Re: [Slashcode-general] I volunteer to help resuscitate Slashcode

[Alexandre L. <ale...@ec...>]

Hi George,

While I wish you good luck, I too believe Slashcode is heading nowhere 
(other than Slashdot, of course). I've been running a Slashsite from 
2005 to August 2010, so until fairly recently,

Look at the mailing list archives, I think they are revealing. In short, 
there is *no* slashcode community anymore. And very few sites use it 
now. With the help of an experienced slash developer, we even developed 
interesting modules for slashcode, such as GeoRSS support and 
interactive web maps in stories. But community support was inexistent. 
2005-2010 was already too late for Slash to be revived in my opinion.

I've been a big fan of the Slashcode moderation system since early 
2000s, that's why I dived. But I found out that for the system to work 
fine, you need tens of comments per day on your site. That ended up not 
being our case, so the superb slash moderation system was ultimately not 
being exploited to its potential by our site.

So, after 5 years of semi-torture with slash, we finally moved to Drupal 
6 last August. I don't regret it a bit. While Drupal isn't perfect (what 
is?), I, a non-developer, can manage it and easily configure it. 
Especially important when considering that this ex-slashsite is a 
side-project that I can devote very little time to it. With the 
thousands of Drupal modules and its very active community, I have access 
to plenty of features I would never had access in slash. I should have 
migrated years ago.


I loved slash (and still love Slashdot), but I believe slashcode is dead 
and its successful revival would be a miracle. But miracles happen! Good 
luck if you try :-)


Alex, slashgeo.org
--
Alexandre Leroux, M.Sc., ing.
Section de la réponse aux urgences environnementales /
Environmental Emergency Response Section
Centre météorologique canadien / Canadian Meteorological Centre
Environnement Canada / Environment Canada
ale...@ec... - (514) 421-5024


On 02/03/11 19:22, George Taft wrote:
> 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
> 
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