As part of our OSNews v3 project, we have a framework in place that would allow registered users to not only comment on existing stories and suggest stories for OSNews editors, but also post their own thoughts on their own personal pages and allow others to comment on them. Read more to learn about some ideas we’ve had, and to give your feedback and suggestions. Most of all, we’d like to know whether this is functionality you’d be interested in using.User-defined conversations, as currently imagined, would combine elements of a blog and an online forum, and integrate with the currently-exising user accounts. Just as ever registered user today has a “User Page” with basic information about them and their commenting activity, the idea would be for each person to have another page onto which they can freely post their thoughts and ideas. Other readers would be able to read what they say and post comments, like any other story at OSNews.
While the idea would be that this would be a place for people to post OS and other technology stuff, there wouldn’t be any reason you couldn’t use these to complain about your co-workers or talk about your cat, like you would in a personal blog. However, our idea is that you could optionally select a category for your posting, choosing from roughly the same topics that we currently have in the OSNews forums (AmigaOS, Linux, QNX, Windows, etc) and those postings would be displayed on a topic page, just like a topic in our forum. That post would thus be displayed alongside other posts on the same topic, and they could all be commented on. If we did this, we would most likely use it as a replacement for the current forum.
So my questions to you, dear readers, are: would you use this? Do you have any ideas that might improve or change what I’ve laid out in these broad strokes? Are you more interested in the on-topic forum-type discussion aspect of this or the free-form blogging aspect? Would you miss our current forum if we replaced it with this? Please let us know what you think in the comments section of this story. Thanks!
I have been a fan of OSNews for quite sometime; in the process submitting over 50 articles under different names. Now you have actually given an incentive to register with the site.
Sounds interesting; you could get a lot more subscribers.
Good work.
I’ve never used your forum, but I would probably use this. Of course I haven’t had time to take part in comment discussion in some time, but I think I would use this.
On top of all this, how about allowing blog post voting, and when a post passes a certain threshold it’s subject is concatenated onto the main page. Take a look at http://www.arstechnica.com with the journals to see what I’m talking about, though the backend would be very much different.
Oh, the one problem with this replacing the forum is that it doesn’t really leave a channel to ask for help. I don’t know if the current forum is used much for this, but that’s one of the big strengths of forums, in my estimation. Maybe a simple phpbb help forum would still be in order. It wouldn’t take all that much oversight if you promote responsible and high posters to mods often enough. Look at linuxforums.org, they do it well.
Cool thoughts… I think the original idea is good, but this is even better.
As for asking for help, we could have an “asking for help” topic, I suppose.
Looking more and more like /.
I’m not saying that to be insulting though.
I personally couldn’t care for that feature. I don’t think you’ll find many people hoping for it either.
That’s what we all want.
I agree, this would be really useful. Having to scroll down through a browser window trying to find the follow-up reply is a bit of a pain.
I agree, this would be really useful. Having to scroll down through a browser window trying to find the follow-up reply is a bit of a pain.
Click the “x Replies” link at the bottom of a comment to see all replies.
Also thread-view is in the codebase, it was discussed and demoed when v3 was in beta. I’m glad it’s turned off though.
The problem with that is that it only gives you the replies to the specifi post, it doesn’t chain down as a threaded view would do…
Need To say More?
It seems like this is another move towards slashdot…
Not that having similar features would be bad, just that being like slashdot would be bad..
I’ve already got a blog, so I’m not sure I’d be interested. Never much liked blogs with a lot of entries anyway; always preferred a small number of good entries.
“So my questions to you, dear readers, are: would you use this?”
Yes I would. I’d talk about my fav OS(es), mainly Kanotix, and I’d complain because no anonymous posting nor profanities/flamebaiting from registered users should be allowed.
Whatever voting system there is, it should have auditing this time around.
And users should have to identify who they work for so there is less bias and less comment warfare.
“Most of all, we’d like to know whether this is functionality you’d be interested in using”
I doubt I’ll use it, but I still have a suggestion. If you are going to implement comments, you should add an option that notifies the article “owner” about new comments. Preferably a choice between getting an email per comment or a mail at user defined intervals.
If the rating thingy would be implemented, I’d certainly use it occasionally. Otherwise I’m sure there would be just too many postings for any interesting discussion to happen on a single one. It would also add value to the website if interesting journal entries would appear on it.
In any case I can’t see how this could _not_ be extremely popular, just like it is on practically every other website that offers a journal feature.
I sometimes have missed something like this (slashdot scares me), as I don’t really want to write often enough to justify a real blog.
