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#35 "Cool Journals"
When Rob and I talked last week, I brought up the idea
of "cool journals" and Rob didn't immediately shoot it
down... I wanted to drop it on sf.net and maybe get
more ideas...
I think we should find a way to encourage users to
write in journals more. It just makes sense. So how do
we do this?
My idea was to throw some journals on the front page,
index.shtml and in a default slashbox. Obviously we
can't make this auto-selected, it would be incredibly
gameable. So we'd have to have human selection of which
journals appear there, which means authors hand-picking
them.
I'd like to toss in an admin.pl op which shows the
latest 20 journals posted, probably limited to users
with nonnegative karma and decent tokens. Authors could
browse them (and scan backwards in time for more) as
they had free time. If we did the interface right,
there could be a simple Submit button to automatically
grab a user's journal and toss it on the homepage.
The slashbox on the homepage would only show the 5 or
10 most recently selected journals. Once more get
selected by authors/admins, old journals fall off the
bottom of the slashbox.
We wouldn't have to have a strict schedule of "today we
must find three more journals!" When authors find
something cool they drop it in. Some cool journals
would stay on the homepage for days, some maybe only
for hours -- oh well, tough luck.
To prevent trolls from getting on the homepage and then
changing all their links to goatsex, we would need to
modify journal.pl so that, if your journal is currently
on the homepage, your ability to edit it is temporarily
revoked.
Also we would want to edit journal.pl so that in the
header/title for a journal, if it was *ever* on the
homepage (even if it's scrolled off now), we give it a
little gold star or something and say "this journal was
a Cool Journal on 1/23/03."
I think this would make people realize that others are
writing journals, and encourage them to start their own.
I have more ideas but this, or something like it,
should happen first, IMHO.
Opinions?
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Note that it should be optional. I should be able to
select, either per-journal or per-account, that my journal
is off limits to Cool Journals. We don't want to drive
people away who might not like their journals presented in
this manner, especially since they would not be able to make
changes.
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Yeah, we thought about that. It would be a checkbox just
like the "Willing To Moderate" checkbox. Lower priority
IMHO, though it's probably easy enough to do.
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How about if you edit the journal entry it is removed from
the frontpage? Its someone's journal, they have a write to
edit what they say.
The search engine already pulls up the latest journal
entries, we can use calls from it to build the page.
I agree with pudge about the option to say "no, I don't wish
this"
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This is a "wouldn't it be cool if..."
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Moving this to the low pri feature requests because that's
what it is. To anyone considering working on this feature
and intending it to be used on Slashdot, the security
concerns and anti-gaming issues would need to be heavily
considered.
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I love this idea. So much that i sugessted it too. :)
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=56120&cid=5459504
Being Jamie suggested it, i guess there is real will to get
this done? Just that "rules" are needed? If rules are what
you need, i should be able to help, as that is right up my
alley.
The best way to to this is to remove the JE and make it a
story, assuming the user has the appropriate option checked.
In a sense, such a JE is a quasi-story submission, except it
also allows comments before it makes it there.
The other half of this (at least in my mind) would be to
turn rejected story submissioons into the user's JEs. (Or
even to make submissions a JE completely.)
Anyway, if you guys are serious about this one but just want
rules, give me some hints and i'll hack up a sort of specs
for your review.