Re: New wiki painful to use

[Michael Tremer <michael.tremer@ipfire.org>]

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Hello,

I know that you did not intend this as such, but I am a little angry with your email.

So I hope that we can work this out and that I can explain why things are as they are at the moment and what I am going to do about it.

First of all: There is no time to work on this. I have been doing nothing else but infrastructure and admin work around the project for the last four weeks. I am barely able to respond to my email. One emergency after the other is happening and I am doing “quick and dirty” on more things than I would like to. Bare this in mind. This is also the reason why I am a bit on the edge.

> On 12 Aug 2019, at 22:42, Jon Murphy <jcmurphy26(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> In my opinion: I feel you’re going to see a drop-off of user written wiki pages.  The new wiki is very painful to use!  (I do understand there are not many users writing wiki pages.)

We have virtually nobody contributing to the wiki. There are a couple of reasons. The technical one is that nobody can register an account. Some people have asked for it and never edited a single line. I think many people see a wiki as a read-only kind of data source. Something that I think Wikipedia has created. People just see it as a book. And you simply don’t edit books.

So, this cannot really get worse in my opinion. But this is not news either. A couple of years ago we have thrown away all translations into which some people have put a lot of effort, but they are old, outdated, unmaintained and confused people even more. I think that that is true for a lot of the English wiki as well and my personal opinion here is to just throw it away. False information is worse than none.

> Most of this is related to the lack of a user interface with built-in shortcuts for bold, italics, links, code blocks, etc.  The wiki really needs a proper user interface like what was available with the old wiki or what is available with the forum.

On that: I have said that the wiki was stitched together a little bit. It was an experiment that has become reality now. It is work in progress. I have asked for feedback and I got little. I do not think that many open points were left that could have easily been implemented. This is why I wasn’t too happy to read this email now, because I would have preferred some constructive ideas and help over this now.

> Is there not another wiki to fit the need?  Like a competitor to Dokuwiki? I’d hate to think the IPFire firewall devs would need to be spending their time creating a new wiki.  

I would absolutely not have gone through this work if I thought that there was anything out there. All projects I have checked out use outdated or custom software. Web software has died a very ugly death recently. We have the same problem with the forum.

In the end it is easier to put a wiki together on our own than spending hours and hours of customising some software that breaks as soon as you install an update (i.e. our forum which is now un-themed and unpatched for a very long time).

So this is the basis we have to work with right now.

> Did the https://github.com/benweet/stackedit.js not work?

This project hasn’t been updated in years. I am not going to integrate legacy software into something new.

> Nothing written above is meant to hurt anyone’s feelings or make anyone mad.  I’m just personally frustrated working in the new wiki environment knowing I’ve only touched 80 pages and we have 300+ pages to go!  Ugh!

I am not taking it as such, but I share your frustration. I am also quite frustrated about seeing loads of HTML and only the word “update” in the change log. This is not how this was intended and we have talked about why this is a bad idea.

-Michael

> 
> Jon
> 
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