0.1 release! (just to call it a name).
Yesterday:
- Grant admin and moderator roles to @bjorn.
- Process explaining How to push a proposal from Drafts to Features, 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.
- Change header logo from SVG to PNG to avoid cross-platform problems.
Today:
- Create a Bitwish Twitter account and a custom header icon link.
- Ask whether it is possible to prevent that users create new topics on the Features category.
Nov 7
- Documentation of the process for Promoting a draft step by step
- Creation of the Archive subcategory, which is muted by default not to bother people with archived draft discussions.
Nov 16
- Now the main page is sorted by Latest instead of Top (discussion). Users can change their default main page this in their preferences.
- Discourse upgraded to 2.8.0.beta8. Includes security fixes. Also other features, but none very relevant to Bitwish.
- Google login verification process completed.
- First email digests sent to users who haven’t logged in in the past 7 days. Users can change the emails they receive in their preferences.
Nov 18
- New category Brainstorm for free-form discussions leading to drafts. (discussion)
- New color palette for categories, inspired by Bitwig’s Grid.
- Now drafts will be closed automatically after 14 days without new comments. Before it was 3 months after their creation. (discussion)
Nov 28
- Psst! Check the upcoming Bitwig Video Guide (an experiment inside the Bitwish experiment, let’s see whether it works).
- New category Bitwig Video Guide, with subcategories muted (except What’s New).
- Population of these categories has started.
- The What’s New subcategory is updated through automatic posts coming from Bitwig’s YouTube account, via RSS.
- Question Answer installed. and RSS Polling Discourse plugins installed.
Dec 3
- After a user request,
.bwproject
files can now be uploaded to Bitwish posts. Let’s see how this goes.
Dec 5
- Now the community wishlist looks better and clearly highlights the features you have voted. All this thanks to Discourse’s Alternative Voting Category Style theme component.
- We have upgraded to Discourse 2.8.0.beta9. This new version comes with some features that might be handy in Bitwish:
- @here mention to notify 10 people who have replied to the topic.
- Tag descriptions, which may be useful in the future.
- Last five searches are shown when starting a search.
The full announcement contains more features:
Sorry for lagging with project documentation.
Dec 8
Dec 11
- A new space to celebrate and discuss Bitwig presets and clips
- New top navigation bar, includes the diffrent areas envisioned in the roadmap.
Dec 12
- Music category created as part of the discussion on Planning a space to share music on Bitwish.
- Creation of Music made with Bitwig - December 2021, a community collection.
Dec 16
- Completion of the import of more than 1,600 topics about Bitwiggers’ presets and clips.
Dec 17
- Creation of the chapters about Grid Modules. With this, the Bitwig Video Guide has its initial structure complete.
Lagging again…
Jan 2
- Kadonneet maat - atmospheric techno becomes the first full album made with Bitwig featured on Bitwish.
- Added fields on user profiles for artist links on Bandcamp, Soundcloud, Spotify, and YouTube.
Jan 6
- Proposal about Support for languages other than English on Bitwish
Jan 14
- Now it is possible to Request a new language on Bitwish.
- The first language added is Spanish / #español
Jan 18
- Upgraded Discourse to 2.8.0.beta11 (weeks before we had upgraded to Beta 10)
Jan 20
- New language added: German / #deutsch
- First meeting with the Bitwig team.
Jan 29
- New Bitwish badges
- Tutorials Participant - Participated in the Bitwig Video Guide.
- Music Participant - Participated in the collection of music made with Bitwig.
Feb 4
Feb 5
- 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.
Feb 16
- New subcategory to host implemented features: #archive:implemented. The first one is Note Out module for The Grid.
- New tag group “Releases” includes #bitwig-4-2 and #bitwig-4-1.
Mar 5
Discourse upgraded to 2.9.0.beta2, a security fix.
This upgrade includes a fix to a bug in the Voting plugin that we had reported:
Mar 7
- 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.