
The Unreal Engine Wiki is now permanently offline - Pulcinella
https://forums.unrealengine.com/unreal-engine/announcements-and-releases/1739154-changes-to-the-official-unreal-engine-wiki
======
sytelus
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
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
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
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
> 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.

------
Traster
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
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!"

~~~
loktarogar
"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
Doesn't that also just open up a lot more community feedback/pushback? I'm
thinking somebody saw it coming in any case and made the call.

~~~
geitir
Hackernews is shutting down in 45 seconds. Please save the pages of any
bookmarks now

------
user5994461
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-t...](https://thehftguy.com/2019/12/10/why-products-are-shutdown-the-
case-of-verizon-and-yahoo-groups/)

~~~
tempestn
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
Not that hard?

You'd need to process each page then data mine it.

~~~
smacktoward
HTTrack ([https://www.httrack.com/](https://www.httrack.com/)) makes tasks
like this trivial.

~~~
imtringued
It doesn't run a full browser engine so it won't work with the vast majority
of websites.

------
tvbusy
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
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
(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.

------
erichocean
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.

~~~
Sophistifunk
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.

~~~
tialaramex
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.

------
muststopmyths
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.

------
jokoon
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
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
Do you think Godot is either missing necessary features or has severe
performance limitations?

~~~
jayd16
Currently its missing necessary features. The roadmap looks good but I can't
ship on a road map.

~~~
philipov
I've been looking at Godot for a hobby project. Could you please describe what
features you need from it that it's missing?

~~~
jayd16
The biggest for me is the fact they're rewriting the graphics stack. The churn
is enough but I also just don't like "fixed"/"simplified"/"helpful" tools that
hide the underlying platform. Unity's shader language is extremely ugly but at
least I can use raw GLSL if I have to. I've had to use custom pragmas to get
certain acceleration features to work on Samsung hardware that doesn't seem
possible in Godot. Hopefully the updates with Vulkan will have more
flexibility.

That said, for a hobby project it seems fine.

~~~
mikst
Hi, I'm not very proficient in graphical programming, but godot docs say this

> Godot uses a shading language similar to GLSL ES 3.0. Most datatypes and
> functions are supported, and the few remaining ones will likely be added
> over time. Unlike the shader language in Godot 2.x, this implementation is
> much closer to the original.

[https://docs.godotengine.org/en/3.0/tutorials/shading/shadin...](https://docs.godotengine.org/en/3.0/tutorials/shading/shading_language.html)

Godot is relatively new and definitely "not there yet", but at least with its
open nature you can do `git clone godot-doc.git` and no top manager can take
it away from you.

------
reilly3000
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
Unity or Unreal?

~~~
PudgePacket
They're talking about both at different points..?

~~~
kick
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
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.

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

~~~
treve
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
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
Pretty sure the wayback machine already has a full archive

~~~
toomuchtodo
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.

------
daenz
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!

------
bane
Looks like the waybackmachine got some of it at least

[https://web.archive.org/web/20191212230615/https://wiki.unre...](https://web.archive.org/web/20191212230615/https://wiki.unrealengine.com/index.php?title=Main_Page)

------
rs23296008n1
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.

~~~
axlee
You could host that wiki for ten bucks a month.

~~~
rs23296008n1
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
Not sure why someone disagreed without a supporting comment.

Every line is fact.

------
kevingadd
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.

------
AA-BA-94-2A-56
Here is the Linking DLLs wiki page discussed in the forum thread:

[https://web.archive.org/web/20181004001430/https://wiki.unre...](https://web.archive.org/web/20181004001430/https://wiki.unrealengine.com/Linking_Dlls)

------
pcvarmint
Someone mirrored it:
[https://michaeljcole.github.io/wiki.unrealengine.com/](https://michaeljcole.github.io/wiki.unrealengine.com/)

------
uk_programmer
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.

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

------
stolen_biscuit
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

------
IXxXI
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.

------
misotaur
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.

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

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

RIP

~~~
rurban
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
It was definitely TWiki in 2001. They must have migrated

------
p2t2p
Using any propitiatory/corporate systems feels more and more like living on a
volcano.

------
gregjw
April Fools?

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

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

------
jhare
"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
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.

~~~
kroltan
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.

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

------
terrycody
self-destruction measure completed

------
marta_morena_23
"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?

