OokWiki (Bob + A secure login + wiki and account permissions) as a replacement for TiddlySpot

[Jed Carty]

Hello all,

The short version: I have a potential replacement for tiddlyspot that could be distributed and self-hosted on something small like a digital ocean droplet. My computer died and help getting a new one would greatly speed up the development and release.

I think that a community managed public server is a good idea, and it is designed so that you can create your own private server.

The long version:

I made a server that works with Bob and TiddlyWiki that adds a secure token-based login that is appropriate for having a web-facing server. I have been working on this periodically for a while, some of you may have seen it when I had Ooktech.xyz up. I have been working on it periodically for a long time and it is very close to ready for public release.

The problem is that an adorable kitten decided that dancing on my multiprise was a good idea and after some impressive sparks the computer I do my development on is dead. The kitten is fine and acts adorably innocent.

The server has all the features of Bob (multiple wikis, everything configured from within the wiki itself, support for multiple simultaneous users), as well as a secure login using JWT (json web tokens). Accounts have granular permissions which can be set, there many but here is a quick incomplete description of what you can do, in no real order. Server administrators can enable or disable almost all of these features if they are not useful for your purposes.

- A simple script to run that sets everything up

- Publicly viewable or private wikis

  - Allow specific people to view or edit a wiki

- If an account owns a wiki they can set permissions on their own wikis

- optional quotas for accounts both in terms of number of wikis and storage

- A plugin library built into the server

- Access controls for plugins as well (so plugins can be used to distribute content 

  without making it public)

- Simple 1-click download for wikis as a single-file without Bob

- profiles/accounts and wikis can be set as private so on one can see them

- Create an account on the server from a wiki

  - update passwords and other account information from inside a wiki

  - accounts can have some 'about me' information, if they want to set it

- Set if an account can create wikis

- namespaces wikis (if I create a wiki called MyWiki it would be inmysocks/MyWiki) so 

  that there are no naming conflicts

- change ownership of a wiki (give a wiki to someone else)

- inter-wiki federation, like chat and sharing tiddlers between wikis

There are many other details about administrator controls, but those are I think the highlights for using the server. Almost all of that is implemented, I am in the process of adding usable in-wiki interfaces for all of it.

The setup script is only currently for linux and osx, I would need someone who is familiar with windows to make that if anyone wants it. Hosting online is generally linux so I am not sure how much it would be needed.

My plan is to put up a demo site as soon as I can that has limited life-time accounts to show the features. You could create an account that lasts a day and after the account and wikis with it are removed.

I am not interested in hosting and running this myself, it would be a community with community governance supported by donations. I do not know the demands that would be put on it, but I don't think that the hosting costs would be more than about $100/month.

I would of course continue updating the server, but maintenance and operation must be a group effort so we don't get a situation like tiddlyspot where we rely on two people who may not be active members of the community and we have no way to shift ownership for continued operation.

I don't know what interest there is in this, so I am going to gauge that from the response to this post. Also, help with getting a development computer would speed things up a lot.

A link to the amazon wishilst for the computer components: https://www.amazon.fr/hz/wishlist/ls/2WM0S9VV3LJR1?ref_=wl_share

ps:

There are a lot of future features that I am working on, like the ability to search multiple wikis from one wiki, inter-server federation so you can have your own private server and interact with other servers, having a login on one server that lets you access wikis on other servers, things like that.

[Jed Carty]

To be clear, the $100/month is a quick estimate of the server costs for a shared community server, a personal one would easily fit on a cheap digital ocean droplet for US$5/month.

I have had a raspberry pi 2 as my local server running Bob and a few other things (gitlab, droppy and some custom server things I made) for a few years without any trouble.

[Mohammad Rahmani]

Hi Jed!

Amazing work! What you did is a big step forward (it is a revolution). This opens a lot of opportunities to use Tiddlywiki for many different purposes, one is online teaching!

Best wishes

Mohammad

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[Mat]

Jed, this is certainly interesting.

Regarding

>I am not interested in hosting and running this myself, it would be a 

> community with community governance supported by donations. 

> [...] maintenance and operation must be a group effort 

What does this practially mean? By "community governance" I'm guessing you mean a few individuals who are proficient with "ocean droplets, Linux, json web tokens... etc, etc", right?, who set up servers and that other less technical people can then put wikis on, right?

Would a "set up" (for lack of better word) provide a front that is as simple as the TiddlySpot front face? Because one biggie with TiddlySpot was the super ease with which users could put up a new wiki.

Thank you!

