Wallets on bitcoin.org - being more inclusive or exclusive over time?

[saivann]

There is an increasing number of requests for adding wallets on bitcoin.org and the new wallet page I think is giving more flexibility to play in-between two different policies;

• Bitcoin.org can be more inclusive and using the score to educate users and incentivize developers to improve their wallets.
• Bitcoin.org can be more exclusive and have more demanding requirements and security standards over time.

In general this hasn't been discussed much yet to my knowledge and I wished to ask general opinions on this, if only to see if there is some rough consensus on any particular direction, or good ideas.

As examples, I guess that the BTChip, Ciphrex, Aegis wallets are good examples of wallets that doesn't meet some standards while still being interesting options for some users.

[harding]

I think maybe the best way to frame this question is: "what's the maximum number of wallets we should display with the current Choose Your Wallet page layout?"

Once we reach that number, any pull requests adding a new wallet will also have to remove an existing wallet. Since there's almost never a simple objective way to determine whether new wallet is better than old wallet, a max-wallet policy will probably lead to uncomfortable conversations. Unfortunately, the alternative seems worse: a Choose Your Wallet page which overwhelms users with too many choices.

For reference, we currently have 16 wallets listed. Based on the six-column desktop CSS layout, I think 18 or 24 wallets would be logical stopping points.

[saivann]

@harding I actually had prepared an option when it comes to scalability so the issue you're presenting could be avoided; the page can only show the first 16 or 12 wallets and have a "Show more.." button (animations would work a bit differently when hovering the menu). However, you certainly have a valid point when it comes to dealing with a large number of wallets; it takes time to review and monitor them.

[i3inary]

Hi, I made my first contribution for our project, Airbitz, and I have to be honest I feel like the choose-your-wallet.html page should default to or at least have an option to display the data in a matrix with wallets being the rows and features being the columns...perhaps a simple datatable that can be sorted so the user can find what is important to them. If the data is compact in the table the fields could have meta data displayed in a hover state.

I can mock something up if you think that would be a good way to display this data...I would suggest using datatables or a similar lib to keep it simple.

[saivann]

I am closing this issue since rules for inclusion are soon to be merged.

@i3inary Regarding the table layout idea, FWIW, the wiki has a table layout:
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Clients

This can be a separate issue or pull request. However IMO, I think a table layout would scale poorly and not work on mobiles. Filtering wallets by feature instead I think would work better - but this would require enough people interested by taking the maintenance on on their shoulders. Testing and reviewing wallets takes quite a lot of time and I expect more wallets will continue to be added on the page, each of them will likely want to promote their own features, so this can become soon quite demanding.