I originally wrote my notes for a prior post but noticed that both Ian and Rex weighed in here, so I will as well.
Will, please reference my notes earlier. 1) I ported Pickwiki to MediaWiki, and provided a link to a prototype which I could complete if we saw some significant community interest. Absolutely no one but Ian, Rex, and I have expressed any interest in commenting on that MediaWiki implementation. This deafening message of silence is being heard here loud n clear. 2) A quick google for "mediawiki notifications" returns lots of hits, but I'll save you the pain and tell you that MediaWiki includes email notifications by default. So, while I'd love to say "hey, we already have what you want, c'mon down!" the problem remains that few other people would use the same resource. As we've seen in this thread, there are links to SourceForge, Github, (both of which DO have email notifications) and others, but everyone wants the community to use Their favorite or they'll walk away. Anyone who doesn't have a favorite seems completely disinterested (OK OK Will, You are not disinterested...). That's what I blogged about and a few people have responded in agreement. I'd really really like to help build another collaboration site, and it can be done quite quickly. But the questions of motivation and interest Must be addressed before we create yet another site that's doomed to die of loneliness. Personally I'd also like to see people just use PickWiki for a while. It's not perfect but it works. Ask the questions and Ian, Rex, and I can help to answer them. Email me if you don't know what else to do. ([email protected]) Let's grow out of that resource. When that happens I'm sure more people would be inclined to take requests and build something suitable. But we're never going to get something that's perfect for everyone. Any resource is going to be some percentage, 50, 70, 94.37% of what each person wants. For this community I'm afraid we have a "if it doesn't do This then I won't use it at all mentality" - and in many cases "This" is already possible but people walk anyway without asking the question or waiting for an answer. Go figure. As an example of that, Will, google for "web page change notifications", select one of the free services, and provide your email address and a PickWiki webpage reference. THERE is your notification! And if we complete the PickWiki migration to MediaWiki it will be built-in. Next question please! As another example of how even a hugely popular CMS can still be inadequate: http://ilikestuffblog.com/2011/07/14/github-notifications-suck/ Point is - people in this community needs to accept that the code in the rest of the world is about as imperfect as the code they work on every day. FOSS gives us the opportunity to help fix it. If you don't want to fix a CMS, just accept what's available and ask others how best to deal with it as-is. But for now everyone is talking about the environment but for all the years that MV BASIC FOSS has been around, we can probably count on a few hands how many post-publication contributions have ever been made to all projects combined. THAT is a serious concern that should be discussed before finalizing Where these non-contributions are going to take place, and how notifications are going to be sent on pages that are never changed. (BTW, this has become a CDPish discussion, completely outside the realm of U2 tech) T _______________________________________________ U2-Users mailing list [email protected] http://listserver.u2ug.org/mailman/listinfo/u2-users
