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A comment on the question "PBwiki 2.0 password?" in PBwiki:

Who's idea was it to require that an administrator have an email address for every single person they want to be able to use his or her wiki... how do we invite people to use the wiki without putting their email address in that little box? – James, on May 16, 2008 20:26

Adriana marked one of abubnic's replies in PBwiki as useful. abubnic replied to the idea "I'm a teacher. How can I get my students logged into a wiki when they don't have e-mail addresses?".

Casey Greene replied on April 07, 2008 17:07 to the question "PBwiki 2.0 password?" in PBwiki:

Creating a SECURE way to use invite keys is something we're working on. We changed a LOT about how PBwiki works in 2.0, which means that the same security measures we took in 1.0 don't work as well in 2.0. That means we have to re-do the whole thing, in a way that satisfies as much of the feedback we've received as we can.

There's no way we can please all of the people all of the time. And I'm sorry that it's taking so long to do this, but we want to do it right. If someone finds a loophole into your classroom wiki and vandalizes it, or even worse, gets access to your login information, or anything like that AT ALL, we might as well pack up and go home. I, for one, don't want to be out a of job. I don't want you to be out of a wiki. I don't want you to feel like using PBwiki is a security risk.

So I'm going to hope that you can be patient for a little while longer while we make sure invite keys are up to our standards, security and usability wise. The people in the office are fond of the saying "eating your own dogfood" - if we won't do it, we don't expect you to, or that you would even want to.

Invite keys in 1.0 still work, although they do require an email address. We've already addressed several ways of going around this.

I'm sorry for all the inconvenience this has caused you.

charming replied on April 07, 2008 00:45 to the question "PBwiki 2.0 password?" in PBwiki:

Someone explain to me again, why "invite keys" are not a good idea for education wikis?

What was the problem? It worked before. Why is it a no-go NOW?!?!

Guy Fawkes replied on April 05, 2008 13:06 to the question "PBwiki 2.0 password?" in PBwiki:

"It seems that Casey is completely out of touch with real schools in real communities".

Hey, now, don't be hatin' on Casey. She doesn't make any of these decisions; she's a very new employee. She has the unenviable position of gathering community opinions, communicating those opinions to management, and then taking the heat when mgmt drags their feet doing anything about it. I think she does a very professional job of community relations (one I know I couldn't do).

Adriana replied on April 05, 2008 10:40 to the question "PBwiki 2.0 password?" in PBwiki:

Ditto. Time to switch to another wiki. Shame.

Adriana marked one of charming's replies in PBwiki as useful. charming replied to the question "PBwiki 2.0 password?".

Adriana marked one of charming's replies in PBwiki as useful. charming replied to the question "PBwiki 2.0 password?".

Carolyn replied on April 05, 2008 06:13 to the question "PBwiki 2.0 password?" in PBwiki:

I am really concerned with this answer. It seems that Casey is completely out of touch with real schools in real communities. Yes, the nice schools in the nice suburbs will have ways around this but a poor rural or inner city school with 3rd graders is not going to be able to access their wiki. True, it would be nice if the government could provide everyone with a nice suburban home and school but that's not going to happen any time soon. In some areas the parents don't speak English and may not read or write. In a rural area there may not be a public library. Some areas of the country don't have any access to high speed internet because it just doesn't go there. But our kids will need this technology for their future. Please do what you can to make this accessible or I know, as a teacher of teachers, you will lose your K-12 educational base.

elzr replied on April 05, 2008 04:39 to the question "PBwiki 2.0 password?" in PBwiki:

Mmm... 'invite keys' were pretty much the whole reason I was hooked on PBWiki. This kind of sucks.

Rachel Pennig replied on March 25, 2008 17:05 to the question "PBwiki 2.0 password?" in PBwiki:

Hey everyone, as Vu mentioned at the beginning of this thread, we really are looking at the best way to get educator wikis used by students without e-mail addresses. Unfortunately when you have an internet-based tool like a wiki, other internet-based issues will come up (like access to an internet connection and e-mail addresses).

I am going to make it my personal mission to help you get a good login system for your students. Let's hear your thoughts here: http://getsatisfaction.com/pbwiki/top...

charming replied on March 25, 2008 16:54 to the question "PBwiki 2.0 password?" in PBwiki:

It looks increasingly as if pbwiki is going to be useless for poorer school districts, that cannot/will not supply email addies for their students, and whose students are extremely unlikely to have internet access and/or local internet-connected libraries (in safe areas) nearby.

