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Wikidot.com Terms of Service - what you can, what you should not etc.
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But — despite all that I'm not complaining. I force myself to open every single one of those emails, and I read the comments directly from the mail. I've learnt a lot just from doing this over the past week or two.
It works something like this:
~ Leiger - Wikidot Community Admin - Volunteer
Wikidot: Official Documentation | Wikidot Discord server | NEW: Wikiroo, backup tool (in development)
Btw, is RSS on page changes on the priority list? (=> http://community.wikidot.com/wishlist:53)
http://feedback.wikidot.com/wish:382
Not really. At this stage we'd rather improve the email notification system. If you expanded your wish with an explanation of why you need this (RSS specifically as compared to notifications) that would be helpful in pushing your wish up the queue. It helps if you give concrete examples.
Portfolio
Well I thought that should be obvious… RSS would let you skim the list of changes in a glance and it wouldn't cram up your mailbox (where you might be expecting important emails from humans and miss to see them beacuse of the numerous notifications).
RSS IS notifications! :)
If there were RSS:
- users would have had the most efficient, technologically available way for tracking changes;
- Wikidot wouldn't have wasted so much time tweaking and tinkering the email notification system which still doesn't make everyone happy (this thread speaks for itself);
- there are always numerous free RSS2email services for the die-hard email fans.
I hope I don't sound reproachful, I'm just willing to point out what I see as an important but missing piece in Wikidot.
http://feedback.wikidot.com/wish:382
So, as a typical user, I have several hundred watches active. Most are created automatically when I edit or comment on a page. It's essential for me to get notifications via email because every other product I use works this way (Jira, svn, launchpad,…).
How do you suggest this work using RSS?
Do you suggest for every watch I go and configure an RSS2email somewhere?
Portfolio
Note also that Wikidot offers RSS feeds all over the place. To help understand how many people use these, we'll do some analysis of the web stats and see what the traffic on RSS feeds is.
Portfolio
My point is that RSS is the overwhelmingly better technology. This is why Wikidot should go with it, regardless of the number of people currently using it. That number is going to increase anyway. Users might react negatively at first but the long-term benefits for them are great. So are for Wikidot. As for Wikidot offering RSS feeds all over the place, that is correct and this is one of the reasons I am using it. But it can do even better by having an RSS feed for page changes history. :)
Hm, I haven't thought about this. Well, then, maybe this wouldn't work
http://feedback.wikidot.com/wish:382
Better for what? RSS is a syndication protocol where the client scrapes the server for data at regular intervals. RSS was never designed for human consumption (it's XML) but for newsfeeds.
But newsfeeds are not the same as notifications. Here is the basic difference between email and RSS: email is persistent, RSS is transient. I.e. emails arrive in your inbox and stay there (until you delete or move them). RSS, if you're not looking at it, just disappears.
Transient is fine for syndication (catching up on the latest news) but it's disastrous for notifications (following who edited your precious page). You need persistent notifications. Otherwise you go away for a day, come back, and you've lost important messages.
Portfolio
RSS feeds are better for quicly skimming large quantities of news, notifications, etc. It does the job of tracking content for changes perfectly well. You can adjust your RSS reader in various ways how to be notified - by an animation of the tray icon, or a pop-up, or sound, or check for new content only manually. Moreover you can assign individual settings for each individual feed.
!??? RSS feeds' content does stay in your RSS reader's cache. Every good reader has a rich set of settings where and how the pulled content from feeds should be stored. I see no difference to the mail box in terms of storage.
How come you lose notifications with RSS!? You just come back, start your RSS reader, click on refresh and it would show you all notifications since the last time you checked them.
http://feedback.wikidot.com/wish:382
Sorry Pieter, for me you are not a typical user of wikidot system. You are more the type of parallel (over ?) administrating too much wikis in the same time.
All my friends do not want to get e-mails from any web site they are "following" by reading over the links in their "favorites". They take a look sometimes and sometimes not.
They have no idea what Notifications are and do not like such a spaming flood I get now with watching such a lot of sites.
I for my own has to decide in the near future - which site i will leave and stop the watching it is too much to follow and to delete.in my innbox.
It is easy to get the infos, to read all the commemts and to be at the last level of information ( that IS correct and good) , but it is really too much. For me.
