Journal FortKnox's Journal: The New Site: The Vision 107
Of course, I suck at naming, so I have no name for the new site, yet. Don't really have much down except some requirements (Yup, doing this the right way... requirements, then use cases, then UML & Prototypes, THEN coding).
Anyway, I got SO MUCH support in my email (thanks guys!) that I decided, instead of emailing everyone my vision, I thought I'd go ahead and give it out here.
I asked myself a lot of questions. Why not slashdot? I don't like the code, nor the stability, but the front page lures people in and the community keeps them there.
Well, if the community wants to leave, why not livejournal? Well, then you lose the allure of the front page, and it just becomes "Another site to visit," which is why a lot of other sites don't work out for the community (orkut, etc...).
So... what I was thinking is to have slashdot with the friends and the community, but bring the front page with it. That's where the new site started... Then I knew since I was starting from scratch, I could make it better... give people what they want and use slashdot as a basis... here's the ideas sketched out so far (keep in mind that its very COMPLEX right now, and nothing is in stone... so please question or add to anything here... its to make a better community, not just sketch out my ideas):
RSS reader. I like sielwolfs description best. It'd be like news.google.com. You'd see articles for any RSS feed you choose (slashdot being one of them, which eliminates the whole "Other site to visit", and, instead, becomes an alternative to coming here). There will be a link to the original story on the site, but also a place to comment on the new site.
Now, to expand it, people with 'higher authority' (registered users, whatever) would be able to put in a different description... to avoid biasiness, you would actually make the description completely biased, and another person would put in a description for the opposite opinion (that way, instead of trying to describe it without a bias, you describe both sides of the story). Stories from different RSS feeds would be able to be tied together (if a slashdot story is the same as a pete's hardware story, you can have them both listed there), maybe even vote on which is the better article? This is how the 'public' section would work.
Now, for journals, you become the admin of your stories, basically. You can add what you want, make groups of people who can do any of the following:
Read your stories
Comment to your stories
Change your poll options
Delete Threads/Comments
etc...
That way, you control everything that pertains to anything you write.
As a reader, you can choose who you read, and how much of them you read. All JE's become 'stories' on your front page. Examples:
I want to read/be notified all this person's journals.
I want to read/be notified all this person's comments.
I want to make this Journal 'sticky' on my front page (on the front page and doesn't get 'pushed off' the front page until you make it 'unsticky'. That way you can keep apprised of any late entries into Em's poll, for example).
I'm still toying around with other ideas... like you can make your own journal topics (like, "Fantasy Football", "The Twins" (for Sol), etc...). That way, if you don't want to read anything I write about Fantasy Football, you simply uncheck it.
Its basically google news + slashdot journaling + massive flexibility all wrapped up in one.
The way I really envision it isn't to make a site about technology, but a site about EVERYTHING. You want ESPN scores? Turn on your ESPN feeds, and you've got it on your front page. Now you don't need to have 5 tabs open to read all your news... its stuck in one place and you get to talk with all your friends, too.
Whatcha think? Seems overly complex until I sketch out some use cases and prototype some pages, but its not out of my coding grasp, yet. Everything I've mentioned I've thought about how it is designed and everything, so it can be done. Please offer your critiques, suggestions, and comments. If we are to make a site worthy of pulling people off of here, we'll need the best ideas from everyone.
Update: I completely forgot about moderation! I will be bending an idea off of google. There will be positive and negative LABELS you put on comments. You can select as many as you want on each comment (everyone can moderate every comment). So, if I say something funny, yet makes ya think, click both "interesting" and "funny" to moderate it. In your prefs, you get options on your viewing habits. You can prefer to read interesting comments, but not many funny comments... so my comment (funny AND interesting) would be in the middle of the comments.
I also forgot how to avoid the noise. Invitation system. Like orkut. You invite as many people as you like. Someone posts a GNAA article, they get kicked/banned... all those they invited get put on a freeze until it is determined whether they are good to the community or detrimental, and the person that INVITED the intruder loses the ability to invite until they get investigated. So, avoid crapflooders by holding those that invite them responsible.
