Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot and SourceForge Sold, Now Under New Management (bizx.info)
kodiaktau writes with a link to today's announcement that DHI Group, Inc. (which you might know better as Dice, the company that bought Slashdot and sister site SourceForge in 2012) today announced that it completed the sale of its Slashdot and SourceForge businesses (together referred to as 'Slashdot Media') to BIZX, LLC in a transaction that closed on January 27, 2016. Financial terms were not disclosed. DHI first announced its plan to sell Slashdot Media in July 2015 as part of its strategy to focus on its core brands, as Slashdot Media no longer fits within the Company's core strategic initiatives. KeyBanc Capital Markets Inc. served as the Company's exclusive financial advisor for the transaction. (FOSS Force has a short article with some more info BIZX and the sale.)
Our first order of business is to get rid of any malware and deceptive advertisements. Check out the plans here: http://fossforce.com/2016/01/s...
"As a leading digital media company, we publish hundreds of popular web sites and provide advertising solutions for multiple industries such as travel & tourism, telecommunications, personal finance, credit, business products and more."
I'm not sure if that is good or bad, but I think we can probably expect more ads.
Existing sites from BIZX are sites such as MyVoipProvider.com and 123Business.com. Just.. look at those two and draw your own conclusions.
How about getting rid of non-functioning "Disable Advertising" buttons?
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Logan, thanks for introducing yourself to me and answering my questions posted as AC in the SpaceX article. I've been around here since around 1999, so I've seen things change a lot over time. I have some suggestions to make, and I'd be interested to hear what you and the other editors have to say.
* Bring back a focus on Linux and FOSS. While I enjoy other topics, too, this is a sister site to SourceForge and FOSS is in Slashdot's DNA. Slsahdot used to have lots of sections (Ask Slashdot, Apple, BSD, YRO, Science, etc...) and some of the stories now posted to the front page could go into those sections. There were stories whenever new versions of the Linux kernel, FreeBSD distributions, and some software packages. Those were good and placed a greater emphasis on FOSS. Renewing a focus on YRO would be great, too, because those rights are under attack now more than ever.
* There used to be a good amount of original content on Slashdot, things like interviews, book reviews, articles written by Jon Katz. I understand that it may not be worth paying someone to write original content, but why not solicit it from users? I'd love to see more of an emphasis on Ask Slashdot and interviews.
* There were also follow-ups on stories that had been posted recently, and they were grouped together into a single article. This was called Slashback. As I recall, that was posted weekly. I'd love to see that come back.
* Please eliminate the restrictions that only allow users posting at -1 to post twice a day. Yes, they're trolls, but they'd also post in journals and converse with other users in their journals. I think there's more AC trolling because of those restrictions (I'm guilty of this), more mod points and effort wasted, and perhaps less interaction between logged-in users. While they're trolls, they were also responsible for much of the culture and humor of this site (e.g., ALL YOUR BASE, IN SOVIET RUSSIA, Natalie Portman and hot grits, can you imagine a Beowulf cluster of, etc...) and were entertaining. It's part of what made the site fun for a lot of people, and I think you'd bring more people here if you relaxed some of the restrictions.
* I'd love to see the current code powering Slashdot to be released as FOSS. One of the great things about Slashdot was Slashcode. It also brought in some community involvement as people could suggest and implement improvements to the site. While this was probably quite a small percentage of users, some contributed and others ran Slash on their own sites. It was also a great gesture that a site about FOSS also released its own code as FOSS.
* Editors were generally unwilling to link to paywalled sites or sites that did sketchy things. The NY Times was the one exception to this. I'd like to see less things on sketchy sites and those with obnoxious ads (Forbes). If people like Ethan want people to read their content, I'd rather they submit the content as stories on Slashdot rather than linking to Forbes, which has served malware ads while demanding people turn off their ad blockers.
The deal closed less than 24 hours ago. We're going to look at all options in order to improve the experience. And, no, that doesn't mean we're going to roll out a crappy new interface without listening to user feedback. We want to make sure we get it right.
Hopefully it'll prosper now. We have a good team in place and we're listening to you guys.
What is the airspeed velocity of a laden swallow?
Part of what I view what has happened with Slashdot, and it is not alone, is that forums are everywhere today. And not just forums but all sorts of different takes on the genre.
I'm going to say some pretty obvious things but back when I 1st discovered the site there was no Facebook or some means of having a forum type discussion on every website. (I honestly don't remember when I 1st made this login but it was a long time ago now. Rob still had links to his favorite sites as part of the content.) So having not only having a forum that was dedicated to "News for Nerds" that also incorporated a system that tried, oh how it has tried over the years, to self moderate the comments was a pretty unique thing.
