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SoylentNews is people

posted by mrcoolbp on Monday May 04 2015, @03:01PM   Printer-friendly
from the suggestions-from-the-community dept.

Here is a submission as a result from a conversation I had with mrcoolbp over email.

I want to present the following idea for a regularly-occurring SoylentNews story: a weekly promotion of an open source software project.

The current vision is to have a weekly post on the main page with an open source project presented (I suggest Sunday afternoon EST time, helping fill the slow news day). After a short description of the project and the normal collection of relevant links (homepage, downloads, etc.), the submitter presents the project to the SoylentNews community. This takes the form of an extended post (similar to the SoylentNews meta posts that often have a short blurb for main page and "Read more past the break").

Keep reading 'past the break' for more:

While we already see a number of open source related articles, typically they are associated with larger projects and with an "event". One of the ideas behind this proposal is to feature less popular projects during business as usual. I would encourage promoting projects which you have personal experience with, i.e. you develop for the project or are an avid user.

In an effort to provide some independent journalism, the content 'past the break' is loosely defined. This could be a review or description of the software, an interview with the dev team, a story about how the software saved your life, poem, and so on. While I currently have these high and mighty dreams for the feature, I also want to encourage those who aren't as inspired by writing to post; SoylentNews is driven by our submissions, and I would rather read a short blurb than have no post.

When a post is selected, the highlighted project should be made aware, not only because it would be polite (and indirectly promote SoylentNews), but if the article goes live at a convenient time, perhaps the dev team might take part in the comment discussion.

What it will take to implement this idea:

  1. An "OSS Plug" topic (https://soylentnews.org/topics.pl). It could fall under other categories but it will be much easier to parse submissions with a dedicated topic.
  2. A decision on the permission required from the parent project. Many "contact us" emails are ignored, so would it be acceptable to make a post without warning the project?
  3. Submissions. Similar to regular articles, this could go dry if people don't participate.
  4. A selection process. If the SN team wants to own this or if a different solution is needed (I'm not familiar with what happens now).

A quick example (short as I don't use the software directly myself):

Weekly OSS: Slashcode!

Slashcode is an OSS project used to run news websites, in particular SoylentNews. From the developer's page:

Slash -- Slashdot Like Automated Storytelling Homepage -- is the code that runs Slashdot. More than that, however, Slash is an architecture for putting together web sites. It comes with functionality for posting articles, conducting polls, having discussions, and more; but it can be extended in innumerable ways.

Slash is written in Perl, and is built on top of Apache and mod_perl. It requires a database backend, though the only well-supported database used with it is MySQL (more databases will become well-supported as time goes on; PostgreSQL support is already well on its way). Slash is fast, scalable, and secure (as evidenced by one of the best test cases you could have, running Slashdot itself). Slash was originally written by CmdrTaco and CowboyNeal.

Through a plugin system, developers can add functionality to Slash. Through themes and templates (which are written using Template Toolkit), the look and feel of a Slash site can be customized.

Read more past the break:


For some reason I cannot put my finger on the first time I saw a website running Slashcode. It must have been ten years ago, but that is a big blur in my memory. I do remember the introduction of SoylentNews, the forefront news website running Slashcode.

Slashcode has a sophisticated commenting system for stories posted. What makes it so innovative is the rating system for each comment. This helps off topic comments get weeded out, and for the more insightful comments to be highlighted. This does depend on the community to prevent abuse, however I have seen very few cases of the commenting system fail.

Some improvements have been made to Slashcode in recent history, and the usability has evolved with the development of SoylentNews. I particularly like how gracefully the site fails thanks to the lack of javascript dependencies and the resulting clean interface.

There are also a number of features present that I have yet to use, and I am unsure how well they will integrate into the news website format. Particularly the Journals. Each user may make posts to their own user Journal. Beyond the site admins I see little need for this feature for regular users, and there are many other social media websites that provide similar functions. However, if this is the extent of feature creep I am satisfied with this project.

 
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  • (Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday May 04 2015, @07:29PM

    by Grishnakh (2831) on Monday May 04 2015, @07:29PM (#178710)

    That isn't going to help anything. People, when they have mod points, are going to down-vote anything they disagree with. If you eliminate the "Disagree" selection, they'll just use "Troll" or "Flamebait" or "Overrated".

