UESPWiki:Archive/CP Elderscrolls.com

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It's been mentioned once or twice that we have a few broken links now that Bethesda have devoted the whole of elderscrolls.com to some new game or other. In fact, we have 257 of them. These include several important references, links to downloads (some of which have already been fixed, but not all) and several pages of concept art. There are 126 links to the forums, which might be fixed simply by swapping the URL to forums.bethsoft.com, but I dunno.

My reason for bringing this up here is to ask if anybody knows of any other locations where the information we previously linked to is now found; to ask if we should in future create copies of off-site information (there are obvious copyright problems here, but there might be ways to deal with those); to ask if we should host patches and other downloads (ditto copyright problems); to ask if somebody wants to handle the task of switching the forum links over (we might want to consider a template); and generally to find out what people want to do here.

For now, it might be worth an admin emailing somebody at Bethesda to ask if there are any plans to reinstate the old material - better it comes from one of the top people. rpeh •T•C•E• 21:50, 23 December 2010 (UTC)

From what I can tell, most- but not all- of the forum links can be fixed by changing "www.elderscrolls.com/forums/" to "forums.bethsoft.com/". I really like the idea of a template. I'd be perfectly willing to switch the forum links over (and at the same time figure out what it's supposed to link to if the URL replacement doesn't point to a legit page), but if someone is willing to create a template for it I'd rather wait 'til after that's been created and go ahead and switch them to the new template.

As long as the copyright owners are okay with it, I think it would make sense to host copies of official pages; theoretically, we could create the articles, delete 'em, and then have an admin un-delete if-and-when necessary. Ditto patches and other downloads, though I really don't know what's involved with that.

I've emailed Bethesda at the general contact page and sent gstaff a message on the forums since he was active at the time. (By the way, is there a better way to contact someone?) I'll let y'all know if/when I get a response. --GK^talk2me 02:46, 24 December 2010 (UTC)

Well, that was a quick response. Here's what gstaff said:

"For the forum stuff, you're best bet is linking to the new extensions... we've been using forums.bethsoft.com for well over a year now and plan to keep with that.

In terms of stuff from the old Elder Scrolls site, I'll need to check with some folks on what the archiving process will be. I'll try to find out after holiday break."

So, that looks like a go-ahead on changing over the forum links, and a wait-and-see on everything else. --GK^talk2me 03:09, 24 December 2010 (UTC)

Wow, fast stuff - thanks GK. RobinHood70, this sounds like another task for HnB if you're willing. If not, I'll have RoBoT do it when I head back to London. Either way, using a template is probably the way to go: {{forum|id}} or something like that. rpeh •T•C•E• 09:45, 24 December 2010 (UTC)

As you might expect at this time of year, I've got a few things going on the next couple of days, so you'll probably end up getting to it before I will. If I get time to write it up, I'll post before I start, otherwise, assume you can go ahead without duplicating my effort. – Robin Hood↝talk 11:20, 24 December 2010 (UTC)

I've just sent gstaff a follow-up message, to see if there's any new info. Unless someone wants to go ahead and create the template, I'm going to be working on fixing what links I can over the next few days; please, everyone, feel free to point out any mistakes or anything I may have overlooked.

Is anyone aware of what ways there might be to deal with copyright issues involved with creating copies of off-site information? I suppose we could just ask the copyright owners, but I honestly don't know at all how all that works. Like I said, we could always create the pages and delete 'em, so that they'd be there to restore if necessary. --GK^talk2me 19:08, 30 January 2011 (UTC)

I just checked, and it looks like the forums now require the topic name as well as the ID. I only looked quickly, but I didn't find any method of locating an older post by ID only, which may be a problem. There's already a {{Bgs}} template, though that links to http://www.bethsoft.com/bgsforums, not just .../forums. It looks like that's yet another variation of the forum links, but I'm not that familiar with either Bethsoft's former or current forums, so I'm not sure how that relates to the elderscrolls.com forums. In any event, those links are broken too.

Just to make a clean start, I've created {{BSForums}}. See its docs for how to use it. Let me know if there are any issues. – Robin Hood↝talk 21:26, 30 January 2011 (UTC)

(←) More as a reminder to myself than anything else: I've found that we'll also have to search for external links to other websites, like morrowind.com. I'm going to leave them for now until we find out what's going to happen there, but when we go through and fix the links for the final time we'll have to check those, too. --GK^talk2me 23:50, 30 January 2011 (UTC)