It has been a while since we introduced the concept of watching and email notifications to allow our users to follow activities related to their Wikidot account. So far email notifications has played critical role in keeping workgroups, communities and site owners up-to-date.
Today we would like to introduce a huge improvement to the "watching" feature. Here is the thing. Getting an email for every page edit, new comment or new post works pretty well, but over time we have discovered the workflow is not flawless:
- it can result in flooding your inbox when you join communities with lots of activity,
- it requires you to define filters for your mailbox to properly categorize notifications, otherwise see above,
- email clients do not always do message threading properly, mixing notifications from different sites, pages or forum threads
These are not deal breakers. Notifications improved our efficiency with Wikidot dramatically. But we did spend a while making it work with our email clients which was not that easy (e.g. new Apple Mail breaks message threading completely). And honestly we do not expect fresh users to spend their time writing perfect filters for their inboxes.
Today we would like to address the above issues by introducing the Activity tab in the account dashboard. Now you could simply jump and try yourself, but let me give a quick overview.
Here are the highlights:
- Every action related to site/category or page you watch is displayed as an activity item with a short preview wherever possible.
- We categorize your activities by site. All sites with recent activities are listed in the left side bar with the number of unread items. You can see either all activities (from all sites) or by individual sites.
- Activities can be unread or read. This should help you quickly spot new content. Activities are marked as read when you click a button or when you scroll down. In this case the we assume that you have already seen what is already loaded on screen.
- Older activities are loaded as you scroll down.
- We try to thread activities by page and by forum topic.
- Whenever possible we try to give you context for a given activity, i.e. previous related activities if they are available.
The concept of browsing activities within the Wikidot account is about 2 year old and we had a prototype ready some time ago. Unfortunately it was based on relational database concept and although worked well when demoed for one user, it did not scale at all for hundreds of thousands of users watching almost million items, generating more than ten thousand activities for all users each day.
It does scale now, thanks to MongoDB, which is being used to collect activities for about two weeks now. MongoDB is a blazingly fast database with great indexing features and it really scales well, which makes it perfect for processing large datasets.
Tell us what you think. Honestly, we have been using activities in dashboard for more than a week now and we found it much more convenient and productive than getting notifications into our mailboxes. It takes now much less time to dig through activities and gives a better overview of what is happening in Wikidot.
O.K, enough talking. Activities are available at:
http://www.wikidot.com/account/activity
One more thing — since we have been collecting all activities for a while now, most of you should have a bunch of them ready for browsing.
There are still a couple of things we would like to be improved, but we believe in the current stage it is already ready to release. We are ready for your feedback!
Thanks for the update :D
This even gives a preview of the page source! Great for no-comment forums!
Great work guys!
I have found now my notifications setup screen..:)
looks good!
Sorry for the bug http://feedback.wikidot.com/bug:527 (Where is the Notifications setup in my account?)
:)
Edit: when will the "old information" be deleted/removed ? Never?
Service is my success. My webtips:www.blender.org (Open source), Wikidot-Handbook.
Sie können fragen und mitwirken in der deutschsprachigen » User-Gemeinschaft für WikidotNutzer oder
im deutschen » Wikidot Handbuch ?
I like this very much. People have actually told me they have a hard time keeping up with their activities in the forum, I think this solves things handily and I'll bet all my active members will be using this.
Do you think it would be useful to have all the links open in a new tab? So that users could always have their activity tab open when jumping from topic to topic?
Also, I understand that you have separated the activities into topics. Would it be possible, however, to have a topic heading before each group of activities that fall under that topic? At least for forum categories. I am not sure about page activity.
Thanks, this makes it quick to check the activity across a large number of sites. A really excellent feature.
Rob Elliott - Strathpeffer, Scotland - Wikidot first line support & community admin team.
This is fantastic! It's exactly what Wikidot needed.
And this is what I like the most about the new Activity tab. Not only does it show a summary of posts in my forums (which are based on the "no comment" format), but it also shows a summary of posts from James' chatroom.
Really, a great solution!
