f13.net

Sorry about the brief downtime this (very early) morning.  We are in the process of setting up a test Wiki and the Web server config file for the Wiki subdomain got botched which causes Apache to throw up its hands and not start up.

Speaking of, let's use this thread to talk about Wikis. Anyone know anything about the Wikis out there? MediaWiki is the one everyone uses but it's a nasty piece of shit. Not only is it ugly but it's incredibly hard to navigate. All the wikis I've looked through are so not user friendly that it makes me wonder what type of moron keeps designing these things. Is it that fucking hard to have one menu on the side for choosing a ToC, Index, or proper search function with filters? Why do the main pages have so much text? Is it so hard to just have a damned blog like listing of the last updates? COMEON.

If a decent (read: Not Ugly, Not Designed by an Engineer) wiki can't be found, I'll work something else out for what I'm working on. But goddamnit I hate wikis.

Mediawiki is a piece of frustrating trash. How wikipedia got the fucker to work is anybody's guess.

A friend of mine uses OpenWiki, but that is windows based. On Monday, I'll ask around about the others. I've several friends who have played around with a few of them.

http://c2.com/cgi-bin/wiki?TopTenWikiEngines

The more interesting stuff is among the pending.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wiki_software

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_wiki_software

http://www.wikimatrix.org/

I was kind of stoked that there was a second commercial one that seemed popular aside from JotSpot. That Atlassian Wiki stuff. But no, that turned out to be an unwieldy piece of shit also. It's just mind blowing that in this web 2.0 bullshit era people can't design a well organized....indexer. Cuz that's all it is. A giant goddamn index for your thoughts and shit. Blech. I'm gonna go through all of that Wiki Matrix tonight.

Yeah. I use OpenWiki as well.

I've used PhpWiki and TikiWiki.. both are fairly straight forward.

Bump. If we had a Wiki, would people be willing to contribute thoughts on game specific entries after they played them? Also, still taking recommendations. I've been looking at the software on and off and I've come to like (to a degree, I suppose) - Screwturn (http://www.screwturn.eu/MainPage.ashx) (sandbox (http://www.screwturn.eu/Sandbox.ashx)) and to less a degree, Tikiwiki (http://tikiwiki.org/tiki-index.php?page=Home).

A few years back I wrote my own Wiki... ...actually I did it twice, the first time, just a couple of perl scripts storing flat file pages in a page directory and then I wrote a PHP DB backed system that kept versions in DB and had some other nifty features, some of which didn't pan out. The PHP system I never fixed after moving my personal sites to a dedicated server... ...but I still use the old perl script setup (it's really simple, just a couple of perl scripts). I run it on local server as a PIM and even have our work use one on a private LAN that is even HTTP password protected. Here is a public version of it - http://chocoman.org/genesis

I did mess with MediaWiki a bit and it would be OK but it's a major PITA to customize and the default settings leave much to be desired. And I've tried some of the others - PHPWiki, PMWiki, etc.. and found them all lacking, or did not see any significant improvement over running my own minimal perl script setup...

Sure, I'd put in a few sentences. Might be fun. It'd be like a message board, only different.

More like collaborative review system than yet another encyclopedia?

I would definitely be interested in such an endeavor.

As long as it was moderated, it might be interesting.

Oh, and we need to win prizes for contributing - or a monthly stipend. (Who writes for free these days?)

Dingoes for everybody!

That actually sounds like a pretty snazzy thing - a collaborative review thing with the myriad of viewpoints of people here might be kind of awesome. It would be something I can see contributing to.

Yeah, we would have to heavily mod the thing. It would probably also be a good idea to "isolate" each contribution, and not refer to past contributions. Then we would get a discussion, which is kind of what we already have.

Doesn't that go against the whole point of wiki?

It would be more like a list of peer reviews, not a discussion - that's what we do here.

I thought the point of a wiki was to post just enough "near-truths" to make it believable to the masses.

So, this wiki thing. Yes, each entry would be about a seperate game. I'm trying to find software where people can add their username and add their post under or above a previous persons post, so we can have multiple opinions on each game that has been inputted. In due time, this sort of thing would add up to a whole lot of information.

Additionally, if the software was tabbable as in, multiple pages for a single item, we could add system requirements / scores / other stuff as well. Oh, and a gallery of course, evne if it's just pics/screencaps we take.

Basically, I'm asking for too much, I think.

What is the name of this Wiki?

[edit]

And domain name?

That was the $64,000 question, Schild.

I demand an answer!

What.

There isn't one installed.

Yeah, I mean.....What will it be called? I know you've reserved like a hundred domain names.

