Update - The Wiki has moved

The PolyVox Wiki can now be found here: https://bitbucket.org/volumesoffun/polyvox/wiki/Home

Original message:
We have been thinking recently that we should remove the wiki from this site for a number of reasons:

• We have had more than one incident of the wiki page being replaced by spam, which we don't notice quickly because we don't often check it.
  
• Much of the material is out of date due to the fairly rapid changes which happen within the API of PolyVox, and there have been a few cases where this has caused problems for new users. There are also some peices of code which are not implemented in the ideal way or which seem to have bugs in them.
  
• Material is too spread out. For example, we have a todo list in the Wiki, in our Git repo, and also in our mind map (and they are all different).

I've just been through and added notes to the pages which I think are out of date, and I'll probably set the Wiki into read only mode for a few weeks (if this is possible). Resources such as shader code snippets and high level descriptions will be moved into the user manual. The todo lists will be replaced by a unified bug/issue tracker soon.

Other suggestions are welcome, but the wiki will disappear in a few weeks unless we hear any. Appologies to those who contributed.

I am in the process of porting your wiki contents to my personal wiki. Please give me a day or two more to finish before taking the wiki offline, as I only just learned about its existence.
Editing a wiki is very easy and allows everyone to add to the knowledgebase with minimal effort. This is important because it lets everyone in the community contribute to user documentation. As PolyVox gains wider usage, the forums begin to fill up and users will want to have a central repository of knowledge rather than browsing a dozen odd forum posts to find a useful tidbit.
What spam prevention measures are in place on your wiki? I personally have never had trouble with spam on my personal MediaWiki because I require that all user accounts be reviewed by me before being enabled. I am not sure if this is doable with Dokuwiki, but it is an idea.
As for consolidating the TODO list, I see that as a separate matter from continuing the wiki.

I finished porting the resources & links section to my wiki. Assuming you have moved the shader snippets to the manual and the TODO list to the bug tracker, all the content should be backed up in case you decide to close down the PolyVox wiki.

I do agree that a wiki is nice in principle, but unfortunatly it doesn't tend to stay up to date with any changes in PolyVox. These changes do still happen quite a lot even at a low level, and it causes frustration for new users when code on the Wiki does not compile. I can't really blame the contributors as the code compiled when they wrote it (so it's me that broke it!) but I also can't take responsibility for maintaining other people's code.

But maybe removing the Wiki is indeed too much... I'm not really sure. At any rate I'd like to make it clear that it is unofficial documentation, and perhaps it could be useful to have a 'last tested version' on each page (we couldn't do this previsouly because we didn't have numbered releases).



Actually there aren't any spam prevention measures in place. I have to say I'm not a bit fan of DokuWiki so far (mostly I don't find it attractive though you can probably add themes). If we do want to keep the Wiki then I'd probably be keen to look at a hosted solution, and at least check out the Wiki which is built into BitBucket.



Indeed, we have the BitBucket issue tracker now.

This sounds like the best way to go. Maybe add a little warning on the front page that 'latest tested versions' should be taken seriously because of frequent source changes.


I have never used the BitBucket wiki before. Would certainly be interesting to try out. My only concern is if BitBucket were to go belly up, is the wiki syntax amenable to porting to other wiki formats? Something to keep in mind.

BitBucket can use ReStructuredText which is the same as used in Sphinx (which we use for our manual) so there would be no problem with porting the contents if necessary. Also, it's a Git repo behind the scenes so making backups would be easy too.

_________________
Matt Williams
Linux/CMake guy

Ok, it sounds like the BitBucket Wiki idea is worth investigating. I've opened an issue for it: https://bitbucket.org/volumesoffun/poly ... f-the-wiki

Good news - the Wiki survives It has been moved to Bitbucket and can now be found here: https://bitbucket.org/volumesoffun/polyvox/wiki/Home

I've moved across most of the content from the old Wiki but I'm not really in a position to update it. We want to make sure that users are clear about which version of PolyVox a given piece of content applies to, so we're encouraging the use of a 'Last tested version of PolyVox:' header on pages which include source code or PolyVox descriptions. Also note that we are using Creole as our markup language (not ReStructuredText as discussed earlier). Please read the Guidelines for editing the wiki before working on it.

The old Wiki has been replaced with redirection pages and will be deleted in the future.