Yesterday we launched the new toolbars for free sites, to a mixed reaction. Today we'll be pushing out a thinner top toolbar as suggested by many of you, and looking at reducing the size of the bottom toolbar as well.
The bottom toolbar has already started driving traffic towards pro sites, and one of the benefits of upgrading to a pro account is that you will simply get more visitors. This is the trade-off: those who use Wikidot for free will be helping to promote the sites of those who pay.
We've been accused of "bait and switch" but the reality is this: Wikidot must be based on a healthy, growing business model where people who get the benefits of a fast, wiki based platform for their blogs, web sites, wikis, and other projects, pay appropriately for it. This is essential in order to improve the product and keep the service running so that those of us who depend on Wikidot for our web sites, can trust that it will always be here.
There are, broadly, only a few ways to fund a project like Wikidot. One is to use venture capital, which most startups do, and which is one reason so many of them fail. Another would be to put ads on every free site, all the time. Another is to sell service upgrades, but a "crippleware" approach does not work well.
So the toolbars may be annoying to some people, but they are part of our determination to keep Wikidot healthy, growing, fast, and useful. We will aim to improve the toolbars, make them less intrusive, and more useful. But if you really want your site to be 100% free of the Wikidot branding, just become a pro user. It is not expensive and you will be helping make Wikidot better.
My sympathies to all those who felt betrayed, surprised, or annoyed by the new toolbars. Apologies especially for not warning site owners in advance: we did send out a newsletter but it went out too late. But thank you also to the many people who yesterday voted with their credit cards and told us that it was a fair price to pay for the service we provide.
Now, if I could just stop clicking on those "remarkable sites" and get back to work…
We just rolled out new toolbars which should work better:
Thanks to everyone for their comments and feedback yesterday. Next on our todo list is simpler registration and site joining, the feature most requested by site admins.
Portfolio
"Bottom toolbar now shows high karma free wikis as well as pro wikis"
I don't get this. So the more success you free site has, the more distractions your visitors have and the more opportunities they will have to get off your web site?
Anyway, since our site seems to have a very low karma we don't have the bottom toolbar.
I'm happy with that.
The more successful your free site is, the more people will see it advertised on other wikis and will come to it through the bottom toolbar.
I pasted this complain already, had no response at all. What's that telling me?
But I'll put it again here…
My day job is looking at ethical issues, and IMO (humble) O - this stinks. If the aim is to get people to upgrade, as implied above by pieterh 15 Jul 2009, 16:36 +0200
"@Gareth, thanks for your question. Yes, you can disable the header/footer on your own Wikidot sites by becoming a Pro or Pro-lite user."
then its worse. People came to this site under certain conditons. Its a kind of contract, I'm not interested in that 'legal' stuff, but its a moral commitment. Wikidot has got us all putting hours and weeks of time into our sites - helping their business to goow - but we are allowed out sites in return. Now someone has added compulsory ADDITIONS TOP AND BOTTOM WHICH SAY (I PARAPHRASE) 'THIS SITE IS CHEAP AND CRAP AND YOU ARE THICK FOR LOOKING AT IT"
Then we are told we can (we have to) pay to get rid of them. Am I alone, on this, or is it really a stinking example of arrogance and mismanagement?"
That's the quote, but honestly, these changes affect the integrity of sites (like ours) and are going to leave a lot of people saying 'Wikidot messes your site around when it feels like, to make money, ignoring previous commitments". We don't want that, do we?
Much the same effect 'could' have been achieved by agreement, especially by changing the rules fro new sites being set up now. That's why I see this as arrogant and mismanagement. Not replying confims my impression.
The top bar is dramatically less gaudy than yesterday. Shrinking those social icons alone did a lot for the aesthetics.
I detect now the top bar on "private" sites is (now) WITHOUT these buttons to twitter, facebook and what else..
This is an important security setup!
And - thanks to hide the MA administrator on the top of this toolbar!
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 ?
lol, "Master Administrator Administrator"
I really didn't want to double post but would still like you to see my concerns and suggestions.
Excellent work guys!
tDM
I like the new top toolbar appearance … but how bout the bottom toolbar? I'm also expect smaller bottom toolbar… But, don't worry, because I'm requesting this if only this possible…
A few comments.
1. I've been a pro user for quite a while, and I think I get very good value for my quite reasonable outlay.
2. I think the thinner toolbar looks a lot better, and I don't think the administrators of free sites have a lot to complain about considering how much they are getting for nothing.
