Talk:Main Page

General layout

I've tried to come up with a compact initial layout and topic list. Suggestions for improvements are welcome. Wormbo 06:31, 13 March 2008 (EDT)

New wiki software / Organization

Various people have had questions, comments, or criticisms of this move to MediaWiki. This seems as good a place as any to discuss it, so feel free to add anything here. – Haarg 21:32, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

Well I guess my biggest concern is the wealth of existing information (namely the tutorials and class hierarchy pages) that we can't simply move over. Most if not all the pages have had at least one contributor to the page that has done at least a minor edit. Then there's the problem of not having a complete history of the older pages so while it may appear that only one individual has worked on a given page, the truth could be that at least two have worked on it but the history of the page has been lost. Then theres the problem of what we can do with new content for the older engines as we cannot add new content to these legacy pages. IMO, the class hierarchy at least could be moved over as most of the pages are simply descriptions of what the class does (which really, Copyrights should have no hold over because there's only so many ways you can describe what a class is responsible for) and have listings for each method and variable and what they're used for.

If that really is not an option then we could go through class by class and (re-) create a class page for each of them by source. So we could have a category for each game and have a hierarchy of classes from each package. It would take a fair bit of time to complete and a decent format would need to be made up. I personally didn't like how the old formats were set up. It seemed like too much information was being thrown at you for classes such as Actor, where there are a lot of variables and methods to go through. I guess we'd have to look at how much more information we could add in the end. I'm not sure how 'definitive' our class pages were, but I'm positive we didn't have many pages for certain classes.

On the topic of tutorials, is there any reason why we can't re-write them? If a tutorial explains how to make a new weapon based on the shock rifle (which has been over done already) we could just reinvent the wheel. The other more advanced tutorials (such as the RPG Class tutorials) could be re-written with a similar basis.

In the end, I think keeping the older content up-to-date and easy to find/navigate through is important as many level designers and modders most likely have not moved over to UE3 and UE2 still has plenty of life left in it.

-DalinSeivewright 12:03, 4 April 2008 (UTC)

Most of the class hierarchy could be moved over or recreated pretty simply. As for tutorials, rewriting them is probably the best solution. While that may seem like wasted effort, I don't see a better solution given the licensing issues. – Haarg 17:17, 5 April 2008 (UTC)

wow. Unreal Wiki had a makeover... This will be confusing for a while...--JeffMOD 14:56, 5 April 2008 (UTC)

A comment on user accounts: It probably could have been explained better, but the user accounts from the old wiki weren't converted to the new software. First, I somewhat doubt it would have been possibly technically But mainly, there was barely any information attached to the old accounts that have been worth keeping. So everyone has to create new user accounts. Additionally, anonymous edits are turned off. I would be interested in feedback on that as well. – Haarg 17:17, 5 April 2008 (UTC)

I think its a great idea. Its a good anti-spam addition that works well for the most part, although it could end up generating a lot of accounts that would only be used once (as I've found a lot of people often to go to a site where they need to sign up to contribute and only ever change one thing they've found). Also, spam bots have been known to sign up a lot so perhaps you could add CAPTCHA to the account creation process. -DalinSeivewright 02:30, 6 April 2008 (UTC)

I don't think we need to add a captcha at this point, but that could be revisited if spam becomes a problem. – Haarg 02:36, 6 April 2008 (UTC)