Mr Bean Posted October 7, 2010 Share Posted October 7, 2010 Sorry if linky to Freelander did not produce correct page link I think for the Defender and Series link it should be this!!! However, who will decide on the format? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
elbekko Posted October 8, 2010 Share Posted October 8, 2010 I'd be up for developing and hosting (at the start, not sure how well my shared hosting would hold up) a site for tech archives. Compiling the articles on there into a PDF every month or so probably won't be too hard, although PDF generation libraries aren't all that easy to come by (unless you pay silly amounts of money). A website is easy to search, and writing a good search really isn't all that hard if you know what features to use (well, English-language search anyway...). The problem there is - it isn't this forum anymore, which I value greatly, and I don't have nearly enough time to have it finished anytime soon. Also, who's going to write and edit the articles? Wikis need a lot of moderation, and everyone knows allowing every idiot out there to write tech articles could have some pretty bad outcomes. Of course rating systems could solve this, but that's another discussion. PDFs may be 'bloaty', but it's one of the few formats that can properly handle cross-platform formatting. The only PDFs I've encountered that aren't searchable are those containing only pictures. I think the best way is to let the end user decide the format, and different formats are offered - PDF (downloadable and relatively easy to search), online (easy to search), downloadable (but hard to search) website, ... I'm just throwing out ideas here, no clue if they're the right ones. The biggest problem with getting a content-based site launched is having actual content. In comparison the rest is fairly trivial. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Retroanaconda Posted October 8, 2010 Share Posted October 8, 2010 The Wiki wouldn't have to be editable by anyone, you could have a membership system similar to the forum, whereby only certain people are allowed to edit it (like we have mods/admin here). I think the forum is pretty good as it is, I've been here several years and I've seen new people come in from time to time, as well as some members leave. At the end of the day you can't please anyone, and no-one's getting paid to do any of this. If you were to change the tech-archive to a non-forum format, I think a Wiki would be the way to go about it. Simple, a UI that's familiar to people, not to strenuous on hosting (other than the article photos themselves), and quite easy to look after. I don't know how the forum hosting works, whether they have a dedicated server which just happens to be only hosting forum software, or if it's one of these special 'forums' hosting packages where all you get is the IPB setup and no extra webspace. If it's the former then the wiki could easily be added to the server with a couple of extra databases and a new subdomain, http://wiki.lr4x4.com for example. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
elbekko Posted October 9, 2010 Share Posted October 9, 2010 Be careful what you say about a wiki being lightweight. MediaWiki (what Wikipedia uses) is pretty damn heavy, and won't run very smoothly with a lot of traffic unless you throw hardware against it. But the upside is, there are plenty of other wikis that are much less resource-intensive. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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