Some people have asked how we choose which sites to display on that annoying but actually very useful bottom toolbar. If you want to know how useful, go to your web statistics and check traffic over the last day. You'll see a hundred or so extra visitors each day.
Web stats by the way are one of those remaining pro-only features, because they cost a lot to calculate. They are really useful.
Back to the story. We started, a few weeks ago, to calculate a "site karma" that measures how active a site is, in terms of number of members, recent edits, and so on. All the 120,000-odd Wikidot sites are then scored into a curve and the curve is chopped into six slices, with karma 0 to 5.
What is this useful for? It lets us detect active sites with a pretty good accuracy. If you look at the bottom toolbar you'll mainly see useful, active sites. There are a few anomalies like the sandbox (lots of edits, but not really a 'remarkable site', but they are rare.
We will, later, make site karma visible and use it as a tool for managing one's own sites (fast access to one's own high karma sites). We'll also use this to replace the 'Featured sites' section on the main page and perhaps a list of the top 1,000 sites.
So the bottom toolbar shows pro sites that have karma 2 or higher, and free sites that have karma 4 or 5. This are the values we're using today, we'll tune them to get the most interesting results.
What if we don't want or need the extra traffic, but are forced to go public because of unrealistic limitations to private sites?
I have no problem with the bar at the top of the page, I'm happy to display the place where my wiki is hosted. For a free service Wikidot *should* have all the right in the world to advertise on our pages.
My problem comes when other wikis, to whom I owe absolutely nothing, get to advertise on my wiki for free. I strongly urge you to reconsider the forcible advertising of other wiki pages. I know you have already said it will likely not go away, but I will just ensure it is understood there is a sizable population of Wikidot users who are strongly opposed to this change.
@JakeH: sorry for the slow and long response.
I'm not sure what you mean by "unrealistic limitations to private sites". Could you explain?
You do make a good point about not owing anything to other wikis, but there are clearly different interests, and conflicts between them. It's my job to navigate and resolve these in a sustainable manner.
There was a review of Wikidot some time ago, on some site, and the reviewer liked the product but complained that it did not emphasise the "community" aspect that was so essential to a wiki farm. Their number one complaint:
We added that to the main page, but you'll admit that adding this to every free wiki makes it "major". We don't just tell visitors "you're on a Wikidot site", we tell them, "and it's part of a community, look!"
There is something of a "try to please everyone, and you'll please no-one" conundrum here. Clearly, there are projects where this kind of community cross-marketing is fine. And clearly there are projects where it is awkward for the site admin to tell his visitors, "I'm using a free service and they stick these awful banners on the site".
Leaving the aesthetics apart (these will improve over time), the key point is that for most web projects working with volunteers, it's fine to be part of a Wikidot community, and for most projects that are "professional", it's not. And in most of the "professional" projects, buying an account to escape the community obligation is a fair deal. We all (I hope) pay for our computers, Internet connections, bandwidth, mobile phones, electricity, water, food. Why should we expect to get a very reliable, high quality web hosting service for free? That makes no sense unless we're used to living at home and paying for nothing.
Yes, we could have introduced these changes gradually, but that would make zero difference. Several small changes instead of one big change, would fool no-one. The fact is, there is a segment of our users who hate us for these changes. There are people who feel bitter about being asked to pay for anything. We knew this, we expected it, and we're not upset by it. That is a fair deal, if it's part of making a better Wikidot over time.
I'll end with a comparison to one of our competitors. The old PBwiki is at least 40 times more expensive than Wikidot, claiming to earn an average of $1,000 per (presumably, paying) user. This should give you an idea of what good value Wikidot is.
And fundamentally, would you trust your web content and community to a business that did not have a solid business model? Personally, I would not, whether my project was a free one, or not.
Portfolio
The wiki I have created on Wikidot is only really useful to about a dozen people in the entire world. It documents some information for a home-brew role-playing campaign my friends and I have been running for about 13 years. It's a hobby, one which we try to keep as inexpensive as possible; especially in light of the current economic situations.
I would run my wiki as a completely private wiki, if not for the fact that I would be limited to 5 members. We have more than five members in our campaign, so I am forced to run it as a public site. As such, I now get the added benefit of having an ugly bar displaying small images of the front page of other wikis and their titles.
Can you explain to me the reasoning behind the tight restrictions of the number of members allowed for private wikis, whether it's a free or paid subscription?
