Pipedot Status Update

by
in pipedot on (#3GW)
Thank you for all of your comments and constructive criticisms from last week's poll. Input like this helps me prioritize the implementation of features that are the most important to you. Seems I underestimated some, like search, and will adjust my schedule accordingly.

Updates for this week:
  • Search Page - Still a bit raw, but have to start somewhere, right?
  • More Editors - We now have three volunteer editors. If you are interested in helping in this department, feel free to contact me. Or you can always submit more stories to help us out.
  • Mailing List - Mainly for staff discussions, but anyone is free to participate. Click the checkbox on your settings page to subscribe to the list. A pretty HTML archive interface will be added soon.
  • Titles - The HTML title on most pages should now be meaningful
  • Forgot Password - You can now reset a forgotten password by answering a standard email challenge
Reply 19 comments

A small bug (Score: 3, Informative)

by nightsky30@pipedot.org on 2014-03-24 11:50 (#S1)

When I select "poll" from the left nav menu, it takes me to the correct page, but I noticed "pipe" is the menu item which receives the grey, selected, outline.

Excellent (Score: 5, Insightful)

by hyper@pipedot.org on 2014-03-24 12:50 (#S7)

You rock Bryan

This is awesome (Score: 3, Insightful)

by sleazyridr@pipedot.org on 2014-03-24 14:55 (#SA)

I love this site! Thanks for doing all this.

Steady incremental changes good! (Score: 3, Insightful)

by fatphil@pipedot.org on 2014-03-24 16:15 (#SC)

Like the way you're progressing. Thanks for getting things working without Javascript, that was very important for me.

I think my feature wish-list is now practically empty - don't get too bloaty!

Re: Steady incremental changes good! (Score: 4, Insightful)

by vanderhoth@pipedot.org on 2014-03-24 16:52 (#SD)

I would still like to see a notification if/when someone replies to one of my comments, but otherwise I agree. I think this is a great replacement for slashcode, which is a horrible monster, all we're missing here is the community.

It would be nice if Bryan would put his efforts up on Github and allow some collaboration, but it's his baby and I can't blame him if he wants to keep it to himself.

Re: Steady incremental changes good! (Score: 2, Insightful)

by billshooterofbul@pipedot.org on 2014-03-24 22:58 (#SM)

Yeah, I hear ya on the lack of community. Even if Bryan does put it up on github, I wouldn't be surprised if others don't pick it up. The soynuts have already put a lot of effort into reviving slashcode, I doubt they would give it up at this point to pursue putting their features into pipecode. In any case, I'd wait until the code was in a good state to show to people after dogfooding it here.

Re: Steady incremental changes good! (Score: 3, Insightful)

by hombre@pipedot.org on 2014-03-25 01:12 (#SQ)

I signed on at Soylent reasonably early. Honestly, I like this place more. No, the community isn't here, yet, but it will come. I found the politicking over there to be rather distasteful. Moreso than anything Dice ever did at The Other Site.

I wish I had the skills to help out here, but I really, really don't. I'll have to settle for sitting back and enjoying the ride.

Re: Steady incremental changes good! (Score: 2, Insightful)

by danieldvorkin@pipedot.org on 2014-03-25 09:26 (#SZ)

I like Soylent for what it is, but yeah, I have to agree. Of course, as the |. community grows, so inevitably will the politicking, but if this could remain the civil N4N site, that would be a wonderful thing.

Re: Steady incremental changes good! (Score: 1)

by billshooterofbul@pipedot.org on 2014-03-25 18:40 (#TK)

I think the lack of a distributed/disconnected work force helps here. Soynuts are all volunteers with their own ideas on how stuff should work, which has led to the tension its had. Maybe they have it under control now, not sure.

Re: Steady incremental changes good! (Score: 2, Insightful)

by omoc@pipedot.org on 2014-03-25 16:16 (#TE)

The community is (probably) watching, I find myself here more often than in the beginning but I still only have a look every couple of days. As more features get implemented it gets more attractive to use.

Notifications on a reply are quite important; much more than "search", what the last poll here said. One thing that this site already does better than soylent is the fact that there is some equivalent of firehose.

