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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 AudioGuy on Thursday April 24 2014, @11:31PM
'Because we don't have a clue how to do that.'
This site was started by a small group of volunteers who used open source Slash code to start a site as an alternative to some corporate actions we felt were unacceptable.
The code we are using, slash code was written years ago, by a pretty good perl programmer who was very knowlegeable about all the various perl libraries and fairly sophisticated techniques. But a young programmer, who by his own admission (I am slamming no one here) made a few mistakes. In addition, the code has been hacked on by others at a later date by others, perhaps with a slightly different vision. The net effect of this is code that is very confusing to understand and work with.
There is NO ONE on staff here who had anything to do with the writing of this code. It is completely new to everyone. In addition, our perl programming expertise is pretty limited, there are just one or two people who might be called accomplished, and I do not believe any that have written an application the scale of slash code. (Maybe one, not sure). It doesn't really matter, as even a really sharp perl expert is going to take a while to get up to speed on THIS code.
It might be descibed as that famous 'maze of twisty little passages'. Or at times, it reminds me of those old 'home improvement' comedy sketches Red Skelton used to do - you know, where you turn on the water and the radio starts playing, to turn on the closet light, you must flush the toilet.
There are a lot of interactions, sometimes the simplest of things is REALLY difficult, and occasionally the reverse is true.
To answer one question, and provide an example: 'Why didn't you have the sidebar status up from the start?'.
Answer - because we had never done that before, and it took a while to figure out how to do it at all. And when we did, initially, the only way to update that little text box was: to do a complete re-install of slash code.
That's right, read that again: 'To update text box, do complete re-install of slash code.'
We have a better way now, but that REALLY was the case initially. We are learning the code, it just takes a while.
So, 'Why didn't you just use the slash poll, and limit it to registered users, and modify it to handle more names' etc.
Because it would have taken a long time to sort all that code out, write new code, and make sure we weren't causing the toilet to flush every time someone voted. :-)
We just didn't feel we had the time to do that properly.
We are learning the code, and making improvements, but at this stage, every one is very hard won.