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. 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 creator's lawns 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.Saved tutorials will likely require updates or rewrites, and removal requests from original authors may need to be taken in if someone is unhappy with being archived.

Tutorials must have a frontend - a wiki, a discord server structured in a particular way, a forum... so far the effort has just been hosted compilations because after all, the content is live and will be for the known future. We'll get to this bridge if we need to, later on.