Suggestions

this page: http://sylnt.us/suggest

Introduction

This is a compilation of Suggestions from various users. Think of it like a "wish list". These differ from feature requests in that they are projects that may require a significant amount of time to implement. A system should be developed for selecting from one, and having the community vote on which to tackle.

Suggestions can currently be added via suggestions (at) soylentnews.org, or by typing "~suggest [your suggestion here]" in our IRC rooms (must be identified with NickServ). You can also just add them below (must be signed up / logged into wiki). You should check the bug tracker on github for bugs and feature requests, the TodoList, or the respective team page before suggesting something to see if it is already being worked on.

Teams: feel free to draw from the following main and IRC suggestion lists and move to a todo list if you would like to tackle one (please remove from here if you do).

Related pages

• SNPodcast
• Spreading the word
• IRC bot projects / task ideas
• SN API ideas
• SlashCode API

Suggestions: Main List

• SoylentNewsRoundup or SNR (best stories, comments, journals, best of IRC)
• Articles Revisited: (by +5 commenters)
  • research, correct, expand
  • re-submit to topic "revisited.soylentnews.org"
  • example: Here
  • Submit story for discussion/publicizing idea
• Add a "settled arguments" section to the wiki (example: the world population is out of control!)
• Add markdown support in SoylentNews ex: http://dillinger.io/
• SoylentNews alternate logo S/N (signal/noise) (also SN = Tin atomic symbol)
• Allow users to mod stories down.
• Allow up-modding of journal entries
• Host our own advertisements
  • Keep them in separate areas (sidebars, boxes)
  • Keep them (mostly) static
  • Keep the off-site javascript requirements for them minimal
• Banner ads that people can use as forum signatures, etc. to spread the word about SoylentNews. See this archived forum thread for more information.
• Extend validity of mod points (new mod points only awarded once old mod points were used up, but once a user gets mod points he can use them for 3-4 days for topics he cares about instead of just using them up)
• add a field for 'submitters' comment' feature to the story submission process (see this journal entry)

