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)

Actually, we need to come up with an easy-to-browse structure for overview pages of the various parts of Unreal modding. The problem here will be that either this kind of page tends to get too long or there are too many pages to click through before reaching actual content. We need to find a good mix between an sophisticated structure and quick access. The topic pages can be accompanied by categories, navigation/info boxes (an example can be found e.g. on Literals) and disambiguation links/pages for when a user uses the Go button of the search box in the sidebar. I hope this will give you an overview of the new tools we can use to structure the Unreal Wiki. -Wormbo 07:58, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

I think we can now all agree this should have been discussed openly and decided much earlier, before the switch to MediaWiki and the subsequent disconnect with Legacy content. This discussion will likely last a while and not get the input of the entire wiki community. Seeing as I was an instrumental contributor of the old organization (which has been widely criticized as poor or no organization), I will step back, keep an eye on the progress and wait for the dust to settle. Good luck.

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)

Two things. Having the Legacy article show up in the search kind of makes it look incredibly messy, unorganized and hard to follow. I understand that its important to stress that Users probably shouldn't do major edits to Legacy pages but somehow hiding the Legacy part of the article name would help things considerably.

Secondly I was comparing the Actor class of UT2003 with that of UT2004 and there are several differences in each. I think we should have at least one Actor page for each generation but what about games within the same generation? Should we have seperate Actor pages for UT2003 and UT2004 within the UE2 namespace or UT2003/UT2004 namespaces or should we have one full page for UT2004 and have a seperate page for the Actor class in UT2003 that just sites the major differences? -DalinSeivewright 01:32, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

Well on the topic of UE2 Id think the best option might be to have a seperate section relating to UE2.5 since its an upgrade on the engine. Both UT2003 and UT2004 are UE2 though but other engines picked up support at UE2.5 where some are based on UE2. I do know there was alittle bit of a hastle with the class tree pages because it contained info from both UE2-2.5 so each difference had to be tagged. I guess it wasnt so bad since some classes are identical between the two, the last idea sounds good to me to do full page on UT2004's Actor and a differences page for UT2003. - OlympusMons

I've found my first Wiki error. When I'm logged out and I go to User talk:Graphik, I get the following database error:

"A database query syntax error has occurred. This may indicate a bug in the software. The last attempted database

query was: (SQL query hidden) from within function "MediaWikiBagOStuff::_doinsert". MySQL returned error "1205: Lock wait timeout exceeded; try

restarting transaction (localhost)"."

The error disapears when I log back in. The last edit noticed before this occurred for that page was "22:53, April 14, 2008". Perhaps it has something to do with the mailto: link in Graphik's edit? -DalinSeivewright 13:07, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

But Dalin, the cause is so simple to isolate with a wonderfully descriptive class name like MediaWikiBagOStuff pointing the way! —Graphik 16:43, 15 April 2008 (UTC)