rixtertech
Posts: 48
Joined: 12/30/2001
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What Kevinkins said, Plus:
quote:
ORIGINAL: nukkxx5058
Meanwhile, how do I find articles if they are hidden ?
Well, I'm not sure "hidden" is the right term but I took a look at the site and its code and might have a suggestion that would help you if you want to put the time into it.
It's a Wordpress site. I haven't spent much time looking at Wordpress code and don't intend to start, so I don't know if its heavily customized or not. The theme is by a fellow that runs NewDirt.org, who seems nice enough. He wrote the theme, but did he install it and does he maintain the site, maybe yes, maybe no to both, who knows? Does he maintain the site now? Probably not. It might have been an intern or a consultant or the CTO or who knows that set everything up, and they might or might not still be maintaining the site now. All I'm trying to point out is that like a custom car, once you have a professional web site constructed you may have quite a challenge to change things and add features later. Just do a little searching on the site you're on right now reading this post for discussions about the code that runs it. The last I knew, the code was so many revisions back (2.4.5 circa early 2000's) that I doubt they could upgrade to current revision (5-something) without losing all or most of the data on the site, or spend $$$$ to try to get the forum developers to write a custom go-back-in-time conversion to bring the old forum data into the current software. It's just not going to happen. Here's just one example of what the current version of this forum software can look like:
https://forums.evga.com/Gaming-and-Gaming-News-f30.aspx
To continue the car analogy - Fast, Good Quality, Cheap: pick any two.
Anyway, back to your question. Lets go to the Archives on command.matrixgames.com and select a month that will live in ignominy: November 2016. In what I sincerely hope was an act of completely unintentional irony, the page touts the release of Command Live #4, scenario pack "Don of a New Era", featuring a speculative extension of the vicious antics of a certain corrupt demagogues favorite murderous kleptocratic role model. If the original poster (OP) of the article had acted properly he would given this post a category of "Command" at the very least, and since multiple categories can be assigned to a post I personally would have also assigned "Russia", "Scenario", and whatever else came to mind that could reasonably be added to the master list of categories kept as an appendix to the sites documentation under the "Organization and Structure" heading.
Instead of any of that "webgeek BS", he assigned it no category at all so that it shows category "Uncategorized" by Wordpress. Click on that link, and you'll find it to be a very common error on this site. Sometimes people have even assigned a category (probably after their post was originally published without one?) and failed or been unable to remove "Uncategorized" from the post and so the post sits on the site years later still showing up in the "uncategorized" pool even though it has a perfectly good category assigned, where it also shows up. Anyway, the posts that are totally uncategorized are probably as close to being truly "hidden" as any on the site, because you're not going to find them just by clicking on a Category link. And categories are as close as you're going to get to an "Index" on this site, unless the site maintainer or consultant gets and installs a "tag cloud" plug-in extension AND the person/people posting material start actually making use of tags and/or categories. The Nov 2016 post is actually a perfect example of the depth of the issue: The actual items of interest are the fact that the DLC has been released, and that there is a PDF file linked to the article that discusses the situation in Ukraine. The posting itself doesn't offer a mumbled word about "Russia", "Ukraine" "Novorossia", "Crimea", "Scenario", "DLC", absolutely nothing that an automated index-builder could find that would lead you to the real content or even the importance/relevance of the post.
Like my desire to see the Matrix forum upgraded, and your desire to find a nicely complete word index of blog postings, this is all extremely unlikely to ever get "fixed", although the situation could be greatly improved by more conscientious use of the options the software already offers, such as Categories. Whoever posts this stuff probably has 16 other jobs to perform on any given day, possibly including shoveling the walk, making sure the coffee maker is primed, the payroll is submitted and the humorless BurrowcRat that keeps calling from the US Dept Of Defense is diapered, burped and coddled closely. He/She might or very well might not have time, authorization, skills or funding to turn any particular outward-facing aspect of Slitherine/Matrix into the tightly administered, nicely oiled and perfectly ordered resource we'd all like it to be. Remember, we may buy the product up front but its not like we're paying any monthly support contracts, and lets not go there! ;) We'll leave that to the Pentagon.
So here's two things you CAN do, if it matters enough to bother.
Refer back to our Nov '16 archive page. Notice the little icon that sits at the left side of the subject line. It looks like 4 squares, 3 grey and the bottom right is black. Click on it or just look at the link and you'll see the original URL for the post when it was created. As far as I know these are permanent, and in any given archive month there should be links like this for every post that is listed in that month's archives.
You could copy those links for articles that you believe contain interesting relevant information into your clipboard as you find them. Include a few keywords (I'd shoot for 5 if possible) that speak to the subjects contained in the post. A real geeky type might want to do all this in XML format, but that's another subject. Do this for a month or few of archives whenever your waiting for something else and before you know it you'd have a pretty good index built up with links to the articles you liked. Since the links are of the format https://command.matrixgames.com/?p=XXX... where XXXX... is the integer number, the URLS would sort pretty well. You could easily make this into an HTML file that you could open in your browser and use to search for relevant links to your current question, or just use a text editor or Mark I Eyeball sensor.
Another thing you can do is use Google. Say your topic is Ukraine. Go to Google or DuckDuckGo or whatever you use and type "Ukraine site:https://command.matrixgames.com" and hit enter. You'll see links to lots of stuff that has been posted there that mentions Ukraine. You WON'T see the Nov '16 post we've been discussing, because of the issues I mentioned already: lack of properly conceived and used Categories and tags, lack of textual data that can be searched for, relevant information sequestered in non-searchable containers such as you-tube videos and PDF files.
You might say its "hidden". I just say it's good software poorly used. Search engines can't find what is not well presented. Not even an on-site index builder could have done anything with that post, because it leaves few clues behind for the software to know what the heck the post is about unless the builder starts descending into links in the post and parsing the media it finds... chaos and wasted time would ensue.
Bottom line and TLDR; it is what it is, either build something that helps you find what you want when you want it or open every months archives and take good notes as you scan. This advice is worth every penny you paid for it.
_____________________________
"They're firing? But they couldn't hit the broad side of a barn from ther-"
-Union Gen. John Sedgewick, Battle of Spotsylvania Courthouse, 1864, KIA while berating a private for ducking sniper fire
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