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posted by NCommander on Sunday February 16 2014, @12:56PM   Printer-friendly
from the still-under-construction dept.
So, since this site went up three days ago, we've made tremendous progress in getting this site up and functional, and many of you gone above and beyond to try and give us content and provide meaningful comments. I'm completely blown away to say the least. I've got some big news to share, and a list of site improvements made over the last few days. Read on for more details ...Moderation: IT WORKS! I finished implementing the algorithm last night, and purging slash of the old one so they won't conflict. The new algorithm is somewhat of a radical departure from the old one. I won't go into full details in this post, but there's a good write-up in my comments here.

Comment Counts: Got these working (again). ACs will only see a static HTML page which is updated every once in awhile. Logged-in users get the dynamic index which should have up-to-date counts. The fix is a bit wonky, so it might snap again. Let me know ASAP as the moderation scripts depend on this number being present (and correct!)

Theme: As you may have noticed, the site looks less ass. Due to the heroic efforts of audioguy, Paul, and others, we've gotten a steady stream of CSS fixes to make the site look and feel more consistent. Its not perfect (Firefox still has width issues), but its a fair improvement. This is one of the last major launch blockers

Topics: Finally got them implemented after we snapped the site in two last night. For the moment, they're all sharing the same icon, so it seems kinda unimpressive, but hopefully we'll have the art assets sometime soon to get them in place. Editors will notice I updated the labels to make them a bit clearer; two important notes on this: For an article to show up you MUST have "The Main Page" in the topic list (slash will complain if you don't have it).

Signoff Requirements: A new feature of SoylentNews requires that editors must have a peer sign-off an article before it can be displayed to the world. Slash has some limited support for this, and I got it working last night. For editors, stories are now marked in red and state "unsigned" on the index if only one person has edited it. Right now, this check is not enforced, but I plan to hopefully address that soon. For the moment, editors can future date and use the buddy system to get things checked off properly so we can have consistent formatting and quality.

Other Changes: I stripped out some of the dead features that I probably won't have time to fix before launch like OpenID login, and fixed the admin spellchecker. I also have a couple of ideas to get varnish going I need to bounce off Robin.
 
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  • (Score: 1) by martyb on Sunday February 16 2014, @02:02PM

    by martyb (76) Subscriber Badge on Sunday February 16 2014, @02:02PM (#259) Journal

    NCommander wrote:

    You posted on this thread, so you can't moderate me :-P

    Oh, I *KNOW* that! I was just hoping someone would take the hint to mod ME up! THEN I could moderate you up, later!!

    --
    Wit is intellect, dancing.
  • (Score: 2, Informative) by NCommander on Sunday February 16 2014, @02:03PM

    by NCommander (2) Subscriber Badge <michael@casadevall.pro> on Sunday February 16 2014, @02:03PM (#260) Homepage Journal
    At the moment, anyone is eligible if their karma is 0 or higher. We'll change that, but we need it to bootstrap the system so to speak.
    --
    Still always moving
    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by martyb on Sunday February 16 2014, @02:11PM

      by martyb (76) Subscriber Badge on Sunday February 16 2014, @02:11PM (#262) Journal

      That makes sense... thanks for the tip!

      Would love to stay and play, but I need to head off to my day job... will be back this evening.

      BTW, how do I set things up so that I see all comments expanded on Classic? I just see "headlines" for all the comments here. I set the thresholds to be be very generous, or so I thought.

      And, while I've got your attention, one of the things I wished for on /. was the ability to export a summary of all my settings, so that if I play around with something and don't like it, I can find my way back to how I had things before. I dunno, XML, JSON, or even just a plain text summary page with all my settings displayed would be a huge win for me.

      Might also make it easier for people to submit bug reports. Just an idea. Keep up the great work - absolutely amazing progress!!!!!

      --
      Wit is intellect, dancing.
      • (Score: 2, Informative) by martyb on Sunday February 16 2014, @02:17PM

        by martyb (76) Subscriber Badge on Sunday February 16 2014, @02:17PM (#263) Journal

        I know it's bad form to reply to myself, but to save others the need to reply, I wrote:

        BTW, how do I set things up so that I see all comments expanded on Classic? I just see "headlines" for all the comments here. I set the thresholds to be be very generous, or so I thought.

        Never mind... found in my preferences that I had the index mode threshold set to +3; just set it to 0 (zero) and now it's all clear!

        --
        Wit is intellect, dancing.
        • (Score: 2, Informative) by NCommander on Sunday February 16 2014, @02:23PM

          by NCommander (2) Subscriber Badge <michael@casadevall.pro> on Sunday February 16 2014, @02:23PM (#264) Homepage Journal
          You can also change your index type to "Nested". Works wonders.
          --
          Still always moving
          • (Score: 1) by martyb on Sunday February 16 2014, @02:26PM

            by martyb (76) Subscriber Badge on Sunday February 16 2014, @02:26PM (#266) Journal

            Nested? Oh yeah. I had that already! That's one of things I loved about the old site. Glad to see it made it over unscathed!

            --
            Wit is intellect, dancing.
            • (Score: 1) by ticho on Sunday February 16 2014, @08:25PM

              by ticho (89) on Sunday February 16 2014, @08:25PM (#298) Homepage Journal

              Nested is what I use as well. I never understood how Threaded mode was supposed to be useful, it is pretty awkward. But maybe it's just me missing something about it.

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 17 2014, @11:48AM

            by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 17 2014, @11:48AM (#589)

            Yes, yes it does! Thank you kindly for the suggestion, in addition to everything else.