Suggestions from IRC

• for moderation, maybe allow anyone to moderate at any time as long as they are logged in and haven't contributed to the conversation, and only have a 'report spam' option as the only negative mod available ~ crutchy @ 02:11, 13 September 2014 (UTC)
• put a link to the story queue on the front page instead of burying it under submit story :) ~ SpallsHurgenson @ 02:52, 17 September 2014 (UTC)
• cofee++ karma slashbox ~ crutchy @ 07:22, 18 September 2014 (UTC)
• community-building: soylent could 'borrow' the nation states model (maybe with some modifications) and embed it into the SN community/karma/mod/relationship systems ~ crutchy @ 08:03, 18 September 2014 (UTC)
• increase karma to maybe 10,000, have badge for number of comments posted, have badge for number of accepted stories, have badge for high levels of karma (bronze for 50+, silver for 250+ and gold for 500+ or something like that) ~ crutchy @ 17:32, 18 September 2014 (UTC)
• Show users their own AC comments in their history ~ chromas @ 07:31, 22 September 2014 (UTC)
• if "comments are owned by whoever posted them" does that mean Soylent PBC has the right to publish them? just a comment on licensing ~ crutchy @ 08:40, 22 September 2014 (UTC)
• TheMightyBuzzard make an irc bot for SN api suggestions :D ~ crutchy @ 10:58, 22 September 2014 (UTC)
• 'xkcd of the week' slashbox. perhaps start with random xkcd and adjust if an xkcd has been mentioned in a comment/story/wiki edit/journal/irc chat/etc ~ crutchy @ 00:44, 27 September 2014 (UTC)
• badges for no. of +5 comments (maybe inc separate funny, informative, etc). badge for no. of successful story submits ~ crutchy @ 04:00, 28 September 2014 (UTC)
• need a way to submit SoylentNews bugs/issues without having to sign up to github, and also would be handy to have scripty check for similar existing issues and either automagically append or link to related issues ~ crutchy @ 05:37, 28 September 2014 (UTC)
• write a scripty that extracts comments that don't include certain keywords (such as systemd) ~ crutchy @ 09:58, 2 October 2014 (UTC)
• a compiled gui client application for SN, with integrated IRC, wiki, auto-login, feeds (based on keywords, username, topic, etc), treeview for comments, user relationship diagram, metadata collection for stats on users (such as no of comments, no of -1/0/1/2/3/4/5 comments, no of accepted submission...
• crutchy to build the above client ~ TheMightyBuzzard @ 10:16, 2 October 2014 (UTC)
• community-building: free subscription to SN as prize for various activities, such as coding/bugsmashing comps, 50x+5 comments, etc (sorry not many ideas). not sure of legalities of prizes ~ crutchy @ 19:00, 2 October 2014 (UTC)
• for SN client IRC module, a bar that shows the last line (or last few lines) said out of all channels that user is in ~ crutchy @ 02:59, 5 October 2014 (UTC)
• we get moar meta moderation ~ crutchy @ 11:09, 8 October 2014 (UTC)
• IRC op policy development ~ crutchy @ 05:22, 19 October 2014 (UTC)
• incoming tweet feed for irc ~ crutchy @ 21:33, 30 October 2014 (UTC)
• if #soylent becomes unruly could always make a server bot automatically redirect quotes containing keywords to a particular channel. then anyone that's interested can congregate there ~ crutchy @ 04:13, 1 November 2014 (UTC)
• or if one person in particular becomes unruly, instead of banning them the server bot could be instructed to redirect all that nick's messages to some other channel with a message indicating where when first enabled ~ crutchy @ 04:15, 1 November 2014 (UTC)
• a slashbox on SN showing the latest few privmsgs from #soylent ~ crutchy @ 09:58, 3 November 2014 (UTC)
• irc polls published in a SN slashbox ~ crutchy @ 23:44, 3 November 2014 (UTC)
• a user setting in SN that replaces every instance of a particular word with another word, such as "cloud" could be changed to "butt" (i know there's a firefox plugin for cloud to butt, but for any word in just SN) ~ crutchy @ 09:07, 8 November 2014 (UTC)
• indication of logged in users ~ crutchy @ 06:54, 14 November 2014 (UTC)
• slashbox with diego's relationship map (http://stats.sylnt.us/social/soylent/) shrunk down, with caption "who's chatting on irc?" ~ crutchy @ 11:20, 16 November 2014 (UTC)
• #twitter feed for soylentil's twitters ~ crutchy @ 07:56, 22 November 2014 (UTC)
• change the IRC logs so the most recent are on the top of the page, not the bottom ~ SpallsHurgenson @ 00:39, 26 November 2014 (UTC)
• assign an official #soylent bot czar to keep all the bots under control ~ SpallsHurgenson @ 02:29, 26 November 2014 (UTC)
• hand out some moderation powers to trusted people around different timezones so someone is always around to deal with spam ~ Konomi @ 06:21, 26 November 2014 (UTC)
• make mod points expirey time based upon number of articles posted in a given time frame ~ Konomi @ 06:23, 26 November 2014 (UTC)
• anti-spam: prevent posting the exact same comment more than once per article ~ crutchy @ 07:04, 26 November 2014 (UTC)
• Maybe you could tie the AC post rate to the rate of mod points given to counter it? [tibman (134)] ~ crutchy @ 07:46, 26 November 2014 (UTC)
• soylent site quotes come from ciri instead of the fortune database ~ crutchy @ 08:09, 26 November 2014 (UTC)
• "spam" link for SN comments that if clicked more than certain amount of times (say 5) by any logged in user, the comment is permanently hidden unless a 'show spam' check box is checked in the view settings ~ crutchy @ 08:34, 26 November 2014 (UTC)
• i meant if clicked 5 times by 5 different logged in users ~ crutchy @ 08:35, 26 November 2014 (UTC)
• (separate from current mod system) ~ crutchy @ 08:36, 26 November 2014 (UTC)
• change the listing of IRC log files so they are listed in reverse chronologicial order (most recent on top). I hate scrolling. :-) ~ SpallsHurgenson @ 01:25, 13 December 2014 (UTC)
• would be nice to have a comment mode that you can post anon, but view listing of anon comments in profile page (not public obviously). anon in this case wouldn't be truly anon, but just not have username against comment. that way i can troll easier >;-D ~ crutchy @ 20:42, 14 December 2014 (UTC)
• for spam filtering, maybe remove all control characters and spaces from a string before lowercasing and evaluating, cos spam words can get through with spaces between letters ~ crutchy @ 00:02, 17 January 2015 (UTC)
• Would it be worth maybe adding an optional user info field for IRC nicks? If someone wants to query a member of staff it might be handy to know how to ping them in IRC. Most staff are fairly easy to recognize, but martyb/bytram things might be confusing. ~ crutchy @ 00:46, 26 January 2015 (UTC)
• there's a bit of space junk in SN page source. http://paste.my.to/at ~ crutchy @ 11:19, 31 January 2015 (UTC)
• could use some sort of "urgent" or "breaking news" check box for submissions to get attention of editors, so that breaking stories that appear everywhere else almost immediately aren't languishing in the queue for a few days before appearing on SN ~ crutchy @ 12:32, 31 January 2015 (UTC)
• maybe a static div at the top with hte mod button instead of having them sprinkled around everywhere, or summin ~ crutchy @ 01:13, 10 February 2015 (UTC)