3. I didn't realise until now that all sites have a karma ranking. Is there any way to see a list of say the top thousand sites and their rankings? Also I think a random selection of high karma sites on the front page in place of the featured sites would be more equitable. It seems a bit unfair that a select few sites get so much extra exposure.
Wayne Eddy
Melbourne, Australia
LGAM Knowledge Base
Contact via Google+
I do *not* appreciate the bottom bar. I am fine with WikiDot advertising on the top of the page with the clean bar that is there now, but I am very disappointed that other wiki sites are now forcibly advertised on the bottom of my wiki. It looks terrible and has absolutely no use to me or the users of my wiki.
You promote a professional feeling wiki, even under the free plans, but you have utterly destroyed any appearance of professionalism by forcing these unrelated and mostly unprofessional wikis onto our sites. I implore the Wikidot designers to reverse at least this aspect of the current changes, it flies in the face of what this site has stood for and what originally drew me here.
Sorry, but I cannot see any bottom bar on one of your (private) sites?
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 ?
The links to random other wikis is most certainly on the bottom of this site:
http://aeveris.wikidot.com/
I think it really detracts from the look of any sight and marginalizes the personalization we used to have of our wikis, now they feel like a cheap page somewere on GeoCities.
1.ok, this is a little "overwhelming" - but why can I not use the menus? I have no chance..
2. this site is "cheap" , if it is not held by an pro account… :)
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 ?
@Helmuti_pdorf
Menus:
I'm not sure why you can't use the menus, they don't play nice with Internet Explorer for some reason. I hate Internet Explorer and the main people I know who use the site use Firefox so I never figured out hot to fix it. It is a known issue and you'll find at least one thread there discussing it. It's a problem with IE, not with the wiki.
Cheap:
Free and cheap hold two very different meanings. Just because something is free doesn't mean it has to be of poor quality or poor appearance. If something is considered cheap, it's not usually a good connotation. A cheap car falls apart shortly after you get it, a cheap meal is usually not very good for you, and a cheap wiki looks less than professional. Just because a site is free doesn't mean it has to be cheap and/or unprofessional.
Yes, the personalization is kind of disturbed. We're working on making those thumbnails smaller.
Nice site btw. You might want to link to the quick reference rather than the full wiki syntax guide.
Portfolio
You might consider giving admins some ability to select wikis that are related to theirs instead of some appearing there they'd prefer didn't. I imagine a lot of community and educational projects would appreciate being able to weed out some. It would also probably end up getting better traffic through their site if they chose sites to display that were most relevant to what they were doing, and then wikidot gets basically free targeting technology.
Thanks for your comments and questions.
@WayneEddy, we started calculating site karma a few weeks ago, and we're now using this in more places. I really like the idea of showing the top 1,000 sites and will discuss this internally. And using site karma instead of featured sites is also a great idea. Perhaps, www.wikidot.com should just show the bottom toolbar, and not show featured sites at all.
@JakeH, I understand the sentiment. We've changed the bottom toolbar so that it does not show on new sites. We'd like to make the links context sensitive in some way - perhaps related by tags, overlapping membership, etc. For new sites this makes no sense. As for removing the toolbar entirely, that probably won't happen, but we will look at using smaller images as Ivan Akira has suggested, and allowing the toolbar to blend in better with sites. It is very important for us that visitors to a Wikidot site know that it is a community of sites, and many people have told us now that they find the site previews useful.
Portfolio
It seems to me this is just a way to force more people into the pro plans, and has nothing to do with community support. I find it dubious at best than these links will draw much traffic to other sites especially considering the fact that, as of yet, I have seen absolutely no connection to the content on my site and any of the sites listed on the bottom bar.
As for deactivating the bottom bar for new sites: seems to me you're just hiding the annoying feature until they've grown to love the site without it. Then, once everything is in place and a person has put int some time… *bam* you hit them with the annoying bar trying to push them ever more slightly towards buying a pro account.
Wikidot already advertises on sites for income, I see no reason there needs to be more advertisement for other sites within the Wikidot community. I did not complain when advertising was forced on us after having joined during a time when the designers of the site said they did not want to force advertisement on anyone, even free accounts. I did not complain when paid accounts were introduced, as I felt it was a fair and intelligent business move by Wikidot.
This latest move, however, seems completely unnecessary and, in my opinion, appears to be nothing more than an annoying banner to force users to pay for the minimal subscription account. I, for one, would rather take my wiki elsewhere than feel forced to pay for a subscription to remove such a useless feature.
