Ravelry, all public, all the time

General Knitting
1

i just thought i’d share an interesting thing i learned about ravelry.

there are no private pages or private projects there. which is fine, i’m not complaining about that. but i was surprised. in a live chat on the ravelry help group, i was told it goes against the very spirit of the site, the openness and shared craft experience.

GG and i have been trying to figure out how to keep in-development projects protected. we’d like to be able to share back-and-forth, but without it going site-wide. and that’s not a possibility. your choices are everybody on the internet, everbody on ravelry, or everybody on ravelry plus a web link for your chosen few outside of ravelry.

if you’re developing a pattern, and have test knitters, the suggested best thing was to keep the back-and-forth to private messages, outside web groups (such as yahoo) or keep it on your own website/blog/domain if possible. then release it on ravelry once it’s finished and ready for consumption.

so just remember if you’re developing patterns or making project pages there, at the very least, all 5 million ravelers can see them, if they want to. at the other end of the spectrum, up to 7.3 billion people could take a gander.

2

Interesting, I didn’t know that. I doubt very much that with 5 mil lion members anyone would really see what I’m working on unless I pointed it out, but good to know.

3

But on the upside, you can build buzz for your upcoming release by having it public in a project or for testing. And, testing publicly more easily gets projects attached to your pattern - an important selling point. (Bit of a coin toss as to what’s better. Depends on your following and biz model.)

I thought for sure you could set up a private group on there, but I guess I am off.

For me, I don’t care. I occasionally post what I’m working on in my group and take (some) pictures along the way to post in test projects. Usually crappy ones. Unless I were developing an entirely new (un-vented) technique, I don’t see a lot of reason to hide. I want people to see how much work it takes to make an excellent pattern happen.

4

X, when we post on here, on Rav or any where else online there is no such thing as privacy…

My suggestion is a messaging app, Skype, or a platform that you can talk privatly with GG.

Good luck,