Anyway, I got SO MUCH support in my email (thanks guys!) that I decided, instead of emailing everyone my vision, I thought I'd go ahead and give it out here.
I asked myself a lot of questions. Why not slashdot? I don't like the code, nor the stability, but the front page lures people in and the community keeps them there.
Well, if the community wants to leave, why not livejournal? Well, then you lose the allure of the front page, and it just becomes "Another site to visit," which is why a lot of other sites don't work out for the community (orkut, etc...).
So... what I was thinking is to have slashdot with the friends and the community, but bring the front page with it. That's where the new site started... Then I knew since I was starting from scratch, I could make it better... give people what they want and use slashdot as a basis... here's the ideas sketched out so far (keep in mind that its very COMPLEX right now, and nothing is in stone... so please question or add to anything here... its to make a better community, not just sketch out my ideas):
RSS reader. I like sielwolfs description best. It'd be like news.google.com. You'd see articles for any RSS feed you choose (slashdot being one of them, which eliminates the whole "Other site to visit", and, instead, becomes an alternative to coming here). There will be a link to the original story on the site, but also a place to comment on the new site.
Now, to expand it, people with 'higher authority' (registered users, whatever) would be able to put in a different description... to avoid biasiness, you would actually make the description completely biased, and another person would put in a description for the opposite opinion (that way, instead of trying to describe it without a bias, you describe both sides of the story). Stories from different RSS feeds would be able to be tied together (if a slashdot story is the same as a pete's hardware story, you can have them both listed there), maybe even vote on which is the better article? This is how the 'public' section would work.
Now, for journals, you become the admin of your stories, basically. You can add what you want, make groups of people who can do any of the following:
Read your stories
Comment to your stories
Change your poll options
Delete Threads/Comments
etc...
That way, you control everything that pertains to anything you write.
As a reader, you can choose who you read, and how much of them you read. All JE's become 'stories' on your front page. Examples:
I want to read/be notified all this person's journals.
I want to read/be notified all this person's comments.
I want to make this Journal 'sticky' on my front page (on the front page and doesn't get 'pushed off' the front page until you make it 'unsticky'. That way you can keep apprised of any late entries into Em's poll, for example).
I'm still toying around with other ideas... like you can make your own journal topics (like, "Fantasy Football", "The Twins" (for Sol), etc...). That way, if you don't want to read anything I write about Fantasy Football, you simply uncheck it.
Its basically google news + slashdot journaling + massive flexibility all wrapped up in one.
The way I really envision it isn't to make a site about technology, but a site about EVERYTHING. You want ESPN scores? Turn on your ESPN feeds, and you've got it on your front page. Now you don't need to have 5 tabs open to read all your news... its stuck in one place and you get to talk with all your friends, too.
Whatcha think? Seems overly complex until I sketch out some use cases and prototype some pages, but its not out of my coding grasp, yet. Everything I've mentioned I've thought about how it is designed and everything, so it can be done. Please offer your critiques, suggestions, and comments. If we are to make a site worthy of pulling people off of here, we'll need the best ideas from everyone.
Update: I completely forgot about moderation! I will be bending an idea off of google. There will be positive and negative LABELS you put on comments. You can select as many as you want on each comment (everyone can moderate every comment). So, if I say something funny, yet makes ya think, click both "interesting" and "funny" to moderate it. In your prefs, you get options on your viewing habits. You can prefer to read interesting comments, but not many funny comments... so my comment (funny AND interesting) would be in the middle of the comments.
