State of OpenWrt wiki and alternatives

[Raylynn Knight]

On Feb 17, 2025, at 7:37 AM, Paul Spooren <mail at aparcar.org> wrote:
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> I’m writing here since the topic is not only administratively but concerns developers, too.
> 
I’m not an official developer, but I have contributed a few pull requests over time.  I am a frequent contributor to https://wikidevi.wi-cat.ru/ which is the DokuWiki referenced in the OpenWrt ToH.  I’ve also been trying to keep the ToH up to date over the past year updating the versions after a new release and adding newly supported devices to the ToH.  Since the 24.10.0 release I’ve noticed a significant lag when posting updates to the pages!
 
> 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.
> 
In the meantime there has appeared to be little to no maintenance of the tables used by drop-downs in the pages for adding to the ToH.  And at some point many of the entries that had been in those tables completely disappeared!

> 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historically, the wiki kept track of packages[1] and devices[2] with the help of rather complex shell scripts, now outdated but a feast for scrapping bots.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 * Remove all “packages” form the Wiki, this results in endless amounts of outdated pages, last pages are for 21.02 which is EOL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]
> 
How do these changes affect the entry of newly supported devices?  

> 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.
> 
I’ve volunteered in the past to assist in administering the pages. I believe any changes would likely be positive.  I would like to stress that having a couple of administrators that participate in the forum and could be contacted there would be a bonus.
 
> 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
This looks very good, but I’d be interested in learning how the links to the images are kept up to date.  

> 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

Let me know if there is any way I could be of assistance in whatever path you take to improve the wiki.

Ray
Ray Knight