Oh, hey, look at htownwiki.hamiltonundergroundpress.com!
It’s the old Htown Wiki, except it’s not old anymore! Well, some of the articles are old – after all, the entire project turns 20 this year – but the wiki itself looks kind of… up to date? And not broken?
Yes, lovers of Hamilton music, the HUP team has dredged up dusty old backups of our town’s beloved wiki, hurriedly learned how to manage the MediaWiki software that it all runs on, breathed life into the whole thing, and given it a new home on a domain that we were already paying for. The internet just got a little bit better.
The Htown Wiki started in 2006 when a group of local music fans realised that there’s a lot of knowledge and history just sitting in people’s brains. They decided that this wasn’t good enough, at least in the case of knowledge and history relating to Hamilton’s music scene, and created a place for people to contribute what they could. Over time this wiki built up into something incredibly special, and a quick count tells us that today there’s something like 2,105 articles there, from Alchemist to Zygote Productions.
If this whole thing is new to you, take yourself back to its twelfth anniversary (2018) when we spoke with its creators, Dan and Gian. Or if you have something to add, create your Htown Wiki account now.
Do you remember your old password?
If you’re already cool enough to have had an Htown Wiki account, it’s still there waiting for you to log in. If you remember your password, then everything’s absolutely sweet. If you don’t, then there’s a tiny little wrinkle in that; somewhere over the past few years, every email address that was saved in the system has kind of slightly disappeared. That’s a problem for resetting forgotten passwords.
So if you want to get back in, email hamiltonundergroundpress@gmail.com and we’ll help you out.
Technical and historical details for sick nerds
The Htown Wiki has moved a few times in its long life. It started out in 2006 on a free wiki site called elwiki.com (RIP), but one of the founders soon moved it to some pre-existing of theirs. That made it a subdomain of expdev.net (RIP) for many years. These were the glory times of the wiki’s life so far. I’m willing to say that expdev was the home of the wiki for well over a decade. As for exactly when those years ended, you’ll need a better historian than me [It was early 2024 when it went offline, but it had been locked for a number of months due to relentless bot attacks. Ed.].
If memory serves, there was some downtime before things reappeared at a new-but-not-new address, htown.co.nz (RIP, twice) [They were actually accessible concurrently for a while, though the expdev site continued to be locked for editing! Ed.]. That domain has a history of its own (and a wiki article too): in the early 2000s htown.co.nz was a popular local music forum, started by some of the same people who would later decide to start a wiki. In fact, they made that decision in a discussion on htown.co.nz, so this backstory is already getting pretty circular. Anyway, the forum disappeared sometime in the mid-2010s, before htown.co.nz briefly reappeared with both the forums and wiki sitting on the same site in the early-mid 2020s. This third incarnation of the Htown Wiki was still a good read but the technical foundation was well cracked. A lot of functionality, including the ability to update or create articles, was busted.
Self-hosting an instance of MediaWiki isn’t the easiest thing in the world, so it’s understandable that this third emergence never quite got up and running like it could have. This most recent iteration of the wiki vanished about 2 or 3 years ago (at a guess) [Actually, it was only around a year ago! This is why the wiki is needed. Our memories are less reliable than any of us beleives! Ed.].
Which brings us up to May 2026. While the HUP team was busy kicking our own website back into life, we decided to see whether the Htown Wiki could also be restored. Luckily, there were still a couple of backup zip files sitting on an uncorrupted hard drive somewhere.
The salvaged version of the Htown Wiki was on MediaWiki v1.25, which has been out of support since 2015. This probably explains why it was impossible to edit the wiki last time it was online – the software was geriatric. It was so old, in fact, that we couldn’t just switch from v1.25 to the current version. (Database structure reasons, don’t ask.) Instead we had to build a ladder through MediaWiki history, with rungs between mutually intelligible versions. There were plenty of ‘oops’ moments along the way, with crucial AI assistance (props to Claude) making it possible to reach the end.
We hopped through a string of four or five releases until we landed on v1.43LTS, which is where we should be. It’s fully functional, 100% restored, and ready for your eyeballs and keystrokes. Welcome to the fourth iteration of the Htown Wiki.
Over to you
So, whatever you know about the Hamilton music scene, you now have a place to share it and keep it safe. Since the wiki hasn’t been properly operational for a while, recent years are a big gap. Or maybe your mate’s band from the 1970s deserves a bit of a write up? Either way, htownwiki.hamiltonundergroundpress.com is waiting for you:
