SoylentNews

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Revision as of 20:01, 10 February 2014 by Sfm (talk | contribs) (Summary of comments and removed to comment history page)
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Frequently Asked Questions

Site Announcements


If you are having tech issues with the forum software, please Email Joel: soylent (at) finite (dot) ms

It's not certain whether we will be able to rollout on Monday as planned, but it's not out of the question either. Expect a rollout status update, late Monday

The slashcode group has been working very hard to get things up and running. SlashCode is 5 years old, heavily dependent on older revs (Apache, Perl, MySQL), and ran as root

Check out the look and feel of the new site!


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 (like I did, but with more people).

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


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.)


To everyone involved... THANK YOU!

We are building a news site alternative to Slashdot. We have started only a few days ago, and this wiki is a temporary measure so that volunteers can coordinate and others can see what's happening.

The idea is to build a news aggregation site that delivers what's important - better articles, less fluff, and all the functionality you expect from the moderation system. We are still looking for volunteers so stop by the boards and the IRC and let us know you want to help!

  • 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: ##altslashdot on chat.freenode.net (Webchat)

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

Mumble (Voice / Text Server) : voice.whackperiod.org

Slashcott Organized boycott of the Dice-owned Slashdot pages

  • Show your support for the "Get rid of Beta" crowd by avoiding Slashdot during the week of February 10-17

Contact: If you want to send the project lead a message: John (at) SoylentNews (dot) org


Status

Check out the FAQ

  • Forums are available at forums.SoylentNews.org
  • We upgraded the hosting by two tiers - this should fix the problems people were having yesterday accessing the system.
  • The System team is working on installing SlashCode. If all goes well, we expect to have a working system by Monday. Everyone believes this goal is achievable.
  • The site now has forums with four user groups: Code, Content, Style, and System.
  • Probably won't be non-profit, see business model.
  • We won't poach from Slashdot. This includes articles and logos, also "style" to a reasonable extent.

Mailing list update Messages are here

ToDo

Slashcode Todo list

  • Install SlashCode on the production site
  • Get some people to help with the site
  • Run a contest for a better name New name discussion
  • Incorporate
  • Consult a lawyer
  • How to handle Advertising (necessary evil) - Opt Out, Limited, Typical(box with ads in the top-right corner)?
  • Improved Mod/Meta-Mod/Story-Selection system to minimize required editor input
  • Provide a voting system to decide which articles hit the main page (Mod point related?)
  • Find and submit some stories

List of Discussion Pages


Milestones

  • Grabbed the Domain Names: AltSlashdot.org, Soylentnews.org
  • Bruce Parens (created "technocrat.net") is aware of Soylentnews.org and is considering contributing (Relaunch ?? stay tuned)
  • Scrapping content from old Slashdot suggestion made. benefits/drawbacks ? Overall I think this is a thumbs down
Content is easier to "find"
Moral/Legal objections were brought up (Even if it was initially "our" content)
We should build our own brand
Pointless to scrap, since it is the comments that draw people in
Editors should be in multiple timezones to cleanup/improve/multi-source submissions for presentation to the main page
  • Initial code build will be from Slashcode... Available (Git?), Old:(5 years) Workable:(maybe)
  • Alternate choices for code base: Wiki, Discourse,
  • Non-profit vs For-profit discussion should go here ( Business )
Debian style project ?
Community driven projects need strong leadership or they tend to flouunder


Comment History

Comments

---

  • Do this as a non-profit, user-run organization please. From what you write it looks like you want replace the regime, not giving the users the control over the website. Why should we trust you not to sell the website to a DICE-like company after it becomes successful? I applaud your efforts to change things, but I really believe that a Debian Project like institution that is both non-commercial and controlled/run by the community has a much higher chance of securing the goals we fight for right now in the long-term. --141.84.69.20 03:20, 6 February 2014 (MST)
  • I like the comment on a Debian like project organization, also, maybe we can create a freenode IRC channel to further organize?

