Proposal for the New News

This is all based upon two guiding principles.

1. The site is, and shall remain, community driven.
2. People are very lazy, and what effort they do put forth comes in bursts.

News Gathering Page

A list of sites that should be checked regularly for news. Listed in order of how overdue the system thinks they are for checking. Give details of the sites, give how often it should be checked, when it was last checked, who checked it off the list..

After that, give the options for editing it.

I also think that it should offer a text field for each site - so that after you check a site you can say what the latest headline on that site was, to aid the next person who checks it.

I expect two types of site to populate this page, the first news sites, such as el Reg which should be checked regularly (every few hours during the working day) The second type sites which don't change very often, but for which changes are very important. For example, the home pages of mods.

It might be possible to use wget to automatically check these sites on some sort of schedule, and then just flag up those sites which have changed since someone checked them off the list.

Pester RT

As well as discussion of admin type stuff, and handling of unsolicited submissions, this list will be used to pester people into submission. Specifically, pestering occasional content authors into writing us columns.

If we keep a single id for each correspondant, then listing them in 'least recently accessed' order will allow people to see who is next up for pestering. Obviously, people have to sign up to be pestered - we don't want to annoy our members, just remind the lazy ones (ie. all of them) that they volunteered to help out.

I see a thread going something like:

• Us: Hey, thanks for signing up
• Them: No problem [Article]
• Us: Hey, thanks for the article
• ... time passes ...
• Us: Hey, it's been a while since we've heard from you. How're you doing? What've you been up to recently?
• Them: ...
• Us: Great! Hey, why don't you write us an article about that?
• Them: [Article]
• Us: Hey, thanks for the article
• ... and so on

Some More Things that I Would Like

Sorry that these are in the order I have thought of them, not the order of importance I place upon them. Due to team-ennui's strictly limited time, we will have to decide which of these are most important.

1. A way for admins to post articles and still have them show up as 'written by' the original author. This could be as simple as a standard way to put it in the main body text.
2. An easier way to migrate articles from BBS and RT to the main news system. Preferably with more auto-markup.
3. Make the BBS / submit news pages / links more prominent on the main portals to the site. Check what (if any) news shows up on main www.morat.net page.