I also forgot how to avoid the noise. Invitation system. Like orkut. You invite as many people as you like. Someone posts a GNAA article, they get kicked/banned... all those they invited get put on a freeze until it is determined whether they are good to the community or detrimental, and the person that INVITED the intruder loses the ability to invite until they get investigated. So, avoid crapflooders by holding those that invite them responsible.
tools (Score:2)
I actually started playing around with this... and found a nice possibility that could make this process pretty simple... well, relativily speaking. Its a tool called WebL, from Compaq. Basically its a scripting language, implemented in Java. Its designed to collect content from a web site and easily do something with it.
The WebL syntax is pretty simply and what I've played around wi
Re:tools (Score:1)
Re:tools (Score:2)
Re:tools (Score:1)
Re:tools (Score:2)
Yah.
I think the journal mentioning the 0.1a release is still on my main journal page. You need Perl. Maybe convert to C. Probably not. Doesn't matter the OS - it'll work in BSD, Linux, and Windows, probably most UNIXes... if you've got something crazy like VMS you might have problems, but I can fix 'em.
The idea here is that it'll save and convert your JEs from a slashsite (/. only ATM) into (cleaned up) HTML, plain text, XML (just decided to do that), or you can tokenize the data and push it through a tem
Re:tools (Score:2)
I was working in Java, and my plan was to implement an apache-soap front end for it and its output would be a XML chunk (which then would leave the end user to freely transform as they wish).
You should check out WebL, lots of good ideas I think in there. It allows you to abstract out the parsing into "webl" scripts so that your code has no knowledge of format... which makes for a
Re:tools (Score:2)
Re:tools (Score:2)
IF we want to archive journals, that can be done as a secondary project.
IMHO.
Of course.
(But I am right in this instance.)
Re:tools (Score:2)
What do you mean by the comments being too coupled? Zirnike and I talked last night and fleshed out an approach to pulling all the comments at -1, Flat and then, optionally, rebuilding them with a threshold into Nested form. Journals? Easy enough. You can either let people upload existing content somehow and provide a template to use to reformat the journals into the new site layout, or, if all else fails, people can format their archived entries into plain text and then manually enter them on the site.
Legally (Score:2)
Re:Legally (Score:2)
Not a problem-o. This be at the bottom of each page:
Comments are owned by the Poster. The Rest © 1997-2004 OSDN
Re:tools (Score:2)
Already Covered (Score:2)
Re:tools (Score:2)
Right, I second Oculus's [slashdot.org] (that sounds weird...) mapping idea. If it's implemented on the server, you can just use FTP and a cron job to check a directory of files for journal entries, with comments, that are waiting to be put into the new system. The archiving tool I'm building will take care of all the necessary formatting - it can spit out anything from plain text, to HTML generated with a template, to XML (I hate XML... just a random observation :) ). Users who've archived their journals already can eith
Strong Points/ Weak Points (Score:2)
"The Slashdot Messaging System" sucks except to let you know when someone adds an entry to their journal. I think it should be more powerful. I like the idea of adding PMs to it, allowing yo
Re:Strong Points/ Weak Points (Score:2)
Your right... too much info can just overload and people will glaze over the good stuff.
Re:Strong Points/ Weak Points (Score:2)
Okay... (Score:1)
Wonder if this'll be done before I hit 10,000 comments?
Dibs on UID 42.
Gonna do devel on sourceforge or something like that? At the very least, the feature request tracker and the bug tracker tools would be nice at some point in time. Heck, depending on how religious you are, you could have it hosted on savannah.
Re:Okay... (Score:2)
I was contemplating hiding scoring altogether, but what is 'slrn'? Basically, you set up what you want to read, like what slashdot is TRYING to do, only thinking it through a little better.
Re:Okay... (Score:2)
Re:Okay... (Score:2)
Re:Okay... (Score:1)
comment id
uid of moderator
moderation flags
?
Re:Okay... (Score:2)
Re:Okay... (Score:1)
slrn is a Usenet news reader for Linux (actually, there might be a Windows or POSIX version). It has very fine grained scoring. For example:
Stories posted by Em: +10 points
Stories in Sports section: -200 points
Stories about general tech: +150 points
Stories with more than 50 comments: +75 points
Final thing: I only read stories that have a positive number of points.
