Re: [Slashcode-general] Slashcode is dead, long live Slashcode?

[gnul <nul...@gm...>]

Building an open source community seems to be a chicken and egg type
of problem.  You need a quality code base that appeals to a wide
audience; and you need that audience using the code.  (Writing
documentation and contributing to the code also helps.)

While Slashcode /appeals/ to a wide audience, and a lot of people
still read Slashdot, it seems many web developers are unable to use
the code.

I feel there are two large limiting factors to growing the Slashcode
community, others have already mentioned both:

1)  Very infrequent updates by the maintainers means that I can't
checkout the latest code and have something that "feels" like /.  (I
can understand that Slashdot itself wants to keep it's look & feel
unique, so ship a subset of images + css.  But the ajax and other
enhancements are key to having a working site.)

2)  The Apache 1.x limitation. It means that developers wanting to
setup a Slashcode site need to setup a virtual server specifically for
Apache 1. (And maintain that software).

If the Slashcode maintainers don't want to extend the effort necessary
to make Slashcode work with Apache 2 as well as ship packaged
releases, then the only option for the community is a fork, which is
always unfortunate.

With all of the other active communities for this type of software, I
think it may be less work to gain a larger community by hacking other
software to include slashcode features such as moderation and the
firehose...

Yet forking or modding other software is still a lot of work.  Bummer.
 Perhaps the best course of action is to lobby the Slashcode
maintainers?

I really want[ed] to build a Slashcode site, but the Apache 1
limitation prevents me.

Good luck!

 -gnul