Status of wiki.menagerie.team

Since the wiki will probably not be seeing a lot of future editing, and because I pay more for an EC2 instance than I do an S3 bucket, I’m going to do one of three things with it.

  1. Turn it into static HTML or Markdown, and serve it from an appropriate hosting type deal (e.g. github pages, S3, DigitalOcean’s CDN offering)
  2. Import the wiki content into the forums here, to preserve the ability to edit and add content - but I’d probably significantly trim the stub pages we have, or consolidate some of them, to keep things simple
  3. Export the whole site into some kind of single PDF, and let people download that if they want any of the content from it

Any preferences? Any alternatives that people would prefer? For example, if searching the wiki is something people do a lot of, options 2 and 3 are better, while if just trawling through pages or scrolling randomly is more fun, options 1 or 3 work best.

References:

I’d personally love to have it in either HTML or markdown or even PDF to host on random average so I can point to it from the podcasts that are still going out for the next 7 months or so :slight_smile: and also just to have as a reference.

For that matter, if there was a way to export it into a format that could then be imported into pmwiki, I could host it in the big gaming Wiki I keep up over there, but a pile of markdown documents and a folder with mdwiki.HTML in it would possibly accomplish the same thing.

Yeah, I have no intention of taking it offline. I just want to save myself 10 bucks and 2 hours of patching a month by baking into a different format.

Mediawiki to pmwiki import: https://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Cookbook/MtoPMwiki

So it sounds like I should export the site to XML, then share that around and let people do what they want with the content. At minimum, I’ll keep hosting it under the menagerie.team domain in some fashion, but there’s no reason it can’t live in multiple places.

I exported what we have, and did a test conversion. One or more files crapped out, but I think that’s solvable with some troubleshooting. I took a shot at writing my own XML converter while I figured it out, and here’s the results.

https://wiki-menagerie-team.sfo2.digitaloceanspaces.com/mdwiki.html#Link.md

Hyperlinks and most images won’t work (I assume the conversion script will handle that), and some of the formatting didn’t make it, but we also did a fair amount of mediawiki-specific templating and stuff.

So overall I’m optimistic.

You guys did some REALLY cool formatting stuff, so that’s not surprising.

Thanks for all your work on this. I really appreciate it. So often, the emotional/technical/backend support of games tends to fall to the GM (at least it has for me in my life), and it’s really amazing to experience the whole group taking that on. Weird, but also awesome. :slight_smile:

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The problem is that dumpBackup doesn’t do the transclusion step, nor does using Special:Export e.g. http://wiki.menagerie.team/Special:Export?pages=Link&action=submit&curonly=true&templates=true

I might just scrape the site, strip out all the MW header/footer stuff, and turn that HTML into Markdown.

EDIT: I did this and it worked out okay, the transclusions are in, and in theory I can write a script to massage all the internal links to something else. Pandoc and mdwiki have some strong disagreements on what constitutes valid markdown, though.

So I’m 14 hours late, but …

(1) I definitely want the content (for future reference in writing, if nothing else). A PDF would probably be easiest for me there, but I can make use of other formats.

(2) I have a dream that we will eventually circle back here in some fashion, in which case having the 1st Generation Menagerie content in some form that would be usale would definitely be of value.

I’ll also throw a hearty huzzah toward @garrett for having both stood this up and done something to take it down in a controlled fashion. Thank you, sir! It’s been a great game resource.

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I’ve got a couple pages to finish up on the wiki (including final issue 63), then will post a link to the dump in a couple formats this weekend.

The $10 for hosting isn’t much, the patching is annoying but not a huge drain, but another factor is my desire to move off of AWS infrastructure, which is where the wiki lives now. :slight_smile:

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I may have one final post, but I can certainly put it in f.m.t’s Menagerie folder. :slight_smile:

Which forum you post on won’t matter, but the link to it on the wiki will. So I’ll wait until I see that go up, or you tell me to skip it.

Oh, derp. You said wiki, not forum. :blush:

Um, do what you want with the wiki. Nothing I’m posting will impact it, I don’t think.