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Journal FortKnox's Journal: Slashdot, 503s, devchannel, thoughts 29

Journal by FortKnox
All these 503s are causing people to rethink slashdot.
True, many of us can give a rats ass about the front page, and use the journals as a means of daily chat. Of course, no one wants to do the 'livejournal' thing, or outside site, because... well... we all came to slashdot for the frontpage and are comfy here.

We've tried moving to other sites... even those that were made in the community. All failed.

Hell, I just found devchannel (another OSDN site), and think it kicks the pants off of slashdot (front page). But no journals...
That got me thinking. What if a site was written with journals and messaging and zoo... that had rss feeds. You link into any site, and you get the rss feed. People choose what they want to read, and you can make 'local' comments on it, and the link to the original site is present. That way you get even more than just 'slashdot'.. you can hook into kuro5hin, fark, etc... and yet you still have the journals and everything all set up.
Of course, there are copywrite issues to deal with (can you put up RSS feeds and make local comments as long as there is a link to the original site?), but I'm kinda keen on the idea... and it wouldn't be too terribly difficult to write.

Whatcha think?
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Slashdot, 503s, devchannel, thoughts More

Slashdot, 503s, devchannel, thoughts

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  • People link to oss stories all the time and make comments about them, I don't see why automating that feed would cause problems. Then again. IANAL AINWB.

    • Re:Comments (Score:3, Insightful)

      by the_mad_poster ( 640772 )

      It's not a legal problem, it's a "being a decent member of the community" problem. Nobody wants to run a site with ads only to have people bypass their interface and slurp their content. If you start interfacing to Slashdot and other systems through a centralized hub, you'll constantly be battling with the various site ownwers to keep access. IP bans, e-mail bans, etc. will be a constant hassle.

      • Perhaps. Still, could use the feeds and just post your own stories whenever you feel so inclined. But then you'd end up with a clone. Still like the idea of a better message system, with PMs and the like.
  • is if we could get it to automagically import zoo settings. So out friends list is copied over. Combine that with the ability to upload journals from the mad poster's script output and you have a great chance.

    I'd also like the ability to have "best friends" which would be people you want to see when they post any comment, not just one in your journal. I can't tell you how many times I've gone back to reread someone's JE and seen a great late entry by Sam or Blinder or MekkaB.

    • Mekka B is ALWAYS right on time... awww yeah!

      ('cept when I'm late!)

    • There's no reason that you wouldn't be able to take plain text locally, feed it to the sanitizing script for formatting (as if it were a textified journal) and then use putslash to send it to the hub. With a friendlier interface (web-based, presumably), the sanitizer and putslash scripts from this thing could already function as reply handlers. Then, you just need the actual hub to collect the information from each site and send it out via RSS.

    • So out friends list is copied over

      Yeah, that would be pretty slick...

      ...that way all my freaks can continue to avoid me. ;-)

      Seriously, though, copying over zoo settings and JEs would rawk.

      I can't tell you how many times I've gone back to reread someone's JE and seen a great late entry by Sam or Blinder or MekkaB.

      What? You don't come back for my posts? *melodramatic sob*

      Cheers,

      Ethelred

  • There should be some type of open source (blog/journal) portal for doing a site like this. Is there anything that is targeted towards such a use? The day at university IT staff meeting, there was some talk about implementing a university wide blogs page that integrates with our directory and authentication services.

    Personally, I'm almost to the point where I'm looking to move from /. or at least post somewhere else simultaneously because of the lack of decent RSS.

  • keep the site/fad die off thing from happening. Of course even if it works we'll lose people by just general attrition.
  • I mean I know they mean I can't read Slashdot what do they mean?
    • Basically it means "yea, the server is still here, but it ain't doing anything more than it has to". It's usually what you throw up when the server is doing its minimal job (that is - serving 503s) while you do maintenance. Sometimes you also see it if a site gets hammered with traffic, but it's normally something that a human configured to display while the system is being worked on.
  • So, it'd be a blogging site with RSS feeds rolled in to make one newsstream?

    Sounds good to me.

  • Exactly (Score:2)

    by nizo ( 81281 )
    This idea is exactly what I was thinking of when I got banned a week ago. I did finally get an asshat reply stating that I am banned (thanks for the reply finally!) I started to respond, and then I realized, why? I looked at my last several comments and I can't find a single one that got modded down. Don't get me wrong, I post dumb posts now and then, but overall my posts have a positive rating. I basically have no idea why I am banned, and the rude response I got wasn't helpful at all. However at this poin

  • I think you should write it. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by mekkab ( 133181 ) on Tuesday July 20, 2004 @03:01PM (#9751647) Homepage Journal
    I'm not gonna volunteer for anything anymore ever again because I can barely keep up with my own life, but screw it;

    write it, start out small but make it flexible* (such a simple design idea... yet so difficult to pull off!), host it, and I'll kick in a few bucks. Yep. I just said the "money" word.

