Fresh in from the "make more work for somebody else" department:
I know you guys are busy as hell, and I know you've got a big push to rebuild the whole thing under the hood, so I'm hoping this wouldn't be too much to incorporate. But I'm much better at copywriting than coding, thus the suggestion.
There's been a lot of effort made to "explain" Hubski, or make it more comprehensible from a new-user standpoint. I applaud this initiative and think it's definitely a great place to expend effort and resources. I will also observe that a lot of what makes up Hubski is best defined as "folklore" - little tips and tricks that are either undocumented or documented in a milion different places that are largely invisible to the very people who need it most.
"Folklore Engine" is a term that is never applied to a wiki but if you look at it, that's what it is. A wiki gives every (qualified) person a place to organize and restate the scattered bits of wisdom that they may have about something. Yay welcome videos, yay tutorials, yay demo pages... but if we had a Wiki, every time one of us comes up with a "here's how I did this" or "here's how you do that" it could be added to the Wiki so that new people could learn and old people could refer.
I mention it now primarily for two reasons - animated gifs, which _wage figured out how to hack to make work, and the fact that I failed to embed a jpg in my last post because the URL had plus signs in it. Having a general repository about gif hackery and URL confusion would be great, but why stop there? There are a bunch of things that we've sort of figured out how to make the site do that aren't exactly documented. This would be a great way for people to see the tips and tricks, while also giving another perspective on the general layout of Hubski as a site.
My wife built a WikiSpaces for her and a friend just to share a project, so I know there are low-tech, low-impact ways of doing this but they're also low-elegance and low-compliance. I wouldn't suggest this if I didn't have a strong suspicion that the various Wiki backends are designed to be incorporated in most platforms but I'm also a ham-handed hacker and it remains easier for me to suggest than to do.
insomniasexx mk thenewgreen forwardslash
Is this feasible or desirable?
From the PoV of someone who has managed a home-grown wiki and written a home-grown wiki, if you guys do do this, can you not make the wiki home-grown? There's a million and one wiki packages out there, most of them are awesome, and it's a hell of a lot easier to make the user db shared (Does hubski use a sql / ldap backend for users?) and skin it similarly than it is to write a whole new wiki in arc and integrate it with the normal site. ikiwiki is great, moinmoin is great, I'm neutral about mediawiki, but there's wikis written from scratch for a specific website almost always lack polish in every aspect and are damn hard to get right. Even if it doesn't share the dark / light skins, even if it has separate notification preferences... as long as it shares the same user and password, whatever you guys roll with would be solid in my book. 2c
We are definitely not going to brew one up. I'm not sure if the one that joelg236 created will suffice. I'm open to hosting a package. That way there are no adverts, and it's under our control. I am sure there are basically one step deployments for Digital Ocean droplets. I'll talk to forwardslash about the realities of account integration between the two.