It never ceases to amaze me, this business strategy. "Lets make our product so annoying that people will buy it!" Did anyone seriously consider the long-term effects of this kind of mentality?

I am already researching other free wiki sites in order to migrate my content away from Wikidot. I appreciated the mentality Wikidot had when I first arrived, but now everything I appreciated has vanished and you're turning into the exact type of company I was trying to avoid.

Go ahead and suggest that I download the software and run my own wiki, but I have not the time, understanding, or money to host something of my own. You already put ugly advertisements on our sites, this latest move is just kicking us while we're already down.

I gotta agree with you, Jake. It's not a business strategy that I'd like to see used generally - eg. go to the hospital and be made so sick you pay for 'intensive care'…!

http://philosophical-investigations.wikidot.com/

(You can't even put your website in the box allocated to it on this board…)

Martin, your analogy doesn't seem to quite cover the wikidot method. Something more apt would be if you go to the hospital and don't want to pay (because,after all, who thinks their health is worth paying for?), you spend some time working off your care*. If hospital work isn't suited to you, you pay for your own care and be on your way.

* As you appear to think the bars are only there to make wikidot ugly for free users (to make you so sick you're willing to pay for intensive care), it's worth explaining how they can contribute to the wikidot ecosystem (how the bars can amount to working for your free care). For one, it makes pro accounts more valuable since the bottom bar on free sites drives more traffic to pro accounts than to free accounts (a lower karma floor to get featured) and traffic is a perk worth paying for to some, for another thing it makes it clearer than before how to get a new wikidot wiki for new users. Even free site creation acts as advertising for the whole wikidot product. Some of the new users will go pro, some will use adsense sharing, all will draw more people into the wikidotverse as they come via Google and other outlets to see the content created by each user.

I have three questions:

1. Can this be a little more discrete? It is too big and it is as molesting as adds.
2. Can I have this removed if I put add for wikidot at my site but in aplace I determine?
3. Can I have this removed from my site with pro-lite account?

Pro-Lite users can remove the toolbars, yes. Ad-sense works independently from this. Over time we'll adjust the look and feel of the toolbars.

Shame that'll only be a pro-only option but understandably they'll want some perks! :-)

Pro lite has power over it. I checked the plans.

One thing we'd like to do, but this will happen later, is give pro users (pro-lite, pro, pro+) ways to customize the toolbar if they don't want to remove it: change the look & feel, replace the Wikidot logo with their own logo, add their own actions like Edit, Join, etc.

As a Pro user, I like the sound of this. Being able to add links for people to join my site/wiki would be a useful addition to the toolbar. In fact, the one-step registration idea would be a good addition as well ;)

Registering for both Wikidot and the wiki/site/blog in question is a bit much - joining both in just 1-2 easy steps would be a lot more intuitive and prevent us from losing traffic to our wikis.

Pieter, the problem is not in having (or not) the possibilities to chose, and if you reread Sttephens post, you'll see that he does not complain to this. The problem NOW, just as it was a problem earlier for putting adds at the top of all free sites is that you do not inform people about what you are going to do, and then only one day, they find their sites with something that shouldn't be there. I am not complaining now because I have already experienced this unpleasant surprise in March, just as Stehoen is experiencing it now, and I know that I cannot do anything about it, so I do not complain. But…

Let me give you a piece of a good advice:

Next time, send massive email to all owners of free sites saying that YOU ARE GOING to do something and giving them those options you are talking about. Send this email with a reasonable amount of time in advance, so the owners of free sites can think and get used to the idea of future different looks of their sites. In this way, you will not have so many negative reactions to changes as you were and are having to each cnahge in this direction you make. Prepare us for change, it hurts less when someone knows what is going to happen, than when you get a stroke by surprise.

@Brunhilda: thanks the advice, this is what we'll do next time. I'd have used this blog but there are not many people watching it yet. We don't like to use mass mailings but we did actually send out a newsletter to all Wikidot users telling them of the change, today.

We have no plans to make any other changes that will affect how Wikidot sites look, except later to remove ads from free sites where they still appear. (Depending on whether pro upgrades replace ad income, or not.)

I didn't get any newsletter.
Mass mailing is not good when it comes to advertising, but if it comes to such crucial decisions it is more than welcome. Blogs and other type of info put here can be easily overlooked and missed, because not everyone visits with the same frequency Community forum and site. For example, I don't even know where to look for your blog even if I wanted to! E-mail is the safest way to be sure that everyone knows what they should know.

If students are seeing toolbars including the bottom one how are you ensuring the content of those linked sites is appropriate for children. I'm betting you're not.

@jeani, thanks for this very important question.

We did, in fact change the policy for educational sites, based on feedback from yourself and others. They no longer show the bottom toolbar. If you have sites that are public but which you would like to turn into private educational sites, please ask here.

What is also important to know:

• We systematically scan for, and remove inappropriate content from Wikidot. It is clearly forbidden in the terms of service, and is actually very rare.
• One of the reasons for showing links to other sites, rather than text ads, was precisely because some people were getting inappropriate text ads (which we cannot control) on their sites.
• Finally, we rely on people using the bottom toolbar so that we are more certain that inappropriate sites will be seen, reported, and removed.

