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.
If the slash codebase could be extended to show when an Administrator moderates your comments?
I've always thought chromatic had some interesting things to say here as a poster, and am curious about how much detail he goes into in his book about Slashcode. Also, not just the code itself, but the ethics involved in running such a site.
For example, does he (or do you, if you happen to be reading this, chromatic) go into things like the admins using "bitchslaps" on their users, and when they should/shouldn't. Or from a somewhat disturbing example from the past week (http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=26315&cid=285 0660), does he discuss things like scripts which flood the stories with "Offtopic" moderations, basically using (abusing?) the admin power to instantly try to squelch both user and moderator opinions? Any philosophical discussions about whether there is any point in giving users moderation power for any reason to shut them up for a while, seeing as there isn't really much point in moderation when some admin with a chip on his shoulder is going to come by and stomp on everyone's opinions by using his unlimited mod points to make sure that something stays marked "Offtopic" (over 250 so far)?
Good luck with the book, chromatic, like I was saying, you're one of the better posters here!
I'm waiting for Wiki version 2 which will include trolls. No logging software is complete without trolls.
"Da ist ein Technölüst in mein Unterpanten!"
Why not use a wiki to handle the submission queue? Let users create articles in the wiki, and have the slashdot editors and other users suggest changes for making an article better before posting it on the main site. That way, marginal articles will be improved, the chance of factual errors is diminished, and story quality is increased. Once the story's good enough, just migrate it to the front page. Story rejection can be handled in a similar way as it currently is, witht the possible addition of having a story expire if there are no additions/changes after a given time frame.
Questions, comments?
Marxism is the opiate of dumbasses
Shouldn't you want until the program starts creating actual HTML until you write a book about it?
Here is the creature they should have put on the cover of the book...
Modding is of course an art. There is no clear-cut mod for every post. A Slashdot template would be cool, but it might bring the problems of Slashdot with it. Trolls, flamers, the Slashdot effect, webhosting costs. All of those things would slap down most smaller sites that are gaining in popularity. A more efficient style should be adopted to keep costs down, trolls and flamers at bay, and a cache system for articles would be nice, too.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
I'm currently running a slash-ish website (using PhpSlice) on the company intranet for corporate news/software downloads/etc. I'd really like to use it for system documentation, but design of these sites is much better for presenting current news than creating manageable archives.
Now I'm wondering if a wiki would help me at all. Has anyone out there used wikis to get real work done? If so, what are their strengths? Brainstorming? Archiving knowledge? Creating dialogue? I'm curious to hear from those webmasters "out in the trenches" that are actually using this tool.
This
The idea to combine wikis and weblogs is very promising. The sequential nature of weblogs is great for news, but not for acting on these news in a sustained fashion. If Slashdot writes about some political issue, if actions are taken they are usually short-lived, or move to other mailing lists. Similarly, wikis can combine sites which host both a lot of persistent knowledge (e.g. papers, essays) with the dynamic, community-creating nature of a weblog. I plan to eventually run violence.de as a wiki-weblog, with the wiki (access-restricted) storing the papers, film pages etc., and the weblog reporting about current issues (sexual repression, censorship, new studies etc.) -- mail me if you want to help.
Wikis, when properly deployed, are the missing component to make weblogs truly useful. With properly deployed, I mean that typical wiki idiosyncrasies need to be avoided: Nobody really wants to use WikiStyleLinks, they make text harder to read and are difficult to get rid of once you have decided to use them. Choose E2 or Wikipedia style links instead. Also, access restrictions are necessary in many contexts. See the article for some further design details.
Moderation Totals: Offtopic=265, Flamebait=4, Troll=26, Redundant=3, Insightful=69, Interesting=154, Informative=32, Funny=8, Overrated=11, Underrated=46, Total=618
It's true then. I always ignored the "Michael censors..." crybaby posts written by hormonally challenged teens, but now someone has presented some real evidence that editors bitchslap accounts. I'm sure it only happens to trolls and crapflooders, but I'm still disappointed. Ban IPs or delete accounts if you must, but don't abuse the moderation system that you want your users to hold sacred.
"What is the sound of one belly slapping?"
