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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

#51

Post by rurban »

efficax wrote: post #35

One of my first paid programming jobs was writing extensions to the Wiki engine used by the Unreal Wiki (TWiki). RIP

Not twiki, looks like MediaWiki to me. Wonder what attracts people to MediaWiki anyway. Horrible and insecure code all over, easy to break into. Only maintainable with massive manual administration costs. And hundreds of Wikipedia editors.

On the opposite I once maintained phpwiki which never had any security problems, and all my known instances still work fine after decades. No much need for massive manual interventions. lots of admin plugins. XSS attacks impossible. I ran backup jobs for the DB (berkeley db was 30 faster than MySQL) and as HTML archive. So even if you have to put it down for php maintainance, you can trivially replace it with a readonly dump without any action buttons and without any PHP.

Re: The Unreal Engine Wiki is now permanently offline

#53

Post by djsumdog »

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…

wget or other site rippers can just make static content out of it. You can write a script to put a notice/header at the top and host it on nginx .. or an S3 bucket.

Re: The Unreal Engine Wiki is now permanently offline

#55

Post by loktarogar »

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…

"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.

Re: The Unreal Engine Wiki is now permanently offline

#56

Post by toomuchtodo »

jsjddbbwj wrote: post #50
toomuchtodo wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I haven’t enumerated all of the Wayback captures for the forum yet, so I can’t speak to how recent and complete the archive of the forum is.

Re: The Unreal Engine Wiki is now permanently offline

#57

Post by jhare »

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…

I agree with your points, and there are a lot of constraints for running a wiki. Especially on a volunteer basis.

Indeed it is not free content, the volunteers that edited the UE4 wiki must be pretty disappointed. But Epic isn't broke and the vague reasoning they offer is insufficient to me and many others.

p.s. Coincidentally I am a daily user of AwesomeWM. Thanks for your efforts!

Re: The Unreal Engine Wiki is now permanently offline

#58

Post by reilly3000 »

kick wrote: post #49
PudgePacket wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I was mixed up about who owned the wiki, sorry folks. Unity networking is still broken. My son did try to move on to Unreal, but he never made anything of substance with it. He got interested in developing with 6502's and got out of 3D games for now.

Re: The Unreal Engine Wiki is now permanently offline

#59

Post by outworlder »

rs23296008n1 wrote: post #14

I never understand why companies do this. Its very developer hostile. Are they having financial problems? Surely Fortnite is keeping the lights on... Could be a signal of underlying management confusion/instability. Might need to reassess.

Can't be due to financial problems with Tencent banking them, can it?

Re: The Unreal Engine Wiki is now permanently offline

#60

Post by tialaramex »

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.

Not necessarily sales/ marketing, but an Old Thing is not a new thing you'll be praised for, it's just another annoying cost that comes out of your budget. Maintenance is boring.

Building a New Thing comes with excitement and praise.

Microsoft has done this so long their own people strongly recommend using URLs in https://aka.ms/ their long term link maintenance software, so that when yet another "exciting" change happens to their entire Microsoft web site you can still find all the vital documentation. Maybe their "Knowledge base" articles for example, will become a Wiki again, and then a social networking site, and then a blog the week after, and then a different Wiki with newly inscrutable URLs. But the aka.ms link can be updated so that you don't need to spend an hour navigating.

The more important maintenance becomes to a company's actual financial health the more senior management rebel and become sure their destiny is to radically reinvent the company. If directors did their actual job (working for the shareholders, for whom "exciting" aka "massively loss making" isn't the goal) the very next thing you'd hear after the CEO announcing the company has a new name, new branding, new logo, would be the Chairman arriving to tell everybody actually it's not a new name, new branding or new logo, just a new CEO, sorry, no big leaving do he was escorted off site by security.

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