Live data from Hacker News

The Unreal Engine Wiki is now permanently offline

forums.unrealengine.com

81–90 of 137 posts

Re: The Unreal Engine Wiki is now permanently offline

#81

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.

About as much as we have right now. The difference is people can at least make backups of the content they need.

Re: The Unreal Engine Wiki is now permanently offline

#82
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…

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.

Re: The Unreal Engine Wiki is now permanently offline

#83

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.

Some marketing people cannot grok user-generated content and absolutely freak out over the perceived lack of control. It's completely irrational but I've had pinhead marketing droids kill my content before with no replacement plan. It's infuriating.

Re: The Unreal Engine Wiki is now permanently offline

#84
post #15

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.

You could host that wiki for ten bucks a month.

Pretty sure it's not a financial problem. As in their announcement, it is a "security issue"

Re: The Unreal Engine Wiki is now permanently offline

#85
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…

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?

Re: The Unreal Engine Wiki is now permanently offline

#86

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.

HTTrack (https://www.httrack.com/) makes tasks like this trivial.

Re: The Unreal Engine Wiki is now permanently offline

#87
post #62
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…

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/

Re: The Unreal Engine Wiki is now permanently offline

#88
Microsoft did a similar thing with ASP.NET site. There were quite a lot of old articles for ASP.NET WebForms that were really good references or if you were working with someone that was new to WebForms you could just point them to a particular article and say "read through this, this has almost everything covered on how to do this".

Very frustrating.

Re: The Unreal Engine Wiki is now permanently offline

#89
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.

I doubt this.

"After over a year in maintenance mode, the official Unreal Engine Wiki is now permanently offline."

It seems to have been a problem for some time.

Re: The Unreal Engine Wiki is now permanently offline

#90
post #46
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…

Completely off-topic, but thank you for your work on AwesomeWM, together with all other contributors! It is a fantastic piece of software and I always use it on all my Linux installs.

About maintaining wikis, that is indeed a problem. In addition, most wiki software I used has extremely clunky administrative tools which make moderation way more challenging than needed.

I used to maintain a tiny private wiki for a previous job, and even in a very small operation (10s of users), it was a disproportionately large maintenance burden.

Post reply on HN