• Hello ES! We could use some help to get us past the finish line on building the new knowledgebase for the forum.
    Can you donate? Please see our fundraising page. Thank you!

Knowledgebase development fundraiser for 2026

We're 6% closer to the goal this week. Not bad.

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Keep it coming!
What increase in user input of content is expected from these upgrades, and how do you measure success of this portion of the project funding and enhancements, from the perspective of adding additional content. I reviewed the kb before donating, but was really disappointed to see little or no progress since I pasted some stuff in last year.
If, for instance, after implementing these enhancements, you see no measurable increase in content, do you continue to invest, or take it off life support?
Are there statistics on how many times the kb has been accessed since the project went live, how many time content was added or edited, by user, etc.? Anything to show users will/may increase participation or content will increase?
I guess I understand in investing in a nice bookshelf, but in the end, I’m mostly interested in the books. Right now there’s only a pamphlet or two at most.
Donating only takes 2 or 3 clicks so it’s really easy, and it’s easier to donate money than time.
 
What increase in user input of content is expected from these upgrades, and how do you measure success of this portion of the project funding and enhancements, from the perspective of adding additional content. I reviewed the kb before donating, but was really disappointed to see little or no progress since I pasted some stuff in last year.

I think improving the editor interface 2x could significantly improve the chances that people will contribute.
The existing editor happens to have annoying behavior around features ES article writers want to use, and we found out that's a problem after the fact.
This is also the cheapest part of the job we're looking to do, since i already paid for the new editor integration on another software i'm building. ES is just paying for a graft.

I think article editors getting notifications about comments is about as impactful.
Otherwise they are completely missing those comments with the current design. So effectively, they don't work.
If we had a fluffy budget, we'd design a public high score table for editors, too.

If, for instance, after implementing these enhancements, you see no measurable increase in content, do you continue to invest, or take it off life support?

If the tool works very well for the job, but nobody will use it, it doesn't make sense to fund it further.
The performance optimizations are already done so, unlike wikimedia, there is no technical/cost reason to pull it from the site.
The worst case scenario is that it's a slow grower. The best case is that we end up with something awesome.

Are there statistics on how many times the kb has been accessed since the project went live, how many time content was added or edited, by user, etc.? Anything to show users will/may increase participation or content will increase?

I didn't build any metric collection into it during the last round to know. But even if i did, bots might skew them anyway.

I guess I understand in investing in a nice bookshelf, but in the end, I’m mostly interested in the books. Right now there’s only a pamphlet or two at most.

I get it.
I want to build a fully custom, high durability bookshelf before we start loading it up, and it turns out we needed more for materials.
We've had 3 off-the-shelf bookshelves collapse on us before. That turned out to be a waste of time and resources.

Have you looked into monetization? Like small ads or maybe sponsorships?

Not yet.
The owner of the site doesn't like ads and neither do i. That's a last resort.
Last time we asked for money, it went better than we expected. So we figured we'd ask again.

In previous posts, i explained why a technicality makes it hard to fundraise from a more general audience.
But it may be possible.
I thought i'd ask the people who would benefit from the software directly first. :)
 
modern world bulletproof format is md, it is very readable by ai and you can use obsidian to write and organize articles and plenty of renders for web to convert it to html.
also about hardware - i got ryzen ai max 395, it is 2.5k$, small and not crazy fast but can fit big models well
 
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I like md, but don't like the limited range of formatting.
I think you should be able to make something closer to webpages. Or at least a notch above wikipedia-level articles.. without having to learn some language.

The new editor stores in JSON format, which can export to Markdown or HTML.

In the future, i'd like to add an alternate article type for markdown, with a switchable text or WYSIWYG editor, to make the nerds happy too. But while you're at it, why not also accommodate arbitrary files? we already have a windows file explorer on the left..

Obsidian is really cool. I don't use it, but it was an influence.
 
I will chip in $500. ( therefore the amount to raise is lower )
Donations are steadily trickling in also.

Thanks for your donations! keep it coming, i think we can make it :)

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I will chip in $500. ( therefore the amount to raise is lower )
Donations are steadily trickling in also.

Thanks for your donations! keep it coming, i think we can make it :)
I threw in a bit more to help.

Question; Will content added to the current knowledge base be transferred to the new KB?
In other words, does it make sense to continue adding content to the current KB?
 
Thanks!

The content transfer can lose some formatting. which i will fix by hand on existing articles.
I don't mind if you continue going, it's my fault that we are upgrading the editor.

Funding? we're getting there!

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Thinking ahead a bit;
Louis Rossman's FUTO funds projects smaller than Zeropress, like this one: https://notes.futo.tech/
I believe they could help us fund the work that makes it a standalone open-source application.

I looked at one of their surveys to see if it meets this criteria:

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I think it's possible we could proceed to then next stage pretty easily.
 
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