About a month ago the mastermind behind LibreCAD (RVT/ries) and I were talking about the need for a new manual and we settled on the idea of using a wiki as a good place to start. So I set one up. And then didn’t have any time to do much else other than push out a few Fedora and RHEL/SL RPMs, write up a bounce page that explains why/how LibreCAD exists across the web, and put up a quick post about it before the Task Monster caught me by surprise and chained me to a huge amount of extra work in other areas (secure infrastructure expansion and ERP system development — noooo~!).
The wiki was originally closed to public edits because we were really concerned about spam being a problem. Since we weren’t really going to announce the wiki anywhere until we had a decent manual already written (or at least the promising beginnings of one) I didn’t expect any traffic to the wiki — and it doesn’t require much imagination to understand what happens to low-traffic, open-edit wikis tucked in the dusty corners of the web. So I had account creation locked and public edits disallowed.
Well, I was wrong. There has been an enormous amount of traffic to the wiki site, and not primarily by spam bots (which amazes me). There is a huge amount of traffic from people who are looking for a “librecad manual”, a “librecad wiki”, “librecad howto” and “librecad”, in that order. I feel bad about not providing a polished manual already (well, only a little bad, its not like I’m being paid anything for this), and considering the traffic situation it seems that maybe opening edits to the public isn’t as dangerous as I had originally thought.
So I opened things up today and we’ll see where this leads. In the event that spam fighting gets to be too time consuming I’ll just close it off again. That would be a pity, but its the nature of dealing with anything “pubic”.