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The Unreal Engine Wiki is now permanently offline

218 points by Pulcinella 7y ago

erichocean 7y ago
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.
- egwynn 7y ago
  By the looks of the most recent snapshot on archive.org[0], that’s what they did. [0] https://web.archive.org/web/20200329185200/https://wiki.unrealengine.com/index.php?title=Main_Page https://web.archive.org/web/20200329185200/https://wiki.unre... EDIT: It seems like the main problem is that they didn’t do a good job communicating their intention and timeline for removing the old wiki.
  - opencl 7y ago
    It had been in read-only maintenance mode for quite a while. Then they just took the whole thing down with no warning. The wayback machine copy unfortunately seems to be missing a lot of articles.
- rwnspace 7y ago
  I think corporate upper management are the only echelon of business capable of such waste and cynicism, maybe they noticed that traffic was going to the wiki and not the dedicated support pages.
- Sophistifunk 7y ago
  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.
  - craftinator 7y ago
    Bingo.
  - tialaramex 7y ago
    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/ 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.
  - hnzix 7y ago
    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.
  - nikanj 7y ago
    "Your bonuses are tied to the amount of traffic your blog posts generate" is such a 2020s KPI. And I've heard of more than one person whose compensation package has those metrics.
- skissane 7y ago
  > But to just destroy information, information about your own product, is…well, it's stupid. Profoundly so. From a purely historical/retrocomputing point of view, I'm really disappointed IBM took the legacy Library Server site offline. It was full of fascinating detritus... old OS/2 manuals, various ancient layered products that IBM dreamed up once upon a time back in the 1990s or early 2000s and which never went anywhere (DDM, DCE, etc)... Why couldn't they just donate the contents to archive.org or something like that, if they don't want to host it anymore? At least they still have the offering information site online – https://www-01.ibm.com/common/ssi/ https://www-01.ibm.com/common/ssi/ – full of product announcements from the 1980s. To pick some random examples: https://www-01.ibm.com/common/ssi/ShowDoc.wss?docURL=/common/ssi/rep_ca/8/897/ENUS286-528/index.html&request_locale=en https://www-01.ibm.com/common/ssi/ShowDoc.wss?docURL=/common... https://www-01.ibm.com/common/ssi/ShowDoc.wss?docURL=/common/ssi/rep_ca/3/877/ENUSZG81-0263/index.html&request_locale=en https://www-01.ibm.com/common/ssi/ShowDoc.wss?docURL=/common... Sadly, I'm sure sooner or later the old stuff from there will be gone too.
  - kalleboo 7y ago
    There's a similar deal going on with Apple. They still host a bunch of old classic Mac/Apple II files, but they're not longer browsable, you have to find old links to them. E.g, here's the first floppy image to install MacOS System 7.5.3 http://download.info.apple.com/Apple_Support_Area/Apple_Software_Updates/English-North_American/Macintosh/System/Older_System/System_7.5_Version_7.5.3/System_7.5.3_01of19.smi.bin http://download.info.apple.com/Apple_Support_Area/Apple_Soft... Their support site also still has a bunch of articles from the 90's in the database, you can still get them to show up in the searches on their own support site, but they're not browsable and hence not indexed by Google. Anyone need help getting HyperCard 1.2.5 working on their Macintosh IIfx with the NuBus Macintosh Display Card 8*24 GC? https://support.apple.com/kb/TA46247?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US# https://support.apple.com/kb/TA46247?viewlocale=en_US&locale...
- deleted 7y ago
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jokoon 7y ago
Since I started using Ogre3D I always had a hard time settling down to feature rich engines like unreal or unity. I don't know how often, giving beginners access to a space shuttle, will it lead to a successful project that can compete with non-indie game developers. There is also a fine line between an indie team of developers who can benefit from those tools, and experienced game developers who would not need them. It seems unreal and unity are just very capable, but cheap, tools that are well-marketed towards students and beginners. The problem is, once those developers learned to use those tools, they are still unable to develop a game without those tools, which is a huge win for unity and unreal. Generally I tend to believe unreal and unity only enable developers to make games that will never be able to compete with more established and skilled game developers. I think it's a pretty sad situation, because initially I really believe indie games were able to compete with those big studios, but they're not, and I think unity and unreal are responsible for this. It seems the whole FOSS mantra/paradigm/philosophy has a lot of trouble penetrating the field of game development, maybe because games are heavily monetized towards consumers, unlike other softwares. It bothers me.
- ironmagma 7y ago
  What engines are you suggesting make it easier to create those games that compete? My experience is that UE4 and Unity are both enabling of indie developers to make very high quality games. The only real limitations are how much effort you put into the art. UE4, while hard to code for, is still orders of magnitude less work than coding all the rendering, animation, and hardware logic from scratch. There are of course other engines, but they are either devoid of the features you need to compete with AAA titles, or have severe performance limitations.
  - philipov 7y ago
    Do you think Godot is either missing necessary features or has severe performance limitations?
    - jayd16 7y ago
      Currently its missing necessary features. The roadmap looks good but I can't ship on a road map.
daenz 7y ago
I used the wiki extensively in my last UE4 project. It had its warts, but it also had valuable information that did not exist anywhere else. Taking this down without a torrent mirror or a grace period is phenomenally harmful to the community. Bad move!
