COPTR Service Status & Sustainability

[anjackson]

The Community-Owned digital Preservation Tool Registry (COPTR) is hosted and supported by the Open Preservation Foundation and the Digital Preservation Coalition. This covers basic server management, operating system updates, monitoring and backups. It also covers MediaWiki user administration and removing any spam that is reported to us.

As such, the service is up and open to usage and contributions. If COPTR appears to be down, compromised, or spammed, please check the Incidents & Outages forums and email us.

However, there are a number of limitations & sustainability issues:

• It is running an obsolete version of Semantic MediaWiki that the OPF+DPC team are not able to update and maintain without additional expert support. As this increases the risk of the service being compromised, we have taken steps to mitigate the consequences of that:
  • The service is fully isolated from all other OPF services. If COPTR is compromised, this does not put anything else at risk.
  • The services is backed-up daily, at a server-image level and via data exports. This means the service can be restored if necessary.
• User accounts and sign-ups are managed manually via the coptr@openpreservation.org. If user account creation is easy, MediaWiki is vulnerable to spam/abuse, and we do not have a team of people who can revert all vandalism, nor the resources to mitigate automated spam attacks.
• COPTR receives a lot of crawler traffic, and occasionally gets overloaded, so may be sluggish or unresponsive sometimes.
• User contributions are currently low and a lot of information is out of date.

This isn't ideal, but it's not clear how to address the situation.

• We initially made a Call for ideas and proposals for the future of COPTR & COW #53 - this made it clear we needed to take time to understand the user community.
• So in 2025 we ran a user survey, as advertised here COPTR Plan & User Needs Survey #54 (among many other places).
• This told us that a lot of people care about COPTR, but:
  • There was not a strong consensus about the scope and direction of COPTR.
  • There is not a coherent user community to engage with, and no shared understanding of COPTR user needs.
  • It is to clear how best to engage the full user community, nor that we (DPC+OPF staff) have the resources to do so.
  • There is no community governance process to decide what to do, and we (DPC+OPF staff) cannot and should not take on that role.

Therefore, the DPC+OPF are attempting to give the COPTR community a chance to come together. This means:

• Committing to keeping the service running, as outlined above.
• Updating the COPTR Home page, About page etc. in an attempt to better communicate and clarify the scope, purpose and requirements of COPTR is it is now.
• Providing spaces and some support for the COPTR community to work in and to grow. Specifically:
  • These GitHub Discussions forums for open discussions, feedback, or raising questions or issues with the service. As well as offering a place for support and information, this is also where any decisions that affect how our shared resources are managed should be worked out, i.e. in the open.
  • The Preservation Registries Special Interest Group (PR-SIG) as a space for people to get some support or discuss issues through the (non-public-facing) mailing list and online Collaboration Café calls (see the PR-SIG page for details). Hopefully, this can be a way to welcome people into the community, and help them build their confidence and understanding so that they feel able to contribute to our shared resources and the public discussion forums mentioned above.

Please note that these spaces open to all. They are not restricted to DPC or OPF members.

If you have any questions, you can ask them here, open a new topic for discussion, or email us. If you need an account setting up on COPTR, or are having trouble accessing your existing account email us.

[kieranjol]

I was going to add the bit about user account creation to the About COPTR wiki page, but perhaps it's intentionally not there? I had trouble knowing how to create a user account earlier.

[anjackson]

Oh, that's just an oversight. I mean, it's on the homepage (I think!?) , and I thought I'd repeated it on the About page. I meant to! Please feel free to add it there!

[kieranjol]

Sorry! It is on the homepage but not on About page which is where I was looking. Added it there and learned to 'show preview' before making edits! https://coptr.digipres.org/About_COPTR

[anjackson]

Just noting here that, at the current time, if you sign up, you'll need to complete a simple kind of CAPTCHA to submit changes. We still have this module set up from when the wiki was running more open, and it asks you maths questions unless you confirm your email address (which I think you do via https://coptr.digipres.org/Special:Preferences - scroll down). I'll ask @carlwilson about switching that module off, given we are controlling user sign-ups manually,

[anjackson]

Also noting that there appears there might be an issue with service sending emails. Signing up new users worked at one point and then failed later. Again, for me to follow up with @carlwilson

EDIT: Ah, yes, if you use https://coptr.digipres.org/Special:EmailUser you can try to send yourself an email, and currently it's throwing an error. I've passed @carlwilson the details.

[anjackson]

Noting that the email is working now, so password resets etc. should work fine (my thanks to @carlwilson)

[anjackson]

Based on user feedback - I just edited the Tool Form to add some help text, with some examples of wikitext markup and a link to the MediaWiki Cheatsheet.