SoylentNews

This is the Wiki for SoylentNews.org

This is a home for information about how this project was started, the vision for it, and discussion about it's future.

Project Goal

To everyone involved... THANK YOU!

We are building a community-driven news site alternative to Slashdot. We have a functioning main site, and we are working on tweaking and improving as we grow.

The vision is to maintain a news aggregation site that delivers what's important - better articles, less fluff, and all the functionality you expect from the moderation system.

• The proposed business model is here
  
• Some business planning is here
  
• A statement of functionality (turn into a requirements document?)--- FeatureList

Get Involved

Hop in to IRC! - IRC: #soylent on irc.soylentnews.org/6697 (Webchat).

Volunteer - Reach out to us: volunteer (at) soylentnews (dot) org

Work on an open project

• Pick a project from the Open Projects list
• Contact the relevant Overlord for more information ( Who's Who?)

Register on the forums - http://forums.SoylentNews.org

• Go to forums.SoylentNews.org and register a user
• Read this post if you are having problems. (Thanks MrGuy)
• Add yourself to whichever groups you are interested in
• For tech issues with the forum software, please Email Joel: soylent (at) finite (dot) ms

Tell Somebody A friend, a colleague, any major news source....

• Do what you can to get the word out
• Also you could participate in The Slashcott

Mailing list update Messages are here

Contacts

All Contact and Overlord info can be found here:

List of Discussion Pages

• NewName
• MailingListUpdates
• Finances -- which model would allow to minimise and/or distribute hosting costs
• Business
• Moderation -- how/if to enhance; was it so bad it was the primary reason for the diaspora?
• FeatureList -- discussion of required/desired characteristics
• Submission guidelines
• Content
• Style
• Migration of users from Slashdot -- how to handle Nicks and UIDs
• Licensing
• WhosWho -- points of contact in different project areas
• Spreading the word
• Comments
• To do
• Bugs
• Stories from former Slashdot users
• What should the IRC network be like?
• How do we want a URL shortener to be used?
• CssWork

Site Name

We have a temporary name!

Thanks go out to everyone who made suggestions - some of them were absolutely brilliant! For example, it hadn't occurred to me to choose a name based on a non-English word, or a palindrome, or a puzzle. Many of the entries were quite clever. (Adies, it took me more than a day to figure yours out. Bravo!)

I won't post the runners up because squatters might take the names before we hold the real contest. We'll figure out a way to prevent this somehow - at worst case we can choose judges and do it privately.

Jerry had the winning entry.

The temp name is: SoylentNews with the tagline: SoylentNews is people!

Does this rock? It hits the trifecta of website goodness:

• Descriptive in a way that mundanes will understand (compare "Photoshop" with "GIMP", "Internet Explorer" with "Firefox", and "MediaPlayer" with "VLC")

• It's part of Nerd culture, a pun, and slightly twisted

• It's suggestive of being community driven

• Possible Trademark issues

• It is attached to some movie about eating corpses and implies "News fresh as processed corpses" (??)

This will be a hard act to beat. Start thinking up names for the contest, or throw your weight behind this one. The contest will be held soon after we open the doors.

(And it was poutine (from IRC) who suggested we use a temporary name. Others may also have suggested it, but it was his post that I noticed. Be sure to thank him if you see him on IRC.)

The Slashcott

The Slashcott (boycott) is getting attention

• Show your support for the "Get rid of Beta" crowd by avoiding Slashdot during the week of February 10-17
• Slashcott, Week 2, officially begins Monday, February 17th, 2014 and runs through the 23rd.

A selection of Slashcott/Beta comments from around the web.......

• http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/02/slashdots-new-interface-could-kill-what-keeps-slashdot-relevant/ <=== Nice article by Ars
• http://spallshurgenson.blogspot.com/2014/02/tragedy-of-commons-redesigning-social.html <=== A good summary of the situation
• https://community.republicwireless.com/thread/23151 <== "How not to treat your community"
• http://www.tidbitsfortechs.com/2014/02/biting-hand-feeds-less-boycotting-slashdot-org-1-week
• http://community.spiceworks.com/topic/442346-trouble-at-slashdot
• http://beta.slashdot.org/submission/3326505 <== "The Individual Midnight Thread"

Similar Projects

• Technocrat - News site presented by Bruce Perens, going on the air Tuesday February 17.
• Pipedot - Rewrite project - Aiming to create a cleaner news site with modern technology.
• Usenet newsgroup comp.misc - on Google Groups, on Squte, via newsreader application

Updates Archive

An archive of updates surrounding initial work and launch can be found at Updates