AA-BA-94-2A-56 7y ago
Here is the Linking DLLs wiki page discussed in the forum thread: https://web.archive.org/web/20181004001430/https://wiki.unrealengine.com/Linking_Dlls https://web.archive.org/web/20181004001430/https://wiki.unre...
Traster 7y ago
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 old pages? I'm pretty lost right now without some of these articles and I don't understand why the only option you had was to completely disable it. Please think about opening it up again just for read. I don't care about the maintenance mode, but the wiki was an important learning point, which is now gone. If you don't want to support the wiki that's fine, you don't owe anyone hosting, but if you're going to dump it, atleast give someone the opportunity to scrape the site and host it themselves.
- themodelplumber 7y ago
  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 groups execute on problems like this without taking time away from other important projects. "Security issue? Extensive fixes needed? Take it down!"
  - djsumdog 7y ago
    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.
  - loktarogar 7y ago
    "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.
    - themodelplumber 7y ago
deleted 7y ago
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stolen_biscuit 7y ago
Bonehead move. Leave it up as read-only and mark when pages are out of date so users can look for up-to-date information elsewhere. Hope they come to their senses and re-upload a read-only archive of the documentation
rs23296008n1 7y ago
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.
- outworlder 7y ago
  Can't be due to financial problems with Tencent banking them, can it?
  - Zanderax 7y ago
    Tim Sweeney has a net worth of 7 billion. It's not about the money, it's bad management.
- axlee 7y ago
  You could host that wiki for ten bucks a month.
  - rs23296008n1 7y ago
    Depends on traffic/content, but yeah text is cheap. Might grab a copy of the archive for reference then local host it. We've got a ton of internal references that will be broken. We haven't touched UE for about 10 months.
    - rs23296008n1 7y ago
      Not sure why someone disagreed without a supporting comment. Every line is fact.
  - arvinsim 7y ago
    Pretty sure it's not a financial problem. As in their announcement, it is a "security issue"
richardboegli 7y ago
> So 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. https://forums.unrealengine.com/unreal-engine/announcements-and-releases/1739154-changes-to-the-official-unreal-engine-wiki/page2#post1739689 https://forums.unrealengine.com/unreal-engine/announcements-...
- treve 7y ago
  Seems like a poor excuse. You can make a read-only version of a Wiki without running wiki software. Just mirror the HTML. At the very least they could have made this open source
  - toomuchtodo 7y ago
    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 https://github.com/ArchiveTeam/grab-site
    - jsjddbbwj 7y ago
      Pretty sure the wayback machine already has a full archive
      - toomuchtodo 7y ago
        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.
tvbusy 7y ago
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.
- pfundstein 7y ago
  My first thought as well, but my second thought was why wouldn't they own up to it? Surely they know that owning up to something like this earns them much more respect and positivity from the community than "taking it down" for no good reason, or worse trying to cover it up.
  - andrewflnr 7y ago
    (a) that's a lot easier to say than do, fear is powerful and (b) no, they wouldn't get any respect for Not. Having. Backups.
- deleted 7y ago
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- cortesoft 7y ago
  No, my guess is it was hacked so they shut it down. That is probably why they say "security risk"
- SparkleBunny 7y ago
  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.
p2t2p 7y ago
Using any propitiatory/corporate systems feels more and more like living on a volcano.
reilly3000 7y ago
Unity is in a comfortable position with newer lines of business from VR, architecture, and animation along with its strong position on the long tail of desktop, console, and mobile gaming. They have the marketplace to beat and a userbase beyond comparison. I believe this enables Google-esq behavior and its disconcerting at best. My son was really into Unity development for a while, but he got discouraged when they deprecated their entire networking stack without providing a suitable replacement (since August 2018) and are even removing support from old LTS releases. For a multi-billion dollar company to suddenly take down a wiki that hundreds of man-months went into creating, that is visited millions of times each year, with no warning or archive- that is open user hostility. They can certainly afford to keep it around in read-only mode as a static site. An intern could run wget and have a mirror up in a few days tops. If there is unmoderated content they are worried about, they can afford to clean it up. This is wrong.
- Damorian 7y ago
  Unity or Unreal?
  - PudgePacket 7y ago
    They're talking about both at different points..?
    - kick 7y ago
      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.
      - reilly3000 7y ago
        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.
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efficax 7y ago
One of my first paid programming jobs was writing extensions to the Wiki engine used by the Unreal Wiki (TWiki). RIP
- rurban 7y ago
  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.
  - efficax 7y ago
    It was definitely TWiki in 2001. They must have migrated
muststopmyths 7y ago
Really stupid. UE4 documentation is generally crap and the wiki resources were quite invaluable. It might be outdated information but it at least gave you a starting point to figure out where to look in the source for more information.
jhare 7y ago
"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
- Elv13 7y ago
