The future of OG Better Informatics with regards to Better Informatics File Collection

[yutotakano]

This issue is mainly for long-term discussion. I'm personally against the ideas but I see the pros too.

BI File Collection is more and more becoming the "main" interface of Better Informatics. Meanwhile, OG Better Informatics is seeing less and less meaningful commits (I think it's just me and a bot who have commited in the last year).

Swapping the domains

**Main Idea: ** Swap betterinformatics.com and files.betterinformatics.com

The main idea is to obsolete the legacy "knowledgebase" page (betterinformatics.com), making the top-level domain serve the BI File Collection. Additionally, it would probably mean renaming "BI File Collection" to "Better Informatics", and renaming the OG BI to some other name (like links.betterinformatics.com). The change would make it easier to refer to what is nowadays the "main" part of Better Informatics (the file/exam collection).

Such change would reduce activity on the links/OG better informatics page even more. To counter that, we can implement things like inline editing of links from within File Collection. The OG repo becomes just a "data storage", and its static (publicly-acccessible) version of the website will primarily only be for emergencies.

A potential negative with doing such a swap, is that graduates and external folks will no longer be able to interact with anything on the top-level domain (since File Collection is strictly behind a student lock). It would push away contribution further from those people, since they have to do an additional step to find the OG website under a subdomain.

Personally, I'm slightly against the domain swap, but open to hearing opinions.

I am strongly for having inline editing of articles nonetheless, to keep activity on the main page from dying.

Even more radical change

An extra more radical change would be to do all of the above, AND move all the knowledgebase data into the File Collection database entirely. This will involve closing down (archiving) the nearly 9 old GitHub repository.

Personally I feel like this would be history lost, and remove a good avenue for students to learn Git. It also removes the ability for graduates, incoming students, and external people from finding ANY information at all.

At the same time, I see the OG repo hasn't seen meaningful updates in forever. Implementing things like inline preview and inline editing of the knowledgebase from within File Collection would be so much easier if everything is in the same database. There's some very hacky workarounds employed currently to link a knowledgebase article with a BI File Collection category.

Personally, I'm strongly against doing this radical change.

Completely new "Hub" to serve both

Another entirely different idea is to make the top-level domain serve a "Better Informatics Hub Page" of some sort. It can link to BI Files and BI Links, as well as other future projects, that are all under subdomains.

This Hub Page might have some dynamic elements, like showing recently updated articles in BI Links or recently answered exams on BI Files.

Personally, I'm slightly for this hub idea, but wouldn't touch any implementation until I see a larger consensus.

[BrianGithubAcc]

I had the same idea just today here are my thoughts on the proposals.
Please bear in mind I am just a user so do not know the technical limitations.

Inline edits

Inline editing also sounds like a good idea to combat the issue of links becoming neglected although it would need some sort of purge(?) of all the outdated information first.

I would be in favor of inline edits.

Domain Swapping & Radical Change

My main problem is that links just seems redundant at this stage so there is no reason not to swap the domains, I have seen the point on having a backup static site but files seems to have very good uptime (from a user perspective). If you made a public section on files (unsure on feasibility) for each course (maybe just do not show the exam) eliminating the pain of adding inline edits then archive it with waybackmachine (might be controversial) it may be a good compromise.

I am for domain swapping.(Prefer hub idea)

Radical Change

I also would not want to see it archived but looking at the commits it is clear it is dying as you mentioned and doing the inline editing would be like hooking it up to life-support. I think realistically it would need repurposed maybe just one centralized resource for non-course rated stuff with course related stuff hosted on files.

Not in favour of radical changes.

Hub

I think that changing betterinformatics.com to link.betterinformatics.com is a good idea along with introducing a betterinformatics hub as it could also have welcome.betterinformatics.com (needs slight updating).

I am in strongly in favor of the Hub idea.

[qaisjp]

+1 on the radical route. -1 on a "swap", not sure on Hub.

Metrics

Do we have metrics on how many users are using the homepage? When I was a student I remember it being very useful as a quick way to jump to other pages.

With the Files collection, you have to log in, which might be too inconvenient and affect engagement / UX for people just using the homepage. (If there are any.)

Graduate access

Re graduate access: as a graduate I've never needed to use Better Informatics, although I'm not in education anymore so maybe if I was doing a masters elsewhere I could have found this useful.

That said, if you have a way of determining who is actually alumni, you could put in some sort of process to enable that.

History

Re history: I wrote the Philosophy section and, on reflection, I think practically it's not important. It's interesting and feels nice and tingly to have it, but I think it's not hugely necessary to have full git history.

I don't know if Files Collection has functionality to revert in case of mistakes / abuse though, so I think it would be good to have that.

Think of it this way: there's very few people contributing to the repo, and an even smaller minority of people that really care about the history. And the history is still there, just not linear / linked to the Files Collection.

