User blog comment:Meighan/New Tools to Start & Grow Your Wiki/@comment-876022-20110720155605/@comment-161697-20110721005702

Ryan, its great that you think we have data you really need, and that shows that there is demand for this tool (SponDash) to move foward, but it was never meant to be a public facing tool, it just ended up turning into one after it became even more awesome then we expected.

There is lots of data in there that isnt really meant for the public, and lots in format that will only make any sense for few people.

The stalling point on it right now is that it works for what it was designed for, so in our eyes its "done" as an internal tool. Any additional work (such as cleaning it up, and makint it for admins) will have to come as spare time allows. If/when it does come to the public, it wont even likely look like what it does now, or even called what it is now.

As everyone has said, we are always looking for ways to expose data we have, and let super users like you "drink from the firehose" of data as much as you want.

As for your comment of things getting partially announced, or talked about, and then never happening... yeah, that happens. Welcome to the real world. Sometimes core ideas that we're exicted to bring about turn out to be harder to actually finish, or sometimes other larger projects take the spotlight and mini-projects get shelved for a rainy day. This AdminDashboard has been tried atleast 3 times, and its just now making it out. This is one of the dangers of watching the SVN like you and other do, you see work that is in progress or just playing around, not all of which makes it sitewide.

The holdback on RevisionDelete was more an internal policy about restriction of tools that are easily abused. We're starting to relax those some, but its a slow process that we have to collect data on how they are being used/abused.

As for SearchLog, we looked at it, and it was decided we're not going to install that. It isnt compatible with our search systems, and we're not even capturing the data that it would be displaying.

PageCSS is a nice idea, and would be awesome to have, but its waaaay to open for abuse and vandalism and cleanup. There are very good reasons we only allow admins to write css that other users can see, and let you write your own personal css that only you can see.

As for TitleBlacklist, we have one available, that serves the needs of its name without allowing all the crazy stuff that the one of wikipedia does. We may someday look at extening some of the functions from that into ours, but we're even starting to push away from usign titleblacklist as it is for performance reasons (parsing a human editable page of regex is a HUGE parsing nightmare). We've put a lot of time and resources into our Phalanx system already, and thats where we're focusing our efforts into in that sector of work. We've got some idea's planned on how to open that interface up for admins, and allow for wiki-level (not global) phalanx style blocks. That will remove the need for TitleBlacklist entirely, and is much much more managable to use.

We really do want to make every feature request you and others ask for, and you and RSW especially know that when we can, we grant nearly any request thats feasable, but if we dont have the corp resources to add a whole new complex extension that really is gonna get a few users, its just not gonna happen. No ammount of begging or asking or taking wiki votes is gonna change that.

Even if we do allow for the requestor (and this is something we're working on making happen) to make the adjustments and the prepwork, some time still has to be spent on reviewing that work and THEN the extension, and then keeping it working every week as we make other changes.

Every request has to be evaluated for the features it adds vs the work of keeping it alive. There is a cut off we have to make. And if we're swamped with stuff that directly helps and moves the company's goals forward, that bar moves up higher then we would like.

--Chris 'Uberfuzzy' Stafford 00:57, July 21, 2011 (UTC)