PDCOM 2.0: THE NEXT LEVEL

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Semantics.

Enjoy wasting your time to bring about a better method to put articles no-one will read on the front page.

The only evidence I need to indicate that people would be interested in those articles is the monthly PD top searches.

[E.O.T.]

OK

          i feel that despite my forumtardedness, i have a grasp on the notion being suggested here. if we're choosing topics to appear on the main page feed,  the search topics would possibly at least, be more directly associated to relevant board material, i would assume.

VISITORS

          would absolutely, in my opinion, be scrolling through this material, because it is simply, predominantly  presented when one is immediately viewing the board.

THE FORUM

          would possibly be more active with individuals actually tuned into what really is happening in a relevant way, on the board, ...maybe?

[Pæs]

What we need to do is install Joomla, Drupal, Wordpress, phpBB, MediaWiki and some other shit, Tumblr and Twitter it up, and feed all of them our content, then randomly select which content management system each user will experience the website through.

[Faust]

What we need to do is install Joomla, Drupal, Wordpress, phpBB, MediaWiki and some other shit, Tumblr and Twitter it up, and feed all of them our content, then randomly select which content management system each user will experience the website through.

A lot of work. If it's going to be that scale I'd have to charge for my time.

[Triple Zero]

What about some sort of system for upvoting/promoting posts, and if enough people upvote a post it gets promoted to the front page?

Man, I think that kind of site format would be incredibly awesome. With interesting content rotating on the front page, that would be pretty hot. We have a lot of high-quality writers/thinkers here, and a lot of the good stuff is just sort of getting lost... this would be a way to put it to good use and revive that antiquated front page into something both interesting and useful.

I'm getting kind of moist just at the idea of it. Do you think this is something that could actually happen?

Yes! Something like that would probably be the most straightforward and obvious way to do it. And that's a good thing.

Glad you suggest it because I usually come up with too complex things. Also I wasn't sure if voting would push hot buttons or not (but I believe that's just karma-style voting).

It needs to be the simplest thing that could possibly do the trick because then, even if Cain turns out to be right, it's not too much wasted effort.

Still,

The problem with PD isn't software based, there isn't a software solution.  No amount of rearranging deckchairs is going to change the fact that it is people's attitudes that need to change, not our "web 2.0 user drive feedback functionality" bullshit.

I both agree and disagree. Yes it's fundamentally an attitude problem. And no, software isn't going to solve it directly, and especially not "web 2.0 user feedback bullshit", whatever that would be.

However, I believe one of the most effective ways to change such an attitude is by broadcasting the type of attitude/content/discussion we would like to see. Like attracts like.

Because directly trying to change the attitudes of individual members of PD is not going to work. It's in fact worse than "probably a bad idea".

But changing the attitude of the community as a whole is a different thing. New people that join because they read our best shit and love it, intrinsically will have a different attitude than new people that join because they see our current most recent discussions and bulshitting and join regardless, or new people that join because their friends said they should.

I believe EOT is saying the same thing with "individuals tuned in".

And as I said I do believe that it is fundamentally an attitude problem, so if you can come up with better ways to change it, there's no reason why not to attack the problem from multiple angles. Flat out telling people on PD they should change their attitudes is one approach that I'm a bit cynical about, though--especially in the long run.

And even if that fails there seem to be a lot of people that would love to see our best shit organised in a better way if only to save them from drowning in an ocean of lesser shit, to archive and keep.

What we need to do is install Joomla, Drupal, Wordpress, phpBB, MediaWiki and some other shit, Tumblr and Twitter it up, and feed all of them our content, then randomly select which content management system each user will experience the website through.

Ooh yes and A/B testing the fuck out of it!

Well, what are you waiting for, set up a Kickstarter, get a co-founder, make a launch partier and do a round of angel investors! And by "doing" I mean "receiving".

Let's open up a can of brogrammers!


(Faust I believe Signor Paesior was taking the figurative piss)

[Faust]

(Faust I believe Signor Paesior was taking the figurative piss)

I actually think its a good system, if it was designed to be scalable to plug into whatever the new fad website is it would allow very swift and automated cross site publishing. There are existing systems out there that do that but they cost a fortune.

