State of OpenWrt wiki and alternatives

[Paul Spooren]

Hi all,

I’m writing here since the topic is not only administratively but concerns developers, too.

Historically openwrt.org was managed by two kind administrators which (to my knowledge) moved on to other things. The website is based on DokuWiki and is now in a semi ideal state, a bunch of AI scraper bots slowing it down further. Some new admins stepped up and help to maintain things (i.e. blocking bots), however things are not great.

Again historically, the wiki kept track of packages[1] and devices[2] with the help of rather complex shell scripts, now outdated but a feast for scrapping bots. At some point in the past, Jo and me converted the table of hardware (aka supported devices) into a JavaScript generated overview, massively lowering the load on the website. Nonetheless, if you look hard enough[3], there are still many linked pages using the legacy system and thereby overloading the server. While writing this email, I realize that all “package” views[4] are legacy and again, very heavy on the server.

I’m suggesting the following immediate changes which will take some time/effort but hopefully result in something with low maintenance in the future:

* Remove all “packages” form the Wiki, this results in endless amounts of outdated pages, last pages are for 21.02 which is EOL
* Spin up some scripts which parses the “newly” introduced index.json file[5] and render a static page every 24 hours, adopt what Alpine does[6], something I tested last year[7] or offer a format supported by Repology[12] and let them do the rendering
* Drop all “table of hardware” views, deploy and link the much better overview from @soif[8]

These steps should remove the endless clobber of pages likely no human actually uses due to endless loading times. If there are no voices against these steps, I’d setup toh.openwrt.org and change.

If we feel fancy, we could move on to a more modern appearance overall. We could render devices pages like LineageOS does, I did some adoption loooong time ago[9]. Combined with the work of @soif this could become quite handy. Feeling even fancies, we could move to a more modern wiki software[10] or have technical documentation rendered[11] based on a Git repository.

Looking forward to your thoughts.

Best,
Paul

[1]: https://openwrt.org/packages/start
[2]: https://openwrt.org/supported_devices
[3]: https://openwrt.org/toh/views/toh_admin_available
[4]: https://openwrt.org/packages/table/start
[5]: https://downloads.openwrt.org/releases/24.10.0/packages/aarch64_cortex-a53/base/index.json
[6]: https://pkgs.alpinelinux.org/packages
[7]: https://github.com/aparcar/pkgbrowser
[8]: https://soif.github.io/OpenWrtTOH/
[9]: https://aparcar.org/openwrt-devices/devices/tp-link_tl-wdr4300/
[10]: https://docmost.com/
[11]: https://docusaurus.io/
[12]: https://repology.org/repository/openwrt_23_05_x86_64
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