And while /. still is somewhat unique in its moderation system there are so many options for people these days who want to express their viewpoint that it is tough to point to anything that /. might have as a strong draw. I say that also with the idea in mind that so many people prefer to live in their own echo chamber such that they are not often look for an educated discussion, rather just a way to be a part of their flavor of groupthink. (And /. has been guilty of that as well of course.)
I don't envy you the challenge of keeping /. relevant and something that will not just be a money sink. It would take way more thought than I wish to do here this late at night. (I was hoping that this post would come earlier when the news broke on the web but cest la vie.) However I will say that I will be keeping a close eye on what the direction of the overall site. Especially things like G+ trying to force me to disclose personal information or any thing like that. The very moment I get a bad vibe from the site or the direction I think that it is going I'll add slashdot.org localhost to my hosts file and that will be that.
Not trying to come across as combative but I felt the need to say as there has been a strong push by many corporations to monetize every part of their IP/data/etc. And I'm not looking for some promise of how exactly you will make /. something other than a money sink. That is for you to figure out...ethically.
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
Could you get feedback from us "veterans" that have been reading /. for the past, say, 15 years?
i.e. Some of the things I'd like to see fixed:
- Unicode support
- Fix the broken "lameness filter" -- You can't even post a reasonable length of code with it, nor provide a list of bullet points with short sentences.
- No more StartsWithAShill and other trolls
- Allow older accounts who have good standing being able to post faster. The 4 minute time-out is archaic compared to reddit
Hello Whipslash, thank you for taking the time to answer questions here.
I've seen this comment by you a few times and I wanted to add my two cents. Hopefully this is as good a place as any to add them.
SourceForge damaged themselves to an incredible degree in my eyes by their various deceptive practices. The tone-deaf (and obviously fake) customer care team responses about dealing with the malware, coupled with the lack of follow-up to any of their promises about the matter, was particularly insulting. That being said, SourceForge is not dead to me.
However, individual projects are. The people behind some of the more popular software projects hosted at SourceForge were all too happy to jump onboard with malware bullshit and to spin and spin to try and justify their decision. FileZilla and PDFCreator come to mind immediately, and I'm sure I could think of another half-dozen if I went back through the software I use day-to-day and consider my history on that item's function.
My recommendation (which I hope you will consider, but not necessarily follow) would be to hunt these projects down, decapitate them, and actively solicit a functional replacement (sponsor the fork!). I will NEVER use FileZilla again. I will NEVER use PDFCreator again. I may remove the DNS blackhole that currently keeps my organization safe from SourceForge's current shitpile, but the project folks who were happy to compromise themselves can burn in hell forever.
Without quality software, there will never be any reason to again visit SourceForge, with or without malware smeared all over its pages.
Thanks again for stopping in. You've got a hell of an uphill battle with SourceForge, I wish you the best of luck.
Since you seem to actually be reading these responses....
markdown. HTML was the latest and greatest we had when Slashdot came out. Let people write in markdown, restructured text, bbcode, html, latex.... Nikola and iPython can do it.
Unicode support. It's 2016. For the love of god, Unicode support.
How about a completely redone-HTML5 skeleton and have a design competition for who can theme it the best. CSS has come pretty far since 2001.
It's like removing the salt and spices from the food you eat.
You need some level of obnoxious people to keep things alive. If everything is just banana smoothies and teletubbies all day long you would get bored pretty quickly.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
The deal closed less than 24 hours ago. We're going to look at all options in order to improve the experience. And, no, that doesn't mean we're going to roll out a crappy new interface without listening to user feedback. We want to make sure we get it right.
Hi Whiplash,
/. and SourceForge are. Presumably a sum of money exchanged hands for these sites and brands and it is not unreasonable for Bizx to expect to make that money back by some means.
First off, thank you for starting out by engaging the community but as you undoubtedly know we're a cynical, suspicious, curmudgeony lot...
Well let me put it this way, many of us would like some kind of idea as to what Bizx's long term plans for
The promises of listening to the community and doing right are all good and well... but as I said we're a cynical and curmudgeony lot so we're quick to go into "we've heard all this before" mode. Also that Bizx is a marketing company, knowing their motivations and desired outcomes would help allay many of our suspicions.
BTW, FWIW I hope for the best (experience sadly, has taught me to expect the worst). Also feature request: may we have an option to have an automatic translation of US customary measurements into Metric.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Does this mean Unicode support? Or, to put it another way, you're going to rewrite from scratch because it's completely broken?
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
It only took Soylent News a few weeks to implement working Unicode support. Apparently the code supports it, but most characters are filtered to prevent trolling. Back in the early days people would do things like post long strings to widen the page, or use Unicode characters to reverse text flow direction and the like. I'm not exactly sure what Soylent did to prevent that but they seem to have it sorted out.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
... and make it as a GitHub competitor? GitHub is good, but far from perfect.