David E. Weekly's dashboard

David E. Weekly replied on March 09, 2009 20:22 to the problem "e-mail notifications were more useful before" in PBwiki:

Really? 2.0 notifications show you what was changed, who changed it, when it was changed, the diff of the change, and links to the changed pages.

David E. Weekly replied on January 08, 2009 19:13 to the problem "Wikis Down!" in PBwiki:

I can tell you that we're seeing no networking issues on our side and have not had other reports of slowdowns or outages. So it's a wee baffling. The next time you see this, can email a report with the full traceroute to support@pbwiki.com?

David E. Weekly replied on January 08, 2009 00:35 to the problem "Wikis Down!" in PBwiki:

Hi! We did have a network problem on New Year's Eve for a few minutes, but we had no such problem yesterday. I'm not sure what the issue is - more traceroutes may help us figure out if there's something particularly strange about our ISP's peering with your ISP.

http://blog.pbwiki.com/ is hosted completely separately from the main PBwiki service, so you should always be able to reach it. We do post there if there are issues with the service.

David E. Weekly replied on August 05, 2008 17:03 to the problem "Changes to Search causing BIG problems" in PBwiki:

So based on your feedback (and the feedback of others) I've been continuing to improve search in a number of ways, including what we had discussed here.

1) Exact page matches are now put right at the top.

2) The search algorithm will include implicit quotes - i.e. to more highly score search terms that are found next to each other in a document or title, even if you don't enclose the terms in quotes.

Both of these changes should hopefully be live in production by the weekend.

I'm sorry you're seeing the "not all results are included" message. This is an indication that our search algorithm is timing out when searching your wiki. There are some performance improvements pending to help address this -- improving search performance will be an ongoing task for us.

RE: the search feedback page - augh, I just verified this is an issue for *1.0* wikis, which is why I couldn't reproduce it on my 2.0 wikis. You're right that the feedback form is totally broken for 1.0. I'll look into this now. Thanks for pointing this out!

David E. Weekly replied on August 01, 2008 22:05 to the problem "Changes to Search causing BIG problems" in PBwiki:

Hi! Thanks for taking the time to give us feedback about the new search page.

First, can you help me understand what was broken about the feedback form (report.php)? You mention it has "3 dead links" but it works just fine from my end, so I'm wondering if there may be a login or browser-specific issue?

Let me assure you that the search results are not *random*. Every page is scored for suitability given the page's content, title, and the terms you were searching for. We've just deployed this scoring algorithm and we're expecting to need to do some fair amount of tuning with it to get ideal results - with feedback from customers like you we'll be able to very quickly get you the results that you need. To most speedily and effectively influence the search ranking, specific feedback about what search you did, what you were expecting to see, and what you actually saw are *incredibly* helpful.

(Quick point of clarification - while the results page is not paginated at the present time, the results are not truncated to the first 100 results as suggested.)

Not sure what you mean by inverted commas? If you mean "quotes" then yes, that's the right way to do phrase matching. I think what you're asking for is to have terms that appear next to each other in the text be more highly scored even when quotes are not included, which is fair.

So, specific things for me to work on:
1) Exact matches on pages should always come first (agreed, wise, easy)
2) More highly score terms that appear next to each other, even when not in a quoted phrase search.

Any others?

David E. Weekly replied on July 28, 2008 23:20 to the problem "Would like to use PB wiki, but useless without a functioning help centre." in PBwiki:

FYI - we've today moved the Help Centre (!) to a much faster server.

David E. Weekly replied on July 26, 2008 17:10 to the problem "Would like to use PB wiki, but useless without a functioning help centre." in PBwiki:

Our apologies; our help center is not up to full production quality as we experiment with better ways to offer users support. Clearly, having the help center be inoperable is not a better way to offer users support. We'll be migrating this to a more robust install pronto. In the interim, you can always get to PBwiki help at http://getsatisfaction.com/pbwiki, even when we're having troubles with our help center! Sorry again to have screwed this up.

Separately, I'd love to hear what problems you're seeing with the productivity plugins.

David E. Weekly replied on July 14, 2008 20:46 to the problem "poor keyword search results & display" in PBwiki:

Hi! I've been working on improving search quality for the wiki over the last few weeks, which is why you'll see some changes there. I'm definitely interested in getting your feedback on what's working in these changes and what's not.

I did a search for ron franscell on your wiki and the search results seemed pretty relevant. What was wrong with it?

http://wiki.wyomingauthors.org/FindPa...

Help me understand and I'll get it fixed for you. :)

Cheers,
David

David E. Weekly replied on July 14, 2008 20:41 to the question "Does "private" guarantee web crawlers are banned?" in PBwiki:

Yes! Not only do we set robots.txt don't crawl settings and put in-page tags that indicate the content should not be redistributed, but the most important bit is that without invited permission, NOBODY (including crawlers) have permission to view your site.

