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Andrey “Rarst” Savchenko —  — Web — blog, service, skribit, widget

Year with Skribit suggestions service

Skribit had shut down on 2011–04–19.

Resnooze had poked me with reminder that today marks one year of using Skribit service on this blog.

Aside from WordPress this is longest I had used any blog-related service, even longer than Google Analytics and such.

Technical evolution

From first and rather clumsy widget Skribit had moved on to much improved second version (which I used until it got under de-cluttering razor) and later got floating tab option.

At moment embedding options are rather flexible and very light. As for “How to install a Skribit widget” suggestion, native instructions on site or Skribit WordPress plugin make that rather easy.

Some consider tab intrusive, I also got this anonymous suggestion – “Don’t follow the scroll bar with a stupid ‘Suggestions?’ box.” to which I can say – offer me non-stupid alternative and I will consider it. :)

Suggestions

Got quite a few suggestions over time. Good chunk of those were quite general and were only barely mentioned, some got proper extensive posts about them. Overall it is around twenty posts made on suggestions and about Skribit itself.

Some were not suggestions at all, it seems Skribit is easy to mistake for chat-box type thing or contact form alternative. Which it isn’t.

Failures

What I lack in Skribit is momentum. Even if I properly cover suggestions made and my traffic is steadily rising, there is no increase in volume of suggestions. They are still very occasional.

Really, any of the several posts with extensive discussion provided in few days as many topics and suggestions in comments as Skribit had in a year.

I had some hopes for groups feature but it fizzled and was recently quietly cut to be reworked. Keep hearing about improvements coming. Well, those seem to take some time.

Overall

I think what is best about Skribit that it is no skin of my back. With initial performance issues fixed it is just there. Even if it doesn’t get attention from readers most of the time it is completely worth keeping for occasions when it does.

Who knows, maybe those improvements will come some day and heat things up a bit. :)

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4 Comments

  • Lyndi #

    Unfortunately we cannot drag users to the suggestion box to get their suggestions (it would have been nice if we could). I have always felt that articles that answer specific user questions are often the best articles. How do we get these suggestions though? I will be watching with anticipation to see if you can find a way of making Skribit work in the way that was intended. Maybe it is time that I give the Skribit widget a try once again.

  • Rarst #

    @Lyndi Well, I didn't really make it work (a lot) in first year. :) Such stuff is usually function of traffic. And if comments are made by ~1% of visitors, Skribit is much less than even that. I am thinking about using widget in addition to floating tab on some pages where context fits. Not decided on this. One of many issues to figure out for new theme (I wonder how many months it will take to get it done in the end).

  • Paul Stamatiou #

    Rarst - thanks for being a long-time Skribit user and advocate! As usual my response is "we're working on it" hehe but we really are. As for "Some were not suggestions at all, it seems Skribit is easy to mistake for chat-box type thing or contact form alternative. Which it isn’t." For the longest time I've had a todo list item relating to something like this... like linking a "what is skribit?" in the suggestions tab or widget somewhere. I try to fast track that out there. Also - since users are familiar with commenting so much, what if we made some alternative method of integrating skribit that functioned like a comment form, but in the context of "do you have a suggestion related to this post" and when you get the suggestion you'll see that the user wrote it from the page for that particular blog post. or they could click a "just a general suggestion" thing. Anyways just one of many random ideas I have floating around. I'd say that within just a few months we will be ready to start marketing skribit and pushing for more user traction. We're just now getting to the cool stuff like user activity streams. ;-) Paul Skribit Co-Founder

  • Rarst #

    @Paul Thanks for dropping by. :) I vaguely remember "comment form" come up in the past. Don't think I like it because of added confusion. Depends on specific implementation I guess (smaller, skribit-branded, etc). May or may not work, hard to say. btw I am still waiting for my Pro account for that survey to arrive. :)