We haf in the last days a flood of new wikis - what we need now is an overview page which shows the dependencies, responsibilities ( official, community, private) and what is important to read for visitors with which level of knowledge .
For my sites I use feedblitz, which informs me sometimes in ONE mail about new pages or edits , new posts in the community. This tells me the same without overloading me with mails…
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 ?
Ah, no, I mean that a typical user will accumulate hundreds of watches over time. Me, I have many more than that.
Two things are clear for me:
If you wish, make a community poll about email vs. RSS. Just ask people what they prefer for following Wikidot activity. I'll promote the poll in the next newsletter.
Portfolio
(I also use RSS a lot, so this is not about my personal preferences, but about typical users and how they work.)
I'm surprised no-one is mentioning the obvious improvements:
Portfolio
Pieterh, I've been trying to explain all the way that how many people have heard of RSS is irrelevant. It is obviously a superior way for receiving notifications. This is why Wikidot should stick to it.
In addition to that it doesn't require that huge maintenance the email notifications do. It doesn't need digests of changes weekly or daily, bundled changes, etc because the user is in a complete control what, when and how much to read. Without interfering with his mail box.
Of course most people haven't heard of RSS. Of course most of them would be reluctant to use it because it requires them to learn something new (no matter how useful it would be for them in the long-term).
What is a useful thing should be guiding us, not what appeals to mental laziness most. Otherwise we wouldn't have switched from horses to fuel-engine cars…
http://feedback.wikidot.com/wish:382
Hi,
I have not been here for a while, hidden behind coding and infrastructure of Wikidot (which is getting larger and larger), but… Yes, I fully agree RSS is much better for notifications, and I have been always using them to catch things from other social networks too (e.g. Facebook). The big benefit, as opposed to emails, is that they do not flood your inbox with stuff. At least for me, even filters and folders do not really work, because keeping notifications in my inbox is not what I want. Why would I keep them? For reference?
From the very beginning Wikidot was all about RSS. And I am a big fan of RSS and always prefer them to emails. They perfectly solve a problem of aggregating events/notifications/news from multiple sources - any decent desktop RSS reader can make it easy to handle hundreds of sources. Google Reader also does a nice job letting you manage it.
Saying that RSS is a fail because it is a "pull", and email is "push"… Sure, but you still need to pull data from your mail server at some time intervals.
BUT there are pretty good reasons we went with email notifications:
I think what can save email notification, and I wish it was here from the beginning as I recommended, is an option to receive a daily digest of sites you are interested in, but not necessarily want to be informed in real-time about every single change. This way you would get just one email a day summarizing e.g. community posts and activity on your other sites, but you could also get real-time notifications from other sites you want. And not get your email inbox flooded.
At some point I would like to upgrade our RSS feeds to work with the notification system, i.e. using the same events etc. Then you could stop receiving those emails and switch entirely to RSS.
BTW: Nice discussion! It really shows the different ways you people use Wikidot!
Michał Frąckowiak @ Wikidot Inc.
Visit my blog at michalf.me
Michal's point about RSS adoption is critical here. Wikidot used to have only RSS, and at least 90% of people who I explained this to asked either "what the heck is RSS?" or, if they were geeks, "uh? wtf?" The response was systematically negative. Admittedly this is from people who are already using the Net in some way to organize. It's almost all email lists.
I don't know of any successful web services that work only with RSS.
Having said this, Michal's idea of allowing RSS as an alternative delivery mechanism is really neat. This was already proposed but I forgot about it. So we offer a variety of delivery mechanisms:
And clearly, this is a personal profile thing. People who want RSS want it systematically. There is no conflict between notifications and RSS, no need to have RSS icons on every page.
Portfolio
RSS feeds (from any source) can be merged into one single email per day thanks to Feedblitz.
Try these links:
or have a look at this howto:Subscribe To Community Sites And Forum Changes Via Feedblitz
I also tried FeedBurner service but found it more difficult to configure, at least at a time before it was acquired by Google.
gerdami - Visit Handbook en Français - Rate this howto:import-simple-excel-tables-into-wikidot up!
@maki: thanks for the insistence on RSS. Do you want to review the proposal on the design section?
Portfolio
Thank pieterh! I reviewed the suggestion and voted for it. I'd be more than happy to see RSS implemented! :)
http://feedback.wikidot.com/wish:382