The nascent "AltSlashdot.org" effort hasn't settled on a name yet. The name will be changed, and will avoid all trademark issues. The plan is to have a community vote on the new name; several punctuation related puns have already been suggested.

The hardest part, of course, is building up enough momentum fast enough for such a large community to transition. It may or may not work...

This is probably right. We are all looking at the beta redesign as an obvious failure. But the people in power may well believe that overall the loss of the community of commenters will be "worth it" to transform the site into a higher-traffic (and thus higher-profit) news aggregator. On some level this makes sense: the active community of Slashdot commentors is far smaller than the size of the people who just visit the site. So if one can piss off the commentors but increase web traffic overall, then it's worth it.

The problem with this logic is that all of those visitors only come to the site to read (if not engage in) the commenting that goes on. Really the (relatively high-quality) comments are the only thing that differentiate Slashdot from any other website. Once you make commenting/discussion more cumbersome, it will go away, and all you will be left with is the Slashdot "brand". But does that brand really have any weight? It only does with the small community of tech-enthusiasts that you just drove away from your site. It's not like the average person is going to see a "friendlier jazzier Slashdot" and immediately think "Wow, finally a Slashdot I can enjoy!".

If you look into the financial details, it appears that Dice considers Slashdot a loser:

... advertising revenue has declined over the past year and there is no improvement expected in the future financial performance of Slashdot.

Note that this isn't saying that Slashdot's ad revenue isn't enough to pay for operating Slashdot; merely saying that the ad revenue is falling with time. They are no doubt desperate to increase profits. It's actually quite possible that Slashdot's ad revenue is undervalued (because it isn't taking into account that many Slashdot users hold key positions where they influence what tech is purchased by companies, friends come to them for tech advice, etc.). But overall the idea that they can increase ad revenue by revamping the entire site is a bad gamble: the community will disappear in a flash, and ad revenue will drop to zero.

Ultimately, Dice management appears willing to take the gamble. It is one they will most likely lose, and we will lose Slashdot in the process. But they won't care much, since Slashdot as-is just isn't pulling in that much money. It's a sad reality that even a community as big and stable as Slashdot (generating constant ad revenue) is still too small/niche to satisfy their money-lost. Our last hope may lie in efforts to build a new site that we can migrate to (e.g. AltSlashdot.org).

Actually, Slashdot alternatives should avoid having a name too closely tied to "Slashdot", so as to avoid trademark disputes down the road.

In fact, Slashdot has actually used the "backslash" brand. If I recall correctly, the original idea was for that site-section to house various 'about slashdot' material, but currently there seems to be nothing there. The tag "Slashback" has also been used on Slashdot and so should be avoided.

FYI, there is burgoning effort to build a replacement at AltSlashdot.org (final name pending a community vote). If you're interested in having a replacement exist, then consider contributing to one of these efforts.

BTW, you should consider coordinating effort with others who are attempting roughly the same thing. E.g. user Okian Warrior has registered AltSlashdot.org and is planning to put a slashcode install there.

In fact, there may be more parallel efforts out there. On the one hand, competition may be good (let the best replica win!); on the other hand, migrating a community the size of Slashdot is no small task, so we may only get one shot at this.

Also, for legal/trademark reasons, you may want to consider a name that doesn't include "Slashdot" so overtly. E.g. tpaudio has suggested "Plusdot". Another idea (mine) is to call it "divergence" or "divergence operator"... the logo would be the mathematical form of divergence, i.e. nabla symbol followed by a dot (which looks like an augmented "slash dot").