<:-)

[Jed Carty]

You would go to the site, the landing page is a wiki, on that wiki you can login or create an account. Once you do that you can use it like Bob, so you create wikis from within the wiki itself. So setup would be simpler than tiddlyspot because you can just make a wiki on the site without having to upload from anywhere.

Community governance would cover rules for use, if quotas exist, who has administrator access, and how server costs are handled. The specifics of how the governance is handled would need to be worked out. Something like voting by people who have wikis, or people who are active making up a committee to make decisions, or something like that. Governance doesn't need to be done by people who are necessarily technically proficient.

I should have the demo working soon and the use part may be more clear.

[Joshua Fontany]

FANTASTIC. This solves a lot of the technical hurdles I was looking at for hosting an RPG-focused TW App somewhere online.

Really looking forward to this, thanks jed!

Best,
Joshua F

[springer]

Jed and all,

When tiddlyspot initially went dark, I went in search of a good domain name, planning to get github to host the content without having people interact with the github urls... but I ran into trouble getting the DNS magic to work (beyond a simple redirect, which isn't what I wanted). 

Anyway, the domain name is tiddly.site   ... so yeah, an obviously easy-to-remember successor to tiddlyspot.com

I'm happy to transfer or donate that domain name to this project of yours, if there's interest.

-Springer

[TW Tones]

Jed,

Thanks for your work, this is very exciting. I would be happy to help with Windows configuration issues, but if the setup is only in Linux It may be hard for me to work it out. Although I know how to do Bob node on widows already, if I need only implement additional features.

I continue to contribute by Patrion and hope others do so as well. Your solutions fill a gap in TiddlyWiki when it comes to serious multi-user wikis. This is a substantial feature release, thank you.

I would be keen to implement it on my LAN and possibly through my Home firewall if possible in time, I can use docker and other solutions by do not know about  digital ocean droplet, and I have cpanel apache services online and possibly even nodeJS and would love to configure a server as well. It would be great to be able to develop and have the results securely online. I would fund an Australian host on top of my Hosting services if I can set it up.

It is sad you are not based in Sydney because I may be able to give you a laptop computer for this. My condolences on the loss of your current one. 

Best wishes for the season.

Tones

[Stobot]

Jed,

I'm very excited to hear that this continues to develop - thank you! I continue to believe that easy multi-user is a key pillar to growing TiddlyWiki usage and adoption overall. As a fan of TiddlyWiki I am happy to help anyway I can to support it's long-term health. To that end, I've been going to your https://github.com/OokTech/TW5-BobEXE/releases page about weekly hoping to see something new - now realizing that there were updates being posted elsewhere.

As you reference learning about use-cases from Google Groups here, I'll share a bit about how I'm currently using BOB, and have been hoping to use it in the future. My most elaborate usage has been around project management. I run a project management team of about 40 project managers. Each project has multiple team members, and there are levels of approvals needed, as progress ties into people's bonus plans. We use a custom blend of Six Sigma, Lean and a couple of other methodologies to track our projects. So, I've setup a BOB on a spare laptop inside the corporate network and built out something for everyone to use / collaborate with. I have a business background, not a web / programmer background, so I struggled through inventing a login process that was relatively easy from my standpoint, but totally insecure. Essentially I gave them a url suffix to access the site which is referenced as their username.

From a functionality standpoint, this works - most of the time. BOB does glitch a bit if you go into / out of edit-mode too fast (as an example, even in the info area where you enter your starting tiddlers, you have to type VERY slowly or it leaves out some of the characters). Running from a laptop to host works okay generally, except in my company they have all these forced updates that give a couple of hours notice, so that laptop needs to be rebooted fairly frequently, and does so automatically. Of course to the end-user, that means the "server is down" frequently which comes off as unprofessional and unstable. This is an area that OokWiki would help with. Additionally, I'm giving out a local address (10.xxx) which means that although most of my team can work remotely and off-network, they're having to login to VPN to access it, which is somewhat annoying to them. By contrast for instance, any of us that are using TiddlyWiki for personal use are hosting as .aspx on SharePoint (WebDAV I think) and able to work completely "off-network". That last distinction also means that they all have access to their personal wikis on their phones, but not BOB. This is another area I'm hoping OokWiki can help with. Actually now that I think of it, another hurdle is that we've recently adopted Microsoft Teams extensively, and you can add web tabs as long as they have https: prefixes - so again SharePoint ones can be added, but not 10.xxx addresses. I'm hoping OokWiki can help there too - I've tweaked my current theme to look very Microsoft-y to ease transition for my team.

