Chromatic On The Wiki Plugin For Slash

lisam writes: "The Wiki plugin integrates nicely with Slash and has a lot of cool features, says Chromatic who introduces Wikis and gives a detailed explanation of how and why the Wiki plugin works in this OnLamp article. (chromatic is coauthor of O'Reilly's upcoming Running Weblogs with Slash.)" A lot of people just think of Slashdot style sites when thinking of the Slash codebase, but this article goes on about how to extend slash in cool ways. If you are interested in plugins, the repository is a good place to start.

Comments

Re:Chromatic's book

[mwalker]

I think your comment really belongs in the hidden Slash META discussion started by CmdrTaco. CmdrTaco is currently answering questions there from all comers, so now's your chance. You can even ask him what he thinks of chromatic and Wikis, which are a move towards more community trust rather than less.

And no I am not Offtopic; I'm trying to transfer the Offtopic people into their own discussion.

Re:Chromatic's book

[chromatic]

Thank you for the kind words.

Chapter 8 of the book is all about the mechanics and philosophy of building a community out of the random visitors who stumble on your website. Most of it isn't limited to running a Slash site, and a lot of it is common sense stuff if you have a background in journalism or publishing.

We tried to come up with a good mixture of ethical and practical ideas, like how to keep readers informed of things, writing author guidelines, and handling mistakes and errata. There's also a discussion on the moderation system (in chapters 6 and 8), including some of the ways in which it can fail. Krow has a nice bit in there about the point at which user moderation is useful (for small sites, it generally isn't).

You're probably more interested in the sections about "Anti-Abuse" features. Comment filters are described, along with their failings, and the example of how to modify Slash code itself involves making the filters less strict to posters with karma above an administrator defined level. It also describes things like IP and Network blacklists.

The approach we take in the book is that these features (moderation, filters, blacklists) are merely tools that administrators can use to keep their site running and their quality of discussion and service high. If you have to use them, make the rules plain and simple and stick by them, but don't fall into the fallacy of believing that Perl can solve social problems. Maybe Perl 6 can, but that's a ways off.

For what it's worth, I put forth the idea that having a recurring story about the site itself, where the administrators and editors participate in the comments, is one of the best things a site can do.

I'm not privy to a lot of details specific to the operations of Slashdot itself, so my opinion on those is merely wild speculation... though I have read the code and do know what's possible. :)