However, adding some constructive feedback:
If I had to suggest an improvement, it would be the ability to decide on a per-site basis whether notifications should be emailed to me or not.
Most sites I'd now like to show up only on this new Activity tab, as it's a much better solution than being emailed about everything. However, certain websites I'd still like to be emailed for as they are likely to be more important to me (comments on my blog, STE website, Wikidot community).
For each site I'd like to decide between: "activity tab only" or "activity tab + email".
~ Leiger - Wikidot Community Admin - Volunteer
Wikidot: Official Documentation | Wikidot Discord server | NEW: Wikiroo, backup tool (in development)
Thanks for the feedback guys! We are now working on fixing some small details and surely looking forward to enhance activities.
Michał Frąckowiak @ Wikidot Inc.
Visit my blog at michalf.me
What with a showing and setup - able "max-limit" per site of all the existing news ( per account) ?
Otherwise this will grow endless …
Service is my success. My webtips:www.blender.org (Open source), Wikidot-Handbook.
Sie können fragen und mitwirken in der deutschsprachigen » User-Gemeinschaft für WikidotNutzer oder
im deutschen » Wikidot Handbuch ?
Our plan is to remove old activities from time to time.
I have made an experience this morning:
yesterday evening Ed Johnson has our http://community.wikidot.com/blog:_start page successfully reverted to revision number 32 after an "account deleted" has changed/spammed it.
Today morning i got a feedblitz mail with this 2 changes.
On my activity center there is no message about this ( and no notification mail) :
either
or (that is the question !)
Could it be implemented in such intelligent way?
Service is my success. My webtips:www.blender.org (Open source), Wikidot-Handbook.
Sie können fragen und mitwirken in der deutschsprachigen » User-Gemeinschaft für WikidotNutzer oder
im deutschen » Wikidot Handbuch ?
Thanks, Helmuti. We will be looking into this later today!
Michał Frąckowiak @ Wikidot Inc.
Visit my blog at michalf.me
I detected now and have to notice:
on this blog start page I have the watching status at the bottom:
This is interesting - how can I am watching the complete site and this "single page" not?
Edit: I cannot find the "Wikidot Commuity" in my "sites" watching list…
Sorry, but this seems to by my fault - I have
either to remove all watching "pages" from my watching list
or start the complete site ( hoping this will remove all "pages" ?)
Service is my success. My webtips:www.blender.org (Open source), Wikidot-Handbook.
Sie können fragen und mitwirken in der deutschsprachigen » User-Gemeinschaft für WikidotNutzer oder
im deutschen » Wikidot Handbuch ?
But indeed the "revert" edit does not generate a new activity. This will be fixed next week.
Michał Frąckowiak @ Wikidot Inc.
Visit my blog at michalf.me
Yes, this was definitely my fault…. the page was not watched and therefore I got no notificatipon about the changes.
Now I made the next experience:
and all the single pages I have watched were removed outr of the list in the watching list of Pages !
This helps a lot to remove my long list of watched pages…
switch on the site watching, - switch off the site watching and the page only I want to watch realy… and all the old bugs and wishes and blog: entries are gone…
Edit: a gag is the fact that the watching of the "Wikidot Blog" itself ( this site) I cannot switch on on the usuable links at the bottom but only in the nav:side from the module watchers. or .. only with a comment .. :)
- Where are here ohn this blog:page the standard Links of the page bottom?
Service is my success. My webtips:www.blender.org (Open source), Wikidot-Handbook.
Sie können fragen und mitwirken in der deutschsprachigen » User-Gemeinschaft für WikidotNutzer oder
im deutschen » Wikidot Handbuch ?
Since it was introduced a month ago the Activities page of the Dashboard has become a vital part of my work each day. With over 30 sites to monitor as well as the community site it was difficult with just the notification emails to pick out anything urgent or important that needed dealing with. The Activities is now open on my screen all day. Thanks for this great feature. It has been a really great month for Wikidot!
Rob Elliott - Strathpeffer, Scotland - Wikidot first line support & community admin team.