Guy Fawkes's dashboard

My mistake... you can respond to individual comments.



About the threads, I imagine that commenting on the top Question would constitute a thread, however those questions need to themselves be put within categories like on my ning classroom 2.0 community, for example. I posted a question about embed codes, but it should really be under "Adding Media to PBWiki" or something like that. Thanks for replying... I worried because the last post was so long ago! – Shayne, on August 01, 2008 23:07

All good suggestions. But here's another ... perhaps I'm the most stupid person in the world, but I don't see "threads" in this new system. All the posts are listed by date ... not very helpful since it requires me (or any user) to input a keyword into the Search box to get relevant replies. Or am I missing something entirely. (And yes, I still hate this, wish the old Forums were in place, for all their faults.)

It appears that the last comment on this thread is 5 months old, however I have a few comments and possible concrete suggestions re PBwiki's using Get Satisfaction for comments.

First of all, there is a problem page on the Summer Camp wiki. Then each page has comments. And there is GS. Where are people SUPPOSED to be asking their questions? This needs to be clarified and posted prominently on PB Wiki's camp and anywhere else that send people over to GS. To be honest, I'm not why PBWiki is using GS... the Problem Page format seems to work fairly well.

There should be a Suggestion Page for specific, constructive suggestions, eg. tagging capability in Get Satisfaction or other ideas.

In the same way that PB Wiki can and should be structured into topics (using folders, tables of contents, etc. GS definitely needs a better system of organizing posts. Possible categories could be: Formatting text, Adding Media, Plugins, etc.

Take a look at features offered on different sites and consider incorporating some of the ones that work well. Eg. Ning discussions allow you to be notified if someone has added to a thread you are following. PBwiki and TappedIn allow you to reply directly to a comment, not just at the bottom. Many communities allow comments to be rated either with useful/not useful or my favorite, best answer.

Guy, you're RIGHT ON!! Go, dude, keep blasting! – pineywoods, on July 30, 2008 20:29

Sorry it's taken me so long to reply (I started the thread), but Guy is totally correct and you are side-stepping. This whole entire thread is NOT about "diversion to Get Satisfaction" but about the lack of pbwiki itself in providing the right kind of customer support!!! (I meant to post this "n" months ago, but here it is today. Deal with it. The old pbwiki forums, for all their problems, were SO MUCH BETTER!!! – pineywoods, on July 30, 2008 20:28

ok this is 1st time back to check out site ... first thing I see that really displease me is "so & so" replied "n months ago" .... put a REAL date in there! "n" number of months ago has absolutely NO relevance in tracking, pbwiki did it so much better ... and I STILL HATE THIS INTERFACE!
Navigation (as promised by pbwiki) is no better, I'm still having difficulty following threads, I can't flag threads, etc, etc.
Again, why did pbwiki abandon ship to some 3rd party just for convenience?? You haven't done a thing here (that I can see) that really helps us poor users. Shame. – pineywoods, on July 30, 2008 20:24

Nathan Schmidt whipped up a quick pbwiki 2.0 API call for rendering wikistyle text into html, and I used that to create a classic editor for 2.0 wikis.

instructions for putting it on your wiki can be found here:

http://getsatisfaction.com/pbwiki/top...

Yes, he was often helpful, but he also showed a flagrant disregard for civil discourse as it suited him. He had the choice to stay and be helpful, or to continue to be inflammatory (a very different thing than honest criticism) and have his account disabled. This was repeatedly made clear to him. He chose the latter. The choice was always his.

Since then he has chosen not to express any regret for his past choices, but to amplify his unabashed contempt for our policies. We think this speaks for itself. – Thor Muller, on May 29, 2008 15:52

By the way, I just realized that there is another forum out there to help with pbwiki questions: http://pbwidget.freeforums.org/index.php. Looks like Guy Fawkes started it as a discussion of the old Widget Library which got tougher to use in V.2, but I bet the people there will answer more general questions too.

