How Can I Best Archive A Long Forgotten List Of Civilopedia Entries?

[Ozymandias]

Long Ago, someone archived a complete and detailed list of the Civilopedia Entries for 70 or so Mods. I can't think of any obvious place for it.https://sites.google.com/site/civiiicivilopedia/

By, "complete and detailed," I mean:

300 The Mod

• Advances
• City Improvements
• Civilizations
• Game Concepts
• Governments
• Resources
• Terrain
• Terrain Improvements
• Units

With an example entry being:

#GOVT_Despotism
^
^
^In Despotism, you rule with absolute power over your subjects, usually enforced by the military. This
system has a tendency to minimize individual freedom and reduce the efficiency of production efforts.
^
^
^
^
^Worker efficiency 100%
^Hurry Method Forced Labor
^Corruption / Waste Rampant
^War Weariness None
^Draft Rate 2
^Military Police Limit 2
^Unit Support
^ per town 4
^ per city 4
^ per metropolis 4
^In addition, any city production square which produces more than two $LINK<food=GCON_Food>, $LINK<shields=GCON_Shields>, or
$LINK<commerce=GCON_Commerce> in a despotic government instead produces one less.
#DESC_GOVT_Despotism
^Despotism is, without a doubt, the simplest form of government. It is based on a simple concept: might makes
right. In a despotism, the power is held unquestionably by those who hold power over the military and who therefore
can enforce their decrees. Because of the oppression experienced in this type of regime, despots often find that
their ability to control the population is proportional to their use of armed troops in towns and cities in which
the people live. Furthermore, because it is such a centralized form of government despotism makes it difficult to
effectively put down rebellions and prevent the misappropriation of funds if their empire grows too large. Despots
pay a terrible price in waste and corruption in their society; and with the development of more sophisticated forms
of government despots often find that staging a coup is necessary for further growth.


-And, yes, this particular one is quite "vanilla" but, did I mention, "70 or so mods"?

 

[Puppeteer]

An online archive? My first thought is AWS S3 or similar object storage, perhaps along with a front end index quite similar to your link.

I've been vaguely thinking lately about a searchable master index and perhaps store of mod data/media/tools. I've head-faked a couple of times towards being a YouTuber or Twitch streamer and chose Jim of Leisure as a name. I even have a very basic site with some Civ 3 links and info, although nothing readers of this forum would find enlightening: https://www.jimofleisure.com/ .

I could toss your civ entries up there with a simple index, and maybe later add more features like search or rendering as likable pages.

Edit: Actually, GitHub may be a good place to stuff this info, too. Not as much future feature potential, but it would immediately inherit a browseable index and search.

 

[Puppeteer]

Yeah, the more I think about it the more I think GitHub (or equivalent code site) is the perfect match for this info. I can be easily browsed, searched, copied in part or in whole (via git cloning or downloaded zip file), and forked by others to add to if the original uploader stops keeping it up to date.

"Future features" are not precluded by being on GitHub; GitHub just becomes the source of data for a fancier index site.

If you don't have a GitHub account and don't particularly feel like making one, I can put it on my myjimnelson account beside my Civ3 projects and forks of others'.

 

[Ozymandias]

But how would I best make an easy to find link here at CFC?

 

[Puppeteer]

Oh, you're wanting to archive civilopedia snippets in the forum?

I can't think of a reasonably clean way to make that happen. There is an attached wiki that might be suitable for the purpose, but then searching the forum wouldn't find them I don't think.

In the forum, though...a separate board with threads for each mod and post for each snipped seems like overkill. Perhaps you could use the code tag and maybe spoiler tag like this? I think this would be searchable.

Mod Name

Spoiler Entry Name :

#GOVT_Despotism
^
^
^In Despotism, you rule with absolute power over your subjects, usually enforced by the military. This
system has a tendency to minimize individual freedom and reduce the efficiency of production efforts.
^
^
^
^
^Worker efficiency 100%
^Hurry Method Forced Labor
^Corruption / Waste Rampant
^War Weariness None
^Draft Rate 2
^Military Police Limit 2
^Unit Support
^ per town 4
^ per city 4
^ per metropolis 4
^In addition, any city production square which produces more than two $LINK<food=GCON_Food>, $LINK<shields=GCON_Shields>, or
$LINK<commerce=GCON_Commerce> in a despotic government instead produces one less.
#DESC_GOVT_Despotism
^Despotism is, without a doubt, the simplest form of government. It is based on a simple concept: might makes
right. In a despotism, the power is held unquestionably by those who hold power over the military and who therefore
can enforce their decrees. Because of the oppression experienced in this type of regime, despots often find that
their ability to control the population is proportional to their use of armed troops in towns and cities in which
the people live. Furthermore, because it is such a centralized form of government despotism makes it difficult to
effectively put down rebellions and prevent the misappropriation of funds if their empire grows too large. Despots
pay a terrible price in waste and corruption in their society; and with the development of more sophisticated forms
of government despots often find that staging a coup is necessary for further growth.

