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SoylentNews
from the I-thought-the-name-was-bacconmuffinnews dept.
After several early attempts, we have settled on a process for deciding on the final name for this site currently known as SoylentNews.org. You'll need to log in and go to: userprefs/homepage and check the box marked "Willing to Vote" if you'd like to participate (do this now, the submission round will go out soon). The vote will occur using an email-based solution loosely based on the Debian/Condercet method that we cooked up. Note: checking this box will indicate that we are scraping your email address from the database for participation (this is completely opt-in). If you wish not to participate, just make sure this box is unchecked (this is the default).
We are opening the floor to name suggestions. If you have suggested a name earlier, you'll need to re-submit it through this email voting system. Though we prefer available domains, if you have pre-purchased a domain (eg: to prevent squatters), by submitting the name you are stating that you are the owner of the domain(s) and will give it without strings attached to this project if it were to be chosen.
The criteria for an acceptable name:
- Unique and free of obvious trademarks
- Ideally be a bit technological/geeky and signal the site is "news"
- Domain should be available in all permutations: .com/.net/.org
- Easy to pronounce
- Easy to type
- Easy to 'market' or has a "hook" (imagine a mug with the name, a logo, slogans, plays on words, etc.)
- Passes the girlfriend / wife / significant other / random person at work - test
This is how it will work:
- The first round will go out asking for name submissions
- Submissions will remain open for 7 days
- The community will vote to yield 5 names
- Staff will vote and produce 5 names
- A final vote on all 10 names will be held
- At this point, the staff will have a second full vote on the same ten items the community voted on
- The result of this vote, and the community vote, including its runoff, will then be published
- The staff vote is the final decision. We have to live with this. But the community will have a powerful influence on the final staff vote.
If you're interested:
NCommander adds: So its finally here, and I wanted to apologize for the long delay before this actually happened. To the editoral team, please bump this to the top of the index for the next 24 hours so everyone gets a chance to see it (click 'fastforward' then save to autoupdate the timestamp). I promise a Featured Story option is coming in the next major update so we don't have to deal with this!
(Score: 2) by hankwang on Sunday April 20 2014, @11:54AM
Just sent in my vote. I hope it registers as I intended; it all appears to me rather fragile and error-prone. So many "DO NOT"s in the instructions makes me worry that my mail client will confuse the parser.
Because of the huge number (90) of options, I felt it necessary to make a shortlist, assign numbers on the shortlist, triple-check that there were no double numbers in the shortlist, then manually copy my numbers to the quoted email, meanwhile being distracted severely by the fact that every item in the email was prefixed by a number. It's like putting #define FOUR 3 in a program and then only using the macro everytime you use the number "3". (Try it, it will drive you crazy)
It would have been better if the mail simply asked: put up to nine domain names in your order of preference, the most preferred one first. Only the first nine domain names will be counted. It does not matter whether they are on a single line or not and anything that is not a domain name or VOTERID will be ignored. Don't worry; our parser will handle HTML,BASE64-encoding, and quotation characters just fine; please leave the VOTERID somewhere in your email.
Avantslash: SoylentNews for mobile [avantslash.org]
(Score: 1) by Maddog on Monday April 21 2014, @12:33AM
Like you I also did an external offline sorting, deleting my obvious dislikes and whittling away down to 9 items. I then put my numbers back into the email and almost clicked send. BUT, I reviewed the instructions again and the numerical ordering note caught my eye, "A higher number means you like this choice better."
I had committed they lay-persons approach to list making by having number 1 my highest preferred choice, my bad (goes back and does corrections).
This process does seem somewhat error prone...I wonder how many others might skim over that instruction point.
(Score: 2) by AudioGuy on Tuesday April 22 2014, @07:50PM
So many "DO NOT"s in the instructions makes me worry that my mail client will confuse the parser.
This is our way of trying to give it the best chance possible.
This is something which is brand new and has never been used for this before, so there is always the possibility of problems. It was written knowing full well that would be the case, so it saves all intermediate steps and anything that gets kicked out for any reason will be checked by hand.