Looking through the good old Lua and modules forum, I've been discovering a number of things I never knew, and some which I only found out myself. The trouble with the forum is that while many of the stuff there is very useful, it's extremely unstructured, and very difficult to find out how to go about finding something you're looking for if you're not sure exactly what you're looking for in the first place!

So... What I propose is the creation over here on the wiki, of either a compilation of useful links to explanatory threads posted on the forum, or actually a movement of the explanations to vastly expand the module makers help section of the documentation. I don't exactly have all that much time at the moment, so I'm inclined to go for the former, at least to start with.

Does anyone have any ideas to add, or suggestions, or any other comments? -- TheFalcon

CosmicGerbil Do you need help doing this? I'd like to help if I can be of any use.

TheFalcon: Help would indeed be welcome. I have not much time at the moment. I'll get back to you when I've thought a little more on this.

TheFalcon: Neil has rather persuaded me out of this now; at least out of the links bit. The actual information could be brought over here and organised usefully (as per conversation here: Neil's wikipage chatter section). You could try something like that if you wanted.

CosmicGerbil I'd like to give it a go. I just wondered whether an A to Z would be useful, so people could more easily find what they were looking for.

TheFalcon: I guess it would be good. The only difficulty is choosing the most useful word to start off with. personally I'd be more inclined to go for a structure something like:

Anyway, that's just a rough idea, and it rather depends how far towards the "full help section" you're willing to go, as opposed to simply putting in links. It also depends on the content of the threads, if you're going to be bringing that over from the forum. If you want, you could start with something like an A-Z, then see what kind of things turn up.

Anyway, those are just suggestions, you can go about it how you like, depending on how much time you want to put into it, and which way you prefer. :)

CosmicGerbil That sounds a much better idea :) I will probably be able to start work on it tomorrow, hopefully, or Tuesday.

CosmicGerbil Oops, I realized I needed to check out a couple of things I'm not sure about. Do I put the help information in this thread, or does it need a new heading. Also, do I need to email people to ask permission to use their info? Last question, do I just bring the threads over how they are written, or do I rewrite them to be easier to read.

Sorry I took so long to get anything written, I have started my work experience this week :)

TheFalcon: Personally I would be inclined to put the info in the documentation section, since it would equate fairly well to a modules and coding help section, and any gaps could be filled in later. So I'd say put it in a new branch from the relevant section of the main docs page, with sub-pages for each area, though possibly not for each topic. However, I think you'd better ask Neil first.

I wouldn't feel that emailing was necessary, if you were rather going to be taking the info from the posts and rearranging it than just copying it straight over. But just put a list of credits in another part of the branch. I guess it depends though, on whether the info gets rewritten, or just copied and then cosmetically enhanced (see answer 3 below). However, that's not really my call, so I guess you'd better ask Neil again. (If you do end up emailing people, you could just create one, fairly blanket email to send to the majority of people. I suspect you might have trouble contacting quite a number of the people, especially for the older topics, and hence(partly) my views above).)

I suspect you'll need to rewrite quite a bit of each thread. Firstly there's probably quite a bit of wrong information in there, or stuff that's not really of any use to anyone. Also, I suspect there'll be quite a lot of work to do in getting the things into wiki format. It depends to some extent how much time you want to put in.

CosmicGerbil Thanks for helping me again, that's brilliant. I've wrote to Neil's wiki page to check with him what to do. I will rewrite the help information and also check the older info and make sure it works on ToME 2.3.* too.

Module Developers Discussion/Module makers and coding help (last edited 2005-09-10 17:32:30 by host86-134-114-120)