Hi, a friend of mine is having issue with the "Shiny" theme - see a screenshot. He is using Firefox 3.5.2 on Linux. The webpage that we are attempting to display can be found here. It displays fine on IE7 and Firefox 3.5.3 on my Windows Vista laptop; and I also tried with Firefox 3.0.x on my linux desktop with no problem (apart that the search bar overlaps with the title for this one). Any idea how to resolve this (apart changing theme - I really like the Shiny theme!)?

It works fine for me.

If you have to change the theme, but like the Shiny theme, perhaps you could consider using the Too Shiny theme by Gabrys? =)

Hopefully that theme doesn't have the same compatibility issues as the regular Shiny theme seems to have for your friend.

What seems to be especially helpful about design proposal 2 is that, in its verbose/non-verbose options, it distinguishes among (and splits apart) automatic Site, Category, and Page watching. These are currently fused together in user options — as "Auto-watch sites I create or join, pages I create, edit or comment" — which is problematic: I do want to auto-watch sites I create, but I don't want to auto-watch, in their entirety, sites I merely join (or have my students auto-watch every update to nav: and css: simply because they're members). Likewise for pages I create vs. pages I edit (which might mean simply cleaning up a typographical error).

I therefore rather like, but don't quite love, the new defaults for automatic subscription:

These are the cases where users are automatically subscribed, and how it works:
* Site owners, admins and mods: all traffic on the whole site.
* Site members: new pages only.
* Page creator or editor: all traffic on that page.
* Page commentor: all traffic on that page.

Again, I would prefer not to auto-watch pages I edit - if I'm editing a page I've created, I already watch it, and if I'm editing someone else's page, I probably either care enough to manually click "watch this page" or else I would prefer not to.

But in any event, this doesn't seem to address the question that keeps coming up on this discussion thread: will admins be able to configure these default settings per-site (i.e. the initial watching behavior for new users), or must the auto-subscriptions be the same for all sites?

HELP…I started this site and now I am static…I need someone to walk me through setting this site up. I have an entire class of gradstudents that want to collaborate and I need some help. Is there anyone out there????????

Sure, what's the site and what are you trying to do? You can find a lot of help on the http://community.wikidot.com site.

What's the current status?

It still works as before, but here is the design for the next revision: http://blog.wikidot.com/design:2

Related to that, http://blog.wikidot.com/design:3

-Pieter

I'm also waiting for an answer on the following question:

Is it possible to shut off watching for a whole site? Or must it be done user-by-user?

Admins should have more control over which categories can be watched, whether they want their whole site to be watchable, etc. Please, Wikidot, I'd appreciate an answer on that.

I'm not looking to shut off watching for my entire site, but rather to set the default watching behavior for users across the board; they would then be able to "inherit from default" or configure with a finer grain. For example, I would expect that most users would want to automatically watch pages they create or forum threads they comment on; I would also expect that most users would not want to automatically watch every page on the wiki, as so many users above have noted. In my case, since my users are students, many of them do not know how to set up email filters or configure their watching settings, and while I can (and will) teach them, it seems an avoidable step.

Are any of the gurus working on making default watch settings configurable by admins? Last we heard was pieterh on 17 July suggesting that we remove the watch links. But again, I'd love to see something between a) shutting the whole thing down and b) receiving tons of edit-spam by default.

What's the current status?

/Gus

From Admin of (josgm.wikidot.com)

I've tried editing the meta data for robots.txt but it seems to have no effect.

However we are also going to review notifications in general. There's still too much email and it's not properly focussed.

Thanks
-Pieter

Is it possible to shut off watching for a whole site? Or must it be done user-by-user?

Admins should have more control over which categories can be watched, whether they want their whole site to be watchable, etc.
Please, Wikidot, I'd appreciate an answer on that.

For petes sake get one of the devs to fiddle your karma thing. Or custom signature. anything to let the reader know that you are on wikidot staff.

@ vada and all those that dont want ads!
please have a CAREFUL read

Best Regards,
Rainey

Best Regards
Rainey

@The Dodgy Monkey: It's still a work in progress. There are a lot of things to take into consideration, not least of all the community opinion and advice, of course. We'll have some new news soon, and will be sure to let everyone know. Thanks for being so patient!!

@bpadmin: You are absolutely correct in what you say. In fact, all of your concerns we are addressing, not only with the new dashboard. We are working on all of those issues you have mentioned, and then some. Making what seems like a small change can have resounding effects throughout all of Wikidot. Soon we'll have everything in place and when we launch these "fixes", well… prepared to be amazed ;-)

@greenwriting: This is something else we are working on. Apparently Wikidot is great for gurus but not so easy for the rest of us. Addressing the needs of new users is something of a priority for us now.

Thanks for all this feedback. I'll pass everyone's concerns on to the dev team here.

Cheers!