FeatureList

Overview

I'd appreciate if everyone would just start adding or removing things they think need to be in the to-be variant of this site

Rather than isolate the things that slashdot already had (we should be familiar with it), let's just explicitly state what we want to see, with the idea that most of it is a copy or inspired by the original. But we can possibly explain, refine, or restrict our focus to the bits that matter.

General Requirements

• Cool new colour
• OAuth provider, could be useful when we integrate other means of communication (e.g. forums, IRC)

What features worked and what features did not work during the lifetime of Slashdot?

• Feature that worked was the karma system allowed users to voluntarily disable the advertisement, made them feel happy even though it did nothing different for the business.
• Feature that did not work: Adding a sponsored poll / slashvertising

Engine Requirements

• Be mindful of bandwidth and the amount of processing done by the server when building any features. One extra character balloons into many megabytes of expensive bandwidth and consumption of server resources. Each feature that bloats a page response or causes the server to process something increases costs--KEEP COSTS DOWN!
• UTF-8 clean for anything that doesn't end up in a URL (i.e. tags, titles, channel names, user names)
  • Of course, some combining marks would have to be filtered, and the resulting text round-tripped through NFD->NFC to prevent certain types of attacks against users or making text difficult to index.
• MathJax support both in comments and in submissions

Mathjax is the math rendering engine used on stackexchange and will allow scientific discussion between us (people who read math).

• Channels (like yro, politics, apple) as first class objects
  • "Primary" channels that have DNS shorthand (http://apple.altslash.org/ being equiv to http://altslash.org/ch/apple/)
  • "Secondary" channels that users could create and play editor that use the more verbose syntax (http://altslash.org/ch/baseball/) that is reminiscent of subreddits
  • User channels (i.e. journals, as we've always had)
• Display user IDs
• Javascript Optional
  • I enjoy having the comment rating slider for example, but main functionality should be accessible with lynx at the least!

• Submission queues for all channels with membership at the discretion of the channel owner; being able to submit also implies up/downvoting submissions and tagging

Editors/channel owners only

List of users who can submit

All of my friends (for user journals)

All users with mod status

All registered users

Everyone

• Articles are also first class objects

Perma-link independant of channel

Articles are tagged by topic(s) as well as channel

Articles are automatically archived

Archive is easily searchable, and should be referenced when submissions are edited.

Articles can be cross-posted to other channels by a channel owner (built into the UI if the editor manages more than one channel)

• Comment key features

Comments are first class objects, just as before, just like articles

Comments can be edited for a short period of time by owner

HOWEVER: Edited comments get a new ID and it links to older versions in the new one. This detail is made prominent to viewer if a comment reply happened before an edit.

Allow alternate markup options (bbcode, markdown, wiki markup)

Provide a mapping to actual div and styles that will be applied, or HTML equivalent codes

• Allow moderation in same article that you've posted in; only disallow moderation to your own reply chain.
  • You're obviously not allowed to moderate in your own accepted or posted article (treating all comments as replies)
  • Does "reply chain" include parent? If not, how do we deal with threadjacking:
    1. AC posts first comment on a new article (let's presume it's an upmod-worthy comment, not fristpsot)
    2. I post my unrelated comment as a reply to AC's FP, in order to achieve greater visibility
    3. I downmod the AC to -1
    4. Now AC is invisible to anyone with threshold != -1 (including many with mod points and threshold=0, who would have modded AC up on his own merits)
    5. Unless/until users with threshold=-1 and mod points happen by to rectify things, my comment is now the first thing most users see.
    6. ??? (sorry, can't resist...)
    7. Profit!
    • Actually, not just the immediate parent like I said, but 'all' ancestor comments. Otherwise as step 1.5 I just reply with an AC troll (which someone else will rightfully downmod), then in step 2 I reply to that; now that the original AC first post is my comment's gp, so I can still downmod it.
  • Good point you should be prevented from moderating any children and ancestors of your posts (but sibling chains are still fair game)

Moderation

Due to its size, moved to a separate article. You are welcome to discuss and add your proposals there!

Article submission

• Editor:
  • UTF-8
  • MathJax (mentioned earlier)
  • ability to check links inline during writing the submission. To see how it works just try writing email in gmail. Everytime when you add a link, there's an option right below it to "check link"

• Encouraging submitting good articles:
  • Everytime when a story gets accepted, the submitter gets a small cryptocoin reward (as we know - very easy to automate this). Since we are very poor (at least at start) we will not pay a fixed amount, but a small percentage of all cryptocoins owned by altslashdot.
  • If a story gets accepted but is hugely downvoted later (think Roland Piquepaille), the submitter must give back his reward to be able to submit a new story. In fact even better if he had to give back a tiny fraction more cryptocoin than he received.
• Is there a path to remove a bad editor ? <=== I'm not very fond of emacs

• To have funds for all that, we could use (check also Finances):
  • That tipping system (mentioned above in moderation), and everytime you tip someone else a very tiny fraction of that tip goes to altslashdot.
  • Also payments from people desperate to post in thread (or story) where they have moderated (if we decide that this feature is useful, and if it is thread or whole story).
  • Failed submitters, who had to give back their reward plus some extra fraction because their story was hated after it was submitted (think Roland Piquepaille) as mentioned above.
  • Also we can simply hope for money from cryptocoin donations address. IMHO that is quite possible if we make this site good.
  • We might consider paying subscribers using cryptocoin.
  • Make a "featured product/serivce -> ask for review" section that charges for having a product reviewed