Anyways, those should help make clear some of the things I hope the evolution of BOB will help me solve someday. I will say that we used this system for a couple of months, but after a network issue caused us to not use the LAN for a couple of weeks, many transitioned back to previous methods of tracking, so we're currently not using it unfortunately. I've been hoping that BOB would make some more progress before I re-introduce it to the team.

Aside from all of that, I've been thinking of various ways I could invest some of my time into helping the TiddlyWiki community. One was to see if adding some beginner-intermediate YouTube videos for how I use TiddlyWiki. I think the more the better in this area for user adoption. A second way to really highlight how game-changing BOB is was to start building Games for BOB - which is what I hope to do over the coming weeks / months!

Games for BOB: My family (wife and 2 kids aged 13 and 10) are all stuck at home pretty much full time at this point. We play a good number of board / card games - which we enjoy. I tested the idea of building games in BOB and having them all login and they're loving it so far (wife mainly rolls her eyes). Using hidden tiddlers and just wiki-text you can get pretty far. My plan is to build out some really basic versions of these games and post them back here to give further (and fun) use cases for real-time multi-user platforms like BOB. My test case was a tic-tac-toe, but have plans for increasingly challenging games. I think most card games, and even things like checkers / chess should be not too bad. I have no intention of building a "computer" player as that would drastically make the code harder, but for in-house simple games, I think it'll be really fun - they can play from their tablets / phones - which they love :)

Anyways Jed - your post was part announcement, part asking for help. I can help a bit financially, but don't know if I have the technical skill you need from that end. I will however continue to be a promoter of your efforts! Let me know how I can help.

[Yann Moudet]

Hello,

  we use tiddlywiki + BOB as a knolewdge base for our team. 

Our configuration: 

 - a linux server with node (LTS versions). 

 - oauth2-proxy: for authentication, Reverse-Proxy and SSL termination.

 - an S3 bucket for storing wiki. (versioning enabled).

 - TiddlyWiki plugins: Bob, Comments and CheckList.

I could provision a demo server with this configuration and/or lend a server for 6 months as a first lease. For the second option, I would need a public key and a wished configuration. 

Yann

[Stobot]

Jed,

I don't want to take the idea too far, but if we were going to have a community-run TiddlySpot-like option available (OokTech) - I wonder if we could also cover / expand on what things like TiddlyTools used to be (and I assume still is for TWC) for the community? The "TiddlyWiki toolmap" in Dynalist from David, and the "scripts" area that Mohammad maintains are fantastic and I'm appreciative that someone puts all the effort into maintaining them. But, most other software has an unofficial plugin forum or something where all authors can post to, get feedback on, and users can vote - or we can see download count - or something else to rank / evaluate them for newer users that don't spend time every day combing through Google Groups like us addicts :) Loft goal, but could be a big step in the maturity of the platform to have something like this available, and this OokWiki could be the technology that could finally make that happen.

[Jed Carty]

A quick update:

I have a demo up (shh, its a secret but you may be able to guess the url). I haven't enabled creating accounts yet because there is still a lot of administrative UI that I need to work out.

It is running on a digital ocean droplet with apache and passenger handling the bits that they handle.

Once I get the temporary accounts set up I will open that up so people can play with it a bit.

Stobot,

I don't think that is taking the idea too far, considering that is one of my big motivations for doing this. I maintained the wiki reference wiki for a while but it was only me and I got distracted by other things, so having something community owned where multiple people can edit and maintain it is one of the prime motivators.

I have lots of ideas about how to use this to help package and distribute plugins in a way that allows far more collaboration and community assistance than is currently available to people who aren't familiar with GitHub and other coding tools. I want things like community documentation and translations for plugins when there is a need, and this could lower the barrier to entry for contributing by a lot.

[Jed Carty]

Stobot,

I missed a lot of your message before, all my work has been on a phone, raspberry pi and a 7 year old laptop, so things are going slow. Unfortunately the lack of any help with getting a new computer means that this isn't going to change any time soon because I am not going to be able to get one myself until work picks up and then I won't have much time to devote to this.

The problem with typing too quickly in when changing a tiddler directly in Bob, like changing the site title, shouldn't be a problem with more recent versions of Bob. I don't remember which version that fix was introduced in.

I like the ideas of games in tiddlywiki, the first large project I did with tiddlywiki was an interactive fiction engine in tiddlywiki. It is in desperate need of an update, but it is still probably my favourite thing that I made. http://zorklike.tiddlyspot.com

[Stobot]

Jed,

I tried to visit your Amazon wish list but it's in French and despite being Canadian, I don't have enough to figure it out - sorry. Are you able to generate an english link, or would you prefer patreon / paypal? (don't know how much they take off the top)

I'm excited to try the new versions - I also commented over on that thread (https://groups.google.com/g/tiddlywiki/c/VBATEGCKPqw/m/hMvu80BfBgAJ) that the only Windows version download I can find (the 1.7) doesn't work - much more details, screenshots, debug notes etc. are posted there. For now, I can't test the updates.

