SoylentNews

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.