Server Set Up Guides: Can we do better?
 

Heyas,

I wanted to start a discussion about how server set up guides are done/handled/maintained. My understanding of the current practice is that community members have written there own, published to forum/wiki and occasionally they get updated. Most guides are claim to be 'complete' and take the user from start to finish.

I am wondering if we can not come up with a better way to do this. For example a group of us could agree to make a 'master guide' which multiple people are responsible for. DB guys handle all the set up, possible errors. Coding people handle set up, compiling etc. Each step in the set up will have its own wiki page and the people involved will be responsible for maintaining their pages. If the workload for creation and maintainable is spread among a number of people then ideally we would be able to keep it up to date.

A special forum could be made for server set up and configuration where hopefully the folks responsible for maintenance will read and post.

In general I think there are too many guides and the result is just confusing. Ideally if this process was stream-lined we may encourage more people to make servers!

This has been discussed before. Make a guide, put it on the wiki, keep it updated. Simple eh? Well, nobody has done it yet.

Simpler said than done, as they say. I guess my central premise is getting multiple people involved, try to keep communication going.

Doesn't take a committee to make a guide.

i started to try to document everything related to the quest system and the database once, then i realized how much it started to feel like work instead of something i enjoyed.

I am just suggesting a different approach.

Do you think if you had others helping you that it would have been easier and less like work?

no. that would just mean i'd have to work with other people who have a different way of doing things, which generally leads to even more work. besides, once you start using terms like "responsibility", volunteering sounds less enjoyable. of course, that is just my opinion.

regardless of any of that, if you think what you are suggesting will stick, write up a treatise and start a wiki on the subject. that's the beauty of wikis and community projects.

i will agree that forum posts are probably one of the worst places for guides (not easily maintained, and never by more than one person -- unless moderators are involved), except for the people can't be bothered to read wikis or use a search engine... and those are the people constantly updated guides tend to help the most.

Part of the problem is that there is no one guide that will work on any system. The differences between setting up on Windows vs Linux alone are too great to even consider putting both into the same guide without just causing lots of confusion and clutter. There are even plenty of differences between Windows XP, Vista/7/8, and Server 2008. To make sure all guides are accurate for all OS's, it means people have to go through the complete setup on each possible OS. And that needs to be done everytime a major change takes place in the setup, which means a ton of work.

There have been a good number of changes lately and there will be even more coming soon. Once the source gets moved from the SVN to git, I imagine someone will get a new guide written for Windows. I might try to update one of the Linux guides as well if I have the time. I just went through a full setup on Linux and it wasn't bad at all and still only deviates from the old guide a bit here and there. Of course, I have done that setup many times lol.

The EMu is going through a major change right now on several fronts.

It would probably be best to wait until the issues of the new setup are worked out before trying to establish a new wiki on it, otherwise you may end up
changing everything that you put into it.

Thank you. So assuming I went forward with the idea, the guide would need to be split in two+ for some parts. I assume that a lot of the DB related information would be platform agnostic.

Good call. For now though I am happy to just throw around ideas and make notes. There are people within the community who have such deep knowledge in certain areas and those are the folks who I want to draw into this discussion- So that they may judge and weigh the ideas.

Disney wifi == no fun

This is what I was going to wait for before beginning one for Windows unless someone beat me to the punch which would be fine by me. Well that and once the Disney magic was over. Minnie mouse turned down my proposal today, so I'm in a bit of a slump over that.. I hope I recover by the time I'm back.

not necessarily. especially given the fact that there are several different ways to create a database and source in data. command line, different utilities (which may or not be available on a given platform), etc.

as an aside, i hope you haven't taken anything i've said the wrong way. i'm all for your idea. i suppose i'm just a bit jaded. in general, it seems that the easier you make something like this for someone, the less drive they have to figure out how things work and why... and if they don't have this basic understanding, they end up doing something wrong and have to ask. then, do you add something else to your documentation or do you politely suggest they read the fine manual?

some examples of this would be the countless quest scripts that use multiple if statements instead of if/elsif/else chains. i've also seen some people say that if/elsif statements won't work without a default else block (not true at all). returning items inside of a conditional, so that all unused items are eaten if one of the conditions is met is also a big issue. as is copying and pasting similar snippets of code multiple times instead of using a short loop.

none of this is really related to the emulator itself, but a lack of understanding of the language used for scripting. regardless, some of them are documented in the forums or the wiki... and some of them are wrong, but some of them are style choices (like how to manage your database - i use the cli or mysql workbench).

ok, i'm done venting now. :)

Did I take it the wrong way? Yes :p I look at your post count, then at mine and wonder if I would be jaded too heh.

In regards to making things easy and a persons drive to understand how things work etc. I think thats a hard one. For me I would love to lower any barriers to entry for server development. We may end up with more posts with scripting issues as you suggest.