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Journal LinuxParanoid's Journal: Ideas born of frustration 12

Journal by LinuxParanoid

Summary: Why not route around the 'closed submission queue' issue by using Slashdot journals?

Elaboration: Isn't it annoying when you submit a story for consideration within Slashdot but it gets rejected? And you're pretty darn sure you had a good story? And even more annoying when you see the story turn up two weeks later as 'news'?

The slashdot editorial chiefs, to my understanding, have repeatedly and persistently refused to open the submission queue to moderation since it has so much garbage (and redundancy?).

Now that may or may not be true; I don't really know. I don't think it's total BS, given how people behave on Slashdot today. I once saw a talk in NYC given by Michael and Timothy discussing what they did as moderators and I can sympathize by the crud they have to wade threw (we watched them go through the queue in realtime on a projection screen.)

Still, it'd be nice to have a place to submit your slashdot rejected stories. And why wouldn't moderation that works for the commentary function work for the editorial function also?

I found another person griping about their rejected submission and having had the same experience yet again within the past few weeks (I've only submitted a dozen or so stories over the 2-3 years I've been on Slashdot), this time wondered whether the Journal system would let us route around this issue. So not having used the Journal system much, I'm going to experiment a bit. Care to join me?

    --LinuxParanoid aka --LP

     

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Ideas born of frustration More

Ideas born of frustration

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  • I don't really come across much that I submit as stories to /. but they've all been rejected. If I find something in the next couple days while the other journal is open to comments then I'll post to it.

    Hopefully this idea will work halfway well.
    • To clarify: I do plan to add a new journal entry for February when the time comes around, so you aren't just limited to trying this out for the next few days.

      I figured that one journal entry for *all* stories would make it very hard to filter out old stuff you already know about. And having journal entries more often than once a month seemed presumptuous or useless. If it makes sense to change things further as we go along, we will.

      --LP
      • Yes, but Journals comment submitting is closed after a few days (7?) much like comments on regular articles. So unless you wish people to store them at the beginning and then submit after you open the Journal at the end of the month... You'll find out how quickly exactly when comments here are closed.
  • 2003-01-16 03:05:13 Why is math part of Computer Science? (askslashdot,ed) (rejected)
    2003-01-16 11:45:07 Gnod - a unique way of mapping the web? (articles,tech) (rejected)

    I like the idea, but how do you "get back" the stories that were rejected? Save them locally as well? *sigh* "Garmin Palm Device With GPS"? I'm thrilled.
    • I like the idea, but how do you "get back" the stories that were rejected? Save them locally as well? *sigh*

      This is a bit of an issue as you point out.

      Yes, you'd have to save the stories locally, email them to yourself, log them in your slashdot journal or messages, or whatever. This may or may not be worth it to you. If it isn't, then perhaps the story wasn't that good anyway, was it?

      It is a bit of a bummer though. I'm looking back at old submissions I never saw covered and am debating whether to reconstruct a couple story submissions for the ones that, 6 months later, still seem interesting. I will make the extra effort for one of them, I suspect. I've generally had good luck re-finding old URLs related to stories via Google and the right keywords, something made even easier if I saved the HTML to disk at the time or bookmarked it.

      --LP
      • Someone needs to set up DotSlash or something, like LiveJournal/DeadJournal... Where you get to post all the stuff you otherwise wouldn't get to post on the "real" SlashDot.

        I've submitted a bunch of stories over the past few years as an AC and they never got noticed. Normally i don't really care, if i'm just linking to a news article, big deal. But the two submissions i did just the other day, they had a bunch of text around them, a la K5 articles. Problem is i don't really like K5 and i'd be more interested in what the people here have to think about it. Meh. Suck.
        • I have a vague memory that someone once setup a slashcode based site for doing this (taking slashdot story rejects) but I can't remember it nor find it. I briefly tried wading through the list of sites on slashcode.com but quickly lost patience. Pointers welcome.

          The advantage of this journal-based approach is that user's wouldn't have to signup for accounts to post/moderate on a second site. And a slashdot-rejects site wouldn't necessarily have an open queue without further customization.

          Until we find something better, you're welcome to post stories here.

          --LP
      • ... you'd have to save the stories locally ... log them in your slashdot journal or messages, or whatever....
        That's my solution. When I have a submission, I first create a journal [slashdot.org] entry, then paste the same thing into a submission [slashdot.org]. Fair warning: these days, the submissions are swamped by my entries of stupid job ads (such as this one [slashdot.org]).

        For what it's worth, I've had fifty-three submissions rejected, and eight accepted.
  • Here's one possible solution. Add a checkbox to the story submission that says:

    [X] Submit to journal if submission is rejected

    Enter it along with the submission into the submissions table in MySQL. Then add to the submission queue script an 'if rejected and submit_to_journal == true then auto_submit_to_journal()' type thing. It'd be a tiny patch and mostly harmless. It could probably be abused like anything else, but the most it could be is a couple thousand more inserts/day. Just ran into this journal via your sig, thought I'd drop that in to the conversation.
    • Thanks for the interesting suggestion. I know perl and SQL but I doubt there's much chance of getting my code run by Slashdot (corrections welcome ;). If CmdrTaco wanted an open submission queue, believe me, we'd have one. I don't think it's the inserts/day or the coding work involved that are keeping this from happening. He has some pragmatic and philosophical concerns he articulates in the FAQ which explain why he hasn't done what you mention:

      How about a page for rejected or pending story submissions? [slashdot.org]
      How about allowing readers to directly administer the submissions bin? [slashdot.org]

      Now I accept that as the creator/innovator of Slashdot (along with others on the team) he has the right to do with it as he pleases. And frankly, I'd accept that opening the one-and-only submission queue to the public probably would be chaotic, might lower the quality (at least for a while) of what shows up on the Slashdot front page which is what ~80% (?) of the readers look at, and would be risky. It *might* not work. So why mess with success?

      Stil, his logic doesn't quite convince me, as it doesn't quite articulate why moderation would work for comment selection and highlighting, but not for story selection. If Google News can perform the editorial role without any human involvement in story selection, surely a distributed moderation mechanism of humans is up to the task, no?

      And in any case, arguments about Slashdot "turning bland" or "becoming too anti-Microsoft" with an open story submission queue remain theoretical without experimental evidence. So we'll try a little experiment here. I doubt CmdrTaco will mind; it doesn't disrupt the golden goose and he shouldn't get extra email. If we get enough traffic, with your and others' help, we may learn something!

      --LP
      • IIRC Taco and friends accept patches on the Sourceforge site. Of course, sitewide implementation is a whole other story. But that suggestion has come up before and I think the response was something like, "I wouldn't be opposed if it worked." It's an easy way to have a complete record of your rejected submissions along with a place to chat about them, at least in my opinion.

        "And in any case, arguments about Slashdot "turning bland" or "becoming too anti-Microsoft" with an open story submission queue remain theoretical without experimental evidence"

        Many would argue that it already has (on both counts). Opening up the submission queue might help reverse that trend. Or it might do the exact opposite and story acceptance might get even worse due to groupthink. *shrug* I have no idea, really. I've had my fair share of rejections, but most have been accepted by someone else. I did have an anonymous ask slashdot that got posted under someone else's name word for word (which I always thought was odd).... anyhoo, it'll be interesting to see how this works out. I'll keep checking back.

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