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Stop messing with the main page
weapon_portalgun article and not actually find what they are looking for. Not only that, but Valve clearly has lost any interest in this wiki whatsoever. This also leads to why the other content regarding reaching out to admins on this wiki is there. This wiki's software is incredibly out of date and is no longer supported whatsoever. I understand where you are coming from Wazanator, but you are essentially thinking way too deeply about this. If Valve does find out, then they will most likely not even care or embrace it, as they realize that people are active and care about this wiki and that they are doing good things with it. Think about it. This is a development wiki that intends to help out developers and mapmakers with games. Treating it like some high-up, we-need-to-preserve-this-it-is-a-wonder-of-the-modern-world is not at all what this wiki is about. The main page is the least of our concerns. What's the difference between linking to Wikipedia and linking to the Portal Wiki? They are both other wikis, not created by Valve, that contain information that is not appropriate on this wiki. Linking to an unofficial Discord I understand is not very professional, however linking to other professional wikis should not be so heavily policed.
I should point out that Valve has always been relatively hands-off when it comes to things like the wiki, SDKs and modding resources in general. Just because their employees aren't editing pages on a regular basis does not mean the wiki has been abandoned, they simply expect users to understand what the wiki is for. See the Valve_Developer_Community:About page for what exactly that is.
To wit: they made the wiki so modders could have a place to put various modding resources like tutorials, documentation and samples. You're not supposed to spend so much time doing administrative stuff.
Modifying the Main Page to get their attention will not work and only gives spammers ideas. I've made note of this vulnerability and suggested that it be dealt with appropriately.
Please refrain from starting an edit war over the Main Page. It should be reverted to its original state before it was modified. That means it should have a 2-column layout so the bottom text isn't pushed so far down. The Valve Technology section should be in the right-hand-side column. You should have their attention now anyway so there is no need to continue displaying the modified contents.
My advice would be to focus on adding and improving modding resources. I help modders out on a regular basis and the most common problems i see are:
- Lack of good introduction to setting up level editors for Half-Life 1, specifically build programs and directories
- Lack of information on making a Source engine mod today (Source SDK is obsolete, Source SDK 2013 is the latest but requires Visual Studio 2013, uses the obsolete Valve Project Creator tool, etc)
- Lack of knowledge on things like Windows Explorer, the command line, batch scripts, etc
- Lack of information on making models for Half-Life 1 (which modeling tool to use, how to compile models, what QC files are, etc)
- Which programs can be used to preview game assets (many people still use Jed's Model Viewer, which has been obsolete for a long time)
Simply put, existing resources are out of date and don't cover topics that were once learned simply by using a computer; since new users are typically introduced to computers by way of mobile devices they lack this experience so it has to be covered as a separate tutorial that establishes baseline knowledge that other tutorials build on top of.
We over at the The Whole Half-Life community have been working on improving our own wiki which contains a lot of older modding resources, including archived versions of Valve Editing Resource Center (VERC) tutorials. The VERC was taken offline after this wiki went up. We have a thread about improving our wiki here: https://twhl.info/thread/view/20342
Note that the existing tutorials on the TWHL wiki are meant to remain for archival purposes. The intention is to create new tutorials to supersede the old ones.
Of course there is a lot of overlap between both wikis.
A lot of GoldSource engine resources were hosted on the Sven Co-op forums but those were taken offline. We're still waiting for them to make an archive available so the various resources can be catalogued and added to the wiki. Some things can be recovered through the Internet Archive but a lot of that stuff was never archived.
I'd recommend focusing on improving articles that cover setting up level editors for GoldSource and Source, making a Source mod with today's available SDKs (including notes about the older Source SDK tool and Alien Swarm), and things like how passing command line parameters works since that seems to be a common issue. Special note should be made of the errors you'll get when using newer versions of Visual Studio since each SDK version uses toolset-specific hacks to redirect memory allocations which causes confusing errors coming from `memoverride.cpp`.
It may also help to have an automated tool that can scan level editor configurations for bad configurations like executing hlvis before hlbsp or executing a compile tool multiple times, but that can be complicated since the configuration is stored differently for each editor.
Also, a lot of important information is contained in old news and update posts contained on the old Half-Life website and steampowered.com. When Valve overhauled their content delivery pipeline in 2013 the old posts were not carried over so having a complete archive for the games would be very helpful.
EDIT: Does Valve have a community manager?
On a related note: The inclusion of a link to 'Necessary Features'. While the page itself is fine, the fact that it is on the homepage is not. I wholeheartedly agree with you that the inclusion of such a link on the homepage is unmerited, unwanted and should be moved elsewhere or outright deleted.
I often improving the wiki together with some other editors and investing my time and effort. At the same time, Valve couldn't even change the damn template on the Main Page on request for so many years. Do you think I care what they have protected there if they are not able to fix even that? It will be great if they finally update the list of moderators and generally spend at least a week improving the wiki (hell, that's enough to hire an office cleaner), but for now all that can happen is Valve's return to creating pages about Counter-Strike 2 Workshop Tools (for this moment, I placed a link to the list of Necessary Features on the Main Page).
Btw, why didn't you delete the Team Fortress 2 wiki, but deleted everything else? You don't understand what you're doing. I hope you'll find the right answer when you look at the "Valve-controlled material".
