When selling a site means selling a community (Opensource.com) [LWN.net]

In the first of two parts Opensource.com talks with Frank Karlitschek about the sale of his network of more than 30 community sites to Blue Systems. "Although he doesn't know much about the future plans Blue Systems has for the websites, Karlitschek says the new owner is interested in continuing to run the websites and develop them in a direction that makes sense for the users and the ecosystem."

Part 2 looks at the SourceForge and Slashdot communities and how the different owners have interacted with them. "[Logan] Abbott got off on the right foot with open source developers with his SourceForge post in early February, SourceForge Acquisition and Future Plans. "Our first order of business was to terminate the 'DevShare' program," he wrote. " ... We want to restore our reputation as a trusted home for open source software, and this was a clear first step towards that. We're more interested in doing the right thing than making extra short-term profit," he added."

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When selling a site means selling a community (Opensource.com)

Posted Mar 9, 2016 8:18 UTC (Wed) by sorokin (guest, #88478) [Link] (20 responses)

I would like to add that there is a site soylentnews.org. I wonder how is it possible to discuss a conflict of slashdot owners with community without mentioning it. SoylentNews was forked when a new slashdot design was shoved down people throat. Its code was based on the old slashcode codebase and then it was significantly improved. Some things like unicode and https support were implemented at SoylentNews faster that at slashdot. As far as I know Unicode and https support are still not implemented at slashdot at the moment.

For a community-moderated site there is no reason in having a company that is constantly trying to monetize it. Even if the current owner of slashdot will make something good what is the guarantee that the next owner won't destroy everything?

When selling a site means selling a community (Opensource.com)

Posted Mar 9, 2016 9:32 UTC (Wed) by ledow (guest, #11753) [Link] (19 responses)

SoylentNews is so much higher quality code than Slashdot ever was.

I can put in pound signs (£) into the comments, something that NO OTHER SITE I've been on ever has a problem with. Slashdot could never fix it. It lets you moderate stories you're already commenting on. Because the power of a moderation to a comment is not that you might "downvote" everyone else to make your comment look good but that you might want to comment on a story AND get rid of trolls. It cleaner and faster. They just need to revamp the mobile site a bit, but even Slashdot still never managed anything particularly wonderful on that side.

Buying a community site isn't just an asset, you have to work to maintain it. And not being able to enter ASCII characters in a textbox is just ridiculous. SoylentNews took the time to fix that, so they get my custom - my visits, and my donation. And pretty much if a story appears on Slashdot, it appears on SoylentNews too.

If the owners of Slashdot want to fix their site, they could. SoylentNews did it, as a community effort. But still Slashdot is broken for me, and has lots of annoyances that anyone who contributes regularly will spot. Hell, since they took over Slashdot, the number of stories that they have had to revoke or massively edit hasn't changed at all. From blatant adverts, to useless summaries, to bad links, it's all still present. If the editors aren't editing, and aren't impartial, why would people want to support their work?

SoylentNews fixed the problems. Slashdot could similarly fix them. You don't go buying a SlashCode-based site without knowing the problems with SlashCode and/or the ability to fix them. If you have, that's just one more reason for everyone to move on.

Whenever I post on Slashdot, the comment on my "low uid" (which isn't really that low) comes up because all the other users from that same era have moved on a long time ago. Slashdot could still be fixed. But it's not. And there's no evidence they're even working on it.

When selling a site means selling a community (Opensource.com)

Posted Mar 9, 2016 13:19 UTC (Wed) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (17 responses)

> And not being able to enter ASCII characters in a textbox is just ridiculous.

FYI, the 'pound sign (£)' is not ASCII. (The 'A' in ASCII stands for 'American')

When selling a site means selling a community (Opensource.com)

Posted Mar 9, 2016 13:47 UTC (Wed) by tao (subscriber, #17563) [Link] (16 responses)

Indeed. There seems to be a common confusion between ISO-8859-<whatever the person who confuses things is used to> and ASCII.

I, of course, personally prefer PETSCII [1] :P

[1] I'm not entirely sure that PETSCII is a proper subset of Unicode yet though. I'm gonna have to check that out -- if all characters can be represented it's time I make a pet2uni converter :)

PETSCII

Posted Mar 9, 2016 14:29 UTC (Wed) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link] (3 responses)

The Wikipedia article suggests that not all of PETSCII's characters are in Unicode. Which, given that Unicode has had more than a decade of active work adding stuff people thought they even might possibly need suggests that nobody even _thought_ they might need those characters from PETSCII

You can convert to Unicode anyway, if you want to convert anyway when there are characters that don't have a direct equivalent you should substitute the Unicode replacement character U+FFFD. This alerts both machines and humans to the fact that something has been damaged or is missing, the machines because it has a unique codepoint reserved only for this purpose, and the humans because it is typically rendered as a white question mark on a black diamond, which is weird looking.

PETSCII

Posted Mar 9, 2016 15:18 UTC (Wed) by tao (subscriber, #17563) [Link] (2 responses)

Yeah, unless you're actually from the 64-scene (I'd argue that the rest of the PETSCII-platforms are by and large forgotten) you're unlikely to ever want to use the PETSCII characters.

