New Community Wiki and Other Changes

[Akkadius]

All,

I am taking the time to make announce some of the new changes that have recently taken place as well as what is to come and how I/we are going to need everyone's help who is capable.

Loginserver Changes

Rogean has put in some long hours making sure that everything would go smooth for this migration as a lot of other behind the scenes things had to go in place to make this happen.

As you will notice now, while you are logged into your forum account you can change your Loginserver account passwords once you are verified.

We all know that it has been a long time coming, but I can tell you that it works pretty damn well.



I shouldn't have to say it, but if you share your account information with others. You are at your own mercy of losing your account. We don't have time to work through all of the account issues that interpolate with players so you are doing this on your own accord.

Thanks Rogean for getting this in place, even though it took forever (I love you slacker) (No homo)

New Wiki

Here is another very exciting change to our community. Forever we have had our existing Wiki which has served its purpose for myself and many others. But it obviously lacks many things, of which the major things are security and usability.

I'm involved with many many projects, of which I have had the exciting opportunity to create a Wiki engine inside a management portal framework that is extremely flexible and allows us to create content with ease and on top of it put it in place in this community to get all of the users feedback on it and grow it with usability and simplicity in mind. Organize and collaborate.

Please do not take this lightly that being able to organize information and collaborate is extremely important in this community for several reasons. One, this is not a business but a organization built on extremely talented individuals built on open source beliefs that have allowed this community to get to the point that it has. The obvious and ultimate thing that everyone shares in this community is its passion for EverQuest and all of those talented individuals that brought that to life (Good with the bad).

There is an incredible amount of information that is around this project and a good majority of it is tucked in everyone's mind. This will allow us to grow and prosper as we allow everyone to extend our existing mentality of open source and sharing our work so that this community can grow and prosper as a whole.

Work in Progress

The Wiki engine itself is at a very use-able and to what I've received from feedback (Very solid). I have been told how wonderful it is to use the editor and the engine once those have been able to get their hands on it and try it out.

Please, also keep in mind that we are in the progress of adding content and cleansing the old Wiki of invalid or old information. We are all doing this as our time permits, and it would be great for those who are reading this that if we can get some serious and dedicated individuals to help us get a lot of this documentation in place.

The Link:
http://wiki.eqemulator.org/i?M=Wiki

You can login as a Guest for view only, you cannot register right now. If you want to get an editing account setup I can get you setup with one, but I need to know what you plan on doing to help put together the Wiki. Do this via a PM on the forums. Do not waste my time if you don't plan to contribute. If you want to view you can use the Guest login.

Content Creation
For the sake of getting content and ideas in place. I ask that everyone who has ideas for what kind of pages should be in the Wiki, please reply to this thread so we can get your ideas on the tracking page. It could be anything and everything, this page was JUST started for this thread so we can start making forward direction. If we all pull together on this we should be able to make some fast progress.

http://wiki.eqemulator.org/p?Wiki_Content_Tracking

Using the Wiki

The Wiki is embedded in a management framework that consists of modules. The modules that are currently in place right now are the Timeline (Events), Pastebin (Code pasties) and the Wiki.

Whenever something is created or added in the Wiki you have the opportunity to see the event on the Timeline. This will soon be extended into E-Mail notifications on when content has been adjusted so that everyone can see when a document has been changed. This will help us effectively stay organized and up to date on what is changing.

With this, keep in mind that I am currently and actively adding new features such as Table of Contents, page subscriptions, page level functions, tooltip functions, account handling and all kinds of other things that I have on my hit list. Recommendations on simple functionality of the Wiki are welcome and are open to reply on this same thread. The other developers in the EQEmu community have already openly expressed their requests for new things, but for the most part the feedback on the usability of the Wiki itself has been extremely positive.

Anything and everything can be put in the Wiki. The content editor is extremely flexible and you are not very limited to what you are able to do to create content.

The Markup

The markup is extremely simple. The only current markup implemented is links to other pages.

Which consists of [[How to Setup a Server]]. You can also have this link to a page look different than the actual page name [[How to Setup a Server|Setting up a Server]] - on the page will simply look like 'Setting up a Server'.

Otherwise the editor is extremely easy to use and most people have had no problem figuring out how to use it. You can copy from other sources, web, word, excel docs and maintain it all in the editor. It eliminates the barriers to entry as well as using it as a tool to empower our community.

I look forward to hearing from everyone on what we want to see added to the Wiki that isn't already there. You can easily search for content that isn't on pages by using the Wiki search. This will search both page title and body content.

I need to attend some other things but I hope this post has shed some light, clarification and inspiration for those who read it.