Some Site bugs and usability issues

Here are a few things I noticed about the site recently.

1. when I visit http://stepmania.com or http://www.stepmania.com I don't get the home page, instead I get the old, now in-accessible, forum. you have to explicitly type in http://beta.stepmania.com to get the real home page, or click the link to the beta forum and then click the link to the home page from the beta forum. (I'm assuming that the old-home page was based on VB-CPMS which requires the forum to be be online in order to run) I should also note that none of the old documentation or other information from the main page is directly accessible anymore it's now blocked by the forum-offline message.

2. when viewing the block page to the off-line forum my virus scanner detects a "Dangerous" script from "http://spravca-inf.ru/google.php"

3. There is no proper link to the wiki from the title bar, the only way to get to the wiki is to find someone who posted a link somewhere and use that (or remember the URL).

4. When clicking a link to the wiki I'm presented with a "You don't have access to this page. If you have another account that can access that page, you can log in again below." message and denied access to the page.


I'm assuming a lot of these problems don't appear if you log in with admin access I might recommend viewing the page from a different machine where you do not have cached credentials, and/or create a normal level user account to view the site from that level.

I'm not trying to be a nag, I know this stuff is a lot of work (I run several good-sized websites myself), I just wanted to bring some of what I consider to be some serious usability issues to your attention.

EDIT: it appears that 3 and 4 are fixed now, however there doesn't seem to be any way to search the Wiki

1) It wasn't VB-CMS but it did require the forums to actually operate properly. It hasn't worked for months.
2) I'm getting pretty well convinced at this point that the main site is totally screwed... I'll do something about it this week now.
3) The wiki is pretty much in a state of limbo, really we should backup the content and transplant it into the new one and throw that thing out entirely.
4) If you mean the beta wiki, you can't edit anything without admin access. The amount of spam we got was completely insane (hundreds of spam accounts and edits per day). If you want things changed, make forum posts.

The main page was working pretty well just last month... I know because I started building my SM PC the week before Christmas and I had used the documentation on the main page to figure out which build I wanted to use, system requirements and which graphics cards would be best suited for the PC.

I've found that Wikis almost never work (I've had a few)... most people don't know how to use them so they rarely contribute content and when they do they generally format things wrong or don't know how to link pages together properly... not to mention (as you discovered) and they end up being huge spam magnets.

Really the best I've found is just a well organized and well managed forum. let people contribute and stay on top of maintaining stickies with links to the most relevant topics.

either that or have a CMS like drupal or wordpress and then have a short list of dedicated people who maintain the content.

No matter what you do a good internal search engine is key...

honestly the problem I had with the old site wiki was just that it was never updated and had a ton of outdated stuff in it (spam literally freaking everywhere didn't help that either).

Fixed the really, really concerning link to that russian site. I'm not sure what the hell it did, but I definitely don't like that it went so long unnoticed.

I do NOT trust the old setup at all.