@JakeH: basically, you're right but it's a choice between more intrusive text ads on sites, or this kind of "accept that your site carries the Wikidot branding or pay to use your own branding" deal. There is no magic solution here that will make everyone happy. Wikidot needs to be looked after, fed, and professionally run. If that means ads, toolbars, or whatever it takes to generate the necessary revenue, we'll do it. Period.
And honestly, the subscription price is so low, it's difficult to understand how paying it is a problem, unless one absolutely wants a free service on principle. I can sympathize with that, but even then the answer is simple: download the software, it is free, after all.
I appreciate your criticism and hopefully over time we'll show that this was the right way forwards.
Portfolio
If these new toolbars are designed to promote the Wikidot community, why don't we get the toolbars onto the main Wikidot page at http://www.wikidot.com? Or, would that ruin the look you're going for?
If it's good enough for our pages, it should be good enough for the main Wikidot page.
Indeed!
We've been enabling the toolbars on all our sites, and we've now switched them on on the www.wikidot.com site. However that front page needs to be redesigned now, the 'featured sites' section is redundant.
This site does not appear to have high enough karma to show the bottom toolbar but hopefully that'll change over the next days.
Portfolio
That's fixed now and this blog is properly showing the bottom toolbar.
Portfolio
Some people have in fact chosen to use intrusive google ads and are happy to give you a cut. At this moment, the community bars are also mandatory and uncustomizable. Will there be a choice between banners and adsense?
Should you do that, you'd do well to keep the community bars available to adsense users, and more customizable. Even people who were shocked at the suddenness of the change would want to support wikidot as many us of have since the beginning so long as we can control it's look and placement more fully.
You could also incentivize use of the lower bar for those not required to use it by adding user to the pool of sites that get featured, and increasing the exposure level of pro sites that choose to display it.
I'd like to offer the choice between Toolbars and AdSense, yes. However, it's trivial for people to claim to use AdSense and then in fact show no ads at all.
How about the following option: if you are an AdSense user, you can show your ads on the bottom toolbar, in place of the site thumbnails.
Does this make sense?
Portfolio
yes i think this is a good option
http://it.dennyhalim.com | http://wiki.dennyhalim.com | http://twitter.com/dennyhalim
Agreed, I think this is a much better option as well.
That's fairly sensible. Though you might want to rewarn users about adsense limits at the point where one would enable this option. Depending on their layout some people might have the limit of ads on some pages and the addition of another bottom ad would put them in violation of adsense rules. It's their responsibility of course, not yours, but a warning to check their pages could be helpful.
What might also help, for users with lots of pages who might not have had the foresight to make their ads controllable through live templates is the ability to disable a specific ad unit (I assume deleting the ad unit would result in an error message where the adsense module in placed in a page, and I checked and "pause" gives an error message as well) so wikidot chooses not to display it even though a module references it. That could be helpful for more than just the current situation for people making changes in how they use adsense at any given time. I'll try to remember to make the disable ad unit a wishlist item.
Will enabling the bottom text ads provide any options for customizing or removing the top toolbar?
These suggestions make sense, and I've taken David's proposal more or less as-is into our issue tracker. Hopefully we'll have this ready next week.
Portfolio
A small functional tip for the top toolbar.
You can type in a domain "your-free-web-project".wikidot.com.
If you type in a domain that is already in use, you get an message about that.
It would be useful that there is also an option in that message box to go to that domain:
- the name is something you are interested in, so why not go take a look there?
- it's also an easy navigator over wikidot.com.
Nice idea, we'll try this out.
Portfolio
No it could never be that bad. Incidentally Yahoo is closing their free Geocities product in October, partly because they hadn't bothered to update it since the end of the First World War, but mainly because, being free and supported by ads, it wasn't making enough money to remain viable.
Rob
Rob Elliott - Strathpeffer, Scotland - Wikidot first line support & community admin team.
geocities didn't fail because it was ad-supported. It failed because it wasn't supported at all, as you noted with your crack about updating. Over time more and better options became available and geocities did nothing to make itself compare favorably with the competition.
The bottom bar of "random" sites showssome private sites as well. Unfortunatly, the thumbnails for these private sites can't be shown due to security.
Kenneth Tsang (@jxeeno)
Thanks for reporting this. We'll fix that asap.
Portfolio
This may seem like a silly question, but just to clarify, do free private sites show up on the bottom toolbar on other wiki sites? I dont have an issue with the bottom bar showing on our site, but as we have high karma, I am concerned about others seeing our site.
There was a bug that caused high-karma private sites to sometimes appear, yes, though with no image preview, and obviously still inaccessible to non-members. We fixed that yesterday.
Portfolio