    The only way to fix moderation of this problem is to give mod points to everyone, not just to some lucky random people who abstain from commenting. Personally, I never moderate here or on Slashdot, and haven't for years, because the stupid mod system won't let me make comments if I do so (it undoes my mods). So, I simply abstain from moderation. If you want me to moderate, then you have to let me comment as well. I refuse to be an unbiased observer.

    This is one reason Reddit is such a great platform: it doesn't have this idiotic moderation system. It's just up or down, and anyone can do it, not just some random person lucky enough to be blessed with mod points, and who also abstains from commenting. Yes, you get bad moderating sometimes, but it's outdone by the sheer number of people who are allowed to mod, and do so. And yes, it basically makes it a popularity contest, but that's what you get when you make something democratic. If you want everything carefully vetted, then you need a dedicated panel of moderators, and that means you need to carefully select such people and then employ them full-time in this capacity. Good luck funding that.

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 3, Informative) by sudo rm -rf on Monday May 04 2015, @08:17PM

    by sudo rm -rf (2357) on Monday May 04 2015, @08:17PM (#178734) Journal

    I think everybody gets mod points here on SN on a daily basis (although there could be some restrictions, I haven't followed the relevant threads very closely..) And also I think Disagree gives +0, so no point-loss. And you *can* comment and moderate in the same thread.

  • (Score: 2) by Marand on Monday May 04 2015, @09:48PM

    by Marand (1081) on Monday May 04 2015, @09:48PM (#178805) Journal

    That isn't going to help anything. People, when they have mod points, are going to down-vote anything they disagree with. If you eliminate the "Disagree" selection, they'll just use "Troll" or "Flamebait" or "Overrated".

    Truth. And since most everyone here knows Disagree is basically a no-op mod, a handful still resort to the others to lower score on things just for disagreement. I got marked Troll recently for saying that I don't think MS failing as a company would be a good thing because Apple or Google would likely fill its place and be worse. No arguments about why they thought I was wrong, just mark troll. And they waited a day or so after the story posting so nobody would go back and upmod me, too.

    The only way to fix moderation of this problem is to give mod points to everyone, not just to some lucky random people who abstain from commenting.

    You get mod points every day here. It even says it in the sidebar: "You get 5 points per day, given out at 00:10 UTC. "

    Personally, I never moderate here or on Slashdot, and haven't for years, because the stupid mod system won't let me make comments if I do so (it undoes my mods). So, I simply abstain from moderation. If you want me to moderate, then you have to let me comment as well. I refuse to be an unbiased observer.

    SN hasn't had mod-or-post since the first couple months. It was one of the first things on SN to deviate from the Slashdot way of doing things. The system has been tweaked twice so far, the first allowed you to mod-then-post (no more moderation after posting), and the current is mod-and-post (you can post before and after moderation, just not on your own comments).

    You wrote two paragraphs denigrating the mod system while showing you don't even know anything about how it works here. Sure, it's still true about Slashdot -- the site's basically stagnant and unlikely to improve -- but if you paid more attention here you might find you like some of the new features the devs here are adding.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 04 2015, @10:02PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 04 2015, @10:02PM (#178811)

    You should make sure that you read the stories that appear Re: S/N's updates to Slash/Slashcode (and the comments therein).
    You are way behind the curve.

    -- gewg_

  • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday May 05 2015, @08:57AM

    by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Tuesday May 05 2015, @08:57AM (#179010) Homepage
    On SN, you can moderate and comment on the same article.

    I agree with your comments about "disagree" though. The other down mod options are still very much being used as "disagree" currently anyway, which is a shame. I'm a big fan of "disagree" as it's honest. 3 disonest tossers without the wits to form a counter-argument just "trolled" one of my recent posts simply because I said something that clashed with their worldview, when it was clear that "-1 disagree" or "-1 because I feel butthurt" would have been more honest. That reminded me of the existence of the old /. metamod system, which we've not adopted here. No system's perfect, certainly.
    --
    Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves