May I suggest to put the manuals, settings, configurations, optimization and whatnot on a wiki-style site?
I’ve used dokuwiki which is pretty nice. This way the community could help and everything would reside on a central point instead of spread on various google docs.
Thanks for the suggestion. We are looking to revamp the knowledge sharing. One of the biggest concerns we have is that we don’t have the manpower to manage the IT aspects of running a site or a forum. Dozuki/Discourse/Google doc because it is professionally managed and very low maintenance.
How is Dokuwiki? Is it vulnerable to spams and bots? We had a hosted board before this, and it was overrun quickly by spams to the point that it was unmanageable.
I see what you mean. Yeah spam is always a problem. Especially on a wiki. You need to establish a good moderation system, but of course it requires manpower. Dokuwiki has some anti-spam (look here) and you can probably set additional layers of security (like allow EDIT only to people registered to this forum).
Of course you can go with a hosted/managed service. There are many options such as Zoho Wiki and possibly dozens others.
thanks for the feedback, I think initially it will be limited to very few users with editing right to keep things simple and moving.
What are some good ones other than zoho? Zoho seems like it has official hosting option.
I think its a great idea. I think limited manpower is no problem either. I’m sure there are better ways, but this is the way that I’ve seen works really well.
You can get a server on Dreamhost for $10 a month. Then use the one click install of mediawiki, which is the same software as Wikipedia. Then they handle the upgrades and all the IT portion of it. You just go in and set up users and point a domain to it.
Then you set up 2 versions of the wiki. The Official Supported documentation, which is what you would write. Then you set up another area of user submitted content. You create some mods of people you know here and let them handle the majority of it. The only thing you would need to do is to set up approval for moderation on the official portion. Let the volunteer moderators take care of the rest.
This is the same way that UnRaid does it. UnRaid is a small team of guys that made a linux branch for personal servers. I run a server on UnRaid and am familiar with them. You can see their wiki here, https://wiki.lime-technology.com/UnRAID_Wiki
The one thing I like about it, is there is a ton of reference material people have gathered over the years about different additions, problem solving, etc. I could imagine that there are pictures of failed prints and it says, does your print look like this? Then it could be A, or B, or C and look at the official documentation here, etc.
I worked at Microsoft for 8 years and documentation/UX is my specialty. There’s a lot of wording I would like to change on the user guide, but rather than create a new thread and submit changes, it would be easier to submit them directly to it and then you just approve or decline the changes.
if you manually limit editing to just few individuals, spam wouldn’t be an issue and you can very easily host your own wiki or find a reliable host like @RonUSMC suggested.
@RonUSMC one recommendation I got is to build the documents here on discourse. Since we are all here already, it has great search and user management functions; we could leverage the existing system. Either a separate category for reference or subcategories within existing ones. what do you think?
the whole point of a wiki is community collaboration. I’ve seen many small errors or outdated info in the the docs (eg: somewhere it is still suggested to set the laser power to 61).
A wiki lets people help you and possibly add valuable content. Also the forum doesn’t let good rational separation of content (like chapters/sections).
Very good examples of well done wikis are http://kodi.wiki/ and https://wiki.archlinux.org/
I really like discourse for what it does well, conversations. I think the main problem with using discourse for documentation is that it is a conversation metaphor and it doesn’t have the robust features that will be required for a fluid documentation cycle.
Off the top of my head, some quick requirements:
Based on those rough requirements, we can say that it needs to be on your server for security and since its going to integrate with discourse. It should be some sort of wiki type. I like wikis because people are used to them and they know how to navigate them immediately. As well as being able to link to the “Moai Wiki” and users would have an immediate expectation of usefulness.
The integration with discourse is two fold. The first is to prevent people from having to sign up for another site and to enable a single username to flow throughout the experience. The second is that users could get flair for their forum name. Wiki contributor, etc. Giving these little stars and titles goes a long way to promote interactivity and documentation. People are shameless self promoters, so they would always be willing to link to pages they have liked or submitted content on.
Those are some initial thoughts, I think the main question is are there any special wiki branches that integrate well with discourse?
dokuwiki has an auth plugin that lets you connect to external software for user authentication such as wordpress and (I guess) Discourse
we have a wiki server set up and we will think about how to organize the information. suggestions are welcomed
Very rough, just to give an idea:
so how does mediawiki user management works? I do not see much options. While I do not mind using a text editor and going into command prompt, I am hoping for something more user friendly so I can spend less time learning the system and more time building the wiki.
mediawiki is a rather complicated piece of software. AFAIK this is your only option https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:User_rights
If you have time, have a look at dokuwiki too (ACL https://www.dokuwiki.org/acl)
Mediawiki is great. The real task will be integrating it with Discourse. In mediawiki you just set up group permissions, which you should take time to sit and think about. Then you just add people to those groups and they inherent the permissions of that group.
As for the layout, I like where Matt is going, but I would just lay them out a bit different. I would want to mimic the forum as much as possible, while keeping the most important/most visited pages at the top. For new users, the speed to information is very important. For users with problems, the speed to fix the problem is important. For normal users, the general layout is important.
That being said, just rearranging Matt’s great start.
Official Documentation
Day 1 with your Moai
Current Settings recommended by Peopoly
(these are not definitive, these are the settings personally tested by Peopoly and known to work, for more general recommendations or ideas, see Community Documentation below)
Hardware and Consumables
(This is only information verified by Peopoly, for more information about off brand resins, see Community Documentation below)
Advanced User Guide
Advanced calibration
Community Documentation (this is not official documentation, this is trial and error by the community, so take it with a grain of salt and as always, test it yourself!)
Diagnose your Failed Print (walkthru of failures with pictures to help you diagnose the problem with solutions)
Settings and Software
Hardware and Consumables
Workflow Examples and settings by speciality
Where to find models to print!
.gcode samples with pictures
not sure I agree on the community documentation. a wiki is a community effort per se, if a page ends up in the wiki it is official (if a moderator doesn’t alter/remove it first). you maybe can add a “wiki discussion” category in discourse where people can suggest/discuss new articles (not to mention that wikis usually have a discussion panel for each page)
I see your point. I’m modeling it after the UnRaid wiki that I linked earlier, https://wiki.lime-technology.com/UnRAID_Wiki . It works very well.
The pain point for them is they have a small team and don’t have time to go in and edit/add for every little thing. The upkeep on a wiki is monstrous. On theirs it allows anyone to go in and edit the community documentation, but to be seen it needs to be approved by some designated community members.
deleted mediawiki and checking out dokuwiki now. It looks to be more user friendly and I think it may work. If not, zohowiki which is a paid wiki service has an user friendly offer as well