SoylentNews is people
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 Friday April 25 2014, @08:43PM
The answer to this is purely practical.
Since we were using email to send ballots, we had a problem: you cannot just send emails without peoples permission.
At one point, the checkbox for getting the daily summaries that registered users can get was set by default. A number of people took exception to this, some even claiming we were spamming them. (This was unintentional on our part, slashcode came with that set by default)
So that was fixed, but it made us very aware of the sensitivity of our community on this issue.
Anything that required an email ballot would therefore need peoples explicit permission. We tried several approaches, things like adding special tags in various places, but all were pretty awkward. In the end, NCommander was able to add a checkbox and field to the database specifically for this purpose.
But there is another problem, which is that sending bulk mail, which this certainly would be, can get you into major block lists. All it takes is one or two complaints, in some cases. To get OUT of these blocklists, you must be able to PROVE :
1. That users explicitly signed up.
2. That the signup mechanism did NOT default to on, in other words, they had to actively take an action to sign up.
We used a checkbox with the idea that people could sign up for votes they wanted to participate in, and not for others. So that checkbox is easily changed at any time.
Yet, we needed to be able to prove a user had signed up for a specific vote.
The only way we could do that is to dump that choice out, at a certain point in time, so that we could show that yes, THIS user signed up for THIS specific vote on THIS date.
This is why, for each vote, there is an explicit sign up period (which we call registration, since the term is familiar), and an explicit cutoff date.