Perl has their camels, Awk got a picture of an awk....
Couldn't they find an 18th-century woodcut of a taco?
Karma: Bored. (Thinking about resurrecting the "Anyone else is an imposter" joke.)
Can we mod the actual story -1 offtopic? Pretty soon we'll be seeing stories about Malda's personal life...
This is necessary...life, feeds on life...
But if they posted it as "from the shameless-self-promotion department", that would be showing a modicum of shame, wouldn't it? Thus it would be inappropriate.
You know, I used to like the department thingies, but I started ignoring them completely like 2 or 3 years ago and didn't even notice I'd done it.
The enemies of Democracy are
A book on installing and running a Slash site would have to cover a lot of things - installing Linux, Apache, mod_perl(not to mention a bunch of other perl modules), and MySQL. Hopefully this book will show how to make a scalable site by using NFS and multiple web servers - since Slash is capable of running on such a beast.
I think a book like this could be useful to a lot of people, and not necessarily just people who want to run a Slash site. If you've ever gotten a Slash site going, you know there is a lot of setup and configuration to make it work, and that is applicable to a lot of other things.
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
After trying slash, zope+slashdot, and a more barebones setup, I've gone with with the twiki implementation of a wiki web. I'm quite happy with that, although, a more heavily used site might well need a DB backend.
An aside. I think that telling users that they can actually *edit* pages scares them a bit.
Best wishes,
Bob
I'm struck by the idea of having a slash-style moderation system on top of a Wiki, with comment levels so you select the degree of potentially amusing noise you are prepared to tolerate. I normally run comments at level 3 but one or two trolls are in my friends list, so I get an interesting mix of very sensible and very stupid comments and I miss a lot of the me-too stuff. That might sound like a strange idea to apply to a Wiki, but I think it could be fun finding out if it works.
I'm wondering, are there alternative implementations of Slash? Of Wiki? Is everything written in Perl (no value judgment here)?
How difficult would it be to port Slash to Java Servlets? Wiki?
The reason I'm asking is not because I'm a Java bigot or anything, but because (1) it seems to be the platform of choice for the Apache Project, and (2) I have a couple of webapps deployed, and I would like to know how difficult would be to integrate Slash/Wiki with them.
Any comments from developers/porters welcome. Thank you!
The article is indeed designed to promote the book, but I wanted to write something new and unique instead of retreading what's in the book. It does contain a similar example, but the article had more room for a longer plugin.
You're welcome not to buy the book, and I hope there's enough information in the article that a decent programmer could write a new plugin without it. Feel free to send me a dollar if you do, though. :)
(I will, of course, sympathize with the cynics who say that Malda wants to promote the book 'cuz he wrote the foreword. No, he didn't use crayon. It's a nice piece.)
how to invest, a novice's guide
I would just like to say how thankless a task writing can really be. Writing involves tremendous amounts of work, especially technical books. The pressures on a writer of a technical topic are incredible. The amount of time it takes for a technical book to go from inception to print is usually a lot less than most other types of books. The turn around time must be minimal because technology evolves so quickly. I have found such a profound admiration for good books, and for the people who dedicate large chunks of their lives to sharing their knowledge.
/.er.
A truly well written book is such a blessing when you wish to learn the subject matter. It is difficult to fully appreciate it unless you have written a a book, or parts of one. So, good luck with the rest of your book Chromatic, I look forward to a book by a fellow
I have always found chromatic's writing here quite well thought. The philosophy and psychology behind online communities fascinating. I have also found slashcode to be much better than most people give it credit for, mainly because it is Perl. Anyhow.
Jeremy
the kuro5hin moderation systems is far, far supperior to slashdot's. Not only can you see all the moderations done to you, but also everyone can moderate (although only select users can hide posts) and the score is the average rather then the addtive total.
As opposed to the slashdot system which is just hack after hack...
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Geez man, you should really get out. There are a lot of server-side setups that would do you a lot better, and be a lot easier to setup and use. scoop is good, a lot of PHP things, etc.
I mean slashdot is OK if you want something exactly like slashdot... but for a simple weblog it's totaly overkill.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.