Cheers for the tag! I hadn't seen this new thread as I was gonna take a break from the SL for bit until I'm doing more ToT related stuff, but you've brought me back lol. This might get a bit big sorry as the creative juices are flowing and I've got a lot of ideas on the subject that people can think about, vote on, laugh at, roll their eyes at, love, hate etc in the months to come haha.
I know I'm kinda sitting on the fence here but to be honest I support both directions of either sticking with the old site or moving to a new one. Although I probably lean a bit more in the direction of a new easier to use, more secure and accessible site with potential for expansion into other Civ games in separate sections (don't rage, I'll clarify that in a minute). I'm still just a SL visitor not a SL member (as I haven't done anything for you) so my vote doesn't mater so much anyway but I'll spill out some ideas here and then I guess you guys can follow
@CurtSibling 's original suggestion of doing a community vote as that is a good idea to help the staff decide which direction to go in. I don't how many members are left in the SL but I'd recommend tagging all the ones you can think of here and asking for vote on old vs new wiki (
@Prof. Garfield you may even be able to edit your top post above to include a vote as I think CFC supports that functionality) and sit on it for a few weeks or months to let the votes roll in. Could also maybe PM people with a link to this thread as that may trigger a email notification to inactive members to get them back (which is never a bad thing hey haha).
Old Site:
As
@techumseh points out the big old site is already there, it works (mostly lol) and was built by a healthier larger community than now, its on CFC, it's downloads are on CFC (except for those broken ones I'll fix soon) and it's got all that great legacy content and guides etc. Thanks to Garfield all you guys can get access to it now and there would be a group of people who can hopefully protect it if some jerk has a sabotage party in there. However as pointed out a above there are a number of problems ie it's not very user friendly/easy to add new content to, no one's overly keen to maintain the thing, and as I pointed out the other day in my thread (& Garfield above) I think there was a "minimum standard" for scenario submissions meaning they had to be tested and reviewed by curators and who on earth here has time for that anymore! Probably none of us lol! As Curt said we're all more modders than curators. Also while I'd like to rescue a lot of stuff that doesn't mean I'm gonna finish their scenario if its broken or unbalanced haha.
However if we do go in this direction then I'll take care of the pre-ToT stuff in that if someone reports broken link to you that's not ToT related just send them my way (instead of lynching them lol) and I'll take care of it. However because the above 'tested and reviewed by a curator' concern I don't feel overly comfortable adding new stuff and 'polluting' the site with rescued but unreviewed content as it seems like I'd be ruining the 'purity' that McMonkey and others worked so hard on all those years ago. Also hesitant to deal with new submissions as I lack the time sit there error checking their work! So yeah that's probably my biggest concern with us sticking with the old site. I can put my hand up and promise you guys that I can take care of the maintenance (ie fixing broken stuff or missing stuff) of all pre-ToT content so you don't have to worry about it but I cannot promise that I can add new stuff to it continuing the 'minimum standards' our predecessors enforced as I lack the time to playtest 'full games' of scenarios.
New Site:
Straight away I personally feel it's important that the new site has all the content from the old site, we don't wanna lose any of that and all the great work they did. As others have pointed out there's great help guides there, as I've pointed out there's all the great pre-ToT stuff there, and there's of course there's all nice ToT stuff you guys are creating. One of the biggest problems with the CFC Civ2 file download area is that every era of Civ2 is all mixed in together (Poly had the same problem back in the day too). The fact that the old wiki categorizes/separates each era of Civ2 in a nice clear fashion is SO useful and definitely something that should be on the new site ensuring easy browsing and that curators can easily look after their own areas of interest instead of having to sift through the whole bloody thing.
So then comes the topic of populating those sections. It's been made extremely clear to me that you guys have no interest in any of the pre-ToT stuff which I understand and respect so obviously that stuff would not be your concern, it would be mine and maybe others but knowing my luck probably just mine haha!
As Garfield said above if we pick a good new free wiki site (sadly I have no idea what's out there and what to recommend sorry) that allows for easy copy and pasting of content then that would make the transfer process SO much easier. I've never created a brand new wiki page in my life though so I'm not an expert on this lol, but I'm guessing there's 2 ways it could be done eg if the backend wiki code is similar then copying and pasting the page code over would hopefully work. However if not then hopefully some of these more modern wiki sites support that markdown thing or whatever its called that you see on many forums, blogs and social media sites where you can literally paste a webpage of stuff into into a new area and it just converts it all (text, pics, links etc) for you in the frontend and generates all the code in the backend. Only problem with the later is that it sometimes generates a lot of garbage code relating to fonts etc. Won't know until we pick a site and experiment a bit what the easiest way can be.
