TDN vs Resource section

#1 1. Seems to be fixed now, can you please confirm?

2. Clicked on the talk link recently...? :) We have this forum area as well. In general if there's something you want changed, you should just change it! This IS a wiki, after all.

3. Google search helps finding things tremendously. Have you tried using the categorization system? It helps, although it requires individual articles to classify themselves... but as you find things you can stick them in the appropriate categories (or make more).

4. The by-product docs are meant to give each product a notion of what's relevant for their product... If you find an article useful... link it! It's a small price to pay for good docs, right? :)

Thank you so much for this well written set of comments. I'd really like to learn more about how you think TDN can improve.

#2 1. A quick test of the login system appears to work. However, it is still necessary to login to TDN separately from the rest of the site. This breaks the seamless experience and makes searching more difficult. For example, I searched for "physics" (something covered on TDN) using the "search" button on the top right of the new main page. After clicking on the link to the TDN, the page that came up told me the article was restricted content - because I wasn't logged into TDN despite being logged into the GG main site. Logging in did make the article show up, but it's still one more step and a separate login.

The same test using the "search" area on the TDN main page uncovers a bug - if you search for "physics" *while logged out*, then click the login link on the top right of the page, you get the following error:

------------------------------------
Search results
From TDN
For query ""

For more information about searching TDN, see Searching TDN.
Badly formed search query
------------------------------------

TDN forgets what I searched for before I logged in.

2. I would venture to say that the "talk" link isn't used much. It certainly isn't as easy to figure out as the "Post a reply" in-your-face area that the resources have. Forums are fine, but somebody has to create a thread and link to it in the article. Very few articles have corresponding threads. Perhaps if a thread were automatically created in the forum for new articles on the wiki?

3. Google search is fine if I know what I'm looking for - I'm more interested in a well-organized "Browse" system, like the resources have. Sometimes you just want to browse...

4. Same comments as #3 apply.

I admit to finding the wiki concept a little strange - I've seen other projects attempt to use wikis, generally with about the same level of success as TDN has had to date. People seem to be slow to move to a new system when they like the old one. I'm a new enough GG member that I'm not seriously attached to the resources, but it's hard not to notice that the resources are considerably more useful than TDN at present.

On the topic of improving TDN, there is one other thing I'd really like to see: a way of dating the submissions. In the resource section, I've found that the date of the comments and article are very important, as some resources were written for earlier versions of the engine and are either obsolete or require significant modification to work on the new version. TDN doesn't seem to have an obvious way to tell when an entry was added (yes, I can see the "History" button - but it would be better if at least the article had a date on the link to it).

If I think of any other issues I'll let you know. I've found the articles on GG to be invaluable, and I want them to continue to be as useful in the future as they are now.

#3 1. Yes, the logins are a bit goofy. We're running TDN on a completely seperate server in order to help keep both it and the GG site responsive. As a result, keeping it integrated with our existing authentication system involves some gyrations. At least it's not rejecting logins for 2 minutes out of every 5, right? ;)

The search issue is temporary due to the beta state of TDN. When we leave beta, which will happen early next year, and start serving content to the general public, many pages will be available to the public, including the search page, which will fix this problem. Thank you for the thorough bug report, though!

2. We've set up this forum area for people to use, and we also have the talk system. We're sort of curious to see what people gravitate towards using. Each have their advantanges and disadvantages and the debates rage endlessly even amongst the most mature wiki users as to which is best. I doubt we're going to make any more than a local determination. :)

3&4. So what's wrong with the current hub pages, except that they aren't fully updated? They're set up for easy browsing. Other indexes can be created as well, as needed. :)

TDN is definitely lagging behind resources at the moment, which is understandable because resources have been around for five years, while TDN has been around for a few months! Even if we put the full resources of GG behind writing TDN docs full time for a year, we wouldn't make a dent in that. This stuff takes time.

TDN is not about embracing the wiki concept - although wikis are tremendously powerful - but about making it easy to maintain a living body of documents. Hitting "edit" and typing things is a lot easier than rebuilding docbook, then waiting for a limited timeslot from the web guy to get it live again. I just wrote an overview of the collision system in Torque to answer a forum post and stuck it in TDN, where anyone can read and update it, rather than letting it be lost in the forums. (tdn.garagegames.com/wiki/TGE/Collision)

If you check the bottom of TDN pages, it notes when that page was last modified. If it's important to people, I can move that to be more visible in the layout.

Thanks for taking the time to cover all this!

#4 After coming back to my computer this morning, I had the login problem happen to me again. I haven't tested this thoroughly, but I'll describe what happened to me:

I left my browser open on an article long enough for my TDN session to time out.

I then noticed a spelling error in the article and hit the "edit" link to fix it.

I got the following error:

-----------------------------------------
Only RTS Starter Kit owners can access this content.
From TDN


Retrieved from "http://tdn.garagegames.com/wiki/RTS/CommandMenu"
MediaWiki
-----------------------------------------

Then I hit the "login" button on the top right.

I was taken to the GG main page. <----- this is the real bug!

#5 Yes, right now the fix isn't complete. If all is well then for about one second out of every 5 minutes, there'll be login glitches. Rick and I are working to path this as well.

But the logins should be significantly more reliable now - before they were broken for nearly 40% of the time!

#6 Hi,

The login has been working fine for me (Firefox 1.5). One question, though - Is there a reason why we can't edit the main T2D page? I can edit from within some of the tutorials, but when I click EDIT anywhere on that main page I get:

This content is restricted to Torque 2D owners. Please click here for more information on private content.

and the editing window comes up without any content in it...

#7 Does it come up completely empty, or does it have:

__NOTOC__   
   
{{Template:T2DScript}}   
    
[[Category:T2D]]

in it? If so you should click on the Template:T2DScript link at the bottom of the edit page, and edit that - it's getting included.

#8 Are there any major updates planned for the TGE section of TDN anytime soon? That place has more broken links than the resource section.

#9 Yes, we have some significant updates that should be happening after T2D 1.1 finishes launching. There are also some tech tasks. Right now I'm a little overloaded (my basement is flooding...) so things are going super slow at work. :)

#10 I'm working on some new articles now, and once Elixer comes active you'll see a lot of the empty placeholder links go away!