Wetpaint is all wet

A diversion away from cancer about lessons in the limits of collaborative technology:

As I've mentioned in this space before, when I was first treated for cancer six years ago, as a single woman living alone I went to some lengths to mobilize the goodwill of a large number of friends and acquaintances to help me through the experience. At the time I wished there were such a thing as a website to which multiple parties could contribute so that I could post online a calendar with my schedule and have people sign up to help me on a day of their choice.

Of course, by the time my cancer had returned, I had become familiar with such a tool, namely the wiki, which is basically a collaborative website that more than one party can make changes to. I found several uses for wikis: When I taught at Ryerson, I wanted a place where students could independently sign up for presentation times (rather than my posting a sign-up sheet on the door and then standing back as the students trampled me, pens in hand), and a place where they could brainstorm together on one online page. I also wanted a website for my book club that all members could contribute to. So, I went searching for just the right wiki.

I chose Wetpaint not just because it was free (they make their money only from ads). A couple of other sites I looked at charged a little for a premium service that permits private wikis; I wouldn't have minded paying, but Wetpaint offered private wikis for nothing. More important, to me, were Wetpaint's unusually attractive templates, including one designed especially for book clubs. I spent a lot of time setting up my wikis, and they worked pretty well, although I had to do a lot of persuading to get my book club members comfortable with the idea; not only are some of the members not particularly adept with computers, but they understandably worried about their addresses being posted on a public website. I assured everyone that I could set the wiki as a private one. Only those people whom I invited by email could join, and they had to set a password to get in.

When I got sick last January, I decided to use Wetpaint for the purpose I'd originally identified: to manage my "care team." On my invitation, friends and relatives could consult an online calendar I set up and offer assistance to fit with my schedule of medical appointments; if they wanted to, they could write offers of rides, etc., or other notes, directly on the calendar. I could indicate whether I needed help with anything in particular, and post updates on my treatments and how I was feeling. In theory, when I become too sick to handle the management of the wiki, other people could take it over and it would be even more useful. It also reassures my family, especially my mother, that I have friends to help out when they can't.

From time to time, invited members have told me that they were unable to register, or, once registered, unable to sign in to Wetpaint. I've just discovered this is more than just a glitch. The last person who had trouble registering got an error message saying that private wikis could no longer invite people to join. I was shocked and went looking for an explanation.

Wetpaint is not a big company with customer service you can call; most problems are resolved on message boards with moderators who seem to offer advice out of the goodness of their hearts. I found out by reading about this latest development that their hearts are not necessarily in the right place.

Evidently, private wikis are a pain for Wetpaint to maintain, so -- without any warning and, indeed, without notification of any kind -- I can no longer invite people to register to belong to one of my wikis. Worse, Wetpaint doesn't acknowledge that this is a problem at all; they don't frame it as something one can no longer do. Instead, they describe what is essentially a workaround: the wiki administrator can still invite someone to join the wiki, but the only way to do it is to send the invitation, then quickly change the wiki's settings to "public," then wait until the individual has registered, then change the settings back to "private." For whatever period of time that might be (the Wetpaint apologists -- I can hardly call them staff -- seem to think that process would take only minutes, but I've had people take weeks to decide to accept my invitation to join), the entire wiki would be open to the whole world.

Thousands of Wetpaint wikis are maintained by corporations, which use them to help staffers collaborate on projects involving proprietary information. The many complaints on the Wetpaint Central discussion board make it clear that the workaround is simply not an option. One user stated on the forum that he had applied for graduate funding based on a project that involved using a private wiki, and now will have to start again from scratch. But the Wetpaint people ridicule the suggestion that outsiders are likely to see any of the private information; they keep saying nobody is going to find it in that short time it's open, blithely ignoring the fact that a principle is at stake: a private wiki's administrator assures its members that the wiki is private and cannot then in good conscience open it up every time a new member wishes to join. This in addition to the extra work involved in monitoring every user's registration.

The discussion thread about this recent development at Wetpaint is an eye-opener, a perfect example of the ethos of the Wild West Web, populated by jolly volunteers and unpaid enthusiasts for whom the idea of customer service is a non-starter because there are no customers and there is no service (one supporter actually had the gall to say explicitly that we were not customers unless we paid for a custom domain name, so how dare we complain?). Wetpaint, host of thousands of wikis, is itself a wiki and by definition is only as good as those who collaborate on it. The "moderators" who respond to the complaints on the discussion thread are petulant and impatient: they seem genuinely puzzled and exasperated that, having stated the facts and explained the workaround, they are still being bombarded by complaints. In a normal business setting, managers would allow similar complaints to accumulate in order to measure clients' dissatisfaction -- I know many would cut them off at a certain point, but I've never seen any manager bully online commenters by implying they had no right to repeat a complaint that had already been made by someone else.

As the discussion unfolded, it became apparent that the main problem is the advertising-supported business model. The advertisers do not want their ads appearing on private sites, which limit the number of impressions they receive and also make them unrecordable. Furthermore, Wetpaint recently suffered massive staff cuts (it had a staff of something like 50).

I suppose the joke is on us "customers" or non-customers or whatever we are; the "information wants to be free" model mitigates against those of us who want both freedom and privacy. But it's been handled rather badly by Wetpaint, whose people are so immersed in computer nerd-dom they can't put themselves in the shoes of regular-guy users. The nature of this kind of Web 2.0 innovation is that many or even most of the heavy users are nerds, too. So when they discuss new developments on the user forum, they don't feel like they are businesspeople addressing customers; they seem to feel they are simply computer people hashing things out with other collaborators.

For example, here's one Wetpaint moderator:

The invite feature for Wetpaint was removed for various reasons. First off, I have have you know it is not "a bit more coding", it is a ton of coding to make the invite system for private sites. So, saying "it is a bit more coding" is a completely false statement.

Also, changing the permissions for a few minutes is not a big deal. Sorry if I sound rude, but it isn't a big deal. A very easy fix to having your students come on the site is during class, make the site un-private, and have all of your students join the site. Then, you can make the site private again. If anyone who is not a student of yours joins the site, you can easily ban them.

I am not a big fan of the removal of invites to private sites, but, there are many ways around this. I have already given you one solution, and you guys are smart people, so I am sure you can figure it out. I do not think making your site public for a few minutes will cause that much damage.

I don't blame these folks for being angry when their obviously thankless jobs are at risk, their workload is higher and they are slaves to a business model that can only piss off a substantial number (but, according to them, a small fraction) of users. But still...

Other commenters have noted that we should be pleased we can still have private wikis, which is true, but what's the point of a private wiki if I can no longer invite people to join without a lot of trouble? And it won't surprise me if Wetpaint simply eliminates the private option since it appears to be so much trouble.

So I am now in search of a new wiki host. Suggestions welcome. I am leaning toward Wikispaces. PBworks is another popular one, and it has gone completely in the opposite direction from Wetpaint by becoming entirely businesslike (they don't even use the word "wiki" anymore, instead talking about "solutions") and charging quite a lot. They are wise to stake out the corporate market, I think. They do offer a basic, free wiki, but I don't like its interface much.