A number of replies were split and moved in a non public board for further discussion. However I believe something and a solution must remain in public until a better public board and way is found.
Integrating basic user help with SMF structure, as used so far, is far superior, as it uses the forum's default theme and so is better help for the end user.
SMF Wiki help uses screen captures. This means a lot of unnecessary work to be done for different languages and the end result will be inferior for the user of a specific SMF forum.
For most foreign languages, current basic user help state for 2.0 is back to early 1.0x versions when not many translations were available.
Fortunately, as Gary informed, there is a mod that restores the feature back, so, until a better solution is found
Can only agreed(and have already said what I mean elsewhere), the choice of Wiki as the help feature was very unwise, for the reasons you mentioned.
I don't think anything will change though, it seems this was done to relieve some work - even if the drawbacks are bigger than the advantages lol:
+ centrally located docs
+ no need to administer submitted work from translators (though CompuArt's editor is there to help with that...)
+ more targeted software for actually displaying docs(which is really a design question around the Help.template => solvable)
- more server stress
- NO docs when server is down
- existing work not updated into the Wiki yet, due to lacking manpower?..and
- previous translators feel their work was "wasted", thus perhaps reluctant to contribute to the Wiki?
- No way to keep docs in sync theme-wise, which was cool to show off features in other themes as well(well, partly anyway)
- SMF site is not Google, so we can expect delays, especially as SMF 2.0 get more spread and updated around the world.
