CmdrTaco's Journal: "Daddy Pants"

I read a comment today from a user who thought that Slashdot Stories were managed by some sort of nebulous group of authors who were all just sort of "There" all the time. I wanted to clarify this point for everyone. This probably will end up in a FAQ update somewhere.

We run Slashdot though what we call 'Daddy Pants'. One person is wearing the pants during each of 18 5 hour shifts. Weekend nights, pants are optional ;) This covers the submissions bin from 8am to 11pm.

The people who have shifts are Me, Hemos, Timothy, Michael, Gamara and CowboyNeal. In addition to the daddy pants shifts, other authors handle subsections (like pudge in the apple section and Cliff in the Ask Slashdot section). Timothy & Michael handle about a third of the shifts each, and the rest of us fill out the rest of the schedule.

We recently set up an email address- daddypants at slashdot dot org that forwards to whoever is wearing the pants at he moment. Eventually this address will be plastered all over the site, but we just set it up the other day and aren't really sure where to put it yet. And honestly I'm somewhat wary about it breaking ;)

The author wearing the pants is responsible for reading and deleting submissions, and then selecting, scheduling, and editing the stories for the main page. During the day we space stories about every 50 minutes. Weekends a little longer. If something important happens we post more. If things are slow, we post less.

most of the time several authors are available. We all hop into the story queue and the bin and assist, throwing in our 2 cents on any given stories. Adding URLs if they come up. Or in some cases, rejecting a story outright for any number of reasons.

Yeah we probably should have the daddypants schedule posted somewhere. I actually maintain the list in iCal these days, but it really doesn't matter to the end user who wears the pants anyway, since in most cases, they should email the poster of the story anyway. I hate when people email me about timothy's story. He posted it! Mail him!

So it's sunday. My daddy pants shift wraps up in a couple of hours and then I have the afternoon free to read or watch the tube. I was thinking of trying to go see The Pianist, but Kathleen hasn't expressed much of an interest in that one. I also have Cerebus #2, Swamp Thing #5, and 2 volumes of Planetary trades to read. And friday's Stargate is still on the Tivo. As you can clearly see, I obviously have exciting plans for the rest of my weekend.

sorry but people will still email you

[Mandrake]

I hate to say it, but as long as people have that mental association between slashdot and you, they're going to email you with comments / complaints / suggestions / etc, regardless of whether you're personally responsible for the particulars of X, Y, or Z. And, really, ultimately, it's a fair assessment on their part, because unless I'm mistaken, you still have a pretty big say on the direction of the site and the content.

I'm not saying you should feel responsible for everything, just that to the average viewer of the site, it's still your web site. Even if it's a whole big monster bugger no longer resembling chips and dips and far too unwieldy to really be just your website anymore.