Community and Pro

by pieterh on 15 Jul 2009 10:57

Today we're rolling out a new release of Wikidot, aimed at reinforcing the Wikidot Community and making it clearer what you get when you upgrade to a pro account.

Today's release has two main changes:

  • Free sites get to use forum signatures, full page history, "clone site" function, custom domains, favicons, and meta tags. Previously these were "pro" features that you had to pay for.
  • Free sites now show the top and bottom Wikidot Community toolbars.

The deal is this: if you use Wikidot for free, your sites shows these toolbars, and you help the Wikidot Community by promoting Wikidot and its functionality to your users. And if you are a pro user, you can switch off those toolbars to get more space for your web page. You pay to get a non-Wikidot look and feel. Also, active pro sites will show on the bottom toolbar, so you get more traffic, thanks to free sites.

The top toolbar also acts like a "web ring": click on the Random site button and you jump to a random Wikidot site that also shows the toolbar. So showing the toolbar will bring you new visitors.

This seems like a fair deal. Pro users help by funding our work, and free users help by promoting pro sites. We had also thought of putting more advertising on free sites but you've told us, consistently, that you don't like this. And I'd really like to get all advertising off Wikidot so we can stick to a promise we once made, "no ads, ever". We were forced to break our heartfelt promise simply because to build and operate Wikidot costs money.

The toolbar model seems like a better deal for us all, except Google.

So, tell me what you think. Do you want the choice between these toolbars or advertising on your free sites? Do you like the idea of cross-promotion of Wikidot sites? Do you like getting all these Wikidot features for free?

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