What a shame.

I really hope that pbwiki finds a way to provide email-addy-free access for students in its education wikis. Right now it increasingly appears that this will not work in 2.0 *sigh*

Guy Fawkes replied on March 25, 2008 15:37 to the question "PBwiki 2.0 password?" in PBwiki:

It only gets worse. We have official confirmation that PBwiki is going to stop allowing you to create 1.0 wikis in the next few weeks, so if you want one, you'd better grab one now, before they lock you out.

Anne-Marie replied on March 25, 2008 15:23 to the question "PBwiki 2.0 password?" in PBwiki:

This--unfortunately--is going to make pbwiki COMPLETELY unusable in my building. No free e-mail accounts are accessible through are filter, and even if they were, I teach in a preK-3 building. 4-9 year-olds don't have their own e-mails, and I wouldn't encourage them to have them, COPPA issues aside. 2.0 was supposed to give us page-level access, but having no way to do this, we might as well be using 1.0. I just got off the phone with a very upset colleague, who specifically asked PBwiki whether a 1.0 or 2.0 wiki would give her the features she needed, among them being student log-ins. She has spent hours setting up the wiki with a colleague and now they find it's useless.
I'm a school librarian with 566 kids in my building. Even if I wanted to, there's not enough time in the world to make PBWiki accounts for them all!

Adriana replied on March 14, 2008 18:49 to the question "PBwiki 2.0 password?" in PBwiki:

Thanks for the replies! I understand the issues - one of the beauty of web tools that there are almost as many uses as there are users, which makes it a design nightmare for the product techies. :)

I have now set up another event wiki with the old version. I just wish I haven't used the beta version for this specific event as it involved sending a lot of uber-geeks at Sun to a non-editable wiki page. Not good.

In the long run, I would like something like a private link with or without an invite key or public link with an invite key. The only reason I wouldn't want a completely free access to most of my wikis is spam, not other users. So my security concerns are not the same as many teachers, educators and businesses.

So why not have several options for access management, from the less to more secure versions?

Vu Nguyen replied on March 14, 2008 18:38 to the question "PBwiki 2.0 password?" in PBwiki:

PBwiki 2.0 beta in its current state does not have invite keys, and so the only way to get into a 2.0 wiki is with a PBwiki Account.

While we are exploring something like invite keys for use cases like your's (or in the cases of classroom wikis where students don't have email addresses), there is no time table for that feature, and there's no guarantee that it would be anything like the old invite keys from PBwiki 1.0.

The reason we're requiring accounts now is to ultimately make it easier to manage a wiki. The problem many users ran into with the old system included situations like when somebody left a company, the company would have to change the password and tell everybody. A single password was also easier to disseminate, which can be a security risk.

Like I said, that does leave out a few use cases like your's, which we're trying to work out as fast as we can!

Thanks for your patience!
Vu

Casey Greene replied on March 14, 2008 18:36 to the question "PBwiki 2.0 password?" in PBwiki:

The thing is, we're trying to make PBwiki the best thing we can, for as many users as we can.

So many people have raised some very, very valid security concerns about invite keys, and many others have raised very, very valid usability and collaboration concerns about invite keys.

This isn't an issue we're going to take lightly, and we want to make sure that the way we go about implementing Invite keys is simple and comprehensible.

In the meantime, creating a 1.0 wiki and setting an invite key would probably be your best bet, since your event is probably time-sensitive. However, 2.0 is still in Beta. This means it's not formally released, it's for test purposes only, and it's going to change a lot up to the time we actually do release it.

Changes and improvements are being made literally, every day. Invite keys are an important enough component of PBwiki that we want to make sure we do them right, even if that means for the time being not having them.

Vu Nguyen replied on March 14, 2008 18:31 to the question "PBwiki 2.0 password?" in PBwiki:

I agree, and engineering's trying to iron out some of those weird user-interface bugs, such as asking for invite-keys when none exist. Thanks for your feedback!

Guy Fawkes marked one of Adriana's replies in PBwiki as useful. Adriana replied to the question "PBwiki 2.0 password?".

Adriana started following the question "How do I manage my notifications?" in Get Satisfaction.