Given a story on a new retractable dome stadium design, tally up the scores, we g
Re:Okay... (Score:2)
Re:Okay... (Score:2)
At the least, there should be a Discordian in those spots...
Hey, look, I type fast enough I can post a complete, self contained thought in under 2 minutes! I must type faster than everyone in charge!
Re:Okay... (Score:1)
Re:Okay... (Score:1)
Re:Okay... (Score:2)
Failing that, I'll take 1 googol.
Failing that, I'll take 12. Because it's such a kewl number.
Cheers,
Ethelred
Re:Okay... (Score:2)
Re:Okay... (Score:2)
Re:Okay... (Score:2)
Since we're claiming numbers (Score:2)
I'm taking 49. Don't ask.
Sounds good (Score:1)
It's a PITA to have to check a site, find the conversation and check to see if anyone ever replied. Much, much more convienant to just check your e-mail and see, hey, someone replied to blah, posted blah, etc.
You could also look into something that would allow each of us to have our own sites for our content, and then some kind of aggregator...
Regardless, I'll still end up being here to some e
Re:Sounds good (Score:2)
Re:Sounds good (Score:1)
Re:Sounds good (Score:2)
Re:Sounds good (Score:2)
Yup. I do my messaging entirely via e-mail. That way I'm notified a little faster. ;->
Cheers,
Ethelred
Re:Sounds good (Score:1)
Man, I can be a pain in the ass, can't I?
Re:Sounds good (Score:2)
Now, I understand your concern here FK. In fact, at my day job, we have this very concern. Just a little background.
We have a system, we call it the "Notification Service" Basically its a messaging system (built on MQSeries) which handles not just emails, but faxing and snail mail... anyway, one of the things we are concerned with is that customers could, potentially, receive something like 10 emails in a day for a given set of events (ordering, st
Is it going to be more stable than /.? (Score:2)
Re:Is it going to be more stable than /.? (Score:2)
Re:Is it going to be more stable than /.? (Score:1)
Of course... the only box I have available to do anything like that is an ancient Celeron 500 with 256MB of RAM and a paltry 10GB HDD.
Re:Is it going to be more stable than /.? (Score:2)
Re:Is it going to be more stable than /.? (Score:2)
-Ab
Re:Is it going to be more stable than /.? (Score:2)
already taken though.
Site name: scram.com (Score:2)
Re:Site name: scram.com (Score:2)
Re:Is it going to be more stable than /.? (Score:2)
Realmofsmart.com?
Dupeless.com!
Re:Is it going to be more stable than /.? (Score:2)
Re:Is it going to be more stable than /.? (Score:1)
alternatedot.org
jouralspace.org
freedot.org
opendot.org
diariumpopuli.org
All these are still free, I can come up with more if you want.
Re:Is it going to be more stable than /.? (Score:2)
Re:Is it going to be more stable than /.? (Score:1)
Alternatively I can register slashdot.lu, but that's about 3 to 4 times more expensive than a .com .org or .net. That per year, and not even thinking about the initial setup fee.
Re:Is it going to be more stable than /.? (Score:1)
A few suggestions (Score:2)
VoxBox
Bangslash
Sanitarium
Ozymandias
Orbis Pundit
Get Rid of Slimy ModS (GROSS)
NotMarotti
Ganesha (Hindu god of wisdom)
Bahubali (Hindu god of learning)
Prometheus
Apollonia
Erastothenes (Greek philosopher, who was jokingly known as "the second-best in the world in everything")...or maybe just "Erasto"
But the best choice would, of course, be "Ethelred's Site".
Hmmm... how about "unread.org"? ;-)
Cheers,
Ethelred
On moderation (Score:2)
Need a Meta area (Score:2)
I also propose that the working name of the site be called FKJE and pronounced "Feek-Jay." Thank you. ;P
I'll say it again...drupal (Score:1)
There's even a throttle mechanism for caching, you can have as many roles/users as you'd like. Prevent anon access.
