Fake or fine?

[Hapax]

Anybody know what this is
http://icwww.epfl.ch/~sam/infosv/doc-sfml/html/index.htm
and why it's describing itself as "the official SFML documentation"?

[GraphicsWhale]

Not part of the dev team but I don't think that's legit...

Look at this: http://icwww.epfl.ch/~sam/. Especially the "School of computer and comunication sciences" part.

Since the website is owned by some college in Switzerland, I'm going to assume it's a copy of the official documentation (hence why it says "official") posted on their website for their students to use (though, I don't have a clue what's up with their bad looking SFML banner). Might be wrong, but I'm almost certain.

Unless whoever put it there got explicit permission from an SFML developer, the only way to know for sure why it's there is to email them.

[Hapax]

I did look at their profile before posting this and came to a similar conclusion.

I suppose it would be fine (?) to be duplicated for educational purposes where access to SFML's site may be blocked (although, it should be white-listed!). The main reason I mentioned it was because I saw it linked to as a "look, here's the documentation" on a public site (YouTube), where it should have been the official site, especially as this 'copy' is out of date.

[Hiura]

Actually I'm the one who put it there (to be exact, I sent the files to the teacher). You can find the syllabus of the class here (French only), but in a few word the goal of the class is to teach first year, Life Sciences students what programming is through a biology-related simulation project that uses SFML for rendering.

I've never noticed the that it states "official" before actually... but the reason is extremely simple (as GraphicsWhale mentioned): that's how the default documentation looks like. The fact that it look strange though is because it has the search feature enable.

I've been TA-ing this class for ~5 years now and can guarantee that at no point we intended to replace sfml-dev.org with our class website. 

We have this online documentation because we need something that always exactly match the version installed on EPFL's virtual machines and avoid any confusion for the students.

Now, the current text also link to the official website but I agree that the wording is not perfect. I'm pretty sure the rest of the team would be happy if a pull request to improve the main page were to be made. :-)

@Hapax: I'm curious about the youtube video you've watched. Could you give me a link? Thanks.

[Hapax]

Ah, it's good that it's someone from the actual team. The reason also makes sense and was something I had half-considered but was not sure about. As stated earlier, the main reason it was odd to me was because it was linked publicly. To avoid publicly shaming (or promoting) anyone in particular, I'll message you the link directly. Who knows? You may know who it is!

[Hiura]

Well, it's always good to report such things. If it used more frequently I'll have a look at what we can do with the teacher. So let me know if it pops up again somewhere else. :-)