  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 approval for new account. Then gave up and retired the Wiki. So no, wiki are not free content. They are a pain, especially when your community tend to have many trolls/hostile individuals like the gaming community. It's not "downright lies" all the time.
  - jhare 7y ago
    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!
  - Zanderax 7y ago
    Epic can't secure a wiki but they can secure the biggest video game in the world? Nah they just lazy.
  - kroltan 7y ago
    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.
deleted 7y ago
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user5994461 7y ago
I had to decom a major wiki in a very large company not long ago. I can give you four reasons why these things happen, possibly without notice. 1) The wiki software and database have been abandoned for years. There is no maintenance and no further release. 2) It will stop working shortly. Like, it doesn't start on Ubuntu > 14 or current MySql at all. 3) It already stopped working and/or the content is already lost. Can be an accidental deletion or the 10 year old server passed away. 4) Security vulnerability. Remote code execution / SQL injection in the wiki software. That can't be fixed because point one. I wrote a longer blog post on software death cycle in companies https://thehftguy.com/2019/12/10/why-products-are-shutdown-the-case-of-verizon-and-yahoo-groups/ https://thehftguy.com/2019/12/10/why-products-are-shutdown-t...
- tempestn 7y ago
  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.
  - dontbeunethical 7y ago
    Not that hard? You'd need to process each page then data mine it.
    - eof 7y ago
      A company that can build a game engine should probably be able to crawl a site and save an html dump?
    - biggestdecision 7y ago
      Just archive.org every page on the wiki. Their api will let you do 15/minute.
    - smacktoward 7y ago
      HTTrack (https://www.httrack.com/ https://www.httrack.com/) makes tasks like this trivial.
ericzawo 7y ago
There's no backup floating around online, cached somewhere? Like waybackmachine?
bane 7y ago
Looks like the waybackmachine got some of it at least https://web.archive.org/web/20191212230615/https://wiki.unrealengine.com/index.php?title=Main_Page https://web.archive.org/web/20191212230615/https://wiki.unre...
mmm_grayons 7y ago
It's a shame most people didn't hear about this; I don't suppose the archive team got any of this?
friendlybus 7y ago
Regardless of the reasoning the message for indies is clear: Time is running out.
sytelus 7y ago
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, it would be unusable for many users. To salt the wound, they aren't even telling you exactly why they are doing this. Why making read-only archive is so hard, at very minimum. Didn't expect this from Tom Sweeney's company.
- Aqua_Geek 7y ago
  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.
  - smacktoward 7y ago
    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?
    - nitemice 7y ago
      The only other "security risk" I can imagine such a read-only wiki could present is if it documents something that could be considered "risky" from a security perspective. That would make this more of a censorship situation.
      - moonchild 7y ago
        > We still have the data, and as mentioned above, we will work to migrate the top content into various official resources. In the meantime, we’re investigating how we can make this content available, even in a rudimentary way. This indicates otherwise.
marta_morena_23 7y ago
"We hear your concerns and frustrations. And we missed an opportunity to give you notice prior to the Wiki page coming down, and for that we apologize. So 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. We still have the data, and as mentioned above, we will work to migrate the top content into various official resources. In the meantime, we’re investigating how we can make this content available, even in a rudimentary way. Some individuals from the community have already reached out to explore a community-hosted Wiki. We are following up with these folks and are evaluating next steps to see what may be possible here as well. " Well you always learn new ways to express incompetence. They do know that you can render wikis into static HTML pages?
uk_programmer 7y ago
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.
terrycody 7y ago
self-destruction measure completed
bashwizard 7y ago
That's a great way to get people to use Unity instead. Which everyone already should.
gregjw 7y ago
April Fools?
misotaur 7y ago
Kinda silly,good documentation is what, partially, will win the engine wars if we can call it that and Unreal is not exactly crystal clear.
rambojazz 7y ago
What's the story here and why is this newsworthy?
kevingadd 7y ago
The lack of a static copy of the wiki really sucks but it's understandable that a mediawiki install would be pulled indefinitely. Mediawiki racks up a dozen CVEs in an average year and even a single one of those is an opportunity to perform watering hole attacks on every UE licensee. Getting RCE on a single UE customer's machine is an opportunity for million+-dollar industrial espionage - it's not uncommon for someone to get a copy of a game's source code and try to extort the developer for cash. We generally only know about the cases where the extortion fails... It's possible that really aggressive security measures could mostly prevent that but even if you were to patch weekly that won't stop someone from pairing an undisclosed mediawiki attack with some other attack that isn't well-known. A game studio's machines are probably using LTS versions of Firefox or Chrome w/slower update cadence, which potentially means multiple days of vulnerability even after an exploit is patched. Also, now that Epic processes credit card payments (Epic Store, etc) it's possible the mediawiki install would prevent them from passing PCI-DSS audits.
pcvarmint 7y ago
Someone mirrored it: https://michaeljcole.github.io/wiki.unrealengine.com/ https://michaeljcole.github.io/wiki.unrealengine.com/
IXxXI 7y ago
Khan Academy's internet traffic increased 250% over normal on quarantine. Unreal Wiki must be experiencing similar trends. The real reason it was shut down.

