Good going Rickyjames! It’ll give me a chance to vote a lot more which will be nice.. Though i hope everyone gets into the voting more now, some may see it as an extra chore but i see it as a bennifit. I hope that this will not decrese the ammount of stories though.

J n

I am up for changing the ordering and composition of the column boxes. I put that monsterous sources box up originally in hopes that people would use it like Drudge’s links to their favorite editorial, then come back and submit stories on what they found. I don’t think that’s happened. Our current link page is also leftover from a membership drive among science journalists I wanted to do but never pulled the trigger on. This seems to be a time for Spring Cleaning around here, maybe I’ll dust off those invitations to science journalists and send em out Any Day Now.

Bottom line, I think putting the source links on the links page and possibly putting up a new set of boxes is the right direction to take. I’ll get on it by the end of the week if nobody else does. Translated – if anybody else in the superuser category wants to take a crack at shuffling the column boxes, now’s your chance. If you don’t feel competent to do so, you know who wrote the Scoop Admin manual, and they’re pretty friendly with answering questions in my experience…

if others think it’s a good idea.

…to churn out the same schlock I always do. Probably more, because if we’re going to go to members checking the queue all the time, there’d better be something there for them to vote on. This actually has been one of my main fears about taking this plunge. Far easier to condition members and readers to expect a couple of new stories from me in the early morning than worry about there being something in the queue all the time.

Well, I’ll take the plunge and see what happens.

Now, what would be some good criteria for voting a story to front page or to Sections? Anyone have any ideas? I’m not sure we should follow the rules that kuro5hin does, as they only get one new frontpage story every 2 days or so. What do we want to accomplish?

Ricky’s just put up a bunch of things that seem to be copies of press releases – I’d vote anything that doesn’t contain much original content (either short text with links, or long text mostly culled form somewhere else) to section, rather than front page.

By the way, thanks Drog for rearranging the page – nice to see the section-only stories up there.

I’m not going to post stories independently or even vote towards moving stories out of the moderation queue. I’d like to see the other editors of SciScoop follow suit and leave story voting and selection up to the members for a while.

So editors shouldn’t vote in the queue? Why not? If the post and drop thresholds are set appropriately, editors should be able to vote just like all members – it’s not like an editor vote counts double or anything :-)

I think after a few days of story voting, the post and drop thresholds should be reconsidered, and adjusted to suit the number of people voting (including the admins!)

…mainly put up so our newly empowered members will have SOMETHING to sink their teeth into. I generally try to boost the content of press releases by link-izing several of the key nouns and / or verbs, but yeah, mostly they’re a way to get decent content up fast. This is going to be a major issue Real Soon Now since I predict at this rate with a threshhold of 4 all of the half dozen press releases I loaded into the queue are going to get posted by sundown.

Suggesstions? Keep loading the queue with press releases? Raise the posting threshhold? Realize my horror of an empty submission queue is no big deal and work on one good article per day no matter what happens with the queue?

It’s a brave new world, and I’m gonna need the most time adjusting to it. Bear with me.

My original logic is that with the threshhold set to 4 the editors can still hardwire the selection process. My public vow of chastity was mainly meant to reassure our tender readers we wouldn’t do that. You’re right, voting should be freely open to everybody. I’m just saying I’m going to voluntarily abstain and see what happens. Adjustments of the threshholds is probably a coming step in this evolution, and a long overdue one.

Janra, you kind of set the stage for me to take this plunge, which has been long overdue. Thanks.

…that if this batch of press releases all get posted only a few hours after they’ve been submitted, which seems likely, that tomorrow’s batch of press releases (OK, I admit that’s what I’ve got planned) get voted on with a higher threhhold – double, maybe, or triple to 8 or 12? My point being, I really think we’ve got quite a few members here (we’ve been averaging 2 new members per day for months now) that are going to vote and continually exhausting the queue at 4 votes for a week isn’t going to tell us much.

I hereby nominate janra to be the Official Threshhold Setter for a while; grrrrl, you do as you see fit. All in favor?

Yeah, our threshold needs to be a percentage of total users. What percentage works, we’ll likely have to see over time.

I don’t think you need to post more stories so as to ensure the queue isn’t empty. We’ll just increase the threshold and the stories will stay in the queue longer. Which will encourage more users to vote. And even if the queue is empty, so what? There are still posted stories to read, after all.

Since some readers don’t care for the format of regular-sized posts with gathered links from many different sites, could that be a separate section?

For me, glancing over possible links of interest on this site is much more user-friendly than reading many different science sites (please excuse my science-lite diet), so I like skimming to see what ricky, or anyone else, has found to be of interest.

SciScoop has posted a dozen stories in a day today. That’s gotta be a record. Madness, it’s madness I say…

I’ll use straight numbers for now, until a good number is found, then I’ll convert it to a percentage so it grows with the site.

Hmm. If you’re interested in assorted links, it may make sense to list the links along with their original title. Similar to the BBC’s listing on the side of articles various related links, although in this case automatically generated from links within articles.

It sounds like you’re interested in just the collection of links. Perhaps when an article is posted, a Links article would automatically be created based upon its links. Possibilities then would be to view an article, view only links of articles, or view both together (often it is hard to figure out from the phrasing which links may contain useful information).

A related idea would be to give people the option of editing/adding comments to each link in their Links article. The Links data could also be used in building other information, such as allowing enough categorization to be specified for each Link to be able to insert links in a DMOZ-like directory. That may be interesting as a collection of science info, although perhaps some use could enhance this site’s news orientation.

Perhaps the criteria for voting a story off the island should be prominently displayed. I’d want to know them before considering a post.