[Late Edit]

Or am I misunderstanding something here? Is this just going to be a minor extension to F13.net?

I was under the impression that you were undertaking some big reference/review project. Expanding the empire, if you will. Something with a larger public presence.

That's an interesting notion. Hmm.

I like the idea of a game wiki, and no doubt would even contribute a few entries.  Best put that pent up editing energy of mine to use somewhere.

As for what kind of Wiki software to use, I've no clue.  Security and stability are about all I'd demand of a wiki.

Just noticed Screwturn is IIS. Shame, won't work.

Name Options:
dodongo.com
gamefroth.com
gamerdiaries.com
kuribosshoe.com
lakituscloud.com
polsvoice.com
prinnyland.com (lol)
prinnies.com (loller)
seaofgehenna.com
thedarksenate.com (lollest)
themagicwhistle.com

That just about covers the game specific domains I have.

What's wrong with wiki.f13.net?

Nothing?

Gamerdiaries and Gamefroth seem like obvious choices, but only because most of the other ones are based off someone else's license (they're all great btw).

I like the Dark Senate. It would kind of fit the purpose of the wiki. Perhaps....wiki.f13.net/Darksenate?

The Dark Senate is a direct reference to Disgaea though, which makes it tough to use. Diaries and Froth, are, yea, obvious choices. I simply can't pick between the two.

Well, you could always try and wait for the dev/publisher to say something.  :evil:

Snip Snap is pretty neat. (http://snipsnap.org/space/Sandbox)

The odds of Nippon Ichi saying something is small Strazos. The problem is the name is too specific.

Bukkakeonrine.com still available?  :-D

I'd prefer wiki.f13.net or prinnies.com.

bukkakeonrine is still available, yes. Not exactly worksafe though as a name, is it?

I think the point with not going with Dark Senate is that one wants to be able to cover more than just Disgaea.  That, and you don't want to inadvertently end up a repository for Flonne and Etna porn.

Save bukkakeonrine and the necessary registry falsification that would go with owning that domain for the next time you need to perform blackmail.  It'll be the gift that keeps on giving.

Something along the lines of illustrating that this Wiki is the only thing standing between the suck of the gaming universe and the common man may make up the best domain name.

No Java. I'd rather work on PHP than that monstrosity.

Trippy gets to choose now! Lol, I'm so bad at this.

prinnies.f13.net seemed pretty good.

You could do 'gamewiki.f13.net' or www.gamewiki.com or reviews.f13.net or gamescore.f13.net (gamescore.com?).

Gamescore sounds cool if you let everyone score the game with their own review, with the average score shown for each game. Could even break it down into categories 'graphics, gameplay, audio, multiplayer' and let users do their own scoring.

But, that's not really a wiki anymore. Sorry.

Edit: I know IGN and those lamers do something like this already, but we could be better!

I definately want people to be able to give their own opinion and some sort of rating on a game. I really don't know how to approach this shit though. I'm treading in the "make your own software" area here and I'm not one who can do that.

Waste of time.  Hell, how many people here write articles (for f13)?


We are too jaded and too opinionated for this to ever be anything.

Saying things like that will drop you out of my favor, asshat.

Just saying, it would require a bit of work from you guys.  A method to peer to peer edit while giving the lurkers/low posters a fair chance in while balancing for the cliques would take some heavy editing.  Assuming you wanted it to be successful.  I dunno, I have a few beers in me so not sure.

Thanks for posting in a meaningful thread while drunk.

Edit: Yea, I'm pretty pissed about other things right now. But then, you're not helpin.

With judging/reviewing games, especially by many people for each, "The Dark Senate" fits the concept pretty well.  Granted I am a Disgaea fangirl...

Of the two gamer sites, I like gamefroth better.  How about "The Frothing Gamer" though?  It flows better to my ears.

Frothing Gamer implies that the gamer himself is bubbling at the mouth rather than frothing for games.

As in, a gamer who happens to froth. Not "one who froths for x" where x is games.

Also, it's really wordy.

SnipSnap has a lot of problems with scalability and stability and crazy java vm processes running amuck.  A friend of mine gave up on it and wrote her own replacement in Python.  I'm not sure how ready for prime time it is, but she's been running her wiki/blog on it for a while now.

http://snippy.ceejbot.com/wiki/show/snippy

I have written two different small wiki/cms type things but both of them suck in different ways and I keep giving up on them because of how miserable web application development makes me.  Embedded systems are so much less stressful.

-Q

I've never heard of it before today, but apparently work uses TWiki (http://twiki.org/) which is a cgi-bin perl script wiki thing. Seems easy enough to set up and actually pretty cool.