Because IF it's relatively easy to bring content across then in the future when I'm more on top of my own projects I can just sit down and smash out copying & pasting over all the old stuff over into new pages over a couple of weekends. Then I can be responsible for keeping the pre-ToT areas in decent condition (ie add new rescued content, fix working links and checking what other people add to it). If we still leave the old wiki site up on CFC (maybe with some "WIKI HAS MOVED" warnings & links everywhere) and don't remove it or take it down then that means all the old working downloads can just stay as they are and we don't have to redo them all which would save an
enormous amount of time, then we only have to worry about putting new content in the CFC Civ2 files area instead of having to move every old file there and relink all the scenario download links too (urgh).
But if we can't find an easy way of copying and pasting pages over and/or we have redo all the download links then yeah.. it'll be too much work (for me anyway) to bring everything across so things won't look so good for the new site and it'll just end up being a small 'bonus' repository of new ToT stuff you guys make. Which would still be a good thing I guess as right now ToT suffers from being too spread out much like pre-ToT stuff is, eg there's ToT stuff on the SL wiki, the CFC forums, the CFC downloads, Poly download backups, Catfish's site, and probably more I'm forgetting or don't know about.
Also I should point out that once I've finished my current MGE related file rescues, tribute video and mod/scenario projects
I'll be switching to 'ToT mode' and working on rescues/video/mods for that. So I'll also be able to help you guys out with the ToT sections in the future a little bit too if you wish. I may have unintentionally given people here the impression that I'm some sort of hippy MGE over ToT lover which is absolutely
NOT the case, I love both, and its just the fact I'm doing my videos and mod projects in chronological order (eg 2 years ago I was doing Civ1 mods & videos and once I'm done with MGE & ToT stuff this year I'll be moving on to Civ3 next!) so that's why you see me talking about MGE a lot in the forums because that's the stage I'm currently working on in my personal projects. In a few months people will probably instead be getting annoyed at me for not shutting up about ToT!
The other idea I have if we go the new wiki site route is if it has good primary and secondary category support like most do then that opens the door for future expansion into other Civ games. Once again this would NOT be of any concern to you guys. It would simply be me creating say a primary Civ3 section separate from the Civ2 one and adding rescued content there and inviting others from that community to help out and submit content to that section. I think there's genuine interest in that community as they've suffered many moves & content losses like the Civ2 community has which
@Civinator can attest to. Also last year to my utter shock I discovered that around 10 years ago there was an
active scenario making group for Civ1 here at CFC (yes really lol). Some of the stuff they made was super cool (eg a Dune scenario) and there's not a huge amount of scenarios there so I could easy do a Civ 1 section on the wiki too.
Layout could be something like this.. (the main welcome landing page could have nice box covers of each game):
Or maybe some would prefer that
ToT breaks away from the chains of classic Civ2 and is treated as a separate category/entity in the series on the main landing page (much like what
I've done in my rescue threads and will do in my video series):
An existing example of a nice layout kind of like what I'm talking about is one of the Command and Conquer wikis here:
https://cnc.fandom.com/wiki/Command_&_Conquer_Wiki
As you can see on the main welcome page it has all the primary categories with each of the C&C and Red alert games and then when you click on one of them you get taken to all the sub categories for that game in the series (addon packs, factions, buildings, units, guides & bonus content etc).
Why is Blake thinking about doing all that extra stuff outside of the SL scope? Well firstly it would be continuing/expanding my existing work to help the other classic Civ communities outside of this one, but more importantly by covering more Civ games it attracts more curators, a larger viewing base and therefore increases the chances of cross game interest. Eg someone goes in to look at Civ3 mod, they get curious and look around the site and see the insanely awesome work the SLeague has been doing pushing ToT's boundaries and next thing you know you've got a new fan and maybe even a contributor. Similar to what
@JPetroski and I were talking about elsewhere with our websites & youtubes where if you want more traffic then increasing the scope of what you cover not only brings in more people but also results in some staying to check out other content and become new fans of that.
