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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

#71

Post by csdreamer7 »

themodelplumber wrote: post #41
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 group…

I do not think your comment deserved to be down voted. That may have very well been their line of thought.

But I also think loktarogar provided a better solution.

And that is what a discussion forum is for.

Re: The Unreal Engine Wiki is now permanently offline

#72

Post by sytelus »

This is bad, very bad. A complete and utter disrespect for people who poured in their blood and sweat in creating the content for them and for free. Migrating only "top" content is insufficient and so ignorant. The value of wiki is almost entirely in long tail. Vast majority of Unreal engine is undocumented where you get all kind of issues few have seen before. If it wasn't for the community creating content for them, it would be unusable for many users. To salt the wound, they aren't even telling you exactly why they are doing this. Why making read-only archive is so hard, at very minimum. Didn't expect this from Tom Sweeney's company.

Re: The Unreal Engine Wiki is now permanently offline

#73

Post by andrewflnr »

pfundstein wrote: post #23
tvbusy wrote: post #22

Sounds like someone accidentally deleted it and they have no backup. Instead of admitting to not having a backup, they can just say it was intentionally shutdown, and ask their staff to salvage whatever is available from archives.

My first thought as well, but my second thought was why wouldn't they own up to it? Surely they know that owning up to something like this earns them much more respect and positivity from the community than "taking it down" for no good reason, or worse trying to cover it up.

(a) that's a lot easier to say than do, fear is powerful and (b) no, they wouldn't get any respect for Not. Having. Backups.

Re: The Unreal Engine Wiki is now permanently offline

#74

Post by marta_morena_23 »

"We hear your concerns and frustrations. And we missed an opportunity to give you notice prior to the Wiki page coming down, and for that we apologize.

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.

We still have the data, and as mentioned above, we will work to migrate the top content into various official resources. In the meantime, we’re investigating how we can make this content available, even in a rudimentary way.

Some individuals from the community have already reached out to explore a community-hosted Wiki. We are following up with these folks and are evaluating next steps to see what may be possible here as well. "

Well you always learn new ways to express incompetence. They do know that you can render wikis into static HTML pages?

Re: The Unreal Engine Wiki is now permanently offline

#75

Post by tempestn »

user5994461 wrote: post #48

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. C…

It shouldn't be hard to save a static copy of the actual HTML and replace the dynamic site with that though. Or at least give others enough time to do the same.

Re: The Unreal Engine Wiki is now permanently offline

#76

Post by dontbeunethical »

tempestn wrote: post #75
user5994461 wrote: post #48

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. C…

It shouldn't be hard to save a static copy of the actual HTML and replace the dynamic site with that though. Or at least give others enough time to do the same.

Not that hard?

You'd need to process each page then data mine it.

Re: The Unreal Engine Wiki is now permanently offline

#77

Post by eof »

dontbeunethical wrote: post #76
tempestn wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It shouldn't be hard to save a static copy of the actual HTML and replace the dynamic site with that though. Or at least give others enough time to do the same.

Not that hard? You'd need to process each page then data mine it.

A company that can build a game engine should probably be able to crawl a site and save an html dump?

Re: The Unreal Engine Wiki is now permanently offline

#78

Post by biggestdecision »

dontbeunethical wrote: post #76
tempestn wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It shouldn't be hard to save a static copy of the actual HTML and replace the dynamic site with that though. Or at least give others enough time to do the same.

Not that hard? You'd need to process each page then data mine it.

Just archive.org every page on the wiki. Their api will let you do 15/minute.

Re: The Unreal Engine Wiki is now permanently offline

#79

Post by themodelplumber »

loktarogar wrote: post #55
themodelplumber wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 group…

"We're going to shut down the wiki starting xx/xx." Don't need to explain, don't need to make a fuss - just announce and move on.

Doesn't that also just open up a lot more community feedback/pushback? I'm thinking somebody saw it coming in any case and made the call.

Re: The Unreal Engine Wiki is now permanently offline

#80

Post by cortesoft »

tvbusy wrote: post #22

Sounds like someone accidentally deleted it and they have no backup. Instead of admitting to not having a backup, they can just say it was intentionally shutdown, and ask their staff to salvage whatever is available from archives.

No, my guess is it was hacked so they shut it down. That is probably why they say "security risk"
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