 

[Ozymandias]

Oh, you're wanting to archive civilopedia snippets in the forum? I can't think of a reasonably clean way to make that happen.

Likewise. The problem is that the site contains the complete 'pedia entries for those ~70 mods; and, because they are "complete," each one also contains nearly everything found in the "vanilla" pedia.

 

[Jorsalfare]

Maybe the (apparently abandoned) Modding Wiki could be utilized for this purpose? Would probably require some work, but these wikis are searchable with possibilities to have as many cross linking and categories as desired.
Just a thought...

 

[WildWeazel]

I also thought of the mod wiki. It would take some leg work, but if you had a page for each mod with each pedia entry as a section, it would be easy to search and copy entries.

Alternatively, it wouldn't be too hard to whip up a quick web tool where you can upload a pedia file and it breaks it up into searchable entries.

 

[Blue Monkey]

You can place zip files here at CFC in the downloads DB. I'd suggest organizing the files however you think best*, zipping them up into one package, and keeping all that beautiful work on this site. God forbid stuff gets lost because external sites vanish.

Maybe include a text file for where specific entries are located?

 

[Ozymandias]

Guys, kindly click on the link ...

 

[Quintillus]

That was @georgestow who archived those, IIRC? I remember when that was going on.

I see two main avenues. The first is approaching it as a set of HTML pages. Most of the city is already structured this way, as can be seen by looking at the URLs. You hover over "300 The Mod" -> "City Improvements", and see it points to "https://sites.google.com/site/civiiicivilopedia/300-the-mod/city-improvements", and click it, and it reloads the page and takes you there. There are some CSS styles and so forth that it loads, but those are also static... in other words it's basically Web 1.0, without any fancy JavaScript resources. It should be possible to slurp all the links (including the CSS) into a local archive, and upload the whole thing on GitHub as Puppeteer mentioned, and then use GitHub Pages to archive it. Given the size of it (70 mods, 10 pages per mod), this would have to be at least mostly automated, but it shouldn't be too bad.

But that wouldn't preserve the "Search" function, which provides additional value. If I search for "the holy grail", it still reloads the page (versus the more modern AJAX request), taking me to https://sites.google.com/site/civii...ges/search?scope=search-site&q=the+holy+grail . But it's clearly doing some processing to be able to return the results that match the search term, and thus it is not possible to archive the results page for every possible search term. This also means that first avenue wouldn't preserve this functionality.

What I don't know is if this is utilizing behavior that is built in to Google Sites, or if there was some additional custom work done here. The response to the search request says the server is "GSE"; a quick search doesn't definitively say what that is, but if I had to guess I'd guess "Google Sites Engine", indicating the search functionality is a feature of Google Sites that you can add easily with minimal configuration. Perhaps the easiest way to replicate it would be trying to embed a Google custom search in the archived pages (or the archived home page), which would only search that GitHub Pages archive?

The Modding Wiki would also address the search problem, but I'm not sure that there would be a convenient way to put the content there.

Another thought is if a GitHub Pages archive can have its own URL path (e.g. CoolCivArchive.githubpages.com), then search engines such as DuckDuckGo can search based on sites. I can search "ozymandias site:forums.civfanatics.com" and it will bring back topics by or about Ozymandias on the forums; the search solution may be instructions saying, "use your favorite search engine to search 'kremlin site:CoolCivArchive.githubpages.com'). Puppeteer may be able to provide input on this, as it sounds like he has used GitHub pages more than I have.

As for how to make it easy to find here, I could argue that the original (non-archived) version isn't the easiest to find here either. That may fall into the larger topic of "sticky cleanup". Once more, the Modding Wiki in theory would also be a place for that, but I'm afraid it has similar visibility problems.

(As a sidebar, I recall the Modiki had a bot issue awhile ago that resulted in not being able to create new accounts... I suspect that contributed to its demise, or at least lack of revival. Its logins are also separate from the forums'; it appears I have an account, but don't know its password or which e-mail I used for it, which most likely means I used my AIM account that probably doesn't exist anymore EDIT: Looks like I did update my e-mail after all, just took a minute or two to arrive! I've successfully logged in... might be time to make the first update to the Wiki in six years...)