For my purposes U+FFFD isn't satisfactory though, since I need to be able to do a reversible translation (I do cross-platform development of C*Base, which uses quite a bit of PETSCII art). Currently I use some ugly hacks. I guess those hacks will have to stay in place :)

PETSCII

Posted Mar 9, 2016 17:07 UTC (Wed) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link] (1 responses)

The BMP Private Use Area is probably the least awful part of Unicode space to put an "ugly hack" if it helps.

On a lot of platforms there is stuff "in" the Private Use Area, such as corporate logos (on some Linux systems there is or was Klingon) but you should be able to find space for a few dozen PET squiggles.

PETSCII

Posted Mar 10, 2016 0:56 UTC (Thu) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

I never looked to see where people stuffed the symbols for 'powerline' and such things.

I have been using these patched fonts on my desktop for a couple months now:

https://github.com/ryanoasis/nerd-fonts

It's cute to have little symbols showing you that your haven't committed your changes to git when you are in the console. Looks good with spacemacs as well.

When selling a site means selling a community (Opensource.com)

Posted Mar 9, 2016 14:53 UTC (Wed) by ledow (guest, #11753) [Link] (10 responses)

ISO-646 predates the ISO-8859 standard you state by a over a decade. We're talking international standards from the 1970's here.

And because it's so antique and ingrained, "Although these encodings are sometimes referred to as ASCII, true ASCII is defined strictly only by the ANSI standard."

So, really, its nothing but pedantry.

And even LWN.net lets me do "£" without anything special happening.

When selling a site means selling a community (Opensource.com)

Posted Mar 9, 2016 15:23 UTC (Wed) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (7 responses)

> So, really, its nothing but pedantry.

'£' does not exist in ASCII. Nor does it exist in ISO-646. Character 0x23 is listed as undefined in the baseline, but the US variant treats it as '$' and the UK variant treats it as '£'

Meanwhile, ISO-8859-1's '£' (0xa3) is not the same as ISO-646-GB's '£'. And ISO-8859-2/3/4/etc doesn't have that symbol at all, using that code for a different character.

So, no, it's not pedantry. The details of the character sets absolutely matter because they are, by definition, not equivalent. This is the entire raison d'etre for Unicode.

When selling a site means selling a community (Opensource.com)

Posted Mar 9, 2016 17:06 UTC (Wed) by hummassa (guest, #307) [Link]

The Unicode ISO-10646 codepoint for '£' is the same as 8859-1 (0x00000A3).

When selling a site means selling a community (Opensource.com)

Posted Mar 10, 2016 10:20 UTC (Thu) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link] (5 responses)

Muphry's law strikes. ASCII 0x23 is Unicode U+0023 '#'. Unicode U+0024 '$' is ASCII 0x24.

When selling a site means selling a community (Opensource.com)

Posted Mar 10, 2016 13:03 UTC (Thu) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (3 responses)

As the saying goes:

There are two hard problems in computing; cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors.

Correct my '$' to '#' and my point stands though. :)

When selling a site means selling a community (Opensource.com)

Posted Mar 10, 2016 17:22 UTC (Thu) by rahvin (guest, #16953) [Link] (2 responses)

Two things eh? I want to put a snarky comment about maybe using your fingers or toes to count how many you actually listed. But I'll be polite ;)

When selling a site means selling a community (Opensource.com)

Posted Mar 11, 2016 1:00 UTC (Fri) by madscientist (subscriber, #16861) [Link] (1 responses)

Whoosh! :-p :-)

When selling a site means selling a community (Opensource.com)

Posted Mar 11, 2016 3:19 UTC (Fri) by rahvin (guest, #16953) [Link]

Missed it, thanks for point it out :)

When selling a site means selling a community (Opensource.com)

Posted Mar 10, 2016 15:19 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

And, as somebody who started work in the early 80s with a lot of old equipment, that could be well confusing. Was the UK pound symbol in the same place as what the Americans call the pound, ie hash, ie shift-3, ie 0x23, or was it what we called the currency symbol, ie shift-4, ie 0x24, which would print "$" in an American scenario and "£" in a UK scenario. Heaven help you if you wanted both "$" and "£" in the same document ...

(And that was on Pr1mos, with its inverted ASCII, so they weren't even 0x23 and 0x24 but 0xA3 and 0xA4 !!! :-)

Cheers,
Wol

When selling a site means selling a community (Opensource.com)

Posted Mar 9, 2016 17:16 UTC (Wed) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link] (1 responses)

LWN uses Unicode, since it uses Postgresql not MySQL it means I can probably write 💩 and it'll work.

When selling a site means selling a community (Opensource.com)

Posted Mar 9, 2016 17:21 UTC (Wed) by tao (subscriber, #17563) [Link]

Yup. And with fonts-symbola installed it'll actually show up correctly too :P

When selling a site means selling a community (Opensource.com)

Posted Mar 9, 2016 20:49 UTC (Wed) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

Heh, I originally cut my teeth on ATASCII, which is still four symbols away from being a unicode subset.. :)

When selling a site means selling a community (Opensource.com)

Posted Mar 9, 2016 14:46 UTC (Wed) by oever (guest, #987) [Link]

Just the other day I was looking at Slash (the /. code) to see that it was unmaintained. It is good to see that there is an up to date fork called rehash (https://github.com/SoylentNews/rehash).

I will recommend this to a semi-large organization (political party with 20k members) for hosting internal discussions.