    Everything is a fucking news aggregate of everything else (Washington Post -=> Obscurestore -=> Slashdot. Seriously. )

    So allow for feeds. Allow for Journals. Allow for personal news reports (not exactly journals, but re-posts of news feeds. Someone may find some stimulation material on Al-jazeera. Someone else may not care, but they may want to hear more stories of the poster-person's crazy cats. Allow me to distinguish).

    write it, site it, and roll it. We'll spread the word. Metafilter and k5 and slashdot are for fucking lamers. Blogging is stupid. Beat them all. CONQUER TEH WERLD!

    • Mod Parent Up. (Score:3, Funny)

      by mekkab ( 133181 )
      Its not because I need the mod pointage... its because my ideas are so damn good! and my magnificence deserve to stand above all of your ideas.
      (j/k! Sorry... I've been up since 4 am.)

  • Thinking off and on (Score:3, Interesting)

    by blinder ( 153117 ) <blinder...dave@@@gmail...com> on Tuesday July 20, 2004 @03:13PM (#9751795) Homepage Journal
    I've been thinking and tinkering with something off and on here for a while. Basically its just a journaling/messaging system... but what's important is how I designed it to do whatever without trying to jam code into strange places.

    Basically the system is designed as a single MDB (message driven bean) and a companion SSB (stateless session bean) and using something like the Bridge pattern. The beans accept "events" (xml chunks) and load "plugins" which are just java classes implementing an "event interface."

    So you can handle async and syncro events using essentially the same thing.

    The front end is basically an apache-soap deal through tomcat (I use jboss as my container) so the client could be php, cf, java, whatever.

    Also, the chatter about "importing" stuff from here... I found this [freshmeat.net] yesterday on freshmeat. never used it, just thought it looked interesting, like using it to do more "intelligent" scrapes from /.

    I dunno, the thing I've been working works pretty well, whenever i need to add functionality, i just another java class and put it somewhere on the classpath and bam, the system is ready.

    The xml chunks are pretty simple... they just contain key/value pairs and also have knowledge of who/what their processor is (via a fully qualified class name).

    Yeah, nothing earth-shatteringly original, but it does the job and gets around the problem of "hacking" in fixes, upgrades and enhancements.

  • Slashcode. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Talinom ( 243100 ) on Tuesday July 20, 2004 @03:21PM (#9751892) Homepage Journal
    So isn't Slashdot open sourced [sourceforge.net]? Why not take it with us if we are going to migrate?

    The Mad Poster's code can rip all historical data from journals.

    We are familiar with the current system.

    All of our friends lists can be brought over.

    Essentially it would be a mass migration. Fix/disable/change the moderation system and most problems would go away. Heck, you could provide a way from the new site to import all of your old stuff. The trick would be to prevent a person from importing another person and impersonating them. Perhaps have them post a JE with a particular non-repeating code to authorize the creation and importation of all user data.

    Unfortunately I have no real cash to offer, just the classic computer geek stuff. Good luck.

    • To prevent someone from creating a [new site] user account that doesn't own the /. account of the same name, the [new site] code could attempt to login using user supplied information. If the user's info can log in to /. then a [new site] account of the same name is created. If no account of that name exists (simple check for the existance of slashdot.org/~user_name), then a [new site] account for that user may be created.

      Is this possible?

      jason
      • In theory anything is possible. Easy is something else entirely. As I am not a programmer you would need to ask a pro. I would suggest either FortKnox or the mad poster.
      • That could easily done. However, I would prefer a method that did not require me to use the same password. Perhaps just posting a random string generated by the other server to your journal and have the other site suck that page down and varify it.
    • slashcode is a big pile of garbage I'd have to wade through and learn. I think I'd be much better off writing a site from scratch in my native tongue (java). Keep in mind that my job requires me to make enterprise sized web applications for financial institutions. I have quite a bit of experience making complex sites, so this shouldn't be so bad.
      • ...I'd have to wade through and learn. I think I'd be much better off writing a site from scratch ...

        Famous last words! Didn't Netscape do this? Who? Netscape? The guys who used to own the browser world until the fucked themselves?

  • ...but my editorial and UI skills might be valuable.

    You have my sword.
  • Do you want to start with the use cases right away, or divide up the work and Bob's your uncle?

    We could always do something crazy like have a /. programming contest. Proof of concept and most votes wins.

    • I'm going through requirements right now, then use cases... next step is possibly making architecture docs (UML, etc..), then I'll divvy up the coding for any volunteers. You volunteering? ;-)
      • Sign me up, man! I'll take a chunk of coding, or requirements gathering, Database, etc. Whatever is needed.
  • for a distributed model for journaling that used 1 main site for keeping track of where the journals are and for authenticating accounts (for comments and such) but everything else (hosting, comments, friends list, relationships, history) was distributed. But I never really got the idea off the ground; one of these days if someone doesn't beat me to it.
  • I think it would definitely be nice to keep the community feel of the JE's, but without stoopid limitations of banning. I think one idea would be to allow any friend to always be able to post to your JE. Anyone else would still be under the ban rule. This might be a good feature request for slashdot.

    Anyway, another site would be cool as well, but it would need some kind of "draw". I remember back when we did marotti.com, and it was cool, but kinda slow. I liked the idea and I think it could happen again

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