We've added a visual guide and useful tips for predefined placements of AdSense units to help you choose the best Adsense unit(s) for your wiki.

Due to popular demand we've added two highly requested new AdSense unit placements: floating left and floating right.

If you do not want to use any of the predefined locations, you can easily put AdSense units in your wiki pages using our new template system. You can create an ad unit with "Custom label for manual placement" and simply put it into a _template page for a given category. This will allow you to include and change custom ad placements across an entire category instead of page by page. If you are unfamiliar with templates, you can find more details on the templates documentation page.

The ListPages module is getting more and more popular and people have started using it in many different and interesting ways: blogging, news pages, even issue trackers. We are getting a lot of positive feedback about it.

Following your suggestions, we have added a new "magical tag" that allows you to select pages with similar tags as the current page. Simply include the wiki syntax below in any page and you will get a list of pages that share tags with the page the module is placed in.

+ Similar pages
[[module ListPages tags="="]]

Of course you can add other options to customize page selection or formatting — see the ListPages module documentation for more details.

The last thing we wanted to mention is… you can now comment on documentation pages!. We enabled comments in our documentation, weeks ago to give you another way to tell us what were doing right — and what we're doing wrong. The comments section is also a great way to point out errors in the documentation so that they can be fixed quickly.

Good luck!

The Wikidot Team

We have just introduced a new nice feature for all wikis — automatic sitemaps. According to sitemaps.org:

Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling. In its simplest form, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL (when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site.

Every wiki now features a special URL which contains a list of pages within a wiki to help search engines crawl and find your content easier. E.g. a sitemap for www.wikidot.com can be found at http://www.wikidot.com/sitemap.xml (note: this is an XML file, your browser might not display this correctly). Of course there are no sitemaps for private wikis — they are not public by definition.

But honestly, last week we have been fighting spam on Wikidot most of the time. About 10% of all content created on Wikidot within the last 2 years is spam (this is not that much, but could become a serious problem if left unattended). Our job is to find spam, hide it from you and discourage people from spamming. Therefore we have built a very nice automatic filter for detecting spam content and now we need to plug this to Wikidot to provide 2 kinds of functionality:

• it should help us marking some wikis as spam (those are mostly about bank credits, health insurances etc.)
• it should help wiki admins and blog authors to protect from spam (spam comments, forum posts, spam pingbacks etc.) — we will certainly need this once we introduce a real blogging platform

As an important step in discouraging spammers from starting spam wikis, every wiki marked as spam:

• blocks all web crawlers (including Google, Yahoo MSN and all others) from indexing the content (by using the robots.txt file),
• changes all external links into redirects with special rel="nofollow" attribute — such links are not visible to any web crawler.

Those certainly make creating "link farms" on Wikidot pretty useless.

Although sitemaps do not bring any new visible improvements, they will certainly improve your wikis' visibility in the Internet. Good luck to all Wikidotians!

(photo by dmax3270)

This week we are introducing a new requested feature that adds "karma" to users' profiles. Karma, in very short words, reflects your activity at Wikidot.com. What is immediately visible is that every user icon (avatar) now has an indicator with 0 to 5 bars that reflect "karma levels" — from "none" to "guru".

You can read more about the karma system in the Karma FAQ.

The general rule is that the more you use Wikidot, the higher your karma is. We are trying to make the karma distribution both fair and motivating for the users and you can get karma for various activities, like creating content, participating in discussions, being active on community portals (like Wikidot's community wiki) and using AdSense on your wikis (this actually helps us too!!!)

Next week we will probably work on improving the AdSense functionality and developing anti-spam techniques.

We wish everyone high karma and good time using Wikidot!
The Wikidot Team

(photo by dullhunk)

So, we have decided to create tools that would help you blog. There is a quick proposal that lists things that would constitute a useful set of blogging features. (Your are welcome to add your comments!)

We have already completed the live templates that allow one to define custom page layout for chosen categories by creating special _template pages.

Last week we have introduced the ListPages module which takes a lot of select criteria (tags, categories, dates…) and can list pages in a custom format — e.g. as a list, a blog-like summary and many others.

From now we will try to stick to the "one week - one new feature or improvement" rule which mean new stuff should be introduced every week from now. In the near future you can expect more work towards the mentioned blogging platform and a Wikidot-wide system of user karma.

Stay tuned!

The Wikidot Team

We are back online. Last night we had the longest network outage so far, lasting ~ 8 hours. Needless to say, we are truly sorry for any inconveniences that this caused.

The long story is that at about 8PM (UTC) we had to reboot the main server. Last server reboot was 180 days ago and since then we were operating without any major issues. Usually rebooting would mean just a few minutes of being off-line and we were fully prepared to do this operation smoothly. Unfortunately there was a problem with starting again — the booting just hanged at one point, without any apparent reason, any message etc. The natural thing was to quickly boot the server in a "rescue mode" and trace the problem. So we did it within the next few minutes. We had a very similar situation when we were testing this server prior to making it public, but apparently the problem was different this time.

As we were suspecting that this could be easier to debug and fix locally (it could be anything, software or hardware), we asked the support team from SoftLayer.com to handle the issue — they are great at fixing such things. And they did it, but it took ~ 8 hours all together to bring the server back.

We hoped it could be fixed quicker, but we are glad it is fixed after all and the service is up, running and stable again. Fortunately it was evening/night in Europe and US and hopefully the outage was not noticed by most of our user, but for us it was a very busy night.

There is certainly one thing we have learned: we will start designing a failover/load-balance infrastructure asap. Right now we have live backups to our server in Germany (so your data is never lost) and theoretically we could make it the primary server during the outage, but the amount of traffic we are getting recently would be too much for it for sure. Shame on us that we have not looked into this before. Anyway, we will do our best to avoid such situations in the future.

Thanks for using Wikidot!

The Wikidot Team