Site: Community News

[AF]

First off any news should be viewable via RSS or some other newsreader means. Primarily as I then have a bog standard way of pulling news items off the site for the lobby.

Secondly, this time period business is bad. Its unnecessary work effort and time, and it undermines the authority of site maintainers. It also means moderators have an extra thing to be vigilant over despite already being in short supply. That vigilance is also proactive due to the time limit.

Its very simple. Users post potential news in a forum. Threads with news are then moved into another forum or deleted by a moderator. News on the front page is drawn from the latter forum.

No timers, or anything, all doable using the existing code base with minimal changes, and it does the job perfectly. Its being asked for by one of our senior moderators and requested in the same thread by numerous other people. It does not step outside the requirements of the community news, and its nice and simple and intuitive.

[Tim Blokdijk]

I will put the RSS thing for news on the road map.

And before everybody is going to repeat each other that it's a good idea to have moderators move topics before it can show up.. I know, I understand English, I already told you guys I'm fine with a implementation that Swift likes to use.
Just give me a few days, ok It's not my day job.

[clericvash]

The best way is to have a seperate forum for people to post new news, then if good move it the actual news forum, this as AF pointed out is what people really want, and what would work.

Also i tried to reigster on the new forum, got this:

Code: Select all

Could not connect to smtp host : -1 :

DEBUG MODE

Line : 112
File : smtp.php

It still registered my username, but not my password, so i cannot login.

[Tim Blokdijk]

You will have to use on of the accounts here http://newspring.clan-sy.com/messageboa ... c.php?t=21
Mail did work some time ago but it was using my mail account with my password. That's a security problem. So I removed it and changed my password, maybe I can use Spring's mail config but I would have to think about the security implications.

[SwiftSpear]

Another question, why not allow people to comment on news before it's moved?
Moderators don't know everything and that would allow people to point out inaccuracies in the news postings before they end up on the frontpage.?

mmm, it was kind of a spur of the moment thing...

3 basic intents
1. Moderators should be moving news quickly so it doesn't have a chance to rot and people get pissed off waiting to be able to comment. Hopefully this gives moderators extra incentive to work fast
2. People are less likely to post garbage news posts because they won't even ever get 1 response, they will just disappear immediately
3. The first 30 comments on a news post will acctually be reactions to new news, not users evaluating weather the post is valid or not.

However, it can easily be changed... I just put it that way cause it seemed right at first. There probably wouldn't be too many problems doing it another way anyways.

[Tim Blokdijk]

I removed the time delay and tested it. It works but feel free to confirm it.

Also with testing I played around with your forum setup.
Only Administrators can moderate the forum at this moment, I presume moderators should have that right to?

I think it's smart to always leave a "shadow" thing when moving so a poster can instantly see his post is accepted.

I think people will only debate news posts that are open to debate, news posts that are truly newsworthy would probably get on topic replay's from the start.
I would say to start with allowing posts, if it's not working we change it.

I'm presuming that if nothing new pop's up people are happy with community news as it's set up currently in the dev. env., that means that the feature will move to the production env. in its current form.

[SinbadEV]

I definitely prefer the "candidate" forum having to have topics manually moved... it's 2 clicks to approve and no chance of garbage getting moved over. Also, if a moderator thinks the "candidate" topic needs more information to be "news worthy" (bad spelling, bad or missing links) we can request it as a reply and then the poster can correct the problem before the item is posted.

[SwiftSpear]

I hadn't bothered playing with the user groups. You had an administrator group and a moderator group already up, the changes I made were under the assumption that they would have similar powers to the current spring forums for the most part, I didn't nerf moderator powers, I just set up the news posting forums. Project news was adminstrator only posting, but moderators could moderate and users could respond.

Users in the moderator user group should be able to moderate the forum... have the "moderator" users acctually been added to the user group, or are they just named so?

[Tim Blokdijk]

I also did not spend a lot of time on the user groups, I just wanted to be sure that you had no special idea's about that part in conjunction with community news.

[SwiftSpear]

I also did not spend a lot of time on the user groups, I just wanted to be sure that you had no special idea's about that part in conjunction with community news.

No, if moderators can't currently moderate it wasn't because of something I did intentionally, most likely the moderator group just hasn't been updated to have powers of that forum yet.