Unlimited members for private wikis

Unlimited members for private wikis

michal frackowiak 1204191532|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover

We are very pleased to see Wikidot wikis used in many different scenarios and cases. And creativity of our users still surprise us.

The thing however that really is pleasing is the usage of private wikis — did you know that over 40% of all our wikis are private? And that about 30% of the users' activity is happening in non-public areas? Unfortunately we cannot have a "featured private wiki" (simply because they are not public) but certainly some of them would deserve attention.

So, what do people use private wikis for? Some of them are personal workspaces created to "keep things in one place", but most of them have been created for small workgroups, also business users, to help communication and organizing workspace and workflow. Just to mention a few areas of usage: software development, b2c communication, knowledge bases, project management etc. And it looks like Wikidot fits (almost) perfectly for the job. Although Wikidot wikis are free, many people use it for mission-critical tasks. Thanks for trusting us!

Also a very large userbase in the private realm comes from universities where wikis are used to support classes, student project and scientific work.

Private wikis (and the whole Wikidot too) is getting more and more popular and recently we have been getting a lot of requests for raising the limits of users in private wikis (each private wiki was limited to 50 users only). We usually do it without problems, but the amount of requests made the waiting queue a bit long. Today we have decided to remove the limit for all the wikis!

Good luck and have a nice wiki,
The Wikidot Team

BTW: Needless to mention, private wikis at Wikidot are still free!

Re: Unlimited members for private wikis

Frederik De Swaef 1204197442|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover

Thank you very much!!! With the 50 members limit we had to make some tough decisions for the invitations. But now….

Keep up the fantastic work.

Re: Unlimited members for private wikis

tristan_davies 1204217492|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover

I really appreciate the change, too. I 'm one of those university users who depend on Wikidot, and I am very glad to be able to make it available to as many members as need it, while still keeping it private.

Re: Unlimited members for private wikis

c-people 1204302451|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover

well done excellent ;-)

Re: Unlimited members for private wikis

Helmuti_pdorf 1204358366|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover

Thanks, Michal and all of the team!

I made the experience, it is a little hard to manage a members list greater than 50…. :)

But because I do not know how much members some of my sites will get:

thanks again for this decision, it prevents me from making some copies of some sites only for this reason!

BTW: if the permissions are making possible to manage user-groups between read - not read, (means "private status" for single pages/categories) than the private status for a complete site is not longer neccessary.

Re: Unlimited members for private wikis

gwpl 1204365148|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover

Great News!

One of factors why my folks reluctantly thought about making knowledge bases on wiki.

Limits, also effected in creating separate private wikis only from limits reason.

Wikidot went opensource, Limits goes down
Shortly speaking: better and better :D

Re: Unlimited members for private wikis

michal frackowiak 1204623275|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover

Thanks for all the feedback! We are working on making Wikidot better and better, but as I have mentioned a few posts before, we are also concentrating on preparing Wikidot v2 preview as soon as possible. The current timeline is that by the end of May we will start freezing the base framework and one will be able to create simple wikis in WD2. I hope the final version will address most of the problems and suggestions, either in the core distribution or by the extensible plugin framework. E.g. to manage users easier one could create an extension that will integrate into the Site Manager. Once we migrate the whole Wikidot.com into WD2 and developers will start writing extensions, we will most probably include some of them in the on-line edition of Wikidot.

What we also think about is a way of writing extensions that do not necessarily need to be installed server-side. We have spent some time working with OpenSocial framework (but honestly the whole OpenSocial-thing is sooooo beta that we decided to postpone it until later) and Facebook's FBML and it gave us a lot of inspiration on how to do it. Probably one could create extensions e.g. for managing list of contacts or for managing members of a wiki.

Good luck!

Michal

Re: Unlimited members for private wikis

Rasky 1205521873|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover

I'm sorry to always been the one that spoils the fun, but might I rememeber that there are literally hundreds of bugs and feature requests in the community forums that go totally ignored? Some of them are probably very easy to do (like adding support for a couple of new embed stuff). It's really sad that there are no official answers from wikidot about when those bugs can get fixed and/or those features scheduled to be added.

