Documentation and Usability

[Fink]

I've been looking through the various bits of documentation, faqs, guides, and help files, and realize that we have accumulated quite a collection of stuff.

However, it's all a bit chaotic. It appears that things have grown organicly and have resulted in a bit of a hodge podge of files. As well, I realize a lot of our documentation and wotnot is out of date.

I think we should take a general peek at the topic of what we can do to clean up and organize the info and documentation available for the game, with an eye towards ease of use and introduction for a new player, or a player looking for more information.

I'm just going to start naming off random stuff in this thread that I see or think of related to this topic.

-fink

[Fink]

Help File:

• most URL's invalid.
• a duplicate .txt version should be available (currently, clicking on the site link to view it fails, as windows can't deal with it).
• "the windows client ...  comes with graphics turned on by default" . Not true.
• discussion of server mentions old stuff? " fox-099 server" We should search for fox-099 and remove or update things that mention this.
• "It should be noted that the game runs at varies with the depth of the dungeon.  This was" sentence ends here. Presumably, was intended to be discussion of the scaled game speed based on depth.
• "I strongly recomend you enable depth_in_feet and show_weights. " These are now on by default.
• "7. It says I need a modified client. Where can I get one?" I assume this is no longer relavant?
• "9. If I am deep in the dungeon, how do I easily return to town? Buy a word o"  line ends here, it appears.
• "n angband, there's an inscription that goes like this: !d!k ... does not work in Mangband." These inscriptions do work in Mang (tho not exactly as described in this section).
• ". How do I make a bow macro? ...Set macro as f1*t" We should add a \e to this.
• "5. Help! Now that I am addicted to mangband, how do I retain a social life?" Stuff like this should probably just be taken out. It just adds more lines to the doc without providing anything usefull.
• Glossary: "Sector -- " is unexplained.
• Glossary: we should add in another dump of common phrases etc (ego nicknames, etc)

[Fink]

The Site

• The Documentation and Tutorials! sections both lead to same page. We should just have one link.
• "Options and Settings" "Totorials" and "Spoilers could be collapsed into one central Documentation page. This new page could contain the main docs, "guides" subsection, Options and Settings link, and Spoilers link.
• The "People" section could be moved to the "What is MAngband" section (this seems appropriate, and would help cut down on the number of initial links present).
• Links: some links do not work (one Japanese link looks lik it may be a non-mang page now?)

[Warrior]

Good initiative fink, I started rewriting my FAQ a month or two ago but I haven't really done much with it since. I totally agree the documentation both from the official website and the in-game documentation is outdated and poor.
Lets fix it!