Maybe you're being harsh. :-) The page is being edited by many anonymous people, it's becoming a valuable resource very rapidly, and for me its simplicity is its brilliance in this case: how to educate hundreds of contributors in no time at all? Answer: remove all functionality.

chinadavis 28 Aug 2009, 23:15 +0200
I tried to leave a comment on how Thunderbird behaves under Snow Leopard, and I find your site incredibly difficult to use. I'm personally not interested in learning how to use your site, life is too short, I just wanted to say that Thunderbird 2.0.0.23 unexpectedly quits quite often under Mac OS 10.6; it's actually one of the applications that works quite bad under the new system.

As a new user to Wikidot that discovered your service when I came to view/edit the Snow Leopard page, I have to disagree completely with the comment from "chinadavis" that gerdami quoted above.

I'm extremely impressed with the Ajax and other technology being used by Wikidot. The service is wonderfully easy to use, the UI is pleasant and inviting (we Mac developers and users know a good UI from a bad one), and everything is well thought out.

Also, as someone who does some Wikipedia editing, this is more like what Wikipedia should be IMO (including notifications!). Speaking of…the Snow Leopard Wikipedia page also references Wikidot's page, so that's likely driving quite a bit of traffic as well.

Thanks for hosting the Snow Leopard page and for all the hard work involved in fixing the resulting massive load issues. There's nothing like a good Slashdotting (or the Snow Leopard equivalent) to give the servers a load test and drive some new code efficiencies. ;-)

I'm extremely impressed with the Ajax and other technology being used by Wikidot. The service is wonderfully easy to use, the UI is pleasant and inviting (we Mac developers and users know a good UI from a bad one), and everything is well thought out.

This is very kind. We use Wikidot every day ourselves and try to make it practical. There are still many things we need to improve, in the UI and elsewhere.

The Snow Leopard page is not a typical Wikidot site, and shows some problems - e.g. being a single page, there are many edit conflicts now. But it's been amazing as a demonstration of how hundreds of people can contribute to a knowledge base.

A more structured site would put one application per page, use tags to organize them, and show the results as a summary. Wikidot is getting pretty good at this kind of dynamic page management. Gerdami has made an example, here: http://snow-template.wikidot.com/

At the same time, having a single page saved us this time because we were able to cache it as a static HTML page. I've just tried again: as anonymous user, the page pops up in about half a second; as a logged in user it takes about 10-15 seconds.

So, yes, this kind of slashdotting is really good for driving efficiencies and we're more than happy to see this traffic. It was a bit stressful for everyone when Wikidot went down but it'll be faster than ever afterwards.

BTW, welcome to Wikidot. :-)

Thanks for the welcome!

The snow-template that Gerdami did is intruiging, but when I try to add something, it gives me an error, "Sorry, you can not create a new page in this category. Only members of this site, site administrators and perhaps selected moderators are allowed to."

I'm signed in, but it still tells me that I'm not a member….

Being a Wikidot user allows you to join any Wikidot website.

When you create a Wikidot website, you can change the editing permissions:

• Make it so everybody can edit/create pages
• Or make it so all Wikidot users can edit/create pages
• Or make it so that only members of the site can edit/create changes

If you want to join the site “snow-template.wikidot.com”, you must go to this page

That will allow you to edit/create pages

Though the insane amount of traffic this site is getting is definitely causing pain… just saw a bunch of 500 errors again.