I especially like your idea of listing links with the original title.  I don’t know… maybe I’m asking for too much, here.

I just know that some of the most valuable information I’ve gained from this site has been in the random listing of links that rj’s not had time to post as individual articles.

Check the sidebar beside the article for a little box called “Related Links”.

Now for commenting on individual links, and putting them in a directory kind of structure, that’s a little harder…

Six of seven submitted stories are out of the mod queue and on the front page within five-and-a-half hours at a posting threshhold of 6. Also, I now realize that in general stories about flying brain tumors are not quite as popular as stories about new ways of cooling beer.

So…what are we shooting for here? A particular length of time that an average story stays in the queue? A particular number of eyeballs to assure quality? A particular number of moderators to assure a certain level of community involvement? Just wondering, never much thought about it…

.
…all nested down under each other like birds hiding in a tree.

Why can’t comments simply be listed one after the other:

…1
…2
…3
…etc.

instead of like:
..1
……2
……3
………4
..5
……6
……etc.

PLUS, the child comments are “hidden”/Subject line only and not displayed until you click on them.

I would like to be able to just read down the list of comments, one after the other. Indent the child comments, that’s okay. Just don’t make me click to see the child and then click “back” to return.

SIXTEEN of the 21 comments are nested, child comments. That’s unnacceptable to me, this loyal and gentle reader.

Go to your comment preferences page and choose “nested” mode.

Nested mode means replies are indented below the comment they reply to, but are fully expanded.

You can also set your preferences to “dynamic threaded” if you are using a version 5+ browser or Mozilla, in which case the comments will initially display as they do now for you, but you can expand and collapse comments and entire subthreads in place, without reloading the page or going to a different page. (This requires a version 5+ browser because it uses advanced HTML and javascript that older browsers don’t understand. Frankly, I don’t understand it either, but it works great.)

At the moment, I’m just going to keep raising the threshold to see how many people will vote. :-)

When the threshold is set appropriately, stories will post with a speed related to their quality, basically. So, having some stories post within 2 hours and others take a day and a half is typical when there’s more than one author and variable submission quality.

I think that, if you can, spreading your submissions to the queue throughout the day will actually get more readers voting overall – right now, I noticed a half-dozen stories were put in the queue at the same time, and most of them were posted at the same time, probably with the same 6 or so people voting. Having them spread out will mean that people who check the site at different times of the day will see a couple of stories in the queue (which, frankly, is a lot less intimidating than 6 or more…) and will check them out.

thanks. i am using a knoppix computer while i fix my main machine(s), Konqueror, etc. none of my normal cookies fire up and frankly, i didn’t know about that one. appreciate it.

jon

throughout the day might increase the number of submissions from others who don’t bother if there’s already tons in there.

K5 has a good document here. I guess we could add our own too. You’d see the link at the spot where you vote.

but I  agree with the post about displaying the responses to comments without clicking.  That would certainly speed the process along.

Perhaps I can get one of my computer-savvy friends to set this up for me.  Thanks for the tip!

…can do anything when it’s in a list:

1. Read and understand all of these instructions before going on to Step 2.
2. Click here.
3. In the box that says “Nested up to:”, place a single “+” mark without the quotes.
4. Click Save.

Man, janra is worth her weight in gold for knowledge of just exactly where stuff like this is located. Thanks.

HOW SIMPLE WAS THAT?!!!!

See why I hang around this site?  So much to learn :-).  If I had read carefully janra’s first sentence, I wouldn’t have needed the help from one of my OTHER computer-savvy friends.

Kinda reminds me of the recent Chinese proverb/SS quote – paraphrased, He who asks a question is a fool for five minutes.  He who never asks remains a fool for a lifetime.

Thanks, janra and rj

Yep, all the comments are visivle now, but I’m getting right-side-cutoff.  How do you get word-wrap?

Your browser should wrap words automatically when they hit the edge of the box they’re in. Generally words getting hidden happens when the browser gets confused about where it should put things. I’m not sure exactly what’s getting cut off – does it wrap at all, with some words missing, or does it not wrap at all? (BTW, I’m making this one long paragraph so it’s guaranteed to wrap on any screen resolution…)

I never noticed this before… but maybe it was there all along. Anyway, I’m still in threaded mode, but now I notice that when I click on a comment to see it, the right-most column containing the shaded edge is missing and the bottom row containing the corners and middle bottom edge is messed up. So there’s definitely an HTML table problem in one of the blocks. This is different that what you described, Ricky, but might be somewhat related.

I’ve been reading this way since we started, on half a dozen different browsers (Mac-Mozilla right now) and have never seen any text cut off. That should never happen…

…it does for me.  Guess I’ve got a bug report to go make over on Scoop…

I have right side cut-off. This is both on my at home computer and on the school computer I’m on at the moment.

what’s your OS, browser (and version), and can you provide a screenshot of the non-wrapping text?

The announcement should have been put in the queue. I’m sure it could have been cut down to one paragraph, with details for those who wanted more.

I get one last over-wrought long-winded self-serving meglo-maniacal article before I admit at last I’m no better than anybody else.  I’ve submitted 800+ articles for SciScoop over the past year-and-a-half, almost two-thirds of the total that have been submitted here.  That’s worth one last burst of self-indulgence, isn’t it?

Ya know, I’m thinking about taking a break for a month or two when I get to a thousand articles submitted…

it’s not a Scoop bug, it’s an IE bug ;-)

I am of course willing to believe it is indeed an IE bug.  Whatever you did fixed it for me.

The default_template was corrupted with an extra column tag back when the 1000 SciScoop stories button was put in. I removed the extra TD tag and IMG tag and replaced with a box.