User:Dismounted Feudal Knight/Archiving/Tutorials and resources

Initially I did not treat this as its own vector of archiving but it is Werety's priority and we go where the motivation lies, and along with mods themselves it's TWC's most important asset.

I do think this can complement the saving of mods themselves. Saving tutorials is not the same matter as saving mods but both can be identified for collection, they just need to be rehosted differently.

Issues

For one many tutorials are flawed or even useless because of image link rot. Woe the day when photobucket is one of the only ones that still delivers the goods. You should see what I've done in the artist's studio. The tutorial index is anorexic. It's impossible to scroll without seeing something flagged as broken because of missing critical images or because the whole thing was a video/image. It's not as bad in TW modding but it's getting there. As I work on curating and cleaning up I find a lot that simply is not worth saving. So there's no point manually trying to do this in bulk: manually saved tutorials need to be chosen for their 'bang for buck'. I follow Werety's lead on this, as well as anyone else with clear thoughts. I may solicit some key modders to opine on this TWC side.

Another issue is rights. TWC has always been protective of its lawn and rehosting tutorials is an idea that has always stalled, including thoughts of saving them straight to the wiki. Modders are often possessive as well, to the extent of bluntly removing, restoring, removing tutorials over largely political qualms or being resistant to updates. The difficulty of actually updating tutorials if you're not the author has also stunted their utility. I think I have an implementation of this that is agreeable but it's still something held back by red tape. This is something that will need to be figured sooner or later. it raises the issue that even if tutorials are saved, they will need to be updated, perhaps rewritten for a new age. If modders wish to opt out of content being saved for rehost, that must be available to them.

Tutorials must have a frontend - a wiki, a discord server structured in a particular way, a forum... mods need a chonky host and a pipe. Inevitably tutorials will need modification to be functional on whatever platform hosts them so that is something to keep in mind. Werety leans towards a dedicated discord server and I lean towards wikifying. Honestly why not both, the more copies exist the better...