218 points by Pulcinella 7y ago

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.

egwynn 7y ago
By the looks of the most recent snapshot on archive.org[0], that’s what they did. [0] https://web.archive.org/web/20200329185200/https://wiki.unrealengine.com/index.php?title=Main_Page https://web.archive.org/web/20200329185200/https://wiki.unre... EDIT: It seems like the main problem is that they didn’t do a good job communicating their intention and timeline for removing the old wiki.
- opencl 7y ago
  It had been in read-only maintenance mode for quite a while. Then they just took the whole thing down with no warning. The wayback machine copy unfortunately seems to be missing a lot of articles.
rwnspace 7y ago
I think corporate upper management are the only echelon of business capable of such waste and cynicism, maybe they noticed that traffic was going to the wiki and not the dedicated support pages.
Sophistifunk 7y ago
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.
- craftinator 7y ago
  Bingo.
- tialaramex 7y ago
  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/ 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.
- hnzix 7y ago
  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.
- nikanj 7y ago
  "Your bonuses are tied to the amount of traffic your blog posts generate" is such a 2020s KPI. And I've heard of more than one person whose compensation package has those metrics.
skissane 7y ago
> But to just destroy information, information about your own product, is…well, it's stupid. Profoundly so. From a purely historical/retrocomputing point of view, I'm really disappointed IBM took the legacy Library Server site offline. It was full of fascinating detritus... old OS/2 manuals, various ancient layered products that IBM dreamed up once upon a time back in the 1990s or early 2000s and which never went anywhere (DDM, DCE, etc)... Why couldn't they just donate the contents to archive.org or something like that, if they don't want to host it anymore? At least they still have the offering information site online – https://www-01.ibm.com/common/ssi/ https://www-01.ibm.com/common/ssi/ – full of product announcements from the 1980s. To pick some random examples: https://www-01.ibm.com/common/ssi/ShowDoc.wss?docURL=/common/ssi/rep_ca/8/897/ENUS286-528/index.html&request_locale=en https://www-01.ibm.com/common/ssi/ShowDoc.wss?docURL=/common... https://www-01.ibm.com/common/ssi/ShowDoc.wss?docURL=/common/ssi/rep_ca/3/877/ENUSZG81-0263/index.html&request_locale=en https://www-01.ibm.com/common/ssi/ShowDoc.wss?docURL=/common... Sadly, I'm sure sooner or later the old stuff from there will be gone too.
- kalleboo 7y ago
  There's a similar deal going on with Apple. They still host a bunch of old classic Mac/Apple II files, but they're not longer browsable, you have to find old links to them. E.g, here's the first floppy image to install MacOS System 7.5.3 http://download.info.apple.com/Apple_Support_Area/Apple_Software_Updates/English-North_American/Macintosh/System/Older_System/System_7.5_Version_7.5.3/System_7.5.3_01of19.smi.bin http://download.info.apple.com/Apple_Support_Area/Apple_Soft... Their support site also still has a bunch of articles from the 90's in the database, you can still get them to show up in the searches on their own support site, but they're not browsable and hence not indexed by Google. Anyone need help getting HyperCard 1.2.5 working on their Macintosh IIfx with the NuBus Macintosh Display Card 8*24 GC? https://support.apple.com/kb/TA46247?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US# https://support.apple.com/kb/TA46247?viewlocale=en_US&locale...
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jokoon 7y ago

