I was going to create a Wiki page for Swift, but not sure where to put it. Is "Projects In Development" just for games (I suspect so). Perhaps we need a Wiki start page for "Misc" or something. It may be I could have just created a page for Swift and it would have been picked up on a search but (having never created a Wiki article before) I couldn't see how I could create a brand new article all on it's own without it "spawning" from one of the starter pages such as "Projects in Development".

Probably being thick

Would it make sense to move the entire Swift website to the retrosoftware domain i.e. recreate the homepage in 'Wiki' format ?

I guess this would mean Steve could maintain the site himself, so he wouldn't have to wait for me to upload new versions etc. Would like to do the same for Rich's BeebASM too if poss ...

So what do you think Peter? Would you be able to knock-up a 'wikified' version of http://www.stairwaytohell.com/swift, preferably at retrosoftware.co.uk/swift ?

I understand that the whole essence of Wikis are that anybody can contribute, but I presume that we'd be able to restrict maintenance of certain areas (e.g. the Swift and BeebASM homepages) to their respective authors?

Being able to maintain and upload new versions would be good for me and less work for Dave Sounds a good idea if possible.

Francis - would you be happy to have your Sprite Utility and Sample Converter (when complete) hosted here? e.g. retrosoftware.co.uk/bbcsprite & retrosoftware.co.uk/wav2bbc

Though I'm afraid it'd mean you'd need to learn all about Wiki maintanence!

No I don't have a problem with that, as long as I can still have them available on my own homepage or at least have the facility to link in with the retrosoftware pages.


I've never done anything with regards to Wiki maintenance before, but I'm always willing to learn.

Kind regards,

Francis.

Yep, also touched on this in the The 'Header' Bar thread. We can either create a new page for PC Tools or include them on the Projects In Development page. One to discuss, really. If we create a new page, I'll attempt to put it in the menu bar.



It's easy. Just add your new page title to the end of this URL:

http://www.retrosoftware.co.uk/wiki/index.php?title=

Then click Edit when it says there's nothing there. This will create the page which will then show up in the wiki searches. However, I don't think there's much point starting a new page, unless you to link to it from one of the other pages on the wiki, otherwise it'll probably never be found!



Indeed. Isn't that why we built this ship?!



Ah, no. That is, yes we can setup a wiki version of that page (and is what I expected we would be doing!). However, I can't change the URLs - the wiki is installed in /wiki/ and we can't change that. If you want, you can get your server admin to configure Apache to redirect that URL to the appropriate wiki page but, tbh, I'd just stick to using the retrosoftware.co.uk URL as is - as I don't expect any of the project pages to grow big enough to warrant sending out multiple URLs ... my 2p's worth. (In fact, we'll need to ask him to do that at launch to get / to forward to /wiki, unless we put in a index.html with a meta refresh, but that might be a bit slow).



Not a great assumption. I can "Protect" certain pages so they're only editable by sysops or by users who have accounts older than a set date but it's somewhat fiddly). It is, in essence, against the spirit of a wiki. For example, if a reader finds a typo on one of these pages they should be able to go in and fix it, without having to notify whoever "owns" that page. Bear in mind that anonymous editing is disabled so all edits are audited, and if a user makes an edit that the "owner" you've described doesn't like, all the owner has to do is look at the edit history of the page and click Revert to go back to a known good version. If a particular user begins to cause a problem by malicious editing, then we look at disciplining / banning them. However, I doubt it'll get that far as I expect this to be a small and pretty well-behaved community. I suggest we run with the wiki as it currently is - if we have any problems with the owners of the Swift and BeebASM projects losing control of their wiki pages, we can re-address this issue.

Two issues to discuss from here, I think:

1) Where are the links to the PC tools going? On the Projects In Development page, or a page of their own?

and 2) I can copy the pages from STH and recreate them on the wiki, if that will help people get started. That's a bit of work, though, so I may not get round to it until the weekend. I'm happy to do it and it will probably let me iron out the hidden bugs you guys haven't noticed yet (specifically, the wiki engine restricts which filetypes can be uploaded as well as the size of the files. I need to modify those to fit what we plan to upload from these pages.)

Just give me a complete list of which sites/projects need moving, and I'll do that later this week (after the rubbish all-day course I'm on finishes, which is stopping me from doing useful things on the net at breaktime!).

Sam.

Not having full control of that Wiki page wouldn't be my first choice, but I understand your suck-it-and-see idea, so I'll go with that for now.

How do we stop complete strangers creating accounts and messing stuff up though ? We can ban them but the next day they could create another new account and do it again. I guess there's nothing we can do, apart from see if it becomes an issue, probably worrying over nothing.

The sites php driven, couldn't we just use;



in a file called index.php

I've always found this method unnoticeable to the user.

It's not suck-it-and-see in the sense that I'm sure I can knock up something to restrict access if we absolutely must, but I really think it's defeating the purpose of a wiki.

There shouldn't be any automated registrations spamming the wiki, because the wiki's own user accounts have been disabled. So that means it would, as you say, have to be someone re-registering in order to make malicious edits. If that really becomes an issue ... and I have a hard time believing it will unless the community grows significantly ... then we can experiment with a few options - e.g. ensuring that all registrations need to be pre-approved before they are enabled ...

either way, this is addressing a problem we don't yet have! Seriously, you can always include a note at the top of the page asking users to leave certain sections alone, if you really want, but I just don't expect us to have any trouble with this. Try playing with the Revert function - it's very easy to remove even very complex edits!



Yep, that's another option. Getting Apache to do it is the cleanest way, I think, but there are a number of alternatives too, so we're not stuck by any means.

Sam.

With you all the way on what you've said

Also note that you can watch a wiki page, in a similar manner to how you can watch a forum topic - that means you will be notified every time someone makes an edit to the page, so you'll know if someone else updates it.

Sam.

Didn't know that, thanks. Also nice job in creating that Swift page. I should have another new version out in about a week, so will make an update then.

Yes, see the "Retro Software wiki maximum file upload" thread I've just created wrt the video tutorials on the original site.

Sam.

The pages for both SWIFT and BeebASM have now been moved to the wiki. The only thing that hasn't are the video tutorials, due to the current PHP file upload limit which has been raised in a separate thread.

Sam.

I've just discovered a nice little tidbit of information from our server hosting gremlins, which means we can re-write URLs, so I've created ones for both SWIFT and BeebASM, in their original style:

http://www.retrosoftware.co.uk/swift
http://www.retrosoftware.co.uk/beebasm

If anyone else wants one, just shout.

Sam.