Wow, that's weak. Banning a user that consistently was able to point out flaws and offer solutions because some staff got their feelings hurt? I generally found Guy Fawkes' advice in the get satisfaction forums to be practical and useful, in direct opposition to most pbwiki staff advice. Staff tended to answer by saying "e-mail us directly". Well, I wouldn't be using the forums if I wanted answers via e-mail. The reason I like wiki's is for the collaboration - the same thing I like about solving problem in forums. You've just managed to remove one of the few people that I trusted to be able to help solve problems in a way that anyone could understand and apply to their own situation. Good thing I stopped bothering with get satisfaction weeks ago anyway.

Interesting point about the lack of wikistyle making the site more like something like geocities...

Going to the Oxford English Dictionary definition of a wiki: A type of web page designed so that its content can be edited by anyone who accesses it, using a simplified markup language.

pbwiki definately is straying away from being a true wiki.

So I just started playing with PBWiki today and I agree that the lack of WikiStyle is a real hinderance for people who write long documents - which is much easier to do offline in a simple text editor. Sure, writing docs offline and then uploading in one giant shot isn't very collaborative, but that's how a lot of things get started.

I understand the issue with WYSIWYG editors destroying WikiStyle (I've seen this with Confluence, SocialText, MediaWiki, etc.) but that seems solvable by constraining edits to what you can do in WikiStyle if the admin chooses to support that.

glad to see that you're taking the "expert user experience" into account since that's what everybody becomes eventually if they use your product as much as you'd like them to... Can't wait to see this stuff go in.... the return of mobile support will be awesome too... when I first started using pbWiki I read and updated it all the time through the web browser in my PSP... but those days are gone, and it'll be exciting if they return. – Tim, on May 16, 2008 20:46

I'm also loving the classic editor, especially creating links is extremely fast.
I use a private wiki with over 100 pages and over 1000 links, links are the core of my wiki and beeing forced to use the new editor would be really a problem.

It's not only the time you need more when using the mouse for links (even shortcuts are much slower and more intricate than classic editor) - the problem is the bad feeling everytime you make a link that it was much easier in the past and that is now called "improvement".

I know there is a problem that the classic formatting gets "destroyed" when someone uses the new editor once - so you can't relly switch back anymore then.
But why don't you make the new editor default and an option in the wiki settings to enable also classic editor which the wikiadmin can turn on and set write permissions to pages so that someones "classic" pages don't get broken.
At least on a private wiki classic editor should be available !

Hmm... how would someone like me get on that list of migrating from early adopter to 2.0? – Andi, on May 14, 2008 00:39

Ski said, "The form should be customizable by wiki owners, such as some might require different info to make the 'allow/deny' decision." Yes, yes, yes!!! The more the wiki Admin can customize this, the more pertinent info that will be received for evaluating the merits of the access request, and the less follow-up work that said Admin will have to do. It will do much to save time, effort, and aggravation. – TexasT, on April 18, 2008 09:01

I miss WikiStyle too. WYSIWYG is the devil. It's so much more complicated and time consuming than just typing what you want on to the page. I don't get the point.

"losing that style of editing causes the service to no longer really be a wiki. It's just HTML pages (a la geocities) with a built in HTML editor."

Thank you.

I agree with Guy and others who are upset to see Wiki markup disappear. To me, losing that style of editing causes the service to no longer really be a wiki. It's just HTML pages (a la geocities) with a built in HTML editor.

Something that I like about wiki markup is the limiting factor that it puts on layout. As well as some of the automatic features such as creating tables of contents for the Headings on the page. This also allowed for anchors for each of those headings automatically. Of course, I might be recalling features that MediaWiki has and not PBwiki.

This strikes me as a difference between myspace and facebook in a way... Facebook was successful in part because it didn't let the user create super-ugly do anything-they-want-to pages. All Facebook pages follow the same formatting rules. Almost all myspace pages I've ever seen look terrible. Wiki markup when followed has a similar effect... It restrains craziness and focuses on the content.

I suggested PBwiki to a friend expecting him to be able to create real wiki pages on a real wiki service. I'm very disappointed to come look at the pages he made, click source, and see this inscrutable HTML appear behind the pages. I'm sorry to say that I regret recommending PBwiki now.