Edit:
I really fail to understand the necessity for a community on a wiki-farm. If there were some foundational similarity to all the wikis, such as wikis about people's favorite movies, tv shows, characters, etc etc… I could see some reason for there being a focus on community. There is absolutely no connection between the majority of the wikis hosted on Wikidot. That is the joy of Wikidot. Each wiki is a world unto itself planted in the soil of Wikidot, but independent of one another.
For example, I just loaded up my wiki and the four wikis advertised at the bottom are:
Taxapia "Make your life less taxing"
GVAN "Global Virital Assistant Network"
Welcome to GOAL! "The website for British Hang Gliding Competitions" and
COSCUP WIKI (No description given)
None of these have any connection to my site. On top of that, there are maybe three or four people who actually come to my site on a regular basis, myself being the #1 visitor. The uglier the site gets, the fewer other people in my group are going to want to use it. I do not like being forced to view advertising, nor do my friends, forcing more and more advertising on us is not a way to keep us around.
If you want people to have a desire to pay for your services, don't annoy them into buying it. Instead, present them with a limited selection of options for the free model and have very enticing options for the pay versions.
You've done almost exactly the opposite. Along with the new influx of forced advertising, you've given the free accounts options which were previously only provided to the pay accounts. Why? If you want to sell something, don't make the trial annoying as heck and expect people to open their wallets. Make the trial/free version easy to use, attractive, and inviting.
I am a teacher. I used to recommend Wikidot to friends and colleges but I will not be doing so until I see a change for the better in the business practices of the company. Annoying people into purchasing a product is not a wise practice and, as I am sure you are very quickly learning now, does nothing to build positive relations with your customer base. Just the same reason you don't hit a dock with a stick every time it fails to sit on command, sure the dog may learn to sit eventually but it's going to hate you in the end. Instead, you entice the dog with a treat. Reward the dog for taking the course of action you want. It's called positive reinforcement and it has been scientifically proven to work much better than negative reinforcement (i.e. you get to make the ugly bars go away if you pay us $$$). I despise bait and switch scenarios, and in my opinion that is exactly what Wikidot has pulled here in the numerous changes over the course of the last year. I find it distasteful and unfortunate.
Thanks for explaining what you meant. In fact we changed this some time ago. I'll explain our current policy on this.
One of the problems with private sites is that they are an easy vehicle for abuse. Child porn exchange, for example. Trading of cracked games. Whatever. Illegal actions endanger the whole Wikidot service. We already spend some effort to randomly check private sites for such abuse. The bottom toolbar should help us moderate public sites, but this cannot help with private sites.
Second, we defined these limits when we were still selling "features". Now, I don't like crippleware but larger private sites seemed, and still seems, a good reason to upgrade.
Lastly, the notion that private services are for paid users only is quite typical and seems to make sense. When someone pays for a site, we have their name and address, which makes abuse much less likely. Sure, you can still use credit cards anonymously but it's harder and does not seem to happen a lot.
So today, it still seems fair that private sites are a form of privilege (especially if we remove the toolbars on them, as we have been asked to, and probably will do). Certainly they no longer act as "community" in any way at all.
And it seems fair to expect people to pay for this privilege, or explain why they deserve it for free (we have that programme of educational sites, for example).
The reasons we have are so strong that I've actually thought we should be even more stringent on new private sites, and limit them to 2-3 members. No decision on that yet.
Does this help? We're always open to changing our policies, based on sensible and fair reasoning (and 'fair' means balancing the needs of many people, which can be painful but is unavoidable).
Portfolio
Thank you, that helps me to better understand the limitations on private sites. Honestly, I would think it would be easier to police private sites for illegal activity than what you suggest, but I have no experience in operating a wiki-farm so I cannot say.
It seems to me that with the use of file-size limitations and bandwidth monitoring, you might be able to better locate sites that are operating in violation of the ToS rather than punishing us all for the ill-deeds of a few people. It is not my fault that people abuse your services, so why should I suffer the penalties of this?
:-) Editing your post while I'm answering it is also a form of bait and switch.
So. More answers, then I really need to grab some lunch.
Search google for "Wikidot review" and on the top page, check the number one complaint from the reviewer: "What Wikidot doesn't have is a major emphasis on existing wikis."
This seems pretty categorical. For some users the community is irrelevant. For others, it's primordial. You may not want to take part in that. Others insist on it.
Sorry to flatly contradict you, but this is not accurate or at least not in this context. We have learned with some regret that the vast majority of Wikidot users prefer to stay within the context of "pay nothing", even when there are good positive incentives to pay something. The failure of positive incentives in the context of this particular service was serious. Perhaps we needed even more "pro only" features. I doubt it. The free Wikidot was simply Good Enough for most people, and we'd have had to start removing more free features.
