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This is a post that I have suspected that I was going to have to write since late December last year.
You will now know that SoylentNews.org is closing down on 30 June but things have not been standing still behind the scenes since we first became aware of NCommander's decision at the end of last week. In fact, it has been a very busy weekend.
A small group of existing staff are looking at alternative possibilities for a 'replacement' site to keep the flow of stories going and allowing discussions to continue. This is a big task, especially in the 38 days remaining in which to try to achieve it. There are several possibilities which spring to mind, Pipedot for example. I have reached out to Bryan but have not yet received a response. However, things as not as straightforward as they seem. The pipecode is written in Php-5 which some of you will realise is no longer supported. We do not want to become dependant on old software which cannot be maintained into the future; that lesson has been taken aboard and reinforced by NCommander's explanation regarding his decision announced today. There are other options but at the moment it is still a search for what is available out there today which also appears maintainable into the future.
But the first thing we need to know is "Is there still sufficient interest in having a discussion site such as ours?" Do you, the community, still want to have your daily dose of stories and the ability to exchange views with many others on this site? Are there any community members who would be willing to join us in trying to establish such a site? Your views are crucial to everything that we do over the coming days and weeks. So please let us know what you think about whether a site is still required with all the alternative technology available today that simply didn't exist 9 years ago. What form should a new site take? What changes to how we operate are essential for you to continue to remain interested in the future site?
Of course, it cannot be a mirror image of what we have today - which many will see as a good thing! But I hope that we would be able to transfer existing accounts, usernames and passwords directly to any new site that we create. We would also have to start with a relatively simple site and build on that over time.
At the end of the day we would have to restart the voluntary subscriptions but not immediately. We can raise some funds to see us get established without the requirement of a financial commitment from the community. Subscriptions were always sufficient in the past and I don't see why that would not be the case in the future too. The fact that we currently have enough to keep this site going until next year bears witness to that. We have also found that we can significantly reduce our running costs based on our current community rather than being ready for a major stream of new members which never materialises. I have no grandiose ideas of becoming a huge site employing our own journalists but just a community that enjoys the discussions as we have been doing for several years. Nevertheless, we would also be trying to build on our existing community which is beginning to happen on this site now that things have settled down.
So don't hold back - let us know what you think.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by janrinok on Tuesday May 23, @07:11AM (1 child)
It is also written in a version of php that is no longer supported. That is immediately a potential red flag because that is how we ended up in this situation. Now maybe there is work going on in the background, but if it isn't in the git repo then how do we discover it? I have emailed Bryan but I have not seen a response yet.
It is still an option under consideration though. We just have to find some php programmers because I do not think that somebody looking at the language for the first time is necessarily the best person to be upgrading, modifying and maintaining the code.
(Score: 4, Informative) by dalek on Tuesday May 23, @09:08AM
I've done a fair amount of PHP coding at various times, though not especially recently. The language is familiar to me, though I'd need to brush up on things if I were to do anything with a recent version. Overall, I think a PHP-based solution is better than sticking with Perl, though other alternatives may be available.
I took a look at the Pipedot code. I think it's better organized than Slash/Rehash, in that it's more intuitive where various functions are located. That's good, because I've looked at Rehash and didn't think it was obvious where in the code some functionality resided. Pipecode seems to be an improvement in that respect. However, it's a huge red flag for me that there appears to be no documentation whatsoever. Yes, there's information about how to install and configure a new Pipecode install, but the code appears to have zero documentation. I couldn't find any discussion of how the code works, and I noticed that there's pretty much zero comments in the source code other than the license at the top of every file and actual code that's been commented out. I've also noticed that while the formatting is reasonable, there's some inconsistency in the conventions of some things like quotes throughout the code. It also seems like there's less flexibility in the actual formatting of the site, where some things are hard coded in places where perhaps they shouldn't be. That might make it annoying to change the design of the site. There are probably other things I'd catch if I looked through the code further, but it certainly looks like there are some potential security issues that would need to be addressed. One of the very few comments mentioned that a piece of code was unsafe and would need to be improved in the future.
You'll also want to rethink some of the policies in Pipecode. For example, I believe images can be posted in some places like journals. On Slashdot, that would pretty much guarantee that the goatse.cx guy's portrait would appear regularly on the site. But it certainly could be abused for worse things than that. At least one time on Slashdot, trolls got a story accepted that linked to one of their servers. Upon getting accepted, the trolls made the page display goatse.cx a small percentage of the time. Because of some of the malicious behavior here, I think I'd be wary of some of the default policies. Slash stores these in a database, but it looks like Pipecode has these hard coded elsewhere in the code. I'm not a fan of this design decision, and it might be a priority to change this before deploying the code.
That's my initial impression from looking at Pipecode for an hour or two. Your opinion may vary. It's not a bad code base, but I have concerns about a number of design decisions and the almost complete lack of documentation.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest just whinge about SN.