Flashcoders Wiki being revived on OSFlash

The Flashcoders mailing list is a very special place for many of us. For me, it was my first home in the Flash community and I owe a great deal to the invaluable conversations that have taken place on the list through the years.

The Flashcoders list was started a long time ago, in a galaxy not too far away by one Branden Hall and has been a cornerstone of Flash developer culture ever since. According to the earliest records in the WayBackMachine, on November 6, 2000, the Flashcoders Wiki (or at least its front page) was set up as a resource to summarize knowledge shared on the list. Unfortunately, sometime around August 2004, the Wiki went down after being wiki-spammed to death.

However, this was not to be the end of the Flashcoders Wiki...

Two days ago, 1stpixel sent a link to the WayBackMachine archives of the Flashcoders Wiki to the OSFlash mailing list. This was during the heated debates surrounding the Flash 8 page and I was busy kick-starting a new RIA project with a great bunch of guys in the Netherlands and didn't have time to read through the ensuing thread which was joined by Ralf Bokelberg and Martin Wood. It was Martin who suggested that we could perhaps start moving some of the "juicy bits" from the archives on to the OSFlash wiki.

Not wanting to do so without Branden's blessing, I wrote to him:

"Some people on the OSFlash list are suggesting salvaging content from the Flashcoders Wiki on the OSFlash wiki. Possibly reviving it as a project. What would you think about this?"

And swiftly got this reply:

"That would be great! Unfortunately most of the content of the old wiki was destroyed or severely compromised - it might be better to start from scratch. Once you get it up though, I'd be more than happy to endorse it as the official wiki. :-) Thanks!"

(Did I mention that Branden's an all-round great guy?) :)

Needless to say, with the speed things move in the open source world, the Flashcoders Wiki project has been added to OSFlash and already has some pages added to it by Martin Wood and others (I just added the Flashcoders Etiquette page to it a few moments ago.)

The process is pretty simple and involves getting the page source of the original wiki page from the WayBackMachine and then converting the Wiki codes to DokuWiki format. The main changes I had to do in my attempt were:Hopefully, we'll be able to put together an automatic conversion script to aid in this process.

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