It may not be necessary to ignore Potential Recruit messages in a month or so as the site matures but about 95% of the anonymous posts I've seen so far have been trolls (and generally foul-mouthed trolls at that).

FIRST POST!

Beyond that, just thanks.  This is fun.  I'll try to write another article next week.  The two I'm thinking about are "Why We Hate SCO" and "DRM, Bring'em Back".  The first explaining that it's (IMO) a little deeper than just that they're scum and trying to steal Linux,  and the second explaining what I feel are some of the consequences of DRM if widely adopted and why I think some of the little discussed consequences are the real intent.

But in writing the very short "Brief History of GrokWar" I rediscovered something I once knew well.  Real writing is hard work!  So I'll try, but I make no promises.

Thanks again!

Great job.  As to the dispatches, you might want to up the settings so that it is a little harder to send a story through.  That way we'll get fewer and comment more in depth.

At least until the site gets more users.

As to the general organization.  Is there still the odd hang when trying to vote it into a section?  If we could figure out sections, that might help with the dispatches.

Also, is there a way to limit the lenght of the intro section so we don't get the same problem that ColonelZen had on his post?  We'd have had it even worse with mine because I did the same thing, but some bad editing on html tags meant that I caught it before doing the final submit.

I have no problems with the hidden posts.  Once you get trusted (participate) enough, you can see them and unhide them if necessary.  The only people who won't be able to see the hidden posts are basically anonymous visitors.  You can also see who rates posts, which will probably discourage rating tyrants.

On the new labels for the ratings, it seems counter-intuitive to call anything with a positive number "bad".  Can't you set up the "bad" ratings with negative numbers?  Just a nitpick really.

A couple of other minor suggestions.  Is there any way to change the labels on dispatches and log entries?  Perhaps to Articles and Blog Entries?  The terminology seems a little wacky to unfamiliar users such as myself :)

How do sections work?  Will there be a navigation block for the sections?  What about a spellchecker?

It would also be nice if users could rate the dispatches, or at least see the ratings that were assigned by whoever approved the dispatches.  Don't know if that is configurable or is a limitation of the implementation...

At the very least it seems to me we may want the CCL non-commercial share-alike license.  The current license would seem to allow others to use the material and release it under a different license, so long as it is non-commercial and attribution is preserved.  At the very least, I'd prefer to see a requirement that the license require that any derivative works be re-released under the same terms.

And, honestly, I'd prefer not to see commercial restrictions, so long as the share-alike clause is retained.  Yes, it does allow people to make money off of it, but it also means that I can take the material they release and re-post it as well.

A) Allow one to rate a single post rather than having a "Rate All" button on each.

B) Instead of a 1-5 scoring system, a -1 through 3, or -2 through 2 system would be preferable, where 1 or 0, respectively is "Neutral". The verbal descriptions from lowest to highest are fine though and should remain the same.

Alternately, a similiar result could be reached more easily by setting "3 Neutral" as the default and not messing with the numbers, but I think 0 or 1 as the Neutral setting is more intuitive.

C) Set a default for all posts, such that unrated posts are voted as Neutral when "Rate All" is selected.

This would promote rating posts, as one wouldn't have to select a rating for each and every post, just the ones they wanted to mod up or down.

Of course, it might also moot suggestion A.

It seems like we could handle a bit more traffic but I don't know that a /.-ing is in order.

It gave me a friendly red message telling me that the section does not exist.

The funny thing (Well... for me anyway) was that I tried to build some spoof into the logbook entry that the system was going to reject my submission based on my boredom/bad grammar factor. That will teach me

Anyway, what is the policy here?  No logbooks? It seems as if the intention was to allow logbooks (from the SOI).  What I was posting was definitely not worthy of Dispatch status.

Thanks for the effort you are putting into this project, would be interesting to see what comes out of it.

Regards

Groendraak