Of course all this stuff would not be compatible if we stuck with the old wiki site as its too hard to use/expand and would resulting in too many people coming in and having full admin access which would be VERY dangerous.
Finally if download mirrors for some important content is of interest to people (should the dreaded event occur of CFC going down) then I should point out that I've already been creating download mirrors of big rescued Civ3 content over on
ModDB. If some of you are unfamiliar with them, ModDB is the largest mod/scenario website on the net and has been around for 20 years now (unlike atomic, rapid, 3d downloads etc who all kicked the bucket after only a few years resulting in many scenarios lost). ModDB gets huge traffic and fully supports Civ2 eg if you look in
my current mod list there you'll see some of my Civ 2 mod project pages where you can see they support free file, video & image hosting. Plus you don't even need to create a full page for the mod there as ModDB also supports straight simple generic file uploads under the master game category so any Civ2 scenario zip file can be added to
their main Civ2 page with an optional 1 picture and a description (wow I hadn't noticed this but it looks like
@Catfish has already put some ToT pictures and stuff there & I also notice some of
@Kasius Klej 's recent MGE work in the files list there too!), which is quite similar to what happens on the CFC Civ2 download section. So anyway it's probably not really needed but nevertheless it is there if people want to have mirror download links for important scenarios and/or if they want more coverage on their work (eg
@JPetroski put Over the Reich there and do up a dev diary article with some of your youtube videos embedded into the post and watch what happens mate
). I was quite surprised with how much attention my silly MGE projects got, but it's a huge site with epic traffic so I guess I shouldn't have been. It does NOT make a good option for a wiki replacement through as it does not have very good list browsing and doesn't support sub categories under the game to find specific scenario types, so I'm just talking about file hosting here (as a mirror, not a replacement for CFC) and extra marketing attention for interested modders.
Upgrade CFC Civ2 file downloads section instead of a wiki:
I notice several people have suggested not bothering with any wiki for browsing mods and just simply browse the CFC Civ2 downloads area that we already use for hosting. Only problems with that are the ones I mentioned above and in the other thread which are that there's not much uniformity as everyone just puts their own ideas of what a title and description layout should be. Then there's the biggest problem of all which is that there are currently 408 files there that are a complete mix of Conflicts, FW, MGE and ToT content under limited categories. There no separation of ToT and pre-ToT content which I think is not good at all as they're not compatible which each other, and much as it might annoy some people here there's always going to be new non-ToT content going in there meaning some of your amazing ToT work will get buried in the lists quickly. None of us want that! Only problem is how the hell would we fix that??? No one has any control over anyone else's downloads there. I'm guessing even you forum moderators wouldn't have high enough access to change other peoples downloads there. Meaning we'd need a full site admin to create the separate ToT and classic Civ 2 era master download sections and subcategories under each of them, and then move each mod into their respective sections and subcategories. A huge messy job that no admin is going to want to do lol. I'd be willing to have a got at it on a later date and
@Knighttime just messaged me suggesting the exact same idea and that he'd be willing to help too but we're not admins so there goes that plan lol. We could slap all the download names in a excel file and then workout and put a ToT or classic flag next to all of them in the list and send it to an admin, but once again they'd still have to one by one move stuff around which I really don't think any of them will want to do unless you guys know an admin here who's still big on Civ2 and cares about that stuff. So yeah unfortunately I don't this is a great option for categorizing and browsing mods compared to a wiki site we fully control, as it's not setup well enough and we'd never have the level of control we need to curate/manage the content.
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That's everything I think. Sorry for another giant post haha, it's just the way my brain works (prob a good thing I don't drink coffee hey Curt lol), but anyway that's all my thoughts on these subjects, now don't have any more to say as its all here, plus once a decision is made I can look back on this post a plan/reference if I forget anything in the years to come. So now its up to you guys and the whole SL to band together, vote and make a decision, then I'll follow your lead and help as best as I can (especially after I finish my own projects!).
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Just a matter of sitting there thinking okay I'm new lurking fan, I've just seen some footage of Over the Reich and omg do I wanna play that on my brand new windows 10 laptop with no cd drive and no copy of ToT. What are all the barriers between me and playing that scenario? Every solution we think of can go into a help page. I had to write one up the other day telling people how to acquire Civ1 for Windows, play it with dos graphics, in HD resolution, with high quality modded music, all inside a virtual machine! So telling people how to acquire a copy of ToT & install ToTPP is a breeze compared to that. 
