Re: [Slashcode-development] RFC for Open Story Submission Queue plugin

[elijah w. <el...@st...>]

> First of all, I was not hostile towards him, you'll see I took the time to
> interact with him 4 or 5 times. Don't get huffy with me because I don't
> agree with Chris, that's irrational and immature. Politics are not
> appreciated nor welcome.

be extremely careful when you use rhetoric like "even you"- it pisses a
large number of people off and is not the best PR :)  anyway, point
taken.  please don't name-call, though.  


> Once again, how do you expect me to detail exactly HOW it works when we
> haven't even finished decided WHAT all it will do? What it will do would be
> done if we were not taking the time, regrettably, to ask others for what

i am asking what your vision of it thus far is.  otherwise you're really
not doing anything more than asking the community to define your project
goals for you in their entirety.  that's the hard part.  not the code. :)


> Look this is a very simple concept. We will be developing an open submission
> queue plugin for Slash. Email me everything you would like to see in it and
> THEN we will come back with a final RFC on final feature set, logic, and
> *implementation*.

that's not such a simple concept when you have provided next to no
information on what your planned stance is.  do you have one?  at
all?  don't ask people who read your message to waste their time coming up
with a feature set critique unless you already have one in mind as a
basis.

and the story submission queue concept isn't simple.  doing a one-shot
implementation is "easy", doing one that works will be harder.


> I don't understand why What (Business logic) and How (Technical logic) are
> such confusing concepts to most techies.

they aren't.  but you haven't provided this list with either.  i'm asking
you to be rhetorically clear and provide a clear picture of what it is
that you're asking, the basis for your assumptions, your ideas thus far,
and your envisioned goal.

in the absence of that, however, here are some ideas:

* submission method modularization (email, http, nntp linkages)
* administrative override (so that the trolls don't mod up a story as a
   prank)
* settable limits on the speed with which a story can be modded up before
	an automated mechanism decides a bot is doing the modding; logging
	of accounts used in this fashion
* graphing of story-submitters and frequency (libgd-perl is your friend)
* a configurable point system that can handle multiple levels of users,
  differing moderation values, and various point assignments from each.
* the ability to assign different point values to different categories-
  something may deserve +5 points from a newbie if posted to a
  "tech" section, +8 points from a recognized
  "strong-supporter-or-friend-of-admin, but only 3 points from a newbie in
  "politics" and 5 from the aforementioned strong supporter.  this puts
  responsibility for categorization in the hands of the users.  i'd like
  to see dropdown javascript boxes (or whatever) allowing the story
  submitter to give the top 3 categories they see fitting and their point
  values.  form submit boxes with regex/match-parsing would work just as
  well.
* RDF / RSS exports of the story submission queues
* items in queue web-accessible via some means other than the story
  moderation page- i'd like to be able to get to a raw dump of the
  stories.  i don't really care how- NNTP or mysql or postgres with a
  simple page that just dumps the data would be fine.  of course, that
  page will need controls on how quickly it can be dumped- perhaps the
  perl script responsible for that can log accesses from IP's and slow
  itself down accordingly?
* a weird idea i just had- what if slashcode could parse in the rdf/rss
  headlines from other sites and include THOSE into the story submission
  queue?  it might not be such a bad idea to be able to choose to see
  headlines frmo other relevant sites in a one-shot format, rather than
  the full-on slash frontpage format. working on flexibility here rather
than what most people would want...

~elijah