As a Roblox developer, it is currently too hard to use the wiki without eventually running into a 404 error.
If Roblox is able to address this issue, it would improve my development experience because I would have an easier time accessing information.
Recently, while doing some casual googling, I came across @EgoMoose’s YouTube channel.
His videos are amazing, and he even took the time to write articles on the topics he covers. The only problem is that these articles seem to have been tragically eaten alive by fluffy 404 bunnies.
Every once and awhile, while surfing the current wiki, I’ll come across broken links that lead to a 404 page.
I just don’t see why those pages had to be entirely deleted. For the love of god can someonebring them back?!
Yeah, I agree with you. If they’re going to delete a wiki page because it’s outdated and there is a new page covering this, at least provide a link to the new page or combine the two.
From what I understand this may be partially due to the new wiki changeout, and if I recall back years ago when this happened, clonetrooper1019, who was formerly a contributor to the wiki, stated that there was still a lot of ground to cover. It’s entirely possible they’ve never gotten to those articles. You can use archive.org to view old cached versions of a wiki page link btw.
But I think in this case it may be best to email the right person with the links to the articles that are gone and they can restore them or take a look.
These pages aren’t getting deleted, they just weren’t migrated when Roblox was changing from MediaWiki to the Developer Hub. Information on the Developer Hub is now curated by an IX team rather than by a team of approved community contributors.
I assume these pages weren’t migrated because they were written by users rather than staff and therefore weren’t official documentation. The Developer Hub is intended for official documentation only. I do find it a bit unfortunate because there were some helpful user articles that did not make it (I am especially upset the MicroProfiler labels explanations article did not come through), but that’s why this category exists - you can request for documentation or articles to be written up.
If you come across missing pages linked somewhere, chances are that it was an article that did not survive migration. It could also be representative of another issue but it depends where you’re getting the link from. This particular case is one of migration non-survival.
Well, that’s dumb. They could have at least left them up and labelled them something like “This article is unofficial, it may not be accurate or up to date”/“This article is outdated, check for new information”. They have articles for long deprecated features marked as such, is it really that hard to store information provided by users?
It’s all well and fine that they’re hiring professionals to do documentation, but why not have community article links redirect to a non-wiki site with the same information? Maybe even the devforums?
Maybe have a bot go through the archives, find all non-official articles, and create a post on the devforums for each non-official article. Then, have links redirect to the corresponding devforums post instead of having people visit a 404 page.
Yea, I think that’s why they want people to write articles on https://medium.com/ now. Honestly idc about where the content is hosted, I just don’t like the broken links.
this is one of the many reasons im making my own wiki. the maing one being stuff like this: they say theres a third argument for DatastoreService:GetDataStore() called options but thats all they dont tell you how to use it.
theres a lot of improvments to be made but the wiki is very useful
Thanks for your feedback everyone - we definitely hear you. Documentation is super important to us, and we’re in the process of exploring ways to re-imagine how we write and provide documentation to all our Creators so that it can be more accurate and accessible for all (API, as well as longer-form articles).
There’s still a lot of work left to do on this, so please don’t take silence as the fact that we’re not prioritizing this, because we definitely are!
I wrote a little web crawler/scraper bot using Headless Chrome Puppeteer to try and automatically find every 404 page in the api reference. This was limited to the developer.roblox.com sub domain and en-us/api-reference suffix.