Since I started using Ogre3D I always had a hard time settling down to feature rich engines like unreal or unity. I don't know how often, giving beginners access to a space shuttle, will it lead to a successful project that can compete with non-indie game developers. There is also a fine line between an indie team of developers who can benefit from those tools, and experienced game developers who would not need them. It seems unreal and unity are just very capable, but cheap, tools that are well-marketed towards students and beginners. The problem is, once those developers learned to use those tools, they are still unable to develop a game without those tools, which is a huge win for unity and unreal. Generally I tend to believe unreal and unity only enable developers to make games that will never be able to compete with more established and skilled game developers. I think it's a pretty sad situation, because initially I really believe indie games were able to compete with those big studios, but they're not, and I think unity and unreal are responsible for this. It seems the whole FOSS mantra/paradigm/philosophy has a lot of trouble penetrating the field of game development, maybe because games are heavily monetized towards consumers, unlike other softwares. It bothers me.

ironmagma 7y ago
What engines are you suggesting make it easier to create those games that compete? My experience is that UE4 and Unity are both enabling of indie developers to make very high quality games. The only real limitations are how much effort you put into the art. UE4, while hard to code for, is still orders of magnitude less work than coding all the rendering, animation, and hardware logic from scratch. There are of course other engines, but they are either devoid of the features you need to compete with AAA titles, or have severe performance limitations.
- philipov 7y ago
  Do you think Godot is either missing necessary features or has severe performance limitations?
  - jayd16 7y ago
    Currently its missing necessary features. The roadmap looks good but I can't ship on a road map.

daenz 7y ago

I used the wiki extensively in my last UE4 project. It had its warts, but it also had valuable information that did not exist anywhere else. Taking this down without a torrent mirror or a grace period is phenomenally harmful to the community. Bad move!

AA-BA-94-2A-56 7y ago

Here is the Linking DLLs wiki page discussed in the forum thread: https://web.archive.org/web/20181004001430/https://wiki.unrealengine.com/Linking_Dlls https://web.archive.org/web/20181004001430/https://wiki.unre...

Traster 7y ago

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 old pages? I'm pretty lost right now without some of these articles and I don't understand why the only option you had was to completely disable it. Please think about opening it up again just for read. I don't care about the maintenance mode, but the wiki was an important learning point, which is now gone. If you don't want to support the wiki that's fine, you don't owe anyone hosting, but if you're going to dump it, atleast give someone the opportunity to scrape the site and host it themselves.

themodelplumber 7y ago
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 groups execute on problems like this without taking time away from other important projects. "Security issue? Extensive fixes needed? Take it down!"
- djsumdog 7y ago
  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.
- loktarogar 7y ago
  "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.
  - themodelplumber 7y ago

deleted 7y ago

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stolen_biscuit 7y ago

Bonehead move. Leave it up as read-only and mark when pages are out of date so users can look for up-to-date information elsewhere. Hope they come to their senses and re-upload a read-only archive of the documentation

rs23296008n1 7y ago

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.

