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Posted by Phil Chett on 15 May 2008 14:16, last edited on 30 Sep 2009 13:31
| This wish is open |
Description
Instead of having to register for "wikidot", then register to the site that i wish to be a member of. Is it possible to register for the site i wish to become a member of, and then automatically be a member of wikidot.
ie. A one step process instead of two ?
there is a new design wiki for this old wish:
http://blog.wikidot.com/wiki:authentication-flow-and-membership-models !
Reasons for 1 Step Registration
- Users frequently "join" wikidot from a particular wiki without realizing they need to go back and join the original wiki as well, hurting the individual wiki's membership and participation. Some users figure it out and get their second membership, others get frustrated and leave.
- On a fairly regular basis in the community forums, someone pops up who has just joined, and asks a very specific question that has nothing to do with wikidot, but is clearly related to the content of a particular wiki. They joined, got pushed over to wikidot.com, thought they were still at the same site they joined from, clicked the forums (which led, unbeknownst to them, to the community forums), and asked a question. Some of these users may never make it back to the original wiki they tried to join. That's bad for the wiki, and it's bad for wikidot too. If they had participated in and gotten help from the original wiki, their chances of becoming a long-time member participating in multiple wikis increases, whereas if they get frustrated and leave, wikidot loses traffic and potential ad revenue, not to mention frustrating individual wiki admin who should have had one more member and contributer.
Links to forum Posts
http://community.wikidot.com/forum/t-23673/serious-user-sign-up-problem
http://community.wikidot.com/forum/t-90938/ultra-simple-joining
Examples of New Users Getting Lost or Fail to Join their desired wiki Because of multi-step confusion
http://community.wikidot.com/forum/t-170170/help
http://community.wikidot.com/forum/t-168638/palm-pre-alarm
http://community.wikidot.com/forum/t-12687/truly-hidden-forums#post-234327
http://community.wikidot.com/forum/t-63070/new-features-and-ideas#post-227698
http://community.wikidot.com/forum/t-103583/factory-reset-mybook-world-edition
http://community.wikidot.com/forum/t-107487/fof-wiki-frets-on-fire#post-316354
http://community.wikidot.com/forum/t-100001/need-help-using-wd-mybook-world-editionii-2tb
http://community.wikidot.com/forum/t-91185/secondary-hard-drive-ipod-leo4all-v4-1-10-5-5#post-265640
http://community.wikidot.com/forum/t-82566/help-with-looping-and-the-2nd-bloodline-in-season-2
risks-and-benefits-of-using-linux-file-server-in-a-windows-environment
Related
And what about Google's FriendConnect ?
- Anyone can join your site with one click by using their existing Google, Yahoo and other accounts.
- Visitors can evangelize for your site by inviting their friends and publishing their activities to their social networks.
- Social gadgets will keep these visitors more deeply engaged with your site, and with each other.
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This is really needed. Half the people who do the "Join this page" process at my wiki only join wikidot and forget to join my wiki. The proposed idea would fix this and streamline the process nicely.
That's been happening to me a lot lately too.
Yeah, a major problem :(
Shane Smith
ethicalwd.com - Blog - Wikidot Editor - Docs
NEW! ZoomPlanner - A new tool for freelancers and small business! Join the waiting list.
Wow, that's a great idea! I strongly hope it gets implemented.
Eduardo R. Ribeiro
http://www.etnolinguistica.org
I agree, the two-step model doesn't make sense to me. When you become a member of a Wikidot site, you should automatically become a member of Wikidot as well.
—chris
I agree with this. We can go farther :
There should be a registration form for a wiki site, that allows the new member to optionally register to wikidot itself with a simple checkbox.
So that one could be member of :
I believe there are a lot of legal problems araising if I can get membership of a wiki but not of wikidot.com itself…
Service is my success. My webtips:www.blender.org (Open source), Wikidot-Handbook.
Sie können fragen und mitwirken in der deutschsprachigen » User-Gemeinschaft für WikidotNutzer oder
im deutschen » Wikidot Handbuch ?
I agree that the 2-step process is not very user-friendly and would welcome a more slick system that doesn't fall foul of wikidot's rules.
Rob
Rob Elliott - Strathpeffer, Scotland - Wikidot first line support & community admin team.
@spir: All of your account information resides with wikidot, so in addition to any legal consequences, there are major technical barriers to what you suggest as well. This wish mainly deals with the presentation of initial registration. Your (spir) suggestion has much, much wider implications.
In addition to the technical issues and the difficulty implementing it, not having a general wikidot account would deny users the ability to participate here in the community support forums, as well as probably thousands of other wiki's that don't require specific membership to post and contribute material. At the time of registration, it would be difficult to explain to someone new to wikidot what they would be giving up by unchecking, or leaving that box unchecked.