David E. Weekly replied on July 10, 2008 17:04 to the problem "Wikis Down!" in PBwiki:

Hi! We did have an outage Tuesday from 3:55pm PDT (11:55pm GMT) to 5:14pm PDT (1:14am GMT) due to systemic power loss at our colocation provider -- several other companies were also affected. For all but about ten minutes of this window, a message was displayed to users indicating that the system was down. This was a very unusual occurrence.

There were no interruption issues yesterday, so it's possible that there was some issue with traffic between your location in the UK and our servers. Next time you see an issue like that could you run a traceroute?

David E. Weekly replied on July 03, 2008 19:15 to the question "copy protection" in PBwiki:

Hi! I'm the Founder and Chairman of PBwiki. Unfortunately, Joel is right. It's impossible to let people view text and pictures while preventing them from making a copy, since the very act of showing them that text and pictures makes a copy. Like Joel said, if you need to ensure that only authorized people can see your text and images, then you should create a private wiki with PBwiki and invite those people who you want to share access.

David E. Weekly replied on June 24, 2008 23:59 to the question "Advanced PBwiki Search" in PBwiki:

Also, search now searches uploaded filenames properly, scores results by the number of matches and sorts their display accordingly, and you can "force" a keyword to be included with +term, so searching for hot +sauce will find all pages that contain sauce and preferentially also contain hot. No pages returned will not contain sauce.

David E. Weekly started following the idea "PBwiki ROCKS" in PBwiki.

David E. Weekly replied on June 24, 2008 16:36 to the question "Troublesome clause in terms of service" in PBwiki:

Let me explain this clause and why we put it in there -- the clause does *not* give PBwiki ownership of your material, override your copyright, etc.

What it does do is give us the right to redistribute your wiki in the way that you asked us to. So if you upload your latest screenplay idea to a private wiki and then share that wiki with your friend, you shouldn't be able to sue PBwiki for making a copy for your friend. So we have to make sure we have permission from you to to share the content you put on your wiki with other people on the wiki, and that's what PBwiki asks for in that clause.

Let me know if you have any more questions; sometimes working through this legal mumbo-jumbo can hurt your head! I know, because I worked with lawyers for days to produce the terms you see! (And the first version of what they gave me was many pages longer and scarier.)

David E. Weekly replied on June 21, 2008 19:46 to the question "Files Security" in PBwiki:

So here's an update - work on this feature has begun in earnest. We've got a first draft design of the production done - the UI is going to help unify several currently-disparate interfaces, adding both file-level security and files in folders. (AllPages, changes.php, FindPage, tags.php, upload.php, and the Folder pages currently present themselves differently, which can be befuddling to new users.) The engineering backend work for both files in folders and file-level security has already been completed; this work was prioritized as a direct result of this thread on GSFN.

We're also going to be working on making our roadmap and ongoing development more transparent without interfering with our core mission of actually improving the product as fast as possible. :)

And thanks for continuing to speak your mind candidly; these kinds of conversations are what help us move both the company and the product forward.

David E. Weekly replied on June 20, 2008 19:44 to the idea "Join the Universal Edit Button movement" in PBwiki:

Nice, rolled from idea to live on all production wikis in about 24 hours. Great work, Mark!!

David E. Weekly reported a problem in Get Satisfaction on June 20, 2008 19:38:

Help Center: in page content truncates page

See - http://help.pbwiki.com/topic.php?id=h...

If an unclosed <noscript> appears in a post, the rest of the page appears truncated. This is probably because the tag is unclosed.

Compare with http://getsatisfaction.com/pbwiki/top... - which works correctly.</noscript>

David E. Weekly replied on June 18, 2008 19:42 to the question "Certificate problem in Firefox 3" in PBwiki:

Interesting. It sounds like something may have gotten wonky with your key store. I'm glad flushing your private data fixed this, and I'll make sure that our support team knows to recommend this if other people face this same issue.

David E. Weekly replied on June 18, 2008 18:53 to the question "Certificate problem in Firefox 3" in PBwiki:

Odd. I'm unable to reproduce this. We've been testing for weeks with Firefox3 release candidates and using the 3.0 final release, https://my.pbwiki.com/ seems to load fine. Equifax Secure Global eBusiness CA-1 is the issuer; do you have your security set to non-standard or have you changed the list of root certificates in your repository?

David E. Weekly replied on June 14, 2008 23:25 to the question "PBWiki is having a server hiccup. Is it temporary? Or a bug?" in PBwiki:

This is called a "500 Error" in geekspeak and it means when our servers got a little too busy to give you an answer fast enough. We monitor these pretty religiously - you apparently got caught by a five minute window during which we got particularly badly hammered by a misbehaving bot.

We have been diligently working to reduce the number of these that are served to users and to make us more robust against such naughty bots. We're very sorry for any hiccups like this you might encounter as we work through improving our systems to smoothly handle high loads.