outworlder 7y ago
Can't be due to financial problems with Tencent banking them, can it?
- Zanderax 7y ago
  Tim Sweeney has a net worth of 7 billion. It's not about the money, it's bad management.
axlee 7y ago
You could host that wiki for ten bucks a month.
- rs23296008n1 7y ago
  Depends on traffic/content, but yeah text is cheap. Might grab a copy of the archive for reference then local host it. We've got a ton of internal references that will be broken. We haven't touched UE for about 10 months.
  - rs23296008n1 7y ago
    Not sure why someone disagreed without a supporting comment. Every line is fact.
- arvinsim 7y ago
  Pretty sure it's not a financial problem. As in their announcement, it is a "security issue"

richardboegli 7y ago

> So 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. https://forums.unrealengine.com/unreal-engine/announcements-and-releases/1739154-changes-to-the-official-unreal-engine-wiki/page2#post1739689 https://forums.unrealengine.com/unreal-engine/announcements-...

treve 7y ago
Seems like a poor excuse. You can make a read-only version of a Wiki without running wiki software. Just mirror the HTML. At the very least they could have made this open source
- toomuchtodo 7y ago
  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 https://github.com/ArchiveTeam/grab-site
  - jsjddbbwj 7y ago
    Pretty sure the wayback machine already has a full archive
    - toomuchtodo 7y ago
      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.

tvbusy 7y ago

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.

pfundstein 7y ago
My first thought as well, but my second thought was why wouldn't they own up to it? Surely they know that owning up to something like this earns them much more respect and positivity from the community than "taking it down" for no good reason, or worse trying to cover it up.
- andrewflnr 7y ago
  (a) that's a lot easier to say than do, fear is powerful and (b) no, they wouldn't get any respect for Not. Having. Backups.
deleted 7y ago
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cortesoft 7y ago
No, my guess is it was hacked so they shut it down. That is probably why they say "security risk"
SparkleBunny 7y ago
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.

p2t2p 7y ago

Using any propitiatory/corporate systems feels more and more like living on a volcano.

reilly3000 7y ago

Unity is in a comfortable position with newer lines of business from VR, architecture, and animation along with its strong position on the long tail of desktop, console, and mobile gaming. They have the marketplace to beat and a userbase beyond comparison. I believe this enables Google-esq behavior and its disconcerting at best. My son was really into Unity development for a while, but he got discouraged when they deprecated their entire networking stack without providing a suitable replacement (since August 2018) and are even removing support from old LTS releases. For a multi-billion dollar company to suddenly take down a wiki that hundreds of man-months went into creating, that is visited millions of times each year, with no warning or archive- that is open user hostility. They can certainly afford to keep it around in read-only mode as a static site. An intern could run wget and have a mirror up in a few days tops. If there is unmoderated content they are worried about, they can afford to clean it up. This is wrong.

Damorian 7y ago
Unity or Unreal?
- PudgePacket 7y ago
  They're talking about both at different points..?
  - kick 7y ago
    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.
    - reilly3000 7y ago
      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.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

efficax 7y ago

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

rurban 7y ago
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.
- efficax 7y ago
  It was definitely TWiki in 2001. They must have migrated

muststopmyths 7y ago

Really stupid. UE4 documentation is generally crap and the wiki resources were quite invaluable. It might be outdated information but it at least gave you a starting point to figure out where to look in the source for more information.

jhare 7y ago

"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

Elv13 7y ago
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 approval for new account. Then gave up and retired the Wiki. So no, wiki are not free content. They are a pain, especially when your community tend to have many trolls/hostile individuals like the gaming community. It's not "downright lies" all the time.
- jhare 7y ago
  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!
- Zanderax 7y ago
  Epic can't secure a wiki but they can secure the biggest video game in the world? Nah they just lazy.
- kroltan 7y ago
  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.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

user5994461 7y ago

I had to decom a major wiki in a very large company not long ago. I can give you four reasons why these things happen, possibly without notice. 1) The wiki software and database have been abandoned for years. There is no maintenance and no further release. 2) It will stop working shortly. Like, it doesn't start on Ubuntu > 14 or current MySql at all. 3) It already stopped working and/or the content is already lost. Can be an accidental deletion or the 10 year old server passed away. 4) Security vulnerability. Remote code execution / SQL injection in the wiki software. That can't be fixed because point one. I wrote a longer blog post on software death cycle in companies https://thehftguy.com/2019/12/10/why-products-are-shutdown-the-case-of-verizon-and-yahoo-groups/ https://thehftguy.com/2019/12/10/why-products-are-shutdown-t...

