The Dark Ages were a five-month period in which the Geohashing Wiki was unavailable.
Before the Dark Ages, the Geohashing Wiki was available at wiki.xkcd.com/geohashing and was hosted on the same server as the xkcd forums. Due to a breach of the xkcd forums, all web services hosted on their server, including the Geohashing Wiki, were taken offline as a precaution in August 2019.
In February 2020, Dan Q ended the Dark Ages by resurrecting the Geohashing Wiki at geohashing.site with a backup of all old pages.
Timeline
- 2019-07-01: According to Troy Hunt, the xkcd forums were breached on this date. The breach was not discovered immediately.
- 2019-08-31: The Dark Ages begin, the Geohashing Wiki is not reachable. A scheduled AperfectBot edit (creating this template) is not performed.
- 2019-09-01: The xkcd phpBB forums were publicly confirmed as breached and start displaying the pictured "503 Service Unavailable" message. The Geohashing Wiki starts displaying the same message.
- 2019-09-02: News websites like this one start reporting on the breached forums, and only mention "hashing" in the context that MD5 is not supposed to be used for passwords anymore.
- 2019-09-03: Geohashers receive an email from davean, the xkcd tech person, explaining that "there’s no indication that the wiki account data was accessed, but since it shared a server with the forums, your account data may have been leaked... The wiki will remain offline until I'm satisfied that it’s secure."
- At some point, Dan Q emails davean asking for his or Randall's blessing to relaunch the Geohashing wiki and a backup of the old pages.
- 2020-01-29: The Admin user was created, indicating that Dan Q was working on launching the new Wiki.
- 2020-01-30: All old files are added to the new Wiki through the maintenance script.
- 2020-02-02: On the Geohashing IRC channel, Dan Q announces that he launched the new Geohashing Wiki at geohashing.site, thus ending the Dark Ages.
Geohashing during the Dark Ages
Geohashing was more difficult during the Dark Ages. The destination coordinates are generated independently of the Wiki, so it was possible to look them up using other services. However, looking up details about achievements required being lucky enough for a web archive to have archived the page.
Other tasks typically done on the wiki, like communicating with other Geohashers, coordinating efforts to reach Geohashes, and documenting expeditions, were not possible through this channel. Some communicated via IRC or Twitter, some used Wikimedia Commons to upload pictures of their expeditions, others were cut off from the rest of the community.
This did not stop Geohashers going on expeditions anyway, earning them the Dark Ages achievement.