Plus, your superusers would have access to see who added who when.
I also have a domain, http://brew-masters.com (as I wrote to FK, f**k the omelette, long live the brew!) which is BARELY used. If you join, I will set up content subscriptions, blogging,..whatever.
In fact, I'll give you access to the disk and MySQL so you can try out modul
Re:I'll say it again...drupal (Score:1)
I think Josh wants to do a clean sheet design. I think some others want to play around. And most of us just want something that is 'notslash'.
Re:I'll say it again...drupal (Score:1)
There are lazy programmers and those that build arks.
Josh is definitely an ark builder.
Me? I like buying my meat at the store and watching movies about cowboys.
Man, it's late and I'm mixing metaphors. Anyway, feel free to go and muck with the site. I'll add some more modules as I get time. Invitation is open to you as well (and anyone else who's game).
I mean, I've got a FREE domain that I'm really not using. I am homebrewing, but very infrequently and I sure don't need a site, but it
Re:I'll say it again...drupal (Score:2)
So its a story of a lazy programmer kicked enough that he stands up and does something about it.
Re:I'll say it again...drupal (Score:2)
Not unless you crack my account. ;-)
yeah. (Score:2)
Yes. This is the next step in the evolution from having JE titles like "MMHI:" and "KoC:"... I would like this a lot. Even if users are only limted to 5 different topic designators... I don't care.
The important thing is flexible message and comment posting. I like the way slashdot works. I like be
Another message board example... (Score:2)
moderation and banning need work (Score:1)
Kick banning people for a single offense is harsh.
Considering that's one of the biggest complaints around here, perhaps we need to think about that before implementing?
names......
something about a new start/new beginning..something along those lines. A little help here?
Re:moderation and banning need work (Score:2)
Re:moderation and banning need work (Score:1)
The thing is that if this bad boy gets huge, then it's gonna be harder to do that.
I think the biggest thing is being flexible.
You can't be all things to everyone, but you can please most...I think.
Or not.
www.hypest.com? It's available
Re:moderation and banning need work (Score:1)
First ban is ten minutes. Then 30, then an hour, 2, 4, etc. Some exponential function.
Re:moderation and banning need work (Score:2)
Rather than just having moderation as a generic "I think this post sucks/rules", add a "report abuse" feature. Any GNAA posts get the poster banned, but a lousy post just eats a chunk of karma. (Would 'report abuse' get abused enough to be a problem?? If so.. ban the offenders from it for abuse!)
RRAA (Score:2)
Ah. Clearly a case of report report abuse abuse.
Cheers,
Ethelred
Re:moderation and banning need work (Score:2)
You should really punish them and recursively go back through all the invites and ban everyone along the chain.
Oh wait... :-)
Re:moderation and banning need work (Score:2)
What about a scheme where the mods on descendants affects the standing of the ancestor? As an example if your 100 children are downmodded 1 point each you lose half of that, or 50 pts. Perhaps even cascade this down further.
Pyramid Scheme (Score:2)
Be honest (Score:1)
Of course, non-obfuscated code will help this issue some:)
Re:Be honest (Score:2)
Entry level. Just got invited. Can read everything and post, but moderation and stuff weighs heavy on them (to avoid crapflooding). Basically you are under suspicion for a while. Can create groups of feeds/people/topics they want to read and how much they want to read of them.
Restricted User. Was a reg user that got put under suspicion cause of one of their invitees (or the
Re:Be honest (Score:1)
For me
Ok, whatever. I really don't care what level I can post at, or whatever.
I just want something I feel like I can affect change on if it's needed
Re:Be honest (Score:1)
Re:Be honest (Score:2)
Moderation & Deleting comments (Score:2)
Re:Moderation & Deleting comments (Score:2)
Oh, and the whole idea of moderation based on the number of posts in an article has piqued my interest (I know you were doing the friend-of-a-friend thing, but it isn't gonna work like slashdot). If there is, say, under 25 posts, nothing is done... 25-50, the owner of the journal entry gets to determine the order... anything larger, and a moderation system is setup.