tempestn 7y ago
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.
- dontbeunethical 7y ago
  Not that hard? You'd need to process each page then data mine it.
  - eof 7y ago
    A company that can build a game engine should probably be able to crawl a site and save an html dump?
  - biggestdecision 7y ago
    Just archive.org every page on the wiki. Their api will let you do 15/minute.
  - smacktoward 7y ago
    HTTrack (https://www.httrack.com/ https://www.httrack.com/) makes tasks like this trivial.

ericzawo 7y ago

There's no backup floating around online, cached somewhere? Like waybackmachine?

bane 7y ago

Looks like the waybackmachine got some of it at least https://web.archive.org/web/20191212230615/https://wiki.unrealengine.com/index.php?title=Main_Page https://web.archive.org/web/20191212230615/https://wiki.unre...

mmm_grayons 7y ago

It's a shame most people didn't hear about this; I don't suppose the archive team got any of this?

friendlybus 7y ago

Regardless of the reasoning the message for indies is clear: Time is running out.

sytelus 7y ago

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, it would be unusable for many users. To salt the wound, they aren't even telling you exactly why they are doing this. Why making read-only archive is so hard, at very minimum. Didn't expect this from Tom Sweeney's company.

Aqua_Geek 7y ago
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.
- smacktoward 7y ago
  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?
  - nitemice 7y ago
    The only other "security risk" I can imagine such a read-only wiki could present is if it documents something that could be considered "risky" from a security perspective. That would make this more of a censorship situation.
    - moonchild 7y ago
      > We still have the data, and as mentioned above, we will work to migrate the top content into various official resources. In the meantime, we’re investigating how we can make this content available, even in a rudimentary way. This indicates otherwise.

marta_morena_23 7y ago

"We hear your concerns and frustrations. And we missed an opportunity to give you notice prior to the Wiki page coming down, and for that we apologize. So 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. We still have the data, and as mentioned above, we will work to migrate the top content into various official resources. In the meantime, we’re investigating how we can make this content available, even in a rudimentary way. Some individuals from the community have already reached out to explore a community-hosted Wiki. We are following up with these folks and are evaluating next steps to see what may be possible here as well. " Well you always learn new ways to express incompetence. They do know that you can render wikis into static HTML pages?

uk_programmer 7y ago

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.

terrycody 7y ago

self-destruction measure completed

bashwizard 7y ago

That's a great way to get people to use Unity instead. Which everyone already should.

gregjw 7y ago

April Fools?

misotaur 7y ago

Kinda silly,good documentation is what, partially, will win the engine wars if we can call it that and Unreal is not exactly crystal clear.

rambojazz 7y ago

What's the story here and why is this newsworthy?

kevingadd 7y ago

The lack of a static copy of the wiki really sucks but it's understandable that a mediawiki install would be pulled indefinitely. Mediawiki racks up a dozen CVEs in an average year and even a single one of those is an opportunity to perform watering hole attacks on every UE licensee. Getting RCE on a single UE customer's machine is an opportunity for million+-dollar industrial espionage - it's not uncommon for someone to get a copy of a game's source code and try to extort the developer for cash. We generally only know about the cases where the extortion fails... It's possible that really aggressive security measures could mostly prevent that but even if you were to patch weekly that won't stop someone from pairing an undisclosed mediawiki attack with some other attack that isn't well-known. A game studio's machines are probably using LTS versions of Firefox or Chrome w/slower update cadence, which potentially means multiple days of vulnerability even after an exploit is patched. Also, now that Epic processes credit card payments (Epic Store, etc) it's possible the mediawiki install would prevent them from passing PCI-DSS audits.

pcvarmint 7y ago

Someone mirrored it: https://michaeljcole.github.io/wiki.unrealengine.com/ https://michaeljcole.github.io/wiki.unrealengine.com/

IXxXI 7y ago

Khan Academy's internet traffic increased 250% over normal on quarantine. Unreal Wiki must be experiencing similar trends. The real reason it was shut down.