In addition to the severe technical and user costs of optional wikidot.com registration, it's unclear what benefits it would bring. So long as this wish is implemented, and 1 step registration is put into place, I can't see what additional benefit any user derives from being able to opt out of (or having to opt-in to) wikidot.com membership. Of course, just because I can't see them, doesn't mean they don't exist. What sort of benefits did you envision spir?
Hi.
I'm in the process of setting up 3 wiki sites for Bowls Clubs /Computer Clubs in Spain.
I have found the same difficulty with the 2-tier application.
Accepting DAVID MARSEILLES reply as valid ( for whatever legal or financial reason….doesn't concern me), none of his reply undermines the principle that you should be able to join a WIKI ….and….WIKIDOT at the same time.
An application for membership of a WIKI will automatically create a WIKIDOT account.
Sometimes simple logic is hard to accept!
morrisg
I would certainly hope not.
You do realize I'm entirely in favor of this solution? In addition to voting for it, and editing it to include additional reasons for adoption, I promote it every chance I get.
There just doesn't appear to be reason, as someone suggested, to go through the trouble of registering for a wiki and NOT getting registered for wikidot at the same time.
No, even such a lot of people wants the 1 - step registration procedere,
i have to warn you all of an effect, that such users
Typical example is Davids http://fortunz.com/ , where "normal" visitors will not mention for a long time, that in a little line at the bottom is written"hosted by wikidot.com"… ( this is not a critic, but a very good site, David!) .
A login & 1.register page - it is new now on an extra page with a big wikidot logo (and not inside a litle popup) , have you mentioned it ? - is in such cases the only moment to make the "provider" visuable to any visitor…
I would like to have a 1- step register too, but I have no idea how to do it without loosing such effect…
Service is my success. My webtips:www.blender.org (Open source), Wikidot-Handbook.
Sie können fragen und mitwirken in der deutschsprachigen » User-Gemeinschaft für WikidotNutzer oder
im deutschen » Wikidot Handbuch ?
I don't think it's necessary to "cloak" wikidot in order to achieve 1-step registration, and that seems to be what you fear.
People's profiles will still exist on wikidot.com, and TOS and any other information could still be delivered to them via whatever registration module is put in place on local sites, in addition to an registration email from wikidot.
What wikidot loses NOW, with registration as is, are users who try join a particular site, not even realizing that it's part of this huge wiki community. They end up at wikidot.com, and don't know where their new site of entry is. Then they quit entirely. They never start their own wiki. They never contribute another thing because they couldn't figure out how to participate in the one place they actually wanted to be in the first place.
Those "lost user links" I added are mostly to people who ended up making ONE post in the community forums where they clearly thought they were still at some particular wiki, and most of them made their last contribution with those posts. For every ONE where there's a breadcrumb trail, I'm convinced there are thousands more who got lost and never posted at all, and just left in frustration.
With a 1 step process, the individual wikis get the users they helped attract to wikidot in the first place, and once their attached to the process, they WILL learn about wikidot in the process, and wikidot's overall retention rate will IMPROVE, not decrease.
Although neither of my sites show direct evidence of wikidot evangelism, they've both had an impact on people who would never have heard of wikidot otherwise. I've got some people on a private site who know wikidot exists because of WiiHD, and very seriously considered bringing a community of more than a thousand here because of it. Sadly, certain forum features have, for now, prevented wikidot from being their primary choice, but every single admin in that team has seen and appreciated the power of wikidot, and I'm certain they'll be back in some form or another one day.
But when individual wikis lose users in the registration process, wikidot loses them too. Everyone benefits from keeping them here, and wikidot doesn't have to become invisible to prevent that loss.
I concur with the honourable gentleman's comments above 100%
For me this one issue is what lets Wikidot down. I'm currently planning a new wiki - and I've spent a whole day looking for alternatives to Wikidot - simply because of this issue. If I could find another wiki farm which was as flexible in terms of the page design, but which was more friendly for the registration of new members, I'd swap in an instant. I love Wikidot - but it's not what I think of it that counts - it's what new members think (many of whom aren't as persistent with technology).
I'm absolutely sure that it would be a simple matter to make registration easier - even if the 'one step registration' isn't possible. There are many many options that jump to mind - and many small tweaks or changes that would help. PLEASE please please can we do something about this (and soon!). I'd be very happy to help people think through the options (I have relevant expertise to offer).
Just to get us started - PLEASE can we change the following message which appears in a red box (generated by the MembershipbyPassword module):
You can not apply.
It seems you already are a member of this site.
Wouldn't it be helpful if instead it said:
You are a member of this wiki
(logged on with the name: "UserName").
