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The Unreal Engine Wiki is now permanently offline

forums.unrealengine.com

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Re: The Unreal Engine Wiki is now permanently offline

#41

Post by themodelplumber »

Traster wrote: post #10

The thing that seems super strange to me is that they don't seem to have warned people they would do this, the first comment is > This isn't very helpful, Amanda! I know that the wiki wasn't optimal, but there were many wiki pages developers like me had bookmarked for years beacuse they contained comprehensive and easy information, which is now missing. Why not just keep the wiki read-only online? Just to retain the…

Such a solution presents a bit of a challenge though, given that you'd be 1) broadcasting a security issue, and 2) possibly compounding it by presenting your audience with some really disagreeable news.

I can at least see why they'd hesitate to leave things up, depending on the anticipated risk and likelihood of addressing it in reasonable time.

Edit: Downvote if it makes you feel better, but this is really how groups execute on problems like this without taking time away from other important projects. "Security issue? Extensive fixes needed? Take it down!"

Re: The Unreal Engine Wiki is now permanently offline

#42

Post by skissane »

erichocean wrote: post #2

I always wonder why companies do stupid things—like this. At the very least, put it in read-only maintenance mode, with a big disclaimer at the top saying so. But to just destroy information, information about your own product , is…well, it's stupid. Profoundly so.

> But to just destroy information, information about your own product, is…well, it's stupid. Profoundly so.

From a purely historical/retrocomputing point of view, I'm really disappointed IBM took the legacy Library Server site offline.

It was full of fascinating detritus... old OS/2 manuals, various ancient layered products that IBM dreamed up once upon a time back in the 1990s or early 2000s and which never went anywhere (DDM, DCE, etc)...

Why couldn't they just donate the contents to archive.org or something like that, if they don't want to host it anymore?

At least they still have the offering information site online – https://www-01.ibm.com/common/ssi/ – full of product announcements from the 1980s. To pick some random examples:

https://www-01.ibm.com/common/ssi/ShowDoc.wss?docURL=/common...

https://www-01.ibm.com/common/ssi/ShowDoc.wss?docURL=/common...

Sadly, I'm sure sooner or later the old stuff from there will be gone too.

Re: The Unreal Engine Wiki is now permanently offline

#43

Post by toomuchtodo »

treve wrote: post #31
richardboegli wrote: post #21

> So why can’t we put a read-only archive online currently? > The Wiki, even in it’s read-only state, was presenting security risks, and it was deemed necessary to take it offline. https://forums.unrealengine.com/unreal-engine/announcements-...

Seems like a poor excuse. You can make a read-only version of a Wiki without running wiki software. Just mirror the HTML. At the very least they could have made this open source

It would’ve been trivial to crawl the forum and dump the resulting WARC files into the Wayback machine to provide a permanent archive. This is just apathetic laziness on their part.

https://github.com/ArchiveTeam/grab-site

Re: The Unreal Engine Wiki is now permanently offline

#44

Post by craftinator »

Sophistifunk wrote: post #16
erichocean wrote: post #2

I always wonder why companies do stupid things—like this. At the very least, put it in read-only maintenance mode, with a big disclaimer at the top saying so. But to just destroy information, information about your own product , is…well, it's stupid. Profoundly so.

In my experience this sort of decision is always driven by sales / marketing people deciding they want to funnel the users into some other part of the site that nobody currently uses because it's not as good.

Bingo.

Re: The Unreal Engine Wiki is now permanently offline

#46

Post by Elv13 »

jhare wrote: post #38

"security risk" - So they're just trying to hand-wave a bluff at a huge community of developers? No one believes this. edit: also I feel bad for this community manager having to lie and apologize

I am the co-maintainer of an OpenSource project called AwesomeWM. I took down our wiki years ago due to:

* Constant vandalism

* Dubious user created content rendering computer non functional

* Trolling edits to cause breakages to people copy/pasting shell commands

* SPAM

* Maintaining the wiki

Before that we forced users to log-in for edits, then forced moderator approvals for everything, then forced moderator approval for new account. Then gave up and retired the Wiki.

So no, wiki are not free content. They are a pain, especially when your community tend to have many trolls/hostile individuals like the gaming community. It's not "downright lies" all the time.

Re: The Unreal Engine Wiki is now permanently offline

#48

Post by user5994461 »

I had to decom a major wiki in a very large company not long ago. I can give you four reasons why these things happen, possibly without notice.

1) The wiki software and database have been abandoned for years. There is no maintenance and no further release.

2) It will stop working shortly. Like, it doesn't start on Ubuntu > 14 or current MySql at all.

3) It already stopped working and/or the content is already lost. Can be an accidental deletion or the 10 year old server passed away.

4) Security vulnerability. Remote code execution / SQL injection in the wiki software. That can't be fixed because point one.

I wrote a longer blog post on software death cycle in companies https://thehftguy.com/2019/12/10/why-products-are-shutdown-t...

Re: The Unreal Engine Wiki is now permanently offline

#49

Post by kick »

PudgePacket wrote: post #32
Damorian wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unity or Unreal?

They're talking about both at different points..?

I don't think so, hence the accusation of "Google-esq behavior" and such.

They seem to be a concerned parent who's mixed up.

Re: The Unreal Engine Wiki is now permanently offline

#50

Post by jsjddbbwj »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #43
treve wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like a poor excuse. You can make a read-only version of a Wiki without running wiki software. Just mirror the HTML. At the very least they could have made this open source

It would’ve been trivial to crawl the forum and dump the resulting WARC files into the Wayback machine to provide a permanent archive. This is just apathetic laziness on their part. https://github.com/ArchiveTeam/grab-site

Pretty sure the wayback machine already has a full archive
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