I sure wouldn’t. Not like there isn’t already more blogs out there than people could possibly read in a lifetime. What would be useful feature to me? The ability to filter by article type – ie, I’d like not see Amiga, PDA, and other articles. Also, disallow any comments with ‘M$’, ‘Windoze’, LinSux, etc … get rid of the 12yolds, please.
I agree with the filtering of lame abbreviations/miss-spellings. If you want to take a jab at Microsoft, think of something more than just “M$”. We know they like their money.
When the IRC channel I used to frequent introduced a cuss-filter, we saw a huge increase in creative comments.
I have been working on a “10 things I would change about linux” paper for a while, but I wasn’t sure what I would do with it. I don’t want to post just in a forum, because I would like a more professional presentation of my ideas. I also don’t want to host it myself, because I don’t have the bandwidth or the traffic. So if you had a good hybrid article/forum system I think I would definately post it here.
Kernel trap has an identical implementation… guess what. I never check people’s pages… I only skim the main stories… But this is just me. maybe someone else finds it attractive. However, even the second version is harder for me to navigate. In my opinion has more useless clutter. If it becomes even more cluttered and hard to understand the site navigation I’ll look for news somewhere else.
Take a page from craigs list, simple (maybe a bit ugly) but damn easy to understand.
FIRE EUGENIA
As if it weren’t bad enough that for some inexplicable reason, OSNews has posted links to OSViews, OSNews would then make it extremely easy to have as many things posted that were as crappy or worse?
Things are bad enough for quality and lack of review many times already, and I don’t see how this would help improve the quality of material (on average) linked to/posted on here.
k5 has a neat thing going, where users vote for an article to make the front page or not. comments, blogs… done a lot of places. but you could host interesting articles and posts also. i’d worry about it getting saturated with stupid opinions though. unless, of course, articles had to be voted in. And probably keep them separate. this site is so clean and up to date that I use it to find all my os news first. clean and informative… with intelligent user base, that is what makes osnews.com. just don’t loose that.
agreed
expansion is good, but keep the front page quality
I was about to say k5, but you beat me to it.
I was a big /. reader for a long time, then I got sick of the comments, so I went to k5. I read k5 for a few months until I realized that while /. misses some good articles, the stuff that makes it to the front page is generally quite good. On the other hand, the stuff that makes it to the front page of k5 is whatever enough people voted for, and if there is one thing that we have all learned in the past 10 years, is that just because something is popular, doesn’t mean it’s good (think music, movies, etc.). I switched back to reading /., and now just don’t bother reading the comments unless it is an ask slashdot that I can answer.
On the occasion that I read the comments here, it’s because I’ve read some braindead article that was linked from here, and I’m checking to see if others have mentioned that it is such (the whole Java no-fragmented memory thing comes to my mind as an example, as well as various posts about programming language X being the next best thing to sliced bread).
Would I use a blog-like thing? I don’t use the /. blog functionality, why would I use this one?
I’d like to see you implement post threading. With popular articles it becomes to hard to keep track of all the “RE: posts”, as they can show up a page removed from the comment their referring to.
I always take time to look at the Comment section before reading the article. You have alot of smart people who show up here to share their ideas and reading the different opinions allows me to see the different sides of the issue.
Threading would allow a place for an interesting opinion to start, get talked about and when finished a place to end.
People will also be more inclined to share their thoughts if they know their posts will be placed within a thread and not end up randomly mixed amongst unrelated posts.
How about you just start using Slashcode? It’s got comments, it’s got moderation, it’s got users, journals, threaded posts…..
You’re reimplementing the wheel here.
http://www.slashcode.com/
I like OSNews in general, it’s easy to see what’s new, commenting stories is easy, and it even looks good. I just haven’t had any reason to register, but if posting of my ideas was done, and it worked well, I probably would register. I think it sounds like an interesting idea and would allow people to more easily create some constructive discussions.
-WereCat
I’m not sure if this is a good idea. I suppose it’ll generate too much noise, and not so much “content” really. If someone is seriously interested in posting his ideas/articles he already has a blog by himself.
100% ACK
It’s a PITA to discuss sth. without!
I currently use Tomboy for writing up all my little ideas I get from time to time. I think this forum would be a better place.
I’m not that great with writing so I’d probably wan’t to update the article from time to time depending on how the discussion goes. This will ofcourse outdate the discussion so it would be great to be able to delete/hide unrelated and outdated comments.
About the threading thing, I think it is better like it is now. It’s easy to see new comments and/or pause and resume reading. Alternatives would be to have some AJAX implemented popupwindow on hover that will show a show summary of relies in a threaded fashon. If threading is a must then I think some GUI element that highlight important changes wihtout the need to go through the whole discussion is needed.