Files Collection complexity

I can't speak to what complexity the radical approach would introduce to Files Collection, but it's worth considering whether the complexity is worth it.

Other static files

Noting that Better Informatics also hosts other static files! Not just links but also iirc there's a venn diagram tool for INF1A. And other stuff like that.

Hub

This sounds fun but I think it would introduce more clicks to users and be in the way of what users actually need, just for the sake of information architecture.

I'd love to learn more about what problems the hub would solve for users.

[yutotakano]

Actually, you're right @qaisjp, for the domain swap idea, we should check metrics before actioning anything. Cloudflare collects some access metrics at the moment but nothing granular (only the number of requests totalled across both domains).

I've been using Rybbit on my personal site and I really like it, so I'm thinking of adding some analytics tracking using that to Better Informatics & the File Collection, maybe temporarily, maybe permanently (who knows). I'd like to see how much usage we see during semester and during at least one exam season, so I'll report back to this issue come January 2026. Open to more discussion until then!

@BrianGithubAcc I do like the idea of making most parts of File Collection available to view publicly, and locking only the exams behind student login. That would also enable anonymous/graduated/external users interacting with the "Documents" section on File Collection, like cheatsheets and summaries.

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Interesting to see various opinions (users, graduates, current admin) all differing. We seem to agree that it'd be nice to edit articles from within File Collection in some way or another. Thus, while this discussion continues (analytics etc need collection, and more people's input would be nice), I think it's worth spending a few days to implement the "life-support" idea of adding inline edit to interact with the Git repo. Whether this becomes a temporary measure (before a DB migration happens) or permanent we'll have to see.

[qaisjp]

(Summarising Discord DMs: I just granted you access to the Google Analytics instance for Better Informatics. Might be worth adding the current admins too. Google Analytics doesn't support adding Google Groups as admins, so only the 2020 set of admins were still on GA.)

[yutotakano]

(Thanks, just invited the other admins too. In the long term I would definitely like to migrate over to Rybbit since it's self-hosted. Easier to make the dashboard publicly viewable too. I'm currently setting it up for File Collection and will soon do so for the OG one too, and for a while we can have both Google Analytics and Rybbit to compare the results.)

[yutotakano]

Update regarding analytics and usage statistics. I haven't drawn any conclusions yet but I'm sharing the raw stats collected from 18th Sep to 7 Dec.

Better Informatics.com	Files.Better Informatics.com
It saw 1.8K unique users since 18th of September to 7 December, of which 671 is from the UK.	It saw 1.4K unique users since 18th of September to 7 December, of which 1.1K is from the UK.
Most viewed pages globally are / /resources/inf1-cl/venn /inf2 /drive /inf3	Most viewed pages globally are / /category/computer-security /category/inf2c /login/ /exams/85p41ejo.pdf (CompSec 2024)
Most viewd pages in the UK are / /inf2 /inf3 /inf4 /drive	Most viewed pages in the UK are same as global stats
Traffic 45.4% UK 23.6% Singapore 15.7% United States 4.7% China 1.4% Canada	Traffic 88.7% UK 6% Singapore 1.5% United States 1.2% China 0.6% Switzerland

During normal semester time, access statistics for the OG Better Informatics is similar to Better Informatics File Collection. The differences are:

• OG one gets slightly more unique daily visitors (avg 20-30/day) compared to File Collection (avg 10-20/day).
• Bounce rate is higher for OG (e.g. 84% across October) compared to File Collection (42% across October)
• Average session duration is shorter for OG (26s) compared to File Collection (2m 25s)
• Pages per session is less for OG (1.4 p/s) compared to File Collection (6.9 p/s)

During exam season, access for File Collection surpassed 150 users/day whereas OG moderately spiked to 50 users/day.

Click to show all screenshots

Global data:

OG	Files

Filtered for UK-only:

OG	Files

[yutotakano]

I've thought about this for a while, but I've decided to basically rebrand File Collection as the Better Informatics. Domain swap (or rather, merge) and all included. I think it's for the better of the platform.

Estimated timeframe is for everything to be done by end of August, and for the 2026-2027 cohort of students to see only the new platform.

They'll be some preparatory works I'll be doing over the next 1-2 months:

• A new "Guides" feature will be added to FC, to accommodate links and guides not specific to a course
• All course-specific knowledgebase articles will be migrated over into the FC database as well.
• FC will try to have more parts publicly browsable (and crawlable to LLMs/Google), notably the new guides and course knowledgebase. Exams will remain locked behind login.
• Specific API endpoints like courses.json will be migrated over and continue to be provided.
• The exam schedule viewer may be migrated depending on the workload, I'm not 100% sure yet though.

Still in the air is support for user-hosted HTML content, like the Venn diagrams viewer (which gets the most traffic on OG BI currently). I'm imagining this (if implemented) to look something like GitHub Pages, which might be too big of a burden to host/maintain securely.