Why is the topic called “Changes to the official Unreal Engine Wiki” when you’ve just deleted it?
Might have been a good idea to maybe ask this before taking the wiki down? It’s kind of hard to look for them now.
All in all, this is a terrible move by Epic and only makes the horrible situation with documentation even more obvious.
As a “Community manager”, you might be interested to know that this is in my opinion a spit in the face of the community.
No notice, no discussion, just Epic, shutting down a valuable resource. Sad.
This is disastrous! So much essential information locked away! Without any warning! If you want to get into certain systems, like the Gameplay Ability System, your are bloody screwed without the wiki!
Who the hell had the idea to just take the page down, without any warning, without providing a replacement. This information was vital for the community, especially new ones!
And I doubt that it’s an April Fool’s… that would be too cruel and also the wiki seems to be REALLY down…
As if… lol.
“Hey guys, here is an engine with a quadrillion different tools, oh, and we just burnt the manual”
:rolleyes:
EDIT: But… its not completely off the table, considering that the Epic Games Store still doesnt have a Shopping Cart, while the UE4-Marketplace has one. (Probably a security risk too >.<)
I would also like to express my discontentment over this decision Please make it available only in read-mode or archive it somewhere that the users can access it!
This really sucks, there are so many times i find myself searching for fringe cases that have sparse documentation, usually there is a helpful wiki page that would aid me in working out an issue immediately.
Backing up the main or frequently used pages is not enough, and is going to leave many people searching endlessly for the less common issues , if anything it should be released to the public as read only or be allowed to be hosted on git.
Also, its pretty shameful that a company as talented and well funded as epic cant make a wiki secure, or provide decent documentation and instead screw over their community and the work they have put in to making your engine accessible.
phew…Well, this seems rather unfortunate. Also I think there should have been work done BEFORE taking it offline. So prepare articles and docs etc. and then take the wiki down. What do you think users are going to do now? Wait for a wiki article to re-appear somewhere in a year or two? From my experience reporting bugs to the current documentation, the team is quite busy or the docs are not that well maintained that those things would happen in an appropriate timeframre
Just to add to what others have said, not only was the wiki incredibly useful in a lot of cases where official documentation was lacking, but this is also an incredibly bad time to do this, when many of us are working from home without the ability to quickly and easily chat to other developers when we run into problems. Taking away a large source of knowledge at this time is quite disappointing.
Gameplay Ability System comes directly to mind, but lots of other parts of UE4 which are poorly documented with lack-luster examples.
Unfortunately, current documentation from Epic on for most topics I’ve tried to find is not comprehensive enough (though I applaud Epic’s dedication to continuously try to make it useful).
Security Risk…? That doesn’t sound believable or credible. There is no reason why it couldn’t be put into a read-only state and flagged for deletion so that the community can take action.
+1 vote to revisit this decision and re-instate it or re-upload it as read-only
okay … that come as a unpleasant surprise …
There were couple of Wiki sites which were a perfect reference of copy and pasting Standard syntax / implementations.
The Wiki was always a community-driven resource and as such it it feels like it would have been beneficial to have worked with the community in resolving it’s issues, rather than outright terminating it without any warning.
Don’t get me wrong it was chock full of terrible advice, many articles hadn’t been updated since the original engine launch - some articles were just outright incorrect - but it also contained a lot of irreplaceable information. It will be difficult if not impossible to provide a list of items which were useful without being able to see the original contents. At least we have the Wayback Machine archive.
As for official documentation - the reality is that because it has to be so generic, it’s rarely useful to anybody other than absolute beginners. The engine is well-designed, and I’d argue that once you reach a certain degree of familiarity with it you can find everything you need yourself.
The Unreal Slackers Discord group is by far the most useful place to get answers and help now, but unfortunately isn’t good at holding on to persistent information. Even the C++ Programming forum right here is full of questions being answered with terrible advice.
The Wiki helped to fill that gap, as it covered a lot of problem-areas the engine has which Epic are never going to do documentation on. For example, the sheer degree of suffering you have to go through to get a dedicated server working on Steam.
Glad to hear it is at least backed up somewhere. We do however need a community-editable, persistent source of information somewhere. If Epic don’t provide one you can bet the community will end up hosting it’s own somewhere.
Was there ever a deadline for this closure or a heads up that this was going to happen? Could have let the community take a copy and host it ourselves before it went down…
The Gameplay Ability System page was rather useful and pretty in-depth and I have been going through it recently too. Thanks to who ever had the backup for that at least.
I’m extremely disappointed this has been taken offline, the infromation on the wiki was invaluable and i’ve used it numerous times as reference to solve issues. Whilst i appreciate security is of the upmost importance, is there any chance that we can get an offline copy to allow us to rehost the content?
I was searching for information I needed for Unreal development, and I landed in this thread. I have a hard enough time finding information on how to develop for Unreal, and now this resource is gone. Why should I continue on this platform now?
Upgrading mediawiki takes 15 minutes. Don’t give us the “security reasons” excuse, you shouldn’t have let the software get so out of date to start with.
Extremely bad call from the ones responsible for it.
The wiki sure had its flaws but in some cases it was the best (if not the only) source for documentation and tutorials.
Please make it available only in read-mode or archive it somewhere that the users can access it!