While I’m ranting I could just as well put this little bit here too: Seeing how the moderation voting system has worked so far I’d say that a range from -5 to 5 is to much. I think -1 to 3 is a better range with the current usage.
I don’t think -5 to 5 is too much, I think that 5 votes per day is not enough. The range provides more fine grained control for us, it’s just that those who vote don’t have enough votes for all the trolls.
I too agree with thread view, I really like techreport.com’s implementation, mostly because it’s fast on my dialup. Also because I like the feel. The only thing it’s missing is, like you said, obviously marking new comments. It’s time based, and while that’s useful, it doesn’t fill the gap.
And become like every news website ?
look, no one cares of ppl stories. they are blogs. if people want a blog, they make one. why have one on osnews ? they already have one on /. or whatever else. Having one on osnews is then just for the hype.
Usefullness ? I think zero.
threaded comments ? man, you need them. Like kuro5hin.org is not bad.
but keep the rest as it is or make something DIFFERENT.
Maybe a mix of a planet like thing but you select articles, so people can participate or something.
But honestly, another slashdot, thanks no thanks. No need.
On each post’s byline, you can put a link to one of the poster’s blogs, chosen at random amonst all those blogs whose categories match the category of the current story.
And yes, we could use threading.
And we could also use being able to edit posts (amonst >>> amongst). Oops.
So instead of having a regular news posting prompting an argument about Linux being ready for the desktop, or Vista being bloated vapourware, we can have several hundred of them occuring at once.
If this where to happen, I would need some kind of guide as to who was actually worth reading. No offence to anyone, but we’re just a bunch of people with opinions, and we’ve all got them.
How about moderating a daily discussion. Users can submit their ‘blog’, which can be vetted, then posted by a moderator for the community to have a discussion. This could be anything from the communicative implications of mouse pointers turning into an hourglass to represent being busy (especially when compared to GEM’s bee), to a history on the CLI.
Either way, users can post an opinion, and the community can respond. This way, we will have one thing worth reading, instead of many things that should be ignored.
I view the whole blogging fad as web pollution.
I hate the implementation you posted Ethyrial, it’s like Slashdot’s…I’d prefer something like IMDB’s thread view. I don’t want to click again and again to read things.
Ah, see, I don’t like having to scroll through one popular thread just to get to other threads, and often go through multiple pages. This brings about Slashdot’s problem of everyone posting to a single thread with even less traffic. I like having the first comments of each thread readily accessible, so the threads can easily be identified, and the state of the thread easily assessed by the visual appearance of the tree.
Honestly, if you’re just going to show every single message in the thread by default, what’s the point of having a thread view at all? It’s just going to push brand new comments back a page or two by big threads, and offer nothing but even more confusion from an organizational standpoint.
If you’ll derive some measure of entertainment from implementing the functionality, you already have reason to consider it. I’m sure that some people will make use of the journal functionality. The obvious advantage that it has over a more general-purpose journal is that it’s more closely coupled with OSNews and the content it provides. Plus it gives people that like to routinely restate the same arguments for every story slightly-related to one of their favorite subjects an easy way of elaborating at great length in one place. There’s also the user-centered news filter aspect, where people that like the links provided by a user can easily take suggestions about what to read, without having to have all of the news on the front page.
The site techreport.com that the above poster Ethyriel has pointed out is a great example of a clean and clear threaded posting site. If the original post that has drawn interest can be clicked on and at the same time bring up within a one page view all subsequent replies then you will end up with the same view that OSNEWS viewer are used to.
Also of interest about this site is the use of a darker backgound with a lighter font face. Looks great.
This articles titled red lettered request for feedback is also getting close to the end of the page , you may want to move it back to the top to get a fair view of our view on these ideas.
I don’t want to seem like a luddite but from my perspective there is nothing wrong with your current format it has the advantages of:
1. Targeted news
2. Opportunity for discussion on the news stories (like this)
3. A range of forums where ad hoc discussion can take place.
This is a great resource that I look at every day (perhaps I need to get a life) and get much information and pleasure from. I vote to leave it as it is.
Regards,
Peter
so basically version 3 is to go rip-off every feature that slashdot has and hope that someday this site will have anywhere close to slashdot’s relevance.
This site is way to heavily censored and moderated for such a feature to even make sense.
Censored by whom?
I would definately use this blog system. As a system developer, I get a finger in every pie (server administrator, coder, designer) at my company, which leaves me with a lot of experience (and short on spare time). This system would be perfect for writing down some experiences with a technology, a rant or just an exitement over a newfound project.
We’re waiting.
Carl