Thanks,
Pieter

Looking into it, I suspect that the issue with the graphics is down to colour depth. I am on a low power thin terminal running vnc, and get an odd halo effect around all the icons against the gradient background, which is probably due to slight variations in the colours when the graphics were anti-aliased that is not evident at higher colour depth settings.

For comparison, the wikidot.com logo in the second "Blog" bar at the top of this page looks lovely and clean.

It is going to be fixed in a moment. Your CSS included padding on every 'a' element, which affected toolbar. We're going to make toolbar CSS resistant.

There won't be any more unpleasant surprises with Wikidot, only nice ones, from now on.

Today actually carries two distinct changes on wikidot. One is, obviously, the new top banner. The other is imposing new changes on existing accounts (where is the grandfathering?). Even when you threw ads on free sites that hadn't enrolled in adsense, there was an opt-out. When you moved formerly free features onto the pro scheme, you didn't take them away from free sites that were currently using them.

The actual banner addition is less worrisome than the idea that terms and balance of features and burdens will change out from under those of us who started wikidot sites with a particular expectation set. It's kind of you to make the above quoted promise, but since the current setup breaks past wikidot promises and established practices, why should I believe this particular promise will stand?

I'm a strong supporter of wikidot in a large variety of contexts and I'm not trying to flame you or make threats or even whine. I really believe it's a fair question.

How do I dislike this? Let me count the ways.

• I dislike these bars for not having known about them beforehand.
• I dislike these bars for their complete irrelevance to our site's content.
• I dislike these bars because they attribute our site to me, when we've worked hard to make our wiki a neighborhood endeavor.
• I dislike these bars because they're clearly there to make me ante up for a paid account. I signed up for a free account, with certain expectations. I'll be a more committed, loyal customer if you offer carrots, not these sticks.
• I dislike these bars, because our wiki is a neighborhood project, and because there's no benefit to whatever broader exposure they promise beyond our neighborhood user base.
• I dislike these bars, because they erode my confidence that Wikidot respects our control over the look and feel of our site.
• I dislike these bars, because had they been in play years ago, I probably wouldn't have chosen to start a site on Wikidot. I imagine many new users share this perspective.

Please take them down. Thanks for reconsidering.

I absolutely agree with David (about the doubt this creates in users' minds about what will happen NEXT) and Scottplan puts it all very elegantly too! I'd just add that Peter is an unconvincing witness. He just said above he 'tried to tell everyone in advance' mailout went out late tec tetc, then here he says his idea was to just do it and 'not worry anyone'. Ha!

But Peter and co. - the users are the people who make the content - not you or the free software. Wikidot has got a bad mindset - I know you work all day coding etc etc, but you still depend on al those 'volunteerrs' to generate the content, which brings in the page views. IIf anything Wikidot staff are in debt to the users. Asking us to give you extra money now is a bit mad!

I understand that changes need to be made and mistakes happen, so mine is a question about company policy rather than assailing anyone's character, just a request for a more formal assurance than a comment on a blog post, as well as a fleshing out of the reasoning behind this move that will help us all understand what Wikidot will and won't promise for the future, and what our balance of rewards and responsibilities will be going forward.

(EDIT: thank you very much for the edit).

@Docmartin: if there is an Internet somewhere where people can earn money from simple page views, please let me know. In the world we live in, page views just cost: bandwidth, servers, people.

The classic way to earn money from page views is to show adverts on all pages and earn money from click-throughs. Even then, advertising is unprofitable unless you have extremely popular sites. We could put ads on every single free Wikidot page, all the time. That seems a really terrible option.

Wikidot does however owe a great deal to our users. The community.wikidot.com site, for example, is a world of helpful, polite people and we really owe those guys a lot. More importantly, we owe all our users a stable, living, and long lasting service. This demands a sustainable way of making money, and it's just a fact of life that some people - with jobs and time - would rather complain than pay. C'est la vie. It seems a fair trade, if it lets us follow through on our commitment to providing a dependable service.

For those who really cannot afford a pro account but feel they deserve one, we're giving away five free Pro accounts.

Peter, the obvious example is the granddaddy Wiki itself - Wikipedia. The money flows in there through charitable donations, the CEO giving talks etc etc. BIG money too.

You are chasing a group of people who you can bet are mostly very poor/ unsalaredi etc etc for tiny bits of cash - which will have a knock-on effect on the vuture use of the wikidot 'farm'. You're losing people and you won't attract so many new ones. You said yourself that the aim was to make the pages unattractive (!) so the people who don't mind will be the people whose sites are not 'serious' - not for the wider audience out there.

Correct me if I'm wrong but all Wikidot are providing is a bit of disk space, which for a typical site is worth <5 zlotys a year, plus as you say the bandwidth, again <5 zlotys. The software is not yours, it is open source, so why should we pay for that? The modifications seem aimed only at making you all money, not at improving it. The support is appreciated, but honestly, so minimal, you can't expect much for that!

If you want to charege (as obviously you do) let's be frank. This is just because you want to be rich. How about making the charges for things like: including video or sound on the sites (high bandwidth)? Limiting the MB for the registed users more strictly. Paying for 'support'?

I've plugged Wikidot in the UK national press as a great resource in the past, so I'm not against you. But this action - damage the user sites to get increased subscriptions - is unethical and will rebound on you later.