Mainframe

An unofficial proof-of-concept for the SCP-Wiki.

Mainframe is a personal attempt to create an affordable, modern replacement for the SCP-Wiki website. It's not complete - and I would've liked to have progressed significantly further before making it public, but I didn't want to go much further on its fundamental design without public opinion.

Right off the bat, Mainframe is:

• A clean slate. No considerations for legacy content were considered. This is to allow as much innovation as possible within its design.
• A modern site, using modern features and sporting proper mobile support. There is no IE11 support and there never will be.
• A functional upgrade. Mainframe has a lot of things going for it compared to the old wiki. It's almost hard to call it a wiki - it's entirely geared for just displaying pages and handling users.
• High performance. Mainframe is heavily optimized for first-load times and smooth runtime performance.
• Really accessible. A lot of work was put into a11y - although there is some limitations. (Must have JS, meaning unfortunately no Opera Mini support) There is a simple truth that must be noted: the original wiki has utterly awful accessibility, which is almost entirely due to Wikidot.
• Finally, and most importantly: cheap as hell. Mainframe attempts to do literally everything as cheaply as possible. A SCP Wiki replacement has to support at least 10,000 active users. Mainframe is a static website with no server backend. It runs entirely between the client and the database. This is the killer-feature of Mainframe and its entire design revolves around it.

Here is what it has that's new, at-least compared to Wikidot:

• A slick, fast, and custom-tuned CodeMirror 6 editor. Seriously - if there was a single feature you could take from Mainframe, it needs to be the editor. It sports live-preview, full-screen editing, drafts, syntax highlighting, mobile support, and more.
• A highly customized Markdown implementation that goes above and beyond what Wikidot could support.
• You can probably login on Chrome.

There is a lot of technical implementation details I could talk about, but that's for later. This project is a huge learning experience and I hope the work I have done here can be put to use.

If you wish to know more about me, or contact me, you can go to my personal website. If you're simply just curious and wish to ask a few questions, my DMs on Discord are open. [Monkatraz#7929]

If you want to work on Mainframe - especially if you're a part of the SCP wiki staff - get in touch on Discord. There would need to be a concerted effort to develop Mainframe into a proper replacement, and I can't do that alone.

Some Shoutouts

This list is not inclusive. It is mostly for some people/projects that cannot be easily credited.

• Dimitar Donovski (u/ArduousIntent) for their excellent SCP logo concept.
• grid-kiss: Converted into a Stylus plugin within the project.

Parameters

Target

Create a replacement wiki-like system for the SCP-Wiki.

• Navigate to user generated pages
  • A slick, clean editor
  • Page sources use Markdown
  • Search support
• Users can create accounts and can use mild personalization features
  • Author pages
  • Display names can be changed at any time
  • Admin roles and tools
  • User preferences (e.g. language)
• Pages have social features designed for the SCP community
  • Ratings
  • Discussion / Comments
    • Pinned comments
• Accessible and semantic design, aka full a11y support

Constraints

• Must be absurdly cheap to operate
• Must support up to 10,000 active users
• Use only modern web technology and markup
• Speedy and native-like web experience if possible

Anti-Constraints

• Explicit lack of IE11 support
• ESNext codebase, compiled down using a transpiler only if needed

Security and Privacy

• Must use a restrictive content security policy
• Use only HTTPS
• No significant monitoring or storage of fingerprint-like user-data
  • If possible, the only confidential data that should be stored specific to users is their email, (securely handled) password, and user preferences.
• Use only opt-in personalization
• Prevent mass scraping of the public database

Not Doing

• Advertisement slots
  • Why? Because I hate ads, and this is meant to be cheap. It shouldn't need ads if it can be cheap enough to be self-hosted by the community through donations.
• Replacement for the forums
  • Forum hosting would likely require custom software and complete server hosting. It would likely be much more cost-effective to just use public services like Discord, IRC, etc.
• Legacy database migration and to-native conversion

Non-MVP Targets

There are various features Mainframe would need to support if it were to actually be used.

• Complete multi-lingual support, with verification that RTL and LTR text works correctly
• Email service, e.g. account verification or password resets
• Legacy content renderer
• Pass a security audit
• Potentially have a test suite for the codebase
• Solution for storing binary data such as images
• Bootstrap script for setting up database instances either locally or on a development remote

Unknowns

• Would there be separate language-based wikis? Mainframe supports multi-lingual pages natively, so this is not straightforward.
• What inexpensive service could be used to store binary data?
  • S3 bucket?

License

MIT.