Re: Steady incremental changes good! (Score: 3, Interesting)

by vanderhoth@pipedot.org on 2014-03-25 12:00 (#T4)

I'm a soynut. I was an early adopter for both sites and tried to help with Soylent when they started, but I couldn't get slashcode working because of the outdated mod_perl extension and gave up after a few days. I advocated scrapping slashcode and starting from scratch, but NCommander got it working and it was decided that they have it working so they'd just replace it a little at a time.

|. has a much nicer interface, way cleaner and easier to look at and way more stable. Slashcode is a mess, both code wise and the UI, they're doing a good job keeping it running for now, but I figure in the long run everyone will move over here as things over there start breaking down and they realize they just can't fix slashcode.

Soylent was the hare, Pipedot is the tortoise.

Re: Steady incremental changes good! (Score: 5, Interesting)

by scott@pipedot.org on 2014-03-25 06:36 (#SW)

My understanding is Bryan wants the code to look less like wet spaghetti before he shares it. Hopefully it will be out under AGPL3.

Request for "intro" document (Score: 1)

by odm@pipedot.org on 2014-03-25 13:44 (#T9)

I've lurked for years at slashdot but I really like it here and would like to help out. However, I'm reluctant to submit new stories as I don't know the correct format or what's acceptable. I also don't really know how modding and stuff works (I never bothered to get a slashdot account). There must be others like me, so I'm wondering if it would be worthwhile creating a brief intro document on how the main points of the site work so that new users like me can help build up the momentum?

Thanks

Re: Request for (Score: 4, Insightful)

by zafiro17@pipedot.org on 2014-03-25 15:42 (#TB)

I signed up as soon as possible for both sites, but heard about - and started visiting - Soylent first. I really got disgusted with all the drama, airing of dirty laundry in the name of transparency, and general, juvenile ass-hattery. I find this site better run. I think the mob-rule mentality over at Soy will be hard to manage. I hope they overcome the challenge, but I don't see how - sooner or later someone is going to either suggest members pay in, or post ads, or something else, and it's going to be a sh*tstorm.

Full disclosure - I volunteered to help Bryan and am now one of the volunteer editors. If you're worried about what to submit or how to format it, my response would be "do your best" and let the editors bang it into shape, if necessary.

I worry when the pipe is dry. I'd like this to be a place where people can discuss what they find interesting. Let's post a bunch of stuff and see what sticks, and the site will eventually evolve. The nice voting mechanism on the pipe allows every user to have a say in things they'd like to see hit the front page for discussion. Jump in!

Re: Request for (Score: 1)

by odm@pipedot.org on 2014-03-25 16:08 (#TD)

ok, in that case I'll submit anything interesting I see and not worry too much about adding explanatory text. thanks
btw, the site's editors are doing a great job so far

Re: Request for (Score: 1)

by rocks@pipedot.org on 2014-03-25 18:51 (#TN)

Thanks for some more background on how different roles in the community work... I too will look to submit some stories...

Great job! (Score: 1)

by elf@pipedot.org on 2014-03-26 14:01 (#TX)

Hi

Just like others I am a member of soylent news and here, and just like others I keep coming back here more and more. Glad to see things picking up in terms of comments, I hope this continues and the community gets ever stronger. Soylent had some in fighting, not good to see in public but I think they are a stronger team now. What I don't like about Soylent is the look and feel, this is where this site excels. The color scheme and look and feel is amazing, especially as there is only one developer on this. I'd offer my coding skills if there was a need to help out as I am a developer by trade.

Quick thing...I tried to use the check box to register for the mailing list. I got this error on save

"error: value not found - method [post] type [text] name [real_name]"

Also I am not quite sure where I can select which email I want this mail to go to?

Uppercase HTML tags not recognized (Score: 1)

by marqueeblink@pipedot.org on 2014-03-28 04:19 (#V4)

This is a small thing, but I bollixed up my first submission awhile back because I used 'A HREF' tags (out of long habit from submitting stories at the other site) instead of 'a href'. The content remained but the tags disappeared in the preview, and (since I'm stubborn) in the submission as well.

Then I read the FAQ.