I'll give your "zorklike" game a try - thanks for passing along! As I have time I'll tinker with it. My hope is that it spurs further interest in BOB which brings help and/or resources to the multi-user effort.

[Jed Carty]

The very incomplete demo is up on ookwiki.com, it has a link to the Wishlist for the computer components and screenshots showing how to use the Wishlist on the French amazon site.

I will update the site as I make progress and write more documentation.

I am also going to use it to make announcements about Bob and other tiddlywiki things that I do.

[Stobot]

Thanks Jed. I tried to work my way through the French site, but was scary clicking buttons concerning logins / payments without understanding it. Note that a chunk of your stuff is not available anymore (had $50+ delivery fees or different model numbers) or was out of my price range, I sent a contribution through PayPal - I hope it makes it way to you.

Thanks for the new version posted - works great so far, will keep testing!

I'm going to try and focus on 2+ player games that can "only be played on BOB" - 1 down (tic-tac-toe which is simple to program, not that much fun though), will add a few more before I make a post on it.

[springer]

Jed, I too found myself stymied after clicking the Amazon link. And there may be folks who want to contribute partial funding toward this or that, or people who’d rather contribute directly to you, trusting that you’ll know how to deal with something that’s not readily available, etc.

If you post some link that works for Venmo, PayPal, etc., I’d chip in without delay. Meanwhile,  Patreon might be especially good as a channel that allows people to support you regularly and be updated about any coordination needed to make the project come together...

-Springer

On Wednesday, December 30, 2020 at 5:47:06 PM UTC-5 inmy...@gmail.com wrote:

[springer]

Or, Jed, try adding variously sized Amazon gift cards to your wish list, if that’s the most straightforward way that we can contribute in smaller denominations.

-Springer

[Jan]

Hi Jed,
great to hear. My Provider finally supports Node so I wanted to try Bod or Arlens Version for some time.
Do you have a demo running somewhere?
All my mechanisms (e.g. for uploads) work which php so I wonder if I could combine these things somehow.

I very much appeciate your constant work for the project. Do yo have a PayPal Tip Jar as well?

Best wishes and Guten Rutsch
Jan

[Jan]

Hi Stobot, Hi Jed,
for the friends of games: I also made a dungeon-like Wiki some time ago.
I comes with an editor you can find going down the page.
It would be a good idea to implement key-navigation, which was difficult at the time I did this experiment.

Yours Jan

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[Jed Carty]

The demo is on ookwiki.com, many of the functions aren't enabled yet.

The PayPal and patreon are the same as they have been for the past few years, I just stopped listing them on announcements because I have gotten almost no response when it comes to support through them, so I stopped bothering. That is why I set up something direct with a very clear way to support development and a clear result of the support.

The links for patreon and PayPal are still in the About OokTech/Support Development section of the Bob tab in the control panel, here they are again:

Patreon is https://www.patreon.com/OokTech

The PayPal link is https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=ZG94CTLHTKYRE

[TW Tones]

Jed,

How much in what currency do you need for your dev computer? I do a small patreon monthly but clearly until others do this will not come quickly.

I am very keen for a node multiuser implementation for the community, for me to host a subset of online services and develop my own comprehensive solutions on top of. 

As I said before, If you were in Australia I may be able to give you an old laptop (if that would do), or we find someone traveling to near you, who could take it. Not withstanding that If I know more about what you need and if you are prepared to accept feedback and requests as you progress (as you have done in the past for me), I would be happy to see what more I can contribute, because I value your solutions.

What you aim to do is the "last mile" or "key gaps" currently with tiddlywiki as a multi-user internet/extranet or Intranet facing solution.

Regards

Tones

[Jed Carty]

My next contract started up faster than expected so OokWiki is moving to the back burner again.

I had hoped that the past few weeks would be a good time to put this project as my priority and get it finished but without a good development machine it wasn't going as quickly as I would have liked.

I will be continuing work on ookwiki, but I don't have any real idea when it will be ready.

[TW Tones]

Jed,

Great to hear you have another contract, I too contracted for some time, and between contracts never felt like a holiday, only ever unemployment.

Never the less let is still help you prepare your infrastructure for when you do have the time.

Tones