[tyrannosaurus vex]

...not letting this topic fall off the first page and languish forever (yet)

another AMAZING SUGGESTION: rewire the Newsfeed so each page-load displays a random snippet in a predictable "old-fashioned TOP SECRET stamp" style somewhere on the page. AND, since discordians are fucking difficult to get along with we should offer various themes for the site, so people can pretend they're visiting the type of site they wish PD was: "click here to pretend PD is a TECHNOLOGY SITE!" and BANG the background goes all brushed-metal and there are blinky lights; or "click here to pretend PD is a RELIGION SITE!" and angels and shit come flying out of nowhere and strum harps.

feel free to ignore these.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Trip mentioned Karma-style voting... does SMF have that capability, but for posts rather than posters? That seems like a super-easy way to manage it.

I am really excited at the idea that this could actually happen, if for no other reason that then when people ask me what Discordianism is all about, I could point them to the front page and say "check this out and read a few of the articles", and they would come away with a decent idea of what Discordianism is about NOW, and not what it was about 50 years ago. It would also make the front page something like what 23ae was supposed to be, but all of our content would come from within, from posts and conversations that are already happening on a regular basis.

[Faust]

There is a karma system in the back end. But it does seem to be posters not posts. It still comes back to automating something to push content to the front page. I'd say in the first run it will be manual. When people think something is good it will get cross posted to the front page where it will remain for some duration.

The next opening I'll have for free time to work on the site is in two weeks time so I'll see about doing something with this then.
I'm currently working flat out on the end of a project, and writing proposals so I will have continued work after this one ends but there should be some leeway.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Cool!

[Anna Mae Bollocks]

There is a karma system in the back end. But it does seem to be posters not posts. It still comes back to automating something to push content to the front page. I'd say in the first run it will be manual. When people think something is good it will get cross posted to the front page where it will remain for some duration.

The next opening I'll have for free time to work on the site is in two weeks time so I'll see about doing something with this then.
I'm currently working flat out on the end of a project, and writing proposals so I will have continued work after this one ends but there should be some leeway.

Those little free phpbb forums have something called a "portal" that shows parts of recent content, it's not the regular front page, it's something separate. Would it be hard to set that up?

[Telarus]

I've been playing with the PD.com RSS feed in a Concept Mapping application that can query OpenCalais and AlchemyAPI for meta-data tags.

[Faust]

There is a karma system in the back end. But it does seem to be posters not posts. It still comes back to automating something to push content to the front page. I'd say in the first run it will be manual. When people think something is good it will get cross posted to the front page where it will remain for some duration.

The next opening I'll have for free time to work on the site is in two weeks time so I'll see about doing something with this then.
I'm currently working flat out on the end of a project, and writing proposals so I will have continued work after this one ends but there should be some leeway.

Those little free phpbb forums have something called a "portal" that shows parts of recent content, it's not the regular front page, it's something separate. Would it be hard to set that up?

My experiences with phpbb have not been great. It allows a lot of modifications but is terribly unstable.

I've been playing with the PD.com RSS feed in a Concept Mapping application that can query OpenCalais and AlchemyAPI for meta-data tags.

This is an interesting way of going about it. I've never used the sites rss feed, that brings up EVERY new thread in a specific forum doesn't it? Have you found a way to tailor it to pick out specific threads?

[Verbal Mike]

I think this is a great idea, and that the manual-first approach is the smartest way to go. And I agree with Trip about changing attitudes etc..

I have some experience with WordPress... It's a very easy, user-friendly system to use, though a bit bulky. You can customize it to an amazing degree using pre-packaged themes and plug-ins, but you do need to admin it smartly because it's a bit easy to break when you do things outside the user-friendly UI (in particular, whenever an update breaks permissions). And there are plenty of themes that make it look like a news site, seriously, probably hundreds, which can be further customized either through a UI or using CSS.

Basically, with WordPress you could have the new homepage up, running, and looking like you want it to, with maybe five hours' work. An hour's work if you don't customize it much except for installing a theme, and dozens of hours if you want to make everything perfect. Seems to me like setting up a slightly customized WP site and then giving a few people editor powaz there for posting nominated posts would be a really easy way to get it going and see how it works out. (Editors can add and edit posts and pages but can't fiddle with the site's settings, iirc. There is also an author category which only lets you add posts and edit your own posts, and maybe edit comments on your own posts. And there's a contributor category which is even more limited, iirc.)

[hooplala]

I could see the value in switching to an articles-with-comments format for rants, etc. In fact, I think that's kind of a fantastic idea. I'd like to see us also retain the forum for other chitchat, but the articles format makes more sense for a lot of the rants, analyses, etc that tend to sink into obscurity on the forum.

This.

I like this.