Goodbye, World
June 5th, 2012 by Dario Solera | Filed under Community.Many of you have been wondering what is happening at STW, and asking about version 4. Well, I’m very sad to announce that as Threeplicate we are abandoning the project.
It would not only be unfair, but irresponsible to keep pretending that everything is fine and we’re still working on the project. There haven’t been any changes for the past 6 months, and now it’s time to face the reality.
Why?
The reasons behind this decision are several, and here are the most relevant (in no particular order):
- the codebase has grown too intricate to be salvageable
- the Visual Editor is totally broken, and there’s no obvious way to make it work while still playing nicely with WikiMarkup
- we have failed to find a viable business model that allowed us to invest in the project
- there is an ever growing need for less vertical, more integrate solutions
- the community around STW is desolate at best (and this is at least partially our fault)
- the forum is plagued by spam (as many as 20 messages per day).
The net result is that we can’t afford – from both an economic and humane point of view – to keep the project going.
What Will Happen?
Fear not, you can keep using STW for as long as you wish, the application is not disappearing. So, this is what will happen:
- we (the original authors) will retain ownership of the entire project, which will be available in source code form on Bitbucket (the same place where it is now) under GPLv2
- we’ll shut down the website, forum and blog, but we’ll make sure all the documentation will still be available (either in the repository or on Bitbucket – we’d appreciate help to migrate the documentation)
- we won’t provide support or bugfixes anymore
- we won’t provide compiled packages anymore
- we’ll remove STW from the Web Application Gallery (WAG).
Note: the website, blog and forum will remain online for at least 4 weeks. The @ScrewTurnWiki Twitter handle will be kept active indefinitely, as it’s a quick way to get in touch with us.
What About Commercial Licenses?
Obviously, we won’t provide commercial licenses anymore. Existing customers will continue to get priority email support until the natural expiration of their contracts. Commercial licenses are lifetime and thus will continue to be valid.
Is That It?
Yes, but we’re open to suggestions. If there’s someone who’d like to take over (or purchase) the project, just drop us a line so we can discuss.
Summing It Up
We’ve counted more than 200k downloads from our website, plus 134,000 from the WAG. Traffic is pretty much constant and it exceeds 15k unique visitors per month, 82k page views and 1.8k unique downloads.
Thank Y’all
I want to thank every one of you who has used ScrewTurn Wiki during the past 7 years, has provided feedback or reported bugs, or has developed a plugin. Thank you, I really mean it. Also, I want to send a special appreciation to Jeff Atwood, who in 2008 donated $5k to the project out of his own pockets. The money itself hasn’t been particularly useful for the project except for buying some of my time to work on it, but it has helped in building my entrepreneurial spirit. So, thank you very much Jeff.
New Posts
It’s a great pity, that the project has already been finished.
I’ll continue to use and improve STW to the extent possible. I’m using v4 now. I’ve fixed some bugs and added a few new features at the moment.
If somebody continues the project, so I’ll be glad to join. If not, then I will publish my ideas independently, so that the others could take advantage of them. Unfortunately, I limited in resources and time, that’s why I have no case to conduct full-fledged developments, but I hope to repair Visual Editor.
I would be very grateful if you can help me with something. Documentation, development plans and etc.
Ryan – Roadkill Wiki engine uses tagging rather than categories, which lets you use multiple tags (“categories”) for a page.
Metadata on pages is probably veering a bit too much towards being a CMS in my view, mediawiki gets around the idea of metadata by using a whole dictionary of esoteric markdown tags like {{subst:AFC submission/draftnew}}. My goal with Roadkill is to *keep it simple*. If you want a giant wiki with 1000 features you’ll never use then mediawiki/mysql on a linux VM box is a better match, Roadkill is aimed at small teams and personal usage.
Roadkill definitely needs some love with supporting more mediawiki markdown tags right now though, so contributions are welcome.
Hi gyus
It is somewhat of repeating one thing I wrote earlier.
Is it feasible, with the permission of the owner’s, to move ScrewTurn wiki over to CodePlex and establish a distributed team that will catch the thread from this point on ?
Given the fact that Screwturn has a good set of followers, this could be a good point to go on.
Could we create a forum thread or a google group, if the forum is about to die, so that we can discuss on the topic the ones that are available to contribute in development effort, and the terms that this could be done under ?
kr
g
I would also like to see this continue.
While I don’t know how much I could contribute, I’d certainly participate in some way. Especially since there are some things I’d like to see changed, and participation is the only way to get that to happen (or resign my self to the way things are) !
I found it easier to email Dario directly if you have questions. I’m currently moderating the forums so hopefully we can keep something going.
Hi everyone, see here: http://blog.screwturn.eu/2012/07/22/volunteers-recruiting/
I’m trying to organize a workgroup.
[...] iterations over its lifetime. A few years ago I rewrote the site using ScrewTurn Wiki. Recently the developers decided to abandon the project and this seemed like as good an impetus as any to relaunch FreeWargamer yet again. This time [...]
i like this product, hard to find anything decent that open source on asp.net, it certainly works for us as intranet documentation system and online help system,
it good, has all the function…
and yes i agree the HTML editor has issue, but the power of this system is not the HTML editor but the plain text where simple
==title==
makes a header and i love the {toc} that generates a toc.
its good stuff, you guys did a good thing,
congrats…
all the best for your next project…
Guys – you did an awesome job in bringing people like me create a knowledge wiki for the projects we do. It’s sad you are leaving! Thanks for everything!!
I have enjoyed using your product. I don’t see any reason to stop, and do hope that you will find a way to move it forward. The product itself is great. I have been using it a couple of years and have had only a few issues. Other than a few minor bugs that I dance around (Duplicate Meta Keywords is a huge pain) and some performance issues now and then, the product is pretty solid.
Hopefully someone will pick up the torch.
Alexander, I would be interested in what bugs you have fixed.
Also if anyone has migrated to SQL 2012, did it work, issues? Did you see a performance gain? (Insert a link in Wiki is a slow point for me)
Anyway, good luck and thank you.
I’m trying to organize a workgroup quickly
The Volunteer’s Recruiting comments mentions a Google group.
Roland — could you post there?
Hi everybody,
We’ve just finished an import tool for our social business solution Incentive. If you want to continue using the content from ScrewTurn Wiki in a still-developing environment, I’d recommend giving it a go!
Try Incentive here: http://www.incentivecorp.com/try-it
Read more about the Import Tool from ScrewTurn Wiki here: http://www.incentivecorp.com/import-from-screwturn-wiki
It’s free for up to three users, and you can read about the pricing for more users here: http://www.incentivecorp.com/pricing
unofficial April update: talk is ongoing at google-groups — https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/stw4k –, and a user-led “fork” (?) is available at https://stw.codeplex.com
Thanks to George and Jonas and everybody else for keeping some momentum going!
So another nail in the coffin of .NET
Awesome Post!! I’m having pork tenderloin for dinner, watermelon for dessert, and ate carrots earlier today!! Check, Check and Check! Thanks for the great info!