---

  • Additional points: Make the whole website (including stories/comments) available under CC-BY-SA to retain the right to fork. You should also reconsider the name. I imagine "AltSlashdot" could get you into all sorts of legal trouble, since it is very close to the "Slashdot" trademark. --141.84.69.20 03:20, 6 February 2014 (MST)


  • Attempt to coordinate and combine the parallel efforts. E.g. Slashdot user dotancohen has apparently registered the domain "slashdotan" and is looking to build a new Slashdot there. There are probably a dozen people hacking away separately on similar efforts. Competition is probably good, but combining efforts should be considered. --Slashdot user JustinOpinion.
  • I'm the dotancohen mentioned by JustinOpinion. I have some limited experience with Amazon Web Services to run cloud servers for sites with very dynamic load profiles. Altslashdot seems like the perfect application of that technology, as we can expect to get slashdotted at any time. I also agree that we should coordinate efforts, as the whole premise is to keep the /. community together. Dotancohen (talk) 08:38, 6 February 2014 (MST)
  • Re: combining efforts. User somenickname (1270442) has registered bangslashdot.(org|net|com) [[1]]
  • I (Bryan) also plan on making a slashdot-inspired site. The website will be called "Pipedot" and be reachable at pipedot.org or pipedot.com. The motto will be "News for nerds, without the corporate slant." Get it? A pipe character looks like a slash without the slant! However, I plan on creating my own software instead of using slashcode/mediawiki/etc so it may take a while to get feature complete with slashdot classsic. (Why? Because I've always wanted to scratch that itch. Duh!)
  • I think it would be best to just go over to Usenet. It is distributed, uncensorable, scales extremely well, the infrastructure is already in place, and it works. No Javascript, no business models, nothing but pure text-mode comment goodness. Eternal September is free and works well, but does not allow binaries. That's fine, we have magnet links these days. EDIT: comp.misc is the new Slashdot. It's official now. Join us there and keep it free as in FREEDOM!
  • relevant slashdot stats from 2011 [[2]]
    • 5.5 million user visits per month.
    • 7,000 comments are added every day.
    • Over 9 million pages views daily.
    • Over 21 million comments.
    • Average monthly bandwidth usage is around 40-50 mbit/sec (450GB/day)
  • I suggest that when updates to the code are made, it should be in the charter (or whatever we are calling it) to make that code public. -- CommonJoe

IRC

General Slashdot Discussion: Come on IRC channel #slashdot at irc.slashnet.org. Or use the web client: http://www.slashnet.org/webclient

AltSlashdot Discussion: Head to IRC channel ##AltSlashdot on irc.freenode.net, Web client is here: https://webchat.freenode.net/


Stories from former Slashdot users

Confessions of an Ex-Slashdot Beta User

Banned from Slashdot

Dice is killing Slashdot


An interesting Idea

Check this out while it's still available. feedback appreciated

Telling the world about SoylentNews.org

  • I don't know what John wants as far as advertising this page but I'm sure he wants as much exposure as possible.
  • Please mention SolentNews.org as much as possible.
  • It seems like the word is spreading (over 25,000 in 5 days) Good job everyone!
    • Any idea on how and where to make sure people know about this project, please post them here?
I'd send a note along to Ars Technica & BoingBoing. (That would get some attention)
Anyone have a Reddit account with a reasonable activity level?
The Register, Digg, Hacker News and anything else you feel would help get the word out there
  • Contacted:
    • The Register
No word back
    • Ars Technica
Was passed along to one of the writers
    • Hacker News
Submission from when AltSlashdot just started
Due for an update once we get an actual site up and running
Similar thread from today Yahwotqa (talk) 10:05, 10 February 2014 (MST)

Licensing?

Apologies for the repost, but this got buried in a talk page and I think we need to start discussing licensing beyond just the term "open-source".

If no one's said it yet, I think we need to move the updated version of Slash to AGPL and get it in a git repo for people to hack on (preferably github). First step in seeing if that's possible is finding out if it's GPLv2+ (i.e. with something like the phrase "or any later version"). Then you go GPLv3 --> AGPL.

Case for the AGPL: 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 turn 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 by requiring the release of modifications to Slash.

Regardless of whether the forked version of Slash goes AGPL, we should still have a clear idea what the license will be. It may require the consent of the original authors to move to a license besides GPLv2 (Rob Malda, Jonathon Pater, Patrick Galbraith, Chris Nandor, Brian Aker, Cliff Wood, Jamie McCarthy), and being stuck forever on GPLv2 would be a shame.

Whether or not the project is going to have a CLA that assigns copyright to some organization, or specifies some other terms, is another question that needs community discussion.

Keep up the great work everyone, very glad to see this materializing! ~ Seandiggity (talk) 12:36, 9 February 2014 (MST)

Database license? To maintain good will, the database should be able to be forked onto new sites if SoylentNews has any sign of going corporate (maybe a bit scrubbed).

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