Why are there so many broken links on RPGC?? I tried to email the maintainer of the Fire Emblem shrine regarding an error in one of the walkhtrough pages (by using the “Contact Maintainer” link), and it bounced back saying that user doesn’t exist. So then I tried to report the problem on the main site (by way of the “Contact Us” link on the “Staff” page). But that one (staff@rpgclassics.com) also bounced, saying the user doesn’t exist. I then tried clicking on the “Join” link, and that one came up 404!
Normally, this means that a site is no longer being maintained or has been abandoned. So imagine my surprise when I clicked on the “Forum” link and found tons of recent activity!
So I’m just curious, why isn’t even the main site being properly maintained? I don’t mean this as an insult or a criticism, mind you. Just curious, as it is a bit unusual for a site that has this much activity. Are you short on manpower or something? I offered to lend a hand in my email, but of course that bounced back with the rest of the message. No doubt there are probably other people who have tried to report similar problems on the website but never found their way to the forums as I just did. At very least, I would strongly suggest updating the contact links.
So you’re saying the people who did run the site have abandoned it then? That’s very unfortunate considering how potentially good a resource this site is for gamers.
Don’t bother contacting the maintainers. If the maintainer links are the only things that are broken, then its not a big deal. If you have questions or comments , come to the forums and we’ll sort it out from here. The join link was probably killed the last time the site went offline because of a random catastrophe and we had to reformat the entrance. Comments, Nulani?
As for the rest of RPGC, those of us who ran the show and kept the site rolling grew up. For example, 984 is finishing law school and I’m in the last year of my PhD in experimental medicine You have to understand that the entire format of the site depends on people coming in and contributing content. When the demographics of the internet changed, people were less interested in the format we produced content in and it became very difficult to generate shrines on recent games because they were very large. We eventually moved towards the wiki model, but we had too much inertia and too many of us had moved on to assist in the transition and it was done too late. Other sites did it before us. You can easily find wikia for various games like Dragon Age and Mass Effect as a result.
Ahh, if I’ve heard this story once I’ve heard it a thousand times. That really was the epitaph of the pre-wiki resource site model.
Still, I think you may be underestimating just how much traffic you guys get from Google alone (though perhaps not if you have Analytics installed, though I didn’t notice the JS for it on any of the pages I looked at). In any case, there’s no reason why you couldn’t convert it to a wiki format now. I mean, the Wikipedia clone software most commonly in use would be a pain in terms of preserving the design layout and converting all the existing shrines into the new format, though a simple PHP script could parse through all that and do it for you with surprisingly little effort.
Then you could rely on the community at large to add to and maintain the site. If your SE rankings are any indication, you should have more than enough diverse traffic to accomodate this model easily.
It was killed when we transitioned e-mail servers, yes. No one was checking them so it made more sense to let them bounce than simply eat e-mails. And, yes, we are aware that we receive surprisingly large amounts of traffic. Unfortunately, even automatically converting shrines would require time, and even then, we’d still have lots of odd bits and ends that’d require fixing. Plus we can’t really convert the shrines against the will of the shrines and some have actually opposed it. It’s been some while since we lasted aired the idea though.
And we do actually have a Wiki. It’s been sluggish work to adapt it though.
Why not simply imploy an “opt-out” system? Send a notice to the shrines or whatever, and any that oppose it will be exempted from the conversion. That should take care of the politics of it, anyway.
I see what you mean on the wiki, but it looks like you’ve been trying to do it manually. The goal I think would be to preserve, at least for the initial conversion, the layout/etc as it appeared on each individual shrine. Furthermore, you would want to configure it so that the URL for each shrine is preserved as well for SEO purposes. If you went with this approach, it would then simply be a matter of translating the HTML of each shrine into the wiki markup language. Aside from the surrounding nav wrapper looking a bit different, each shrine should come out about the same as they are now. Only now users will be able to edit the shrines directly (including fixing any minor anomalies that might come up during conversion).
You’re assuming we coded the HTML with anything resembling quality or even consistency. The shrines are a mishmash of coding styles due to our insistence that everything be hand-coded. Most markup is full of FONT tags rather than actual semantic markup or CSS. There was an automated tool I made at one point, but even that couldn’t handle everything we threw at it, and I doubt it’s still functional, and I don’t have the time or desire to revisit it. Any real attempt at automation is doomed to end up looking terrible.
Hmm well there is another option. There are Wiki scripts out there that, unlike Wikipedia clone, actually do fully support HTML/CSS. The most noteworthy example is TikiWiki. I’m pretty sure it can handle depreciated stuff like font tags as well.
I think there are tools that can remove all html tags and keep the content, though that would mean having to reformat everything wiki-style, I suppose.
That won’t be necessary though if you just use a wiki software that allows straight HTML. There are wiki packages designed to do this very thing we’re talking about. In fact, before Wikipedia came around, a “wiki” typically referred to a website that allowed community editing of its HTML contents. This is a pretty common thing.
So I tested out some of this HTML to Wiki conversion stuff earlier. Personally, I got some mixed results. I used 2-3 different converters, and tested a few pages’ source code from the shrines. For something like weapon/armor charts, it’s not too bad with little to minimal editing to sort things out. For more complicated stuff (like pictures in tables, and stuff with fixed width, etc.), some things would have to be redone to have stuff looking straight.
One issue you’d definitely have is images. Unless there was a way to mass batch everything to Persephone, you’d have to reupload images from the shrines. (Unless this particular wiki stuff would be on the actual server where the shrines are or whatever.)
Unless I’m totally missing something here…am I?
My idea was always that we should start by creating a few wikis for new, high-profile games, and try to do those really well, before we go about converting the entire site (since, in any case, some people might not want their shrines converted). I still think that would be a good way to proceed – perhaps the release of FF13 would allow us to revive that idea, since we’ll have roughly an even start with the other gaming sites?
What were you volunteering to do, Kris? Certainly your offer to help is potentially very valuable.
I’m not sure yet. I do this sorta thing for a living and my time is limited, so I’ll need to give it some thought. If we can come up with a solution that y’all like, then I think I’d be willing to handle the grunt work for ya in terms of setting up the wiki and working out a batch conversion mechanism. I like to do some pro-bono work for the community now and then and I think this would be worthy of that.
Let me do a little experimenting on my own and I’ll try to get a more definitive answer for ya in the next few days.