And in fact any positive incentive is a negative one, seen from the other side.
I agree 100% with you, and this is our goal. However, once again, unless there is an actual obligation (not an incentive) to open wallets, people simply do not do it.
You are a teacher. You have a job. That $25 per year is less than the time you've already spent arguing this (and I appreciate that you've been eloquent and polite) with me. Yet you seem to be in principle against paying that small fee and getting exactly what you are asking for. This is a common principle, it's one I also have. We've grown up to expect things for free.
When we all know, nothing can be both free, and worthwhile. The toolbars are a cost, yes, but it is a cost that is in my judgement fair. Those who wish to have a private space, separate from the community, should pay for that privilege, or explain why they deserve it for free (per the educational wiki programme).
If only we'd had the ability to make "numerous changes over the course of the last year". We've been far too restricted to do more than tweak the product and keep it running.
The good news is that since the toolbars came out, pro sales have gone up nicely, meaning we can now start to consider expanding the team and responding faster to bug reports and feature requests.
It is all related: no pain, no gain.
@JakeH, I appreciate the comments and hope you trust my sincerity in wanting to make Wikidot a great product that is useful to as many people as possible, for the lowest possible cost.
Portfolio
Bandwidth monitoring seems like a good idea for catching abuse. I'll discuss this with the team. It may or may not be technically feasible. Wikidot is built using extreme caching techniques meaning that the bulk of traffic does not come from the database at all, but from external caches.
Cheers,
Pieter
Portfolio
@JakeH, you've asked me many questions and I've tried answer them. Perhaps I can ask you one.
You're a high karma user, registered for more than a year. You obviously care about Wikidot, and you care about your sites, it shows. Wikidot helps you with your private projects. So how come in the last year you never upgraded to a pro or pro-lite account, even when you hit the limit of five users?
Thanks,
Pieter
Portfolio
While I have a job, yes, it's pay is not particularly that great. Also, I am putting my wife through medical school. Like someone in another comment thread mentioned, $25 may not seem like a lot to some people, but it is for others. I have to budget for just about every dollar I spend, an extra $25 a year for one of my general low-cost hobbies is another $25 I can't put into a saving account for the future education of my children.
As with all things, there are opportunity costs involved in making one investment over another. In all honestly, my wikis on Wikidot are little more than an addition to a semi-monthly hobby. Why haven't I invested the money when I've invested the time to argue my case? Because my time is mine to spend how I please, as is my money. At the moment, a pro-account with Wikidot is just something I have chosen not to invest into. Do I see myself doing so in the future? Perhaps, but we'll have to see where things go. I'm more concerned with principles than simple convenience.
Beside all that, I'd have to get more than the basic account to support the number of users I intend to have on a private wiki. $60 would be a more accurate figure.
Even at $60, with ten members, that's only $6 per member per year. Just go without a single lunch, one day out of one year and you'll have covered the cost of a pro account.
The Chronicles of Heaven's Gate
A 4th edition Dungeons & Dragons campaign setting.
I'm not asking my members to pay to use the wiki, especially considering that many of them visit once a month if that. Also, I already don't eat out. Making suggestions on how to manage my budget, without knowing anything about my budget, doesn't work.
@JakeH: thanks for sharing. You'll perhaps not believe me, but your situation sounds better than those of us here, at the sharp end of Wikidot.com. We also believe in principles - such as offering Wikidot.org for free - but the bills for servers, hosting, traffic come to us, and we pay them.
You're of course free to not invest in Wikidot, but I don't think you can ask for other people to make sacrifices for your benefit, either. Yet that is what you're asking for: "give me what I want, but do not ask me to pay". Pro accounts pay our operating costs, our salaries, and the education of our wives and children.
Exactly what principles are you arguing for here?
Portfolio
The main principle is a promise you guys made about advertising. The main reason I came to Wikidot when I was spent a lot of time searching around was that you did not force advertising on your users. I greatly appreciated that, it was one of the main reasons I decided to bring my friends here rather that someplace else.
Now, to take a step back a second. I understand sometimes things change in a business and that sometimes you are forced to do things you'd rather not in order to pay the bills. I have never had a bad thing to say about Wikidot, even when ad-sense was put on all free sites. I understood you needed to pay the bills, so I didn't complain about it. I do not want Wikidot to fail and I understand that Internet advertising seems to be fading somewhat as a viable source of income. But I'm not quite yet understanding how the advertising of other wikis is helping to create much income. You mentioned it is drawing in a few new pro members, other than that is there any other income generating purpose to the bottom bar other than annoying people into purchasing a pro account?
