I used to; Dmon is now the most active admin and generally one of Sarna’s strongest pillars.

Sean: Ah, a lawyer—this explains both the long answer and how well it’s written. But I also appreciate the administration work. Telling people “no” is not a fun job.

Frabby: Most of the time I try to be an enabler, not a “no” person. I prefer to help people and try to make them good editors, instead of simply telling them off.

Sean: Speaking of those good editors, how many does Sarna have these days?

Frabby: Always too few.

There’s always one or two dozen ‘casual editors’, names you’ve heard before, who will each do a few dozen edits a year. Then there’s a surprising lot of people who register accounts but never actually edit an article (real users, not bots).

The number of core editors who do all the heavy lifting is small, usually less than a dozen. Typically, a prolific user will have a meteoritic rise in edits and prominence (like I did), but reduce their output or stop editing altogether after a few years. Sometimes they come back, but most ‘bright stars’ will shine brightly for no more than four years. Long-term users like Dmon or myself are the exception rather than the norm. This is problematic for big projects, and also at this time, I reckon Sarna as a whole is around four years behind the curve as CGL publications go.

Sean: So consider this a call for editors. SARNA NEEDS YOU, dear reader!

Frabby: And then there’s the fact that the number of edits says nothing about the quality of edits. Some users will only do a handful of edits but of sterling quality, with excellent research, references, and citations, good article structure, and few typos. Some users have specialized in editing out typos, misspellings, and poor grammar.

This is really a community project. Every little contribution helps. Anyone can contribute. You don’t even have to register. But still, many people seem afraid to edit articles on Sarna. Sometimes I get requests that amount to asking for permission to edit something.

Sean: There’s still a lot of info from the ilClan Recognition Guides that still hasn’t made it into the wiki, that’s for sure.

What about the Sarna Discord? How do you feel about the community that’s grown on this humble little social app?

Frabby: Again, no easy answer. It’s also a very long-winded answer because for me, the discord flows together with several massive changes:

When Sarna first became a wiki and when I was there to guide Sarna through its baby steps, BattleTech was at a low point. MechWarrior: Dark Age was in its death throes, CBT was perceived as dead, and the IP situation—especially the lack of novels—really hamstrung CGL in their attempts to keep the line not only alive but move it beyond 3067 once FanPro’s license had run out (the FanPro CBT license had prohibited them from going beyond 3067, so they wouldn’t interfere with the MWDA storyline). Mind you, I think that CGL did a fantastic job given they had one or two hands tied behind their back. The old success formula from the FASA days didn’t work anymore. CGL slowly climbed out of that hole, and then MechWarrior Online, HBS’ BATTLETECH game, and their Clan Invasion Kickstarter blew it out of the water in a short few years. Not to mention the COVID pandemic that probably brought more people to the internet, including our little niche.

That was great for BattleTech, but the sudden success and the sudden drastic increase in product output massively overtaxed Sarna’s ability to keep up-to-date. We were still catching up on the previous 25 years as it was.

At the same time, a subtle yet even more significant change occurred; the industry switched from physical, paper-based publishing to electronic publishing. Sarna was geared towards covering physical products, and while we made an effort to cover digital publications, particularly BattleCorps, this was only an adjunct to the setup that was centered on physical game boxes and physical sourcebooks and novels. I felt that Sarna was coming apart at the seams and that perhaps we needed to restructure the whole wiki. Revamp infoboxes (some of which were used in literally thousands of articles). Create proper directories for categories, create templates for articles, rethink how we sort and provide info.

That became my personal “three pillars” project which I was going to propose. The idea was that there are three distinct “pillars” of the Sarna Wiki, these being lore, non-fictional/real-world context, and game concerns. But I was still working on whipping this proposal into shape when the Discord community was created and immediately took off like a moon rocket. Changes like bringing Deadfire on board as a tech wizard for the wiki sidelined my own ideas and made them somewhat redundant. On one hand, I was happy that there was now a much larger community including people who were more competent than me in certain fields; on the other hand, it also meant control of the wiki had become a bit more difficult yet as there were even more people pulling in different directions. My free time for work on Sarna has been in a steady decline for years, so I was neither able nor willing to put even more work into adminship to be a central figure in this new, larger community.

I think it is well-known by now that I am a bit grumpy when it comes to social media. Trying not to go on tangents here. Let’s just say that compared to the Sarna talk pages the dedicated users used to use, we now have better direct contact which is sometimes helpful but overall I find that I have to spend more time filtering out relevant stuff from irrelevant blathering, and ultimately get less work done on Sarna. That’s my take on it, anyway.

Sean: Fair enough. Not all technologies are advancements for all people. Do you know of any ongoing projects that are particularly exciting, or are things pretty chill on the wiki front these days?

Frabby: I probably sounded a bit more negative there than I actually feel about it. The fact is, talk about Sarna was boosted considerably through Discord but the actual editing work didn’t increase nearly as much.

Getting the SUCKit back up is perhaps the most important project right now (and is making progress behind the scenes). Other than that, this being a wiki, everybody seems to be pursuing their private pet projects, either alone or in small groups. Personally, I found myself in a place where coordinating with others was eating up all my time to the point where my own projects were put on the back burner. Project coordination is luckily the one field that profited most from Discord, and I hope to dig myself out of this hole and start really contributing to Sarna again next year. My own chief pet project (among many minor ones) is putting up summaries for novels and other fiction pieces.

Sean: Uh, what is SUCKit? Sounds like a fantastic acronym at least.

Frabby: Sarna Unified Cartography Kit. Fantastic resource. But I had only a minimal part in it. It was chiefly built by users Bad Syntax, VoltAmpere, and gruese. The latter is now the project leader, after the other two left.

Sean:  Alrighty! And to close things off, what are you looking forward to most in 2024, either for Sarna or BattleTech in general?

Frabby: Well BattleTech is going to be 40 next year and I’m sure CGL has noticed.

Personally, there’s a pet project of mine that has been submitted and accepted and that CGL has been sitting on for a long time now. I hope it’s going to see publication next year. Unfortunately, I can’t say more as I’m under NDA.

And Sarna? Sarna will always be there and provide background, context, and explanation. 

Sean: Love it. Anything else you wanna add?

Frabby: Upon re-reading, I’m having difficulties coming up with a closing statement. Which in and of itself is perhaps emblematic of the nature of Sarna as a wiki; we’re working in the background, collating information, trying to keep the universe… manageable. The greatest praise for a fan wiki project like Sarna is that it has become a cornerstone of universe research for the community and even the developers. This does come with pitfalls of its own when false or misleading information on Sarna creates confusion in fact-checking or (worst case scenario) is mistakenly taken at face value. But by and large, I feel Sarna is where it should be. It just needs more work, and it needs to include all that new info that keeps coming out on its pages. We’re working on it. By the BattleTech community, for the BattleTech community.

Ah. It occurs to me that this segues into a good closing statement after all:

If you have in-depth knowledge of BattleTech lore, if you have an adequate grasp of American-English spelling and grammar, and an affinity for encyclopedic style writing, then Sarna is your chance to add your personal contribution to this community-built resource. We have vast holes in our coverage of “everything BattleTech” (our mission statement as per Policy: Notability), and since every BattleTech fan is an expert in their own little niche of this grand universe, everyone is welcome to add their knowledge to the wiki! 

Sean: Perfect! Thanks for taking the time to give your thoughts, Frabby!

Thank you to both Nic and Frabby for sharing your thoughts with us on Sarna’s 50,000 article extravaganza! Here’s to another 50,000 more articles as the BattleTech universe continues to expand.

And as always, MechWarriors: Stay Syrupy.