AND - could we at least add something to the Wikidot registration page, which currently looks like this:
just to show people that they are in the right place. A simple sentence would help. What about:
JOINING "NAME". Welcome. In order to join the wiki-website "NAME" you must first be a member of Wikidot (which hosts many other wiki-websites too). This page is for joining Wikidot. After you have completed this registration you will still need to join the "NAME" site too.
AND please can we change the "Are you human?" question to say "Please type the letter/number code you see into the box:"
These are really simple things surely…. is it worth me listing some more?
This was a major sticking point for me when I opted to use the open source version on my own server for a project at work. I also love wikidot and found that no matter how much I looked elsewhere, my travels always led me back here because of all of the other features.
I ended up changing several of the source pages for my private Wikidot install at work in an effort to provide a simpler explanation so I could get my 200+ users signed up. Thankfully, I figured out a way to enroll the users as members of all sites they needed to access by using PGAdmin3 (a 3rd party app to manage the Postgresql database) and enrolling them through the "back door". If they could get through the master account creation, I could take it from there.
What makes some sense to me would be adding another layer of membership. Why would I want a "master" Wikidot account if I just wanted to participate in a single wiki site hosted here? If I'm not interested in creating new wiki sites, it's one less hoop I would have to jump through.
Community Admin
Yes, yes, yes, it would be so much easier to get recalcitrant, newbie users to jump on the wiki platform if registration were simpler.
I work in non-profit and am rolling out a grassroots wiki, and people get discouraged when their first interaction with the wiki is confusing.
It would be delightful if the registration process were simple, e.g. click on link to individual wiki, choose Sign Up, guide through account creation, then automatically apply for wiki. The application flag could be embedded in the link!
OK, I'm being a little facetious about this. After all, I found an amazingly supportive community when I started out on this long, strange trip.
But really, Wikidot could care less about its newbies.
This weekend I compared two datasets of known neighbors who use our wiki. Set A: emails. Set B: logons. Corellating the two sets (in the search module, one… by… one…), I found 66 member logons I didn't even know existed. And of course that doesn't even count users whose emails I don't know.
This is like trying to catch water in a sieve.
These are users who are brand new to Wikidot and who are wanting to engage with a wiki. They could use some help, or at the very least some acknowledgement from their new wiki-community that they've arrived. Who better than the people using that wiki? But we have no way of knowing they're even there.
To me, it's really frustrating. To anyone wanting to make the Wikidot model succeed, it's just absurd.
When I found those 66 neighbors who were Wikidotians but not yet members of our wiki, I literally pasted hundreds of emails into the search box, one by one. It was a labor of love, and I wanted to demonstrate a point.
Until one-step signup happens, it would be great to have an easier way to search for our lost, wandering orphan members. There should be a more streamlined way to correlate emails against wikidot logons.
In the site manager, we've got a tool for bulk email uploads. That's to email prospective members. Can we have a similar tool for "bulk searches"? Flickr's got something like that and it's been handy.
I bet many of us attract new users to Wikidot by emailing them directly. But so far, with this two-step disconnect, the result isn't obvious. We should have a better tool for stitching our communities together.
Hear, Hear!
Totally agree, new users want to join the specific site they are visiting, registration to Wikidot is the underlying bonus of it. We cannot take for granted that everyone is a technology savvy cause actually is the other way round, and double registration is totally confusing. That results in frustration for everyone: the user who cannot join the site he/she wants, the admin who doesn't get members and Wikidot losing current and prospective admins.
just for a gigle, and because i was bored i just randomly clicked of 50 users to see how many were members of sites
just over half ARE NOT MEMBERS OF ANY SITE!
just thought you might like to know :-)
Changelog:
It's not exactly what we're asking for, but at least they're tuned in to some of the problems we've been highlighting.
Can this make happen? Because one of my site member in the past just join Wikidot but bypass joinning my wiki… sigh it's happen until now…
Thank you all for your comments and I really apologise for the unbearably long time it's taking us to fix this problem with Wikidot. Trust me, this horrid registration model irritates me as much as it does you. Some things I'd like to say: (a) we'll be following this site much more closely in future and (b) I'm taking a much more active role in how the product develops. If you have any issues that annoy you, please contact me directly by email at moc.xitami|hp#moc.xitami|hp. Thanks again for your patience. Good things take time and Wikidot is more than just a wiki.
Portfolio
Thanks, Pieter. That's great news. I hope we'll soon have good news about another highly-rated feature request as well: Custom New Page module (forms).
Eduardo R. Ribeiro
http://www.etnolinguistica.org
Yes, forms are a brilliant idea and one I've wanted to get into Wikidot since David suggested them. We have more or less designed it, but it won't happen till after the summer.
Portfolio