Here we post updates about the Bitwish project. For questions or feedback, please use Bitwish talk or create a new topic.
About 30 users signed up in Bitwish during its first day of life, one of them volunteering as admin. New feature requests have been posted and a few discussions have started. This is a great start for a community project!
How Bitwish started
Nov 4, 2021
Bitwig releases 4.1 beta 1. A wave of feedback includes cries for missing feature requests as always.
@icaria36 (who had been thinking about the amount of energy lost in these community cries) reaches out to @antic604 (creator of probably the biggest Bitwig feature requests survey) sharing the idea of creating a community wishlist. He replies with an encouraging answer.
Nov 5
@icaria36 has a day off work. The rest is a technical description of steps.
bitwish.top is registered on Gandi for 6,19€ (1 year). Cheapest option for a decent available domain. Never heard about this “.top” before but it’s kind of convenient.
Discourse is chosen after checking some open source StackOverflow clones and wishlist / roadmap apps, Discourse is very solid open source software and it can be tweaked as a community wishlist. A Discourse droplet is created on DigitalOcean.com for 10€ / month (1 vCPU, 2GB RAM, 50GB disk, Ubuntu, Frankfurt data center).
A sending domain is created on Mailgun (Flex plan, negligible cost for now)
As soon as the site is up with minimal information, a ping is shared on Discord (Bitwig, polarity-music and Gelhein). Silence plus one skeptical reaction.
Discourse basic setup and tweaking. The Grey Amber theme happens to offer a color scheme familiar to Bitwig users. Discourse’s default Light theme can be selected by users in their preferences, plus other themes. Install Discourse Voting official plugin. Set up logins for Google, Discord, and GitHub. A lot more settings tweaks.
Logo creation (by a non-designer) using Inkscape and GIMP. A perfect SVG heart is replicated on top of Bitwig logo’s characteristic pattern. Painted on orange/red Bitwig color. Liberation Sans font-family, bold.
Process explaining Writing a good feature request, motivated by the feedback received about “the Bitwig team doesn’t care”. Let’s assume that they (just like most product development teams) care about good quality feedback that takes into consideration Bitwig’s vision and development constraints. Votes and emotions are very motivating as a community member, but that alone won’t go anywhere indeed.
Ask how to make bitwish.top/votes the default main page.
Discourse upgraded to 2.9.0beta1. There is no new functionality for users. The 2.8 cycle is completed and the Dicourse team publshed a blog post explaining what’s new.
The automatic daily bump of one topic has been disabled in the #drafts category (where we have 8 topic currently) and it has been enabled in the #brainstorm category (where we have 33 topics). The idea is to see whether old Brainstorm topics can be turned into drafts, still are worth discussing, or should be archived.
Nothing like limitation of resource to plan more efficiently. I’m in a very busy phase at work and it’s likely to continue for a bit. I’m reducing any unnecessary overhead to keep the Bitwish maintenance as lean as possible:
Time limit removed from Drafts (less pressure for everyone, now that the traffic is low)
No bumping of old topics (it didn’t bring new activity)
No daily collection of new tutorials (after months it didn’t get much feedback, contributions or )
No active promotion in places like YouTube or Soundcloud (new users keep coming, new votes too, slowly moving)
No more monthly reports (didn’t get much feedback or , and the Bitwig team know where to find the watchlist if they are interested).
Before the end of the month I will update the monthly topics to make them permanent (no need to reset them monthly) and I will remove the voting of posts (the feature isn’t being used).
This way the maintenance will be directly proportional to the activity. Discourse does a very good job at sending notifications and digests automatically.
I’m looking forward to seeing the next Bitwig version, and whether we can scratch a few more requests. Meanwhile, please keep coming your comments, your votes, and new requests.
I’m very sorry for being quite absent in the past months. High intensity at work combined with lack of replies from Bitwig wasn’t a good combination for Bitwish motivation.
But then… the Bitwish keeps going because people keep joining and posting. It’s a thin stream but quite regular. 1-2 new users are registering almost every day, and some of them post or vote right away. This is very encouraging!
Right now there are 572 registered users.
We need a refresh of moderators and admins. Bitwish maintenance isn’t much work, but doing it alone isn’t as fun, and it takes one stretch deadline at work or the opposite (vacation) to keep me away from Bitwish.
I have muted the Presets & Clips category because its automatic posts were becoming too prominent next to the low human activity in the forum. People can unmute it in their user preferences.
I have updated Discourse after a… too long time. One big new feature the software has is the sidebar. I have enabled it and got rid of the custom top navigation bar in the header. I hope you like it.
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