Last week we introduced Activities and since then we have received positive feedback. Thanks! And we are really glad our new feature makes using Wikidot so much more effective!
We have added a few improvements to the activities in the last few days that we would like to share with you:
- When you log in at Wikidot front page or create an account anywhere at www.wikidot.com you are automatically taken to your account.
- Threading of activities related to the same page is now improved.
- All new users automatically watch the community site and our blog, and we populate their activities with activities from the last few days so they do not need to face the "blank page effect".
- New users have email notifications turned off by default, but the "auto watch" is now on (i.e. they watch every page they edit or comment all all sites they join).
We hope these changes will prove themselve to be helpful. We are also thinking about a few other improvements:
- We need more complete coverage of activities (some actions still do not generate activities).
- It would be great to have an option of daily (or once a few days) email digest as an alternative for instant email notifications. Just to keep people in loop.
- How about watching a user? (Like following on Twitter or liking on Facebook?)
- Some interface improvements are planned — easier activity management etc.
Our more general direction is to make the account dashboard the default place for logged-in users, leaving our front page at http://www.wikidot.com for the anonymous crowd. The front page itself would then explain what Wikidot is and focus on convincing people to use it.
And since it has been a whole week since we introduced activities it would be great to ask: how do you like it? Did it improve the way you use Wikidot?
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I would rather have e-mail notifications on by default for new users.
Most people do not like to read several paragraphs explaining out to do this and that. For example, my students sometimes are surprised because they didn't know about some warnings delivered several days ago. I know they could use the feed button to get timely information delivered to their feeds reader, but probably most of them do not have a feeds reader or do not know what that is. Or, maybe like me, never got used to use a feeds reader.
So, when I want to be sure everybody gets informed about some urgent issues, I use the newsletter feature (great tool, by the way!).
So, I would go for e-mail notifications on for new users by default. If possible, for all activities (so that my students would not miss a new warning: at the moment, I have to duplicate efforts: send a newsletter and also writing in the forum). With any e-mail notification there could be a short bottom line explaining how to change the settings of e-mail notifications, so that the knowledgeable person can change it as better fits their needs.
If such a option is not appropriate for other sites, then the next best option would be to give the manager of each specific wikidot site the power to enforce that every new member of that site would have e-mail notifications on by default (and maybe even with the possibility of preventing members to disallow such a feature).
Another thing that would be nice for private sites would be the possibility of seeing, in the profile of each member, what activities he has done, at least the ones related to that specific site. At the moment that is not possible when the site is private. As you can imagine, this would be a big improvement when a site is used for education matters. Or try in some way to get such a feature within the new Activities tab?… But then old activities should not automatically disapear (and maybe would not be the right place for a site with more than 400 members!).
Hi, António (nice to have one more Portuguese speaker around!). I gotta respectfully disagree with you here. When email notifications were on by default, people were flooded by (mostly irrelevant) emails every time any changes were made. Many users would be annoyed by this and, instead of unwatching the site (exactly for the same reasons you mention: most people are unwilling to learn how to undo things), would simply mark the message as spam (which was horrible for the reputation of Wikidot and any site within it).
Sure, giving us more control over the "watch" feature is always a great idea (I, for one, would simply abolish the possibility of watching altogether, in my sites; for really important changes in the sites, there's always the newsletter feature). While watching may be a good thing for most collaborative sites, Wikidot has (as the slogan goes) evolved into "more than a Wiki" farm. As an admin of non-wiki sites, I think it's silly (even a little creepy) to have people potentially watching even the slightest changes in your site (no matter how cosmetic it might be), without being able to do anything about it.
Etnolinguistica.Org
An information hub on South American languages
This was exactly our experience immediately after introducing email notifications. We had "auto-watch" and "email notifications" both turned on. It got a lot of complaints from both users and admins from multiple sites.
People got flooded with unwanted mail. They woke up only to notice that their email box was filled with tens or hundreds of emails. Take into account not everyone is comfortable with email filters and there will always be users who will delete these emails one-by-one. And for sites with a lot of activity: no-go.
So we made "auto-watch" disabled by default then. Kind of failure, because if you were an admin and wanted to keep your users in loop you needed to explicitly tell them "watch my site". Joining as a member was not enough.
Now, if you want your users to get instant email notifications, you can also encourage them to. But they will watch your site. But to complete the "loop" we want to send emails, no more often than one a day, with a summary of unread activities. There might be a delay in communication, but will work.
Michał Frąckowiak @ Wikidot Inc.
Visit my blog at michalf.me
You can make auto-watch option optional per site. So each owner of the site can decide if he wants his site to be auto-watched for new users, or not.
If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be vegan. - Paul McCartney
Thanks to Etnolinguística (olá!) and Michal for the comments. I see your point and I agree that I even avoid to make too many saves when editing a page (now it is easier, by using the draft feature) in order not to generate too many notifications for the few people that are watching all pages.
In fact, in my mind I was thinking more of some specific activities, though I didn't make that explicit: I would like that members of the site would get e-mail notifications when I write in the forum. As I mentioned, I can send members a newsletter, but that will not be archived in the forum, so I usually have to write in two places if I want to keep the record of all messages in one place. So, maybe the wikidot team could think about an improvement in this respect? Why not having the possibility of choosing, when writing in the forum, that the writer wants some specific message to be notified by e-mail to every member? Or at least give that possibility to the administrators of a site.
It would be very nice if you can add a back to top button or link for people that scroll down to the bottom of their activity feed.
As I understand your wish - you mean without "reloading" the page and set all the new marked unread threads/blocks to be "red" ?
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