Re:Moderation & Deleting comments (Score:2)
Also, what about archival, or is that under the 10,000 ft floor?
I'm glad to provide the inspiration (Score:2)
I always think the key is 'User Push, User Pull'. Users push by creating journals, tagging specific feeds, and posting (upping the popularity of a specific article).
Users pull by friending other users, and selecting Topics of Interest. I think it was George who described a model where Em tags an article on the Bears making a blockbuster trade to get Orlando Pace and Holt from the Rams.
Since he's my friend and I have sports
Your friends' feeds? (Score:2)
Assuming for instance, that sielwolf and myself were mutual friends (or the equivalent). If my front-page rules were set up to always have Linux, BSD, and Apple news, with 10% would be dedicated to random-friend-feeds, but never Microsoft (or Java ewwww
reaction (Score:2)
How about being able to upload your own icons? :-)
I also forgot how to avoid the noise. Invitation system. Like orkut. You invite as many people as you like. Someone posts a GNAA article, they get kicked/banned... all those they invited get put on a freeze until it
noise... (Score:2)
I like the idea of the invite freeze on someone that posts the obvious troll. For those wanting to engage in a little troll sp
Names, Mods, Editors, Feeds, and More (Score:2)
Names:
First off, I have a pair of names that you may very well hate. Here they are:
morethansum.org sumofparts.org
Meant to emphasize the added value of community. Both domains are currently available.
*Update*
Scient. Meaning Knowing or skillfull. ScientNews or ScientAggro. I just like Scient.
Mods:
I'll call your proposed Mod system Tagging. I think allowing everyone to tag every comment will get seriously out of hand. Sure, it's no work to add a record to the database, but querying all that da
User Awareness (Score:2)
I think it would be especially important to know if Editor Powers had been invoked. It might even be worth having optional notification: "Unedited" to indicate that Supreme Authority had not been used (more than one identical Tag by an Editor, comment deletion, etc).
This is all along the lines of having users able to know what is happening in the background.
Another idea (Score:2)
Re:Another idea (Score:2)
Although, I'd want site admins to be able to see the 'main' account from the alias (in case of abuse), but this is a pretty good idea. No need to have multi-accounts then...
Re:Another idea (Score:2)
Re:Another idea (Score:2)
Would all the posts - alias or not - show up on the user's comments page? Would they have a selection box to choose which set of comments to see?
Would they share a single karma pool, or would each alias be on its own? I can see benefits both ways...
Re:Another idea (Score:2)
So, perhaps each alias has it's own karma pool which begins equal to the karma of the parent account. Y
Okay, that's it (Score:2)
Seems that you've been bellyaching about this place almost since day 01 of your JE, variously threatening to make your own site, and offering suggestions (obviously to no avail) as to how to make this one better, for OVER THREE YEARS!!!!!!!!!!!
Dude. Time to make some magic. No looking back. Move forward. Let's get it done. Go!
Re:Okay, that's it (Score:2)
Could I assist? (Score:2)
I know you don't know my work and I've mainly just hacked out servlets, but I can do JSP, I've got patterns-based design courses under my belt, and I can
Moderation Suggestion (Score:2)
Take your labeling system, which I like, and expand it. Everybody gets an unlimited number of labels to apply to any post, and every label has a duality to it. You have funny and unfunny, insightful and uninsightful, informative and uninformative, etc. A person applies a label if they feel the post warrants one, so if I don't lik
Raising funds (Score:2)
Re:Raising funds (Score:2)
There's one feature missing (Score:2)
1)ignore a users comments only (but still read their stories)
2)ignore a users stories (but still read thier comments)
3)ignore both comments and stories.
distributed feeds? (Score:2)