river osprey
A common complaint I've noticed within this server is the lack of official documentation on features/systems with Unreal Engine. A lot of community members have created excellent blogs/websites where they share their findings, post learning material, share other resources, etc. Which is great to have that information shared with others, and great to have people willing to do so in the community. However, all this information is scattered. Everyone has their own website for their library of knowledge. I believe this to be a problem with no current solution.
I want to plant the idea of adding a catalog of sorts to the Unreal Source website. This is to hopefully increase the discoverability of community made resources. Essentially, a "pretty-fied" and organized depot of links to these community resources. The information from those blogs would not be placed on the Unreal Source website. This catalog could present the information in the form of "cards" which have a title, a little description maybe, some tags for organization and discoverability, and when clicked on they take you to the that place. Similar information that you can see in google search results with the title and a little preview of what's on the site. Visually probably something akin to how Kaos has his individual blogs set up on his website: https://www.thegames.dev/?cat=4. It would just be the information pulled from the link rather than scraping it from the content of the actual sites.
Who's going to add those "cards"?
- I'm not an experienced web-dev, but ideally individuals would create a "PR", where they fill out a form with a title, link, description, whatever else information seems necessary, and assign a tag(s) to the link. Then Pfist approves the "PR" (I believe no human approval could lead to chaos as people could submit whatever shit they wanted) and some fancy web-dev automation tech auto-magically creates the card
What about the Unreal Community Wiki?
- It is not well organized, nor populated. It is a 3rd party site that stores the information itself. It is more of a burden on the author to remember that they wrote information on a 3rd party site and to go back and update it.
What if people don't want you to scrape data from their blogs and post it else where?
- The catalog should not scrape anymore information from the individual links other than what you can see in that little preview in google search results (Sorry for lack of terminology here)
Things like the Wiki, Forums, and other information sharing hubs failing because the information is out of date?
- I would expect that to be less common as the information lives on the individuals personal websites. It is much more of a hassle to even remember that you posted some information on some 3rd party website, then to also find it and update it. Here, the information lives on the individuals personal websites where they tend to be much more likely to keep up to date. Obviously it can still go out of date but I expect that to be much less common.
Who's going to maintain this?
- Um, automation magic! Seriously, I don't know squat about maintaining a website. I imagine some tech for creating some type of PR system and automation on creating the individual cards exists, and with those in place there wouldn't be much maintenance I imagine (I say with 0 experience in maintaining a website).
How do we prevent junk from being submitted? Who's going to vet all that?
- I don't think we could do that. You could discuss having a comment section for each link, ratings, reviews, etc., but that all just adds more work in developing, implementing, and maintaining a feature like this.
Please feel free to leave any and all feedback, critiques, questions, etc., that cross your mind regarding this 🙂
Thank you to everyone in #programmer-hangout earlier who acted as a responsive rubber duck and bringing up possible issues when I was spitballing this idea 😄
slender path
tight river
pale spade