I'm basically thinking of migrating my wiki out of wikidot not because I'm dissatisfacted (on the contrary, I really love wikidot), but because a project without developers paying attention to the community is a dead project. In fact, in several months that I'm using wikidot v1 basically nothing noticable happened in its development (if not those bugfixes about multiple domains).

Re: Unlimited members for private wikis

Craig Macomber 1205530549|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover

As a software developer, I may be able explain what might be happening. Michal is working on wikidot v2. Much of the code in v2 is new and separate. Thus, improvements to the current version may not effect the upcoming release. Thus, some of those "easy" fixes could be undone by the upgrade to v2, which he though would be done by now. Basically, it is easier and more effective to fix the bugs in the 2.0 source than to make and release 1.1 at this point. As soon as 2.0 is out, I'm going to try to organize the flood of issues and bugs. We will want to setup a category on the community site for bugs, and one for suggested improvements. Then we will use the ranking system to prioritize the issues, and tag them with the bug types (spelling, documentation, missing feature etc.). That way the bugs should be much easier to fix.

I would still like to say that the lack or attention given to bug reports (and my unanswered support email for fixing a completely broken (database error) admin category on my site) is unacceptable. At least an automated "we are busy, it might take a month" message would be nice.

last edited on 1205530918|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover by Craig Macomber + show more

Re: Unlimited members for private wikis

Rasky 1205581217|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover

Well, totally stopping to maintain the current version of a software to develop a brand new version isn't exactly the way to keep the community happy. Michal could still allocate a 5% of his time to at least acknowledge those bugs and maybe provide quick fixes to those which are really quick to fix. You either play with the community or you lose it.

And yes, I think wikidot also needs a better bug reporting/archiving system. Now that it's free software, it could use one of those free hosting offers reserved to free softwares (like Jira which is good). Or you could (ab)use the wiki itself as a bug database in the way MoinMoin does. Both solutions are much better than a forum where things are posted and go forgotten forever.

Re: Unlimited members for private wikis

Helmuti_pdorf 1205583584|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover

I think these debatte should go to the developers site: http://www.wikidot.org/ …it makes more sense as on the User-platform itself.

Re: Unlimited members for private wikis

Rakshith K S 1205904908|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover

Its too good

Re: Unlimited members for private wikis

pieterh 1206369791|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover

Rasky, I fully agree that it's painful to see bugs reported and left. Wikidot/2.0 has been a larger change than some of us expected. Personally I'd like to see Wikidot used for bug reporting, there are lots of interesting ways to build bug tracking using wikis, even if they are still clumsier than something like Jira (which we use in many projects).

Re: Unlimited members for private wikis

michal frackowiak 1206716040|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover

Thanks for all the comments — indeed the 2.0 is more challenging than we have expected and we had to put tight deadlines to it so that we could make a preview as soon as possible.

Creating a complex wiki software is not a job one can do overnight and obviously it takes people, time and a lot of effort to make a decent, open and quality software that combines a lot of different technologies. Wikidot 1. is a kind of "hack" that combines such technologies but (since it was created in very limited time) does not prove itself as a web platform that we would like Wikidot to become.

Unfortunately this came with the cost of Wikidot 1 and the online service too. Actually we are spending quite a lot of time on it, securing the growth and keeping the service available practically without any outage (since we have moved to the new datacenter in December), making secure backups etc. Right now we are looking forward to hiring someone (developer/community manager) who would actually run the online service and coordinate things so that we could split responsibilities in a more "healthy" way. So far we have not been successful in finding such people locally in Torun but we intensively keep trying. We also had some problems with the support email (and our other emails) handling, which I agree should never ever happen.

Since the 2.0 is doing fine at the moment and most likely we will introduce a preview by the end of May, we will try to balance our effort between 2.0 and 1.0 better.

Thanks!

Michal and The Team

Re: Unlimited members for private wikis

Shi Yin 1209204112|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover

I still not very clear how to use this private wikis

Re: Unlimited members for private wikis

Helmuti_pdorf 1209282537|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover

You have created your first one ? :)

Good luck with the usage!

For a "company" this is a good collaboration tool!

You need no application, no software, no internal network with shared point or shared drives.. only a browser.

And no one else the allowed members can have a look… not even search machines like google.. :)

My personal tip: try the "print" funktion!