Now for a month WikiAlpha, one of the most famous open wiki, has seceded from the World Wide Web and its fans are far from being calm. Popular due to its high rankings in Google Search, the site has been withdrawn and the nature of this created numerous discussions and viral storm within the community.
The first halt of the site, which was detected by users because of the SSL error, was followed by the quick guess of their account’s possible server problems or Google algorithm penalty. Some users presumed that the cycle of the site’s visits and the sale of backlinks on the freelance platform led to an automatic penalty. Some of these backlinks were rather falsely advertised as being similar to the Wiki links, and a host of new clients were scammed.
But as the days passed into weeks the situation began to get uglier or rather got a darker twist. Some incidents were reported on a person who was thought to be behind WikiAlpha which had been uploading material on gambling. This is a man who has previously had his pages removed for breaching the rules of this site, who after being boot in a very public manner went to Cloudflare, the company that hosts WikiAlpha and claim that they were a phishing site. Indeed, Cloudflare continues the work of WikiAlpha’s administrators and closing its servers without a proper investigation as a reaction to these threats intending not to become responsible for possible accidents.
This outage has provoked crucial questions for Cloudflare’s complaint review process and the susceptibility of online communities to malicious actions due to the absence of WikiAlpha. This largely contributed to users complaining that there is no accountability in the announcements made whereby a single person could bring down a commonly used app.
Nevertheless, no statement is still pending from WikiAlpha’s administrators or Cloudflare, and it has left the community wondering. The occurrence of the event proves how vulnerable the social media platforms are and how crucial it is to design better defensive measures to minimize such disruptions. As the weeks go by, one cannot decide about the future of WikiAlpha, the community of the platform is waiting for any signs of the possible continuation.