Changes to the official Unreal Engine Wiki

I think the security they talk about isnt concern about what content is being put on the wiki. The mediawiki version being used was outdated, and hasn’t been updated as far as i could tell since before the wiki was made readonly. The probability is that being readonly was ok for the short term to prevent an exploit that could only be leveraged while logged in with write access (which they never got around to apply that update, as mentioned in the header at the top of every wiki page saying they were moving to newer software), and then at some point recently a critical vulnerability was revealed that could even be exploited on a readonly wiki. I’ve maintained many wikis before and encountered this very situation, your choices then are to upgrade mediawiki (usually a simple process, untar new files over old, run the upgrade script, adjust any themes where neccessary) or simply take the wiki down if you’re lazy.

I think in this instance they picked the “cheapest” option of “just shut it down” rather than divert someone’s day away from a project that more directly brings money to Epic. This order probably came from an executive higher up in Epic who did not understand the value of community content. A stupid move yes, but not one motivated by the wikis content, more its software and lack of love given to it over the years.

Found this :wink:

This is certainly not epic.

Exactly, @Rama you might have misunderstood, it’s very likely that there is a vulnerability in the wiki web app (not in the contents of the wiki).
Of course, it’s still not a way to handle it, I just wanted to mention it for clarification :slight_smile:

I suggest building a web page that redirects old wiki articles to their relevant documentation equivalent instead of redirecting to this forum post.

For pages that don’t have a relevant documentation equivalent, collect the amount of traffic and prioritize new documentation based on the traffic to those pages.

My 2 cents!

I saved this link to work on this later: A new, community-hosted Unreal Engine Wiki - Announcements and Releases - Unreal Engine Forums

Is this code mirrored somewhere else?

Just to clear up some misconceptions (and to be clear, I’m not taking a side here, my personal opinion on the sudden closure of the Wiki is that it’s an extremely poor move on the part of Epic having neglected most, if not all, of their community channels for such a long time);

The security issue is with the wiki software. This is somewhat unsurprising since it hadn’t been updated in quite some time; locking it for editing all the time ago may have stopped the spam from getting through, but without that content having been migrated to something less vulnerable, the outdated wiki software likely now poses a vulnerability across what is a fairly integrated ecosystem.

I dislike the sudden removal as much as the next person, but, they do own the content. They also own all the content posted here, and on the Answerhub. It’s in the terms of service you agreed to when you registered.

One of the reasons a lot of people are upset, is because there is no documentation equivalent to a number of the more valuable pages.

[THERE IS A STATIC VERSION OF THE WIKI HERE

An Archive.org backup of wiki.unrealengine.com | wiki.unrealengine.com](An Archive.org backup of wiki.unrealengine.com | wiki.unrealengine.com)

I recreated the wiki.unrealengine.com site from the internet archive backups, transcoding it to markdown, then a static site in VuePress. I’ve been focusing on learning Unreal for a few months, and it was nice to take a vacay back to the cozy land of web dev.

Anyways, I’m putting it down for a minute, what should we do now? PR’s welcome.

Michael

– Anger is self-liberating - it exhausts or destroys itself. – The Buddha

You can find several tutorials about that on youtube when you search for the keywords there

Some of the best online tutorials, including **official Unreal Engine **tutorials, hosted their assets on the wiki.

Thanks for taking it down and making those useless.

We’re a bunch of coders. Do you really think we’re going to believe the “having a read-only wiki is a security risk” excuse??? Show a little respect to your users.

the wiki was more helpful than the “documentation”

I’d say that this sucks big time but the at this point it’s basically putting the wiki out of its misery… We just need to start up a community wiki and have the community maintain it. Wouldn’t be the first of its kind.

The Wiki is unbelivably offline, give the Wiki back.
It is the convenient place to search some knowledges assisting official documentations.
I learned much from the Wiki (Coder, Alone), it was made of many people’ efforts…

April fools right? Right?

Any chance we can get a wiki export or a download?

There was a LOT of useful pages on that wiki that a few developers return to from time to time.

I think this was a bad ideia, regressing the learning curve more for users, especially C++ folks. Where unreal wiki was a great font of knowladge. A pdf version of wiki, is a good strategy, and I looking forward for Unreal staff create a better documentation with exemple as wiki had or give a way to see it again. Thanks.

I’ve started restoring the wiki content manually to Unreal:Main Page - wiki.vg. It will take me a couple weeks to restore the majority of the content manually, but the good news is that between the Google cache and wayback machine a large portion of the content is available to be restored even if Epic does not provide the XML mediawiki dump.

If anyone is familiar with mediawiki and has the time, it looks like Epic used a tool to migrate from a different wiki tool to mediawiki and it really tells in the markup. Some of the pages are terrifying messes of inline html, headers are tags instead of ==, ===, etc. Feel free to contribute.

The wiki.vg project started nearly 10 years ago to document the technical aspects of Minecraft and has been up (ad-free) ever since. I’m more than happy to keep the unreal wiki content alive on it forever.

I’m not familiar with Wiki securities issues, but is there an actual good reason for not providing a proper dump of the wiki (like in “mediawiki friendly easy to import dump”) to the community so it can be restarted somewhere else with minimum effort?
Or maybe Epic is already doing that behind the scene with some highly involved community members?

These are real questions, not trying to be aggressive or whatever here, just trying to understand.

so,… its April 2nd, 09:19 AM, and the wiki still is offline?

@Epic - April Fools are only done on April 1st, usually.

At least provide a download link to the wiki as a .zip to open locally…

EDIT: Fine, whatever, we still have YouTube and other sources, now that epic killed the wiki.

I just want to ask why!!! why ???why???