[Slashcode-general] I volunteer to help resuscitate Slashcode

[George T. <geo...@gm...>]

An Open Letter to the Developers of Slashdot, and What's Left of the
Slashcode Community --

I'm an avid reader of Slashdot. I don't comment much, but I've always
been impressed by Slashdot's moderation system. It manages what should
be an unmanageable task: ensuring a civil discussion among thousands
and thousands of users.

I've come into a situation where I now need a system much like
Slashdot's: an extensible and scalable readership-moderated online
discussion forum. Lo and behold, Slashdot make Slash open source years
ago. They even got an O'Reilly book.

But Slashcode was never the priority of the coders. The last official
release is, what, nine years old? There's been much more modern code
released, but even that's a couple of years old. What little traces I
can find of other sites using Slash involve those sites migrating to
something else. This message is evidently the first post on
slashcode-general in almost a year. The coders have written that
management of the open-source branch of the codebase is still not
their priority. And so the userbase has almost disappeared, like so
many Mac clones.

Over the past three months, I've tried to install Slash myself, and I
run into the sorts of problems that are documented elsewhere. I relied
on the woefully out-of-date alternate install document at
misterorange.com. And I still don't know: am I using the right
distro...is there a best distro? Is this version of Perl too new? This
version of MySQL or Apache? Why is this thing not working...and why is
it so hard to make work? The friend who's been helping me through this
process has constantly grumbled about the suite's age, its reliance on
aged platforms, and wouldn't I like to try something more modern?

Nevertheless, no one can name me a CMS that does as good or better a
job of moderation. (I desperately wish someone could, because I'd be
pleased to go use that.) The coders have given their reasoning for why
they still use Perl and Apache 1.3: because they still work. Slashdot
is living proof that Slashcode works. I buy their logic.

I believe so strongly in its value as a discussion-moderating tool
that I'm pledging to volunteer time to revive the Slashcode project.
I'm asking for help from whoever will give it.

I'm at best a feral coder. (I found a bug in installing 2.52 the other
night, a typo that screws up the install at the creation of the
"Preview" table. I was able to fix it and get the whole install done,
but it took forever and it only half-works.) But I know what good user
interface design looks like, and I'm an excellent writer and
documenter. I'd like at least to help make the installation more
user-friendly.

Perhaps it's naive of me to think that this email will make something
happen. But if you have even a smidgen of interest in making Slash
accessible to a slightly more general audience, please, please post
here. Let's begin this project anew.

== George