[Slashcode-development] Thoughts on persistent storie capability.

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Persistent stories: Stories that are meant to be continuously used for
discussion regarding one or more issues/subjects/blah that do not 'time
out/die' like typical 'news' type stories that are tied to chronology. The
example I gave was on a web design site, a story could be created for 'HTML
Help'. Since on a site like this that kind of story would always be
beneficial and isn't tied to anything chronological (like news stories.) it
would be nice to have this always 'stick around'. It's pretty much the only
real feature BB's like UBB and Phorum have over Slash and I see it
constantly requested.

So that I don't have to preface any conversation regarding this with that
'definition' does anyone have a better suggestion for this kind of story
than persistent story? Otherwise I'll refer to it as that from now on with
no preface.

On to the reason for writing! In thinking about how persistent stories would
work, I came across a few question marks.

IIRC, BB's usuall 'prune' stories so you don't have a persistent story
sticking around for 5 years and ending up having 25k comments. I guess the
easy solution to this is to have some cron job do the same, but what do
other people think about how to handle this? (Or perhaps not handle it at
all and implement some 'date' type filter so people can choose to read only
comments made in the past x days. Or both? Or?)

Moderation: You cannot participate in a story you meta-moderated and vice
versa. Since persistent stories are, by nature, ongoing things, if this
policy remains you will have either people essentially 'banned' from
participating in ever-continuing discussion or people 'banned' from ever
moderating comments to it. The solution I see is a overhaul of the
meta-moderation system to allow every user (with configurable filters, for
example only allow *registered* users with karma > x and length of account
activity > y, etc.) the ability to moderate every comment in every story,
regardless of which stories they participate in. Basically the way
www.kuro5hin.org does it. It's a more democratic policy and since it allows
much more moderation, you have a finer grained moderation result. For
example, since 100 people moderated user Foo's comment, his rating will be
much more 'real' and accurate to the communities opinion of his comment than
if 5 people, 3 of which are Foo's pals, moderated him up. However I'm no
Stephen Hawking, so, what do you guys think?

There's several more but this is plenty to get started. I especially want to
know Brian's thoughts.

regards