The Wiki

Yagisan

<i>This post was originally made by <b>Yagisan</b> on the dengDevs blog. It was posted under the categories: Blog, Documentation, Engine, Games, jDoom, jHeretic, jHexen, Mac OS X, Platforms, Unix/Linux, Windows.</i>

I think it's time we retired the wiki and replaced it with static html documentation. My reasoning for this is:
<ul>
<li>Our "community" does not use the wiki.</li>
<li>We spend most of our time reverting vandalism</li>
<li>If not reverting vandalism, we are deleting spam.</li>
<li>It would free up time to actually document things, instead of wasting it on maintenance.</li>
<li>I doubt much of the "community" would know its gone</li>
</ul>

skyjake

I strongly disagree about closing it completely. Under the circumstances, I would suggest we just make it mandatory to be a registered user and be logged in to make any page edits, and make it impossible for just anyone to register themselves. This would allow the team to still use the wiki for our purposes (which I've personally found to be very useful) and any community members who wish to make contributions could register with us personally first.

Yagisan

Can we even name one, just one community member that has ever contributed documentation to the wiki ? I can't. We changed the wiki to require registration and to be logged in to post, and it didn't decrease spam levels at all.

The entire history of the last 500 edits is basically DaniJ or myself reverting and banning. Perhaps if we actually had a community that helped patrol the wiki to prevent vandalism it would be less, but clearly they don't even use it. (Visit the forums sometime to see abundant proof of this)

skyjake

I would very much prefer to continue using the wiki in the future, as it is very handy for us (=me and Danij) to keep track of the version history and design things.

Disallow the creation of new accounts: <tt>$wgGroupPermissions[’*'][’createaccount’] = false;</tt>

And delete all the current accounts we suspect of being spammers.

Should do the trick?

Yagisan

I think we blocked everyone now - just waiting on DaniJ to chime in as the wiki admin.

DaniJ

I don't think we should get rid of the wiki, despite the fact that 90% of the commits are spam atm.

Unfortunetly, I've not really had chance yet to upgrade the version of MediaWiki we are using. There are apparently more and better options to help prevent spamming in later versions and I would much prefer to try that first.

The wiki has proven itself to be a useful resource to us devs at least and therefore I would like to keep it going. I'd bet it is being used by the users also (and site usage stats would suggest this too). It is just a shame that none feel compelled to help improve the docs

KuriKai

I put some stuff in near the start but have not touched it in ages