Hacker News Reader

Comment by sytelus | Hacker News Reader

This is bad, very bad. A complete and utter disrespect for people who poured in their blood and sweat in creating the content for them and for free. Migrating only "top" content is insufficient and so ignorant. The value of wiki is almost entirely in long tail. Vast majority of Unreal engine is undocumented where you get all kind of issues few have seen before. If it wasn't for the community creating content for them, it would be unusable for many users. To salt the wound, they aren't even telling you exactly why they are doing this. Why making read-only archive is so hard, at very minimum. Didn't expect this from Tom Sweeney's company.

View on HN

I posted recently about how bad ue4’s c++ documentation is, and how it drives people to Unity. They have been promising to make it better for 7ish years from what I gather in forums. What is with them

Looks like the post got updated with some reasoning:

> Why can’t we put a read-only archive online currently? The Wiki, even in it’s read-only state, was presenting security risks, and it was deemed necessary to take it offline.

So crawl the Wiki pages, grind out static HTML copies of them, and make those available. Not many security risks associated with static HTML.

What am I missing here?

The only other "security risk" I can imagine such a read-only wiki could present is if it documents something that could be considered "risky" from a security perspective. That would make this more of a censorship situation.

> We still have the data, and as mentioned above, we will work to migrate the top content into various official resources. In the meantime, we’re investigating how we can make this content available, even in a rudimentary way.

This indicates otherwise.

I did this for a forum I used to host for many years. I crawled versions for people (using a user with the same rights as they did so it wouldn't contain anything extra) with static assets and referred images and zipped that up, so they could browse the old posts locally and nostalgize. It worked really well.

Maybe the people at UE need to be taught how to use wget.

Static content needs a web server and a way to move the content to the server (ftp, sftp, rsync..), and ssl certification, and a DNS entry, and DDOS protection, and a way to manage credentials for those things. It's not zero risk at all. There are plenty of ways to attack a static site. The only way static is safer is because you're not executing scripts on the server (which is a massive win, I don't want to down play that aspect), everything else is the same as a dynamic site.

That's still a lame excuse though. They could have outsourced all the "hard" stuff to a free Netlify account.

Like what problem specifically that you cannot mitigate? If you can't just host static contents on a new empty server and get it going, how does the rest of the world work at all?

That is just an excuse.

I read it's very easy to that nowadays with Chrome's Puppeteer.

Easier still with wget perhaps? https://www.gnu.org/software/wget/manual/wget.html#Very-Adva...

How can it be a security risk?

Turn both the DB and the disk read-only and your security issues should mostly be solved.

This kind of crap is why I will always prefer a local archive and use the hell out of youtube-dl and similar tools.

I'm in a similar boat. What other similar tools have you found yourself using? For example, Ive been learning the hell out of wget, but I find my tool library lacking or lacking in trust.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com