[TriLUG] TriLUG Website Infrastructure

Bill Farrow bill at arrowsreach.com
Wed Nov 20 15:53:26 EST 2013


On Wed, Nov 20, 2013 at 2:29 PM, Matt Pusateri
<mpusateri at wickedtrails.com> wrote:
> I’d like to to hear the issues, that are holding us back as a group.  I can
> see where there current versions are dated.  But I’d like to know what
> problems are trying to be solved?

1. Friction - If you want to increase community involvement you must
reduce the friction for contributors to contribute. Our members find
it difficult to contribute information to the website. To edit a page
on trilug.org you need to enter the simple spam blocking username and
password, create an account, authenticate with the wiki, and then
enter the editing mode. We have received numerous complaints from
users when they have failed to collaboratively edit stuff in the past.
An example was last years Dec party sign-up on the wiki. Over the last
365 days we have had a total of 4 editors touching only 3 pages.

2. Search - The trilug website is not indexed by search engines
because we implemented a simple short term spam block for the wiki.
This short term solution has been in place for a couple of years.

3. Authentication - having multiple passwords on the same site sucks.
We use LDAP for shell accounts, so why not use the same credentials
for other services.

4. Markdown, GIT, etc. - As a leading technology group we should be
keeping up with the our wider community.

5. Analytics - almost non-existant. Which services should we be
putting our effort into ? Moderating email lists ? Helping people on
IRC ? Adding content to the website ? Numbers would help.


If we can solve some of these problems, I think we can grow our
community and encourage participation. Once this is done I would like
to see us move to offer more services, like dynamic dns, firefox sync,
personal wiki's.

Bill


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