Pieter, as I had posted back in March, I would love to see a concept to let the Community improve existing Wikidot code.
You could start small: I've stopped counting how often someone from the community has offered his help to translate Wikidot to another language. The same for cleaning typos or improving language in the docs.
Right. Here are three ways we're opening up Wikidot to the Community:
More suggestions?
I do like wikidot. It's well done with many features done just right. It's clear you've put a lot of work into a labor of love and I hope it pays off for you all.
The rant, then:
Seriously, just fix the bing.com awstats thing. It's not important, but little things add up. And it's trivial to do! http://www.smartlabsoftware.com/howto/awstats-how-to.htm
In fact, the web stats in general could use a lot of work. Having the last 30 days always instead of having only one day of stats the 1st of each month and 30 days at the end of the month isn't as helpful as it could be. And it'd be great to do things like filter out hosts.
And the Google site maps! Broken, broken, broken! Adding per-category meta tags would help a lot, but there's so much more that could be done. It's so close to being a great feature that it's a bit painful to see it botched.
The two most highly rated wishes, are…
One step registration.
View permissions
And have been for well over a year .
Instead of attending to them, or announcing that it cant be done, we get "cornify" and notice of a "new user interface" (3 months ago… still waiting for something that i don't particularly need)
IMHO, both of the above wishes woul;d be a dam good reason to encourage users to go pro.
Wikidot grew up around a developer-led process, which in the beginning made it dynamic and interesting. But over time, that process turned hostile to the Community, and led us to make really bad decisions, such as announcing fancy new features that no-one had asked for, while ignoring absolutely necessary (but boring) work that everyone was screaming for.
This was my fault, for being more interested in using Wikidot than fixing the process. It had worked, why mess with it? Well, the main reason that "new user interface" never landed, was that for three months we've been ripping apart the process and rebuilding it. We have a new internal issue tracker that holds everything we work on. We have a process that moves from request to design to prototype to development to testing to production. Obvious stuff, but we were taking shortcuts all over the place before.
There are about four issues in that tracker for easier registration: when joining a site, when making a comment, when trying to edit a page, etc. This is our highest priority work. When it's done, making the step from anonymous user to registered user, to site member should be smooth and compelling.
For view permissions, you have my vote (literally, I voted that request up ages ago). We've got two issues under development for that. One is private categories, which will be a simple admin function (category is private y/n, if private only site members can see its pages). The second is draft editing, which lets members edit a page and then publish it in one step.
For what it's worth, I cancelled the new home page. Maybe another day, when there is spare time, we'll start on that again. It was a good idea, but we do not lack in good ideas, just time to execute them.
Yes, that would be great. And, of course, content input through forms. I think one-step registration should be free, available to all by default, not some pro feature (as Phill Chett seems to be suggesting). I just discovered ning.com, and their registration system is incredibly nice, whether you want to join their whole network or just one of their sites. I think making it easier for people to join a site is just a matter of respect for the site builders and their users. And one shouldn't pay extra for that.
that process turned hostile to the Community, and led us to make really bad decisions, such as announcing fancy new features that no-one had asked for, while ignoring absolutely necessary (but boring) work that everyone was screaming for.
Exactly. For a long, long time, it was impossible to include an AddThis widget, even though it was one of the top requests. Meanwhile, Cornify was made available — and I still wonder what the heck that's useful for if you're building a site for grown-ups. No offense to those who like it, but it sounded just plain ridiculous to me when they made it available before so many highly-rated requests…
OK, thanks for the opportunity to vent. Talk to you again next Tuesday :)
For what it's worth, here is the new Wikidot policy on pro features, advertising, and changes.
First, we now consider all design aspects that make it harder to use Wikidot in specific ways (7-click delete, 4-step registration) as bugs, and aim to fix these before adding new features (with a few exceptions).
Second, we will be removing the crippleware aspect of free wikis, so that the pro features except those which are costly to do (web stats is the main one) are available to all wikis. I do not like restricting what people can do with Wikidot, it just reduces their motivation to use it.
Lastly, we want to remove ads on free sites, and replace them with a more social and constructive incentive for people to upgrade to pro accounts. Basically: if you don't pay, your sites help promote the Wikidot community, and if you want your sites to not do the community promotion thing, you pay.
This will become clear quite soon. Ads are what brings us most money now, so will remain until we're sure that the new model will get more people to upgrade to pro.
Thank you Pieter. Its good to know that actions are in place.
Like a Swan slowly getting nowhere on a fast moving stream, all we see is a stationary Swan.
If we had a camera under water, we would see that the poor Swans feet are paddling along like bugger.
You are appearing to provide an underwater camera for us. I thank you for that. Keep it up. (please)
I like the Swan image. Makes me think it's time for a New Logo Competition. Yes, this is pretty much how things are, the swan is doing its best to remain stately and regal and stable, while its little feet are frantically pushing and pulling against the tides. Michal and Piotr and Lukasz and everyone in the Community do an amazing job of keeping wikidot.com up and stable and responsive but we need to see those feet, in order to appreciate the results.
yesterday….
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 ?