On an unrelated note, several people in these comment threads have asked Wikidot to give us a peek at the expenses and income of the company. Maybe if people were able to see, in hard numbers, how Wikidot is struggling financially that might actually garner a lot more support than annoying the heck out of us by altering the appearance of our sites? Nobody here wants you to fail, I'm sure of that. Despite most of what I said, I still greatly respect the service that Wikidot provides and have come to enjoy using the site and it's tools. Like you said, I have a high karma rating and I've been here for more than a year, I think. (Quick aside… just how the heck does a guy break into that last karma bar?!)
If what you say is true, things aren't looking good for Wikidot financially, then I am sorry. I hope these changes actually help you to keep the site a viable business venture. Other than this most recent change, I have always been more than happy with everything Wikidot has provided through its service. It's going to be a while, but when we have a more disposable income here at the JakeH household, I'll be looking to grab a pro account. Right now… I just have too much on my plate to commit.
One last note and I'll end my long-winded diatribe. Right now we're simply engaged in the age-old haggling between a customer and a business. You do make a slight amount of money off the free wikis. Obviously not enough to keep Wikidot afloat by itself, but there is some income there. So we don't really have the sites for free, we don't pay anything but we also advertise for Wikidot (through ad-sense). Some people get in on the action by drawing in some income from their ads themselves. Personally, I don't want to make an income on advertising. It's a principle thing again and probably why this upset me so much in the first place.
Long story short, if these most recent changes help to keep Wikidot alive… that helps me to be more comfortable with them. I still think sharing the hard numbers of your situation might draw in a lot more support than this. Just look at Wikipedia, they put that donation bar at the top of their page every so often and it seems to work fairly well for them. Ask and ye shall receive. Annoy and… well… receive something else.
I've never been that bothered about the personal karma but this site karma thing has tweaked my interest. Mainly because over the last few days I have seen several of my sites that are under development (they are public sites) and a live client site appear on a number of occasions in the bottom bar but never yet seen my main business site at strathviewconsultants.wkidot.com (even after being a sad individual and refreshing for half an hour). I am the only contributor to the site, but given that I link almost daily from the forum to the site in order to post solutions I find it rather puzzling. I must be doing something wrong as I assume the algorithm is ok.I look forward to the release of details about how the site karma is calculated.
Rob
Rob Elliott - Strathpeffer, Scotland - Wikidot first line support & community admin team.
Doesn't sound like it really considers traffic, especially since they note the cost of calculating web stats (though since you're pro and they already calc web stats, maybe they should include traffic in pro karma*). Remember the old diagram of site activity on the old front page which basically sorted sites by most edits per day/week/month. I bet it skews towards that type of activity, along with, as quoted, membership numbers.
I wonder if they will indeed clarify figures, since gaming the site karma system has real consequences unlike gaming the user karma, and I don't recall them ever getting concrete with percentages on user karma, though I think they did list all the factors considered.
*Though I understand the need to sort for interesting sites, and to use an algorithm to do so (which will never be perfect), if indeed traffic isn't already used for pro karma, I think it should be. I wouldn't want uninteresting sites appearing in the lower bar any more than anyone else, but there are plenty of useful mature wikis that really won't ever again reach the kind edit activity that lots of less interesting/useful new wikis will reach as they add initial content and alter the appearance of their site. By using traffic, which I gather is already calculated for pro sites, you can balance things a little more. People aren't going to regularly visit a site that isn't helpful or interesting in some way. You still weed out abandonware but give even more of a boost to pro users than just a lower karma floor.
I agree, it certainly doesn't appear to be based on traffic, nor on the number or frequency of edits to the site. It just struck me as odd that a bare-bones site under development and with no content yet and so far only one member (me) like http://lordlieutenant-rosshire.wikidot.com should seem to appear when a more established site like my business one, albeit deliberately with only a couple of members and not necessarily a more interesting site, doesn't appear, at least not when I try it. It's not that I'm upset in any way, I am just curious about why one might have a higher site karma than another.
I also keep seeing the same sites in the bottom bar so that also makes me wonder what the algorithm is.
It's clearly a courageous move for pieter to announce these things - it gives people the opportunity to ask questions…whinge…moan…complain…argue…challenge……….
Right, back to the coal-face writing a boring spec for a GIS system.
Rob
Rob Elliott - Strathpeffer, Scotland - Wikidot first line support & community admin team.
Afaik the site karma calculation ignores traffic but I think that would be a useful component, at least to filter out unused sites that may just have a lot of recent activity. Recent activity is treated as more significant, which explains why new sites appear more easily.
Portfolio