New Flashlight Wiki
I have been learning a lot about flashlights over the last couple of years. As a way of keeping all of the information straight, I wrote a lot of articles for CandlePowerForum's Wiki. Their Wiki was pretty sad, but it became a really good resource that I could refer to. I don't know if that many people were using it, but it was helpful to me at least.
But the problem with the CPF Wiki was that it was under constant spam attacks. The administrator there took some steps to stop the spam but last week almost all of their pages were vandalized. I reported this to the admin and the user that had damaged the pages was blocked, but the vandalism was not undone. I certainly didn't want to fix all of those pages. I have offered to help administer the wiki in the past, but the administrator does not want any help. Also some pages are locked and the ability to upload images, which could be really helpful, has been turned off.
So I thought that rather than waste time fixing vandalism attacks that I am not allowed to control, I would just make my own wiki. You may recall that I already made a wiki when I was learning how to do computer drafting. That was really more of a personal wiki for stuff I was learning and could store code snippets since I knew I would be getting away from drafting for a while and didn't know when I would get back to it.
So I set up a new wiki this weekend. I moved a lot of what I had written at CPF over to the new one and re-did the front page which was locked on the old site. I also made a few changes and additions, so it is already more up-to-date than the original. I still wasn't 100% sure I would really set up my Wiki, but the more I did it, the more I knew this was the way to go. I looked for a good domain name, but flashlightwiki.com was taken as well as wikiflashlight.com, flashwiki.com, lightwiki.com, etc. (none of which were being used for anything; people just bought them and then parked them hoping someone would want to buy the domains from them). I did find that flashlight-wiki.com and candlewiki.com were not taken. I liked the play on words of candlewiki, but when I asked what Jeb thought, he said candlewiki needs to be about candles, not flashlights.
So today I went to godaddy.com and bought flashlight-wiki.com for $6. The host I use for igirder.com and lakeavondale.com already lets me add as many domains as I want as long as my total storage space and bandwidth don't exceed their limits. I'm using about half of my allotted storage space, but hardly any of my bandwidth, so I don't think the new wiki should break the account. The total cost for a year is really only $6, so it seems like there is nothing to lose.
To fight spam, I decided to allow editing only by "confirmed" users. So a person can sign up and then I have to confirm them. Based on my experience at CPF Wiki, there aren't going to be many people who really want to help, so I don't think there will be much maintenance in keeping up with confirmed users. But I may also have to purge unconfirmed users which has become a chore at lakeavondale.com where I do something similar and seem to get a couple of Russian-sounding "neighbors" signing up with Gmail accounts each day.
| Permalink
| 
Comments (4)
Google already has the new site listed. Searching for flashlight wiki, the page turns up on the second page of results (no. 13 overall). Yay!
Posted by Ted | November 30, 2010 11:45 AM
Google advanced the Wiki to No. 6 on its results, but the wiki wasn't listed at all in Yahoo or Bing (which turn out to be the same thing). A couple of days ago I submitted it manually and even though Yahoo Slurp had been by before, it was only today that the wiki showed up in their search results. And at Number 2! Right behind Wikipedia's entry for flashlight.
Still not much in terms of traffic, though. Only a few vistors are referred to the site per day from search engines.
One of the main LED producers, Cree, just released a new, brighter LED so there is a lot of updating to do on the wiki as different flashlight manufacturers incorporate it into their offerings.
Posted by Ted | December 11, 2010 2:45 PM
Yahoo and Bing still have the wiki at the number 2 spot when you search for "flashlight wiki." Google moved it up this week to number 4, now ahead of a flashlight wikia (a less moderated, for-profit version of Wikipedia) that is pretty lame honestly. The three results in Google are all from Wikipedia, so I doubt the wiki will ever get ahead of those. And maybe it doesn't entirely matter since the January statistics indicate only 21 people have reached the site by searching for those terms (certainly some of them are me). I get an average of 88 visitors a day, with about 20 being referred by search engines (based on search terms that show up, so there may be more referrals but the search terms don't register). I'm still leaving it free of advertising for now and don't know that I would get much of anything with ads.
Posted by Ted | January 27, 2011 8:01 PM
The original CPF Wiki is now gone. Nobody was adding to it, so eventually the owner pulled the plug and, sadly, nobody said anything on the message boards. I'm up to about 300 visitors a day, with maybe 100 of those coming from searches that AW stats can track. A handful of people have signed up for accounts, but I'm pretty much the only one making changes. At Google if you search for flashlight wiki, my site is 3rd and 4th. At Yahoo or Bing, it is 2nd, 3rd, and 4th. The Wikipedia article for Flashlights is still first.
Posted by Ted | October 9, 2011 5:01 PM