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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

#91

Post by nitemice »

smacktoward wrote: post #85
Aqua_Geek wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks like the post got updated with some reasoning: > 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.

So crawl the Wiki pages, grind out static HTML copies of them, and make those available. Not many security risks associated with static HTML. What am I missing here?

The only other "security risk" I can imagine such a read-only wiki could present is if it documents something that could be considered "risky" from a security perspective. That would make this more of a censorship situation.

Re: The Unreal Engine Wiki is now permanently offline

#92

Post by geitir »

themodelplumber wrote: post #79
loktarogar wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

Hackernews is shutting down in 45 seconds. Please save the pages of any bookmarks now

Re: The Unreal Engine Wiki is now permanently offline

#93

Post by moonchild »

nitemice wrote: post #91
smacktoward wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So crawl the Wiki pages, grind out static HTML copies of them, and make those available. Not many security risks associated with static HTML. What am I missing here?

The only other "security risk" I can imagine such a read-only wiki could present is if it documents something that could be considered "risky" from a security perspective. That would make this more of a censorship situation.

> 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.

This indicates otherwise.

Re: The Unreal Engine Wiki is now permanently offline

#94

Post by gentleman11 »

sytelus wrote: post #72

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…

I posted recently about how bad ue4’s c++ documentation is, and how it drives people to Unity. They have been promising to make it better for 7ish years from what I gather in forums. What is with them

Re: The Unreal Engine Wiki is now permanently offline

#96

Post by gentleman11 »

crocodiletears wrote: post #39
jokoon wrote: post #6

Since I started using Ogre3D I always had a hard time settling down to feature rich engines like unreal or unity. I don't know how often, giving beginners access to a space shuttle, will it lead to a successful project that can compete with non-indie game developers. There is also a fine line between an indie team of developers who can benefit from those tools, and experienced game developers who would not need them.…

I think you're discounting the value of the tools Unity and UE offer to experienced developers/teams, and ignoring that outside a few exceptions, Indies haven't really been able to compete with AAA Devs since the PS2 era, when games more or less got programmed from scratch, or were adapted from the brittle code of previous titles. Nearly every major studio or publisher has a similar toolset they've either built from…

Excellent post, but in the context of this discussion, I disagree on one point:

> a mature engine like UE, or Unity has a wealth of crowdsourced documentation, and it's almost impossible to trip over an issue that someone else hasn't already triaged before you

C++ in UE4 is a nightmare to work with because you have to scour forums for a day and a half to find somebody who might have mentioned the name of the function you need. Great engine besides that, but that is a pretty big deal. Unity however - everything is the first page of search results. Incredibly valuable!

Re: The Unreal Engine Wiki is now permanently offline

#97

Post by hyperpallium »

JeremyNT wrote: post #87
c3534l wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lesson I've long learned: never bookmark anything. Bookmarks are to temporarily remember a URL, not to archive content. If the content is important or meaningful to you, save the page.

Yes this. Grab the 'singlefile' add-on[0] and train yourself to hit that instead of bookmarking. You'll be much happier if you ever need the information again! [0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/single-file/

Firefox: reader view then bookmark saves the content.

Re: The Unreal Engine Wiki is now permanently offline

#98

Post by Ndymium »

smacktoward wrote: post #85
Aqua_Geek wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks like the post got updated with some reasoning: > 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.

So crawl the Wiki pages, grind out static HTML copies of them, and make those available. Not many security risks associated with static HTML. What am I missing here?

I did this for a forum I used to host for many years. I crawled versions for people (using a user with the same rights as they did so it wouldn't contain anything extra) with static assets and referred images and zipped that up, so they could browse the old posts locally and nostalgize. It worked really well.

Maybe the people at UE need to be taught how to use wget.

Re: The Unreal Engine Wiki is now permanently offline

#99

Post by phreack »

Elv13 wrote: post #46
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 approv…

They're of course allowed to refuse to maintain it, but why in the world wouldn't they keep a static read-only copy of it?!
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