Wikidot Community

Maybe it's time I stopped flogging this dead horse for awhile. (Giddap!)

This old forum system…

Are we really looking to move away from the existing forum system?

The original page (with all comments) is here, but you should only reply be creating a new sub-thread on the first page I linked to as the second link isn't being used any more.

That's one more specific example of moving away from a half-finished space, and moving on to a new one that's emptier and more split-up (ergo more disjointed and complicated).

Let's shift from a pioneering metaphor to a gold prospecting one — I think we need more and better tools for automatically sifting and sorting our tailings and nuggets into fewer buckets. We shouldn't be constantly introducing more buckets and telling our community to evaluate their particular pebbles and to place each one into its respective bucket.

If our wider community users do participate in that kind of exercise, those granules won't end up where we want them, so it'll be even harder for anyone to locate those shiny nuggets. More likely, we'll just lose lots of enthusiastic prospectors and instead be left with a few ornery old sourdoughs.

Are we really looking to move away from the existing forum system?

This hasn't been discussed for the community, no.

However I believe Wikidot itself will support development for features that will help a page-based forum system before they will support development for the older, closed-source forum.

Are we really looking to move away from the existing forum system?

Probably on one of my older blog postings there is a discussion of Wikidot's plan here. The old forum system is not wiki, it was originally imported wholesale as a module application and slightly wikified. But it lacks what we consider to be modern features: attachments, history, tags, parenting, etc.

So for some time now we've been developing alternative wiki-based forums. There are a few prototypes and patterns, and the projects site is probably the most sophisticated of these. I'm aiming to make a simple drop-in forum package based on the TopicTree pattern. We have fairly good emulations of traditional forums, but done entirely in user-space (which is desirable).

When it comes to bug fixes and new features, we will not invest in the old forum module except for urgent fixes. Over time I'd expect to see new sites use the wikified forums, and abandon the old forum module.

I'm aware of the "watching" feature. But even with the watching on, I didn't receive any email in the past 24 hours. What gives? I understand that Wikidot is supposed to send an email notification once a day about all the activities that have taken place at the site.

If I recall the daily digest is for things like unread PMs, account notifications etc If you want an instant notification of categories, sites and forums you are watching this is set in the Watching tab of your account.

I'm aware of the "watching" feature. But even with the watching on, I didn't receive any email in the past 24 hours. What gives? I understand that Wikidot is supposed to send an email notification once a day about all the activities that have taken place at the site.

Hmm… are you using a Hotmail account? Due to their idea of "spam control", Wikidot is unable to send watching notifications to any Hotmail users.

I believe it pops up a warning about this when using a Hotmail e-mail address to create an account… so if this is actually the problem, maybe Wikidot needs to make the warning more noticeable.

Ok. I've tried various things and reached this state:

1. Notification of new comments and forum threads are sent immediately (as opposed to daily). But there is no notification of new "pages". I think it is just as important to notify the members of new pages. Can I turn on notification of new "pages" as an administrator?

2. Some members only receive instant notification of new comments, but not of new threads in the forum. How can this be explained?

Thanks.

If you and your members are not using Hotmail, then the only other possibility is that the wrong categories/pages are being watched.

Or, you might have set up some private categories - which only send notifications to administrators, regardless of who has view access.

Without being able to see your site, we are only guessing and have little chance of being able to give you a proper solution. I'd suggest either temporarily removing any sensitive info from your site and making it possible for one or more of us to have access, or creating a public site that shows the same problem, that we can look at instead.