Talk:SoylentNews

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Okay, let's see if that works.

And help kill beta by joining the Slashcott

February 10th -17th

unitron

Slashdot UID 5733

Teething pains?

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Is this an "only if Slashdot doesn't back down on beta" contingency, or = "going to happen no matter what Slashdot does"?

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Hot Grits

I have poured them down my pants. Thank you. 86.50.93.164 10:16, 6 February 2014 (MST) Iskender (1040286)

• Why are they down your pants? They should be on Natalie Portman - naked and petrified..

Group or Business

Okian Warrior seems to want to be CmdrTaco all over again. While I am a very, very pro-business sort of person, I don't think we want to just push reset and do Slashdot over again as another build it up and cash out endeavor. It seems like that's exactly what would happen, and on the backs of volunteers no less. The only way I could see supporting this endeavor as a business would be with some sort of codified protection like a charter, whereby certain attributes of the way the site functions would be guaranteed, and those guarantees could only be changed if (the charter could only be modified if) the users were polled and agreed to it. In this way the business could operate but be ultimately accountable to and restrained by the userbase. This seems like a good hybrid solution. ~ElectricTurtle

You could solve this by managing it similar to the debian project.

^ Agree with both sentiments. I'm a bit skeptical of Okian Warrior's business mindset... we need this to resemble a non-profit FOSS project. Can that really be so hard to do (in the beginning, especially, and also with all the cloud services now available to avoid slashdotting?). Some will balk at the Debian-like structure as too codified and rigid, but let's at least discuss this as a FOSS project first, and *maybe* some ad revenue down the line to support it. Although, donations/crowdfunding seems better to me. ~ Seandiggity (talk) 08:52, 7 February 2014 (MST)

I agree that we shouldn't trade corporate overlord for a new master with the prospect of becoming a corporate overlord. I am not opposed to the project manager making money off the site though. Instead of an exit strategy how about a transitional strategy wherein the founder makes a fixed amount of money and/or profits for a fixed time? Eg $100k or 5yrs, whichever comes first.

As far as monetization, premium accounts with little or no ads is easy. Couple this with paid postings to receive a higher start moderation eg. 5¢ for 0,nuetral if you don't have an account. It shouldn't be hard to get the money to buy the site from the founder. Especially if coupled with annual wikipedia donation drives to cover the site overhead.

Non-profit or volunteer org is a good approach. If it's owned by a business or corporation, I will not use it. Mfnickster (talk)

Stories

• Could there be Open Hardware FPGAs? http://www.electronicsweekly.com/mannerisms/fpga/will-expiring-patents-boost-fp-2007-03/

Barrapunto

People here should be familiar with the Spanish language version of Slashdot, Barrapunto.com. It looks like it was forked from older Slashcode, and it does not appear to be a dice holding. This is the most durable SlashClone with which I'm familiar. I seem to recall reading about it more than 5 years ago. If nothing else, we could learn a lot from them about running a successful SlashClone.

We should make a list of any currently running clones.

• http://slashcode.com/www.slashcode.com/

Thanks for posting the link. That looks a lot more like /. Classic. Now we certainly don't want to knock over the server that discusses SlashCode, so we shouldn't be posting there... but they seem like an ideal candidate for a bunch to form a non-profit org. IMHO, that's the answer. We need to form a non-profit dedicated to serving the users. Worst case scenario we replace ads with something like the annual Wikipedia begging; but it might be worth it.

The Wikipedia begging beats having advertizes dictating the content of your site or selling the users info for $$$ Wikipedia I believe does it right. Script Cat (talk) 14:28, 6 February 2014 (MST)
(The advertising on barrapunto.com looks fine and unobtrusive to me. My 2 cents, but no, I don't know much about advertising paying the bills, sadly.)(Gaaark)

Alternate domain ideas?

It's come up elsewhere online that a name including slashdot might get this project into hot water with DICE

Hosting and collaboration

make it foss with gpl2
is there any reason why the site can't be directly hosted by https://github.com/
ultra-nerdy, with plenty of linuxy flavor
no need to worry about dedicated infrastructure, and domain doesn't matter that much if it's something like "github.com/altslash" nerds are gunna find and remember it

I don't trust Github. I don't think they really care about their community any more than Dice cares about Slashdot's. Mfnickster (talk)

I don't think that's a problem, since every repository clone is essentially a full backup, so if they pull something sinister, we can simply stop using them. Yahwotqa (talk) 06:31, 10 February 2014 (MST)

Like we "simply stopped using" Slashdot? :) Mfnickster (talk)

There are some similarities, yes. :) Yahwotqa (talk) 07:27, 10 February 2014 (MST)

Yeah, that's the beauty of git, you can move elsewhere in minutes. But at least having the updated Slash code on github is a good advertisement as well, and would allow lurkers (like me!) who are not directly involved with the new codebase clone the repo and try it out. ~ Seandiggity (talk) 08:05, 10 February 2014 (MST)

Journals

I hope journals are included and hope people use them.

and wiki home pages too (good for introducing yourself). here's mine if anyone is curious. it also has links to my soylent journal entries. ~ crutchy

AGPL licensing

If no one's said it yet, I think we need to move the updated version of SlashCode to AGPL and get it in a git repo for people to hack on (preferably github). I'm happy to put it up there under that license but I don't want to see (yet another) fork. Any objections to that license? It's recommended by the FSF for any Web software, or really any that runs primarily over a network. In my view, it will protect us from seeing the fruit of our labors be turned into another locked up DiceDot... how nice would it have been to have at least the updated "Slashdot Classic" interface available now to hack on instead of the circa 2009 version? The AGPL would have made that possible. ~ Seandiggity (talk) 09:22, 7 February 2014 (MST)

Can you just re-license someone else's code? How is that legally possible? Also, it might make sense to fork it anyway just to have control over the code base. It could also be ported to another language (don't say .NET or PHP please!). Mfnickster (talk)

You can license a modified version of a program under a compatible license, depending upon the terms that the original authors released the source. Many forks end up under a different license through some new mix of code. If the original Slash is licensed "GPL v2.0 or any later version" there's a clear path to GPLv3 and then AGPL. If not, the authors must be the ones to do it, and we might think about asking them (all of whom left Slashdot a while ago AFAIK) rather than stay on GPLv2 forever. Whatever the case, we should be thinking about licensing, esp. because direct competition between this and /. is bound to raise Dice's ire. ~ Seandiggity (talk) 20:43, 9 February 2014 (MST)

FYI, take a look at my better-written frontpage post... we also should be thinking about things like CLAs and discussing them. Joining the Slashcott now... ~ Seandiggity (talk) 21:14, 9 February 2014 (MST)

Slashcott, Week 2

Did I mention that I've officially extended the Slashcott?

Week 2 runs from February 17th, 2014, to February 23rd, 2014.

And of course what Dice will probably never understand is that it really is a Valentine to Slashdot

-unitron

Some features

How about Unicode support, a basic feature Dice never got around to implement? Or HTTPS to everyone. Possibly a Twitter feed to tell about new stories, like /. has. Just throwing some ideas around. :) 80.223.182.224 07:42, 16 February 2014 (MST)

newsbot

Maybe develop some kind of distributed bot for scraping the web for tech news (including inconspicuous stories lurking on the web in hard to reach places).