Lose the guide, shut down the Geocities page?

[Joseph Hewitt]

Recently someone posted for help on the GearHead_Dev forum. He had read in the guide that this was the best place to ask about problems... this got me to thinking. Much of GearHead's support material is horribly out of date.

I think I should shut down the Geocities home page, and replace it with a link to the roguelikedevelopment page. I should remove the GHGuide from that page and include links to the forum and wiki in the GH1 and GH2 readmes.

I should probably also work on some introduction pages explaining GearHead to new players.

What do you think?

[Epsilon]

Kill the page, link to the Wiki and forums.

[SharkD]

Personally, I think we should keep the guide. Sure, it's out of date; but, that just means we need to update it. Plus, I prefer having something that's downloadable, as I'm on a dialup connection and need to keep the line clear.

If we had an CVS or SVN we could keep a working copy of the guide there, and then just periodically compile a distributable.

I would also keep the homepage (that is unless you're reaching your bandwidth limit). News sites that cover GearHead link to it, and it's nice to have a homepage for stuff. Maybe you should change the homepage to more of a blog format, where you update it periodically with version changes and other news.

[edit] Nevermind. I thought the roguelikedevelopment page was the homepage. In this case, go ahead andd axe the homepage. My comments regarding the blog format still stand, though.

[edit2] On a side note, I added the GearHead quickstart guides to the wiki; so, most if not all information has now been transferred there.

[macksting]

Whereas, while the guide is totally out of date and could be removed in favor of a Wiki, I find that I'm rather fond of the webpage.

Hmm. Frankly, I'll go with the majority decision on this, except to say that, while the guide is a great idea, I'm just not that attached.

[Tung Nguyen]

If losing the guide is the way to go, the knowledge within should at least be transferred to the wiki. In updated form, of course.

[Skulkraken]

I think having a downloadable/printable guide would be a good thing, so that people will have something to refer to if they're offline.  Where it's kept is pretty much irrelevant, as long as it's somewhere where it can easily be updated.

I'll go with the majority vote on the issue about the website.

[Joseph Hewitt]

Is there a way to create a downloadable snapshot of the wiki, or some portion of the wiki? That would solve the problem of maintaining the guide + having a downloadable version all in one fell swoop.

[SharkD]

I was going to mention this. That would be an awesome feature for MediaWiki to have. I might make a feature request over at their homepage. The only other option is to use a program such as HTTrack to copy the website to disk. But, then you get all the extra wiki-specific metadata that has no real use offline and merely serves as bloat.

[edit] Here's a link to discussion on the topic of dumping mediawiki databases: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Data_dumps

[Anticheese]

There is a neat little program called Zulupad which combines the features of a wiki with a copy of wordpad..It might be a good tool to help draft Wiki's.

But anyway, I'd much rather download a guide (albiet a much updated and continuiously updated guide) or have it packaged with GH than to download a wiki.

There's another use for version control...

[Kornel Kisielewicz]

Okay, I'll put my 0.02$ into this thread. I will be moving to a new ISP in the next month (there will be a period of downtime because of that). Then I'll be merging all the chaosforge wikis into one wikifarm (that will be transparent to you -- only the adress of the wiki will change). But I finally will be able to provide Joseph with full access to the server (with a database). That will leave us the possibility of moving all Joseph wants to http://gearhead.chaosforge.org/ -- all the downloads and other sites. I'm also willing to spend some time on creating a new gearhead webpage (in the common theme of the forum and wiki).

Yeah, the idea of a new website is already very old, but somehow it never came to be (my fault here's probably the biggest ).

As for the Guide, I would propose creating a separate single wiki page for it and updating it by mutual strengths. Then periodicaly exporting it to txt and PDF.

[Hamato]

Sounds good to me. I would also really like a guide for downloading.