Additionally, they’ve already addressed several of my issues with the service.
- Even free accounts now have 2 gigabytes of storage space.
- On PBwiki 2.0, they’ve got several color schemes, and none of them look nearly as horrible as the old “Bamboo” or “Hideous Neon Orange” themes.

My only real complaint is that they’ve dispensed with the “Wiki password” feature in PBWiki 2.0 and now require all collaborators to make accounts. One of the things I found attractive about the old system was that I didn’t have to send out individual email invites to a lot of people; I could just cc everyone with a link and password.

The old system is still available in PBWiki 1.0, though; so I’m not complaining too much.

It’s totally true that it doesn’t cost very much money to set up a MediaWiki on, say, a Dreamhost or 1&1 account. If you’re a geek-on-a-budget, it’s not a bad answer, if you’re comfy with MediaWiki in particular, and don’t really care too much about performance, and don’t really worry about your wiki having a lot of users, and your data isn’t all that confidential, and if you have the time to maintain it securely and keep it up to date with patches, and you’re okay with using a non-WYSIWYG editor.

By using PBwiki you can spend your time worrying about other things. You don’t have to worry about hard drive crashes, breakins, failures, etc. It’ll just always be there for you, up and secure, and easy. Every day the service gets a little better. The time savings and peace of mind is worth a lot to the tens of thousands of businesses (and educators!) that use our service, which is why folks actually spend money on our service.

Kinda like how you can do your own payroll or income tax on your own, but it’s a PITA and you might get it wrong so you might as well have someone else take care of it for a reasonable fee. We take care of the worry of running a wiki so you can take care of whatever it is that you do for a living – probably not running wikis, unless you’re in our space.

My $0.02, anyhow, kinda biased.

Cheers,
David

re: Point-and-Click Editor – I honestly hadn’t noticed it’s presence. Took me a bit to figure out how to switch to it. But really, the new editor is just an embedded, customized copy of FCKeditor.

re: Speed – That is a good thing. Thinking back on it, pbwiki was a tad sluggish at times.

Maybe I’m just cynical and hard to impress. PBwiki is a decent service, and I’d recommend the free plan to anyone. But I honestly would not pay for a service plan upgrade. Why? Because, as I stated before, for the same amount of money, you could get a real hosting plan, load MediaWiki on it, and have a whole lot more power. This is the same reason why I probably won’t be paying for a wordpress.com upgrade.
Don’t get me wrong. Pre-setup plans where you don’t have to worry about the software running the site are nice. But I know enough about hosting providers, PHP, FTP, HTML, CSS, etc, that I could set up a decent site and be in full control for roughly the same amount of money as wp.com and pbwiki charge for an upgrade.

Hi! I’m the CEO of PBwiki. Thanks for writing this review of PBwiki; sorry to have not noticed it until now. [ Arthur's simply an enthusiastic user; we didn't pay him. ]

RE: ads – there is a single, small Google ad displayed on (free, non-educational) public wikis. Please let me know if you find it obtrusive.

I’m also not sure if you’ve tried our Point-and-Click Editor yet. It makes it super easy to edit documents without needing to know wiki code, and uniquely you can switch back and forth between WYSIWYG and wikitext modes as you wish. You can also drop in calendars, slideshows, equations, and more with a few clicks. We launched this a few months ago, so we haven’t just been sitting on our thumbs.

The service is also about ten times faster than it was even two months ago.

If you have suggestions for what we could do to make it better, I’m all ears.

PBwiki is overpriced. If you want to spend the kind of money they want, you’re far better getting real hosting and installing MediaWiki. It’d be ton more flexible, too.

Essentially, almost nothing has changed since I posted this. I think they’ve added universal account, unlimited comments on free wikis, templates, and some bug fixes. I don’t use any of those features. Big wup.

Watch for Google’s upcoming JotSpot rerelease. Given their track record, that’s what I’ll probably switch to. I can almost guarantee the storage space will be 10x what pbwiki offers at the free level.

There’s a slightly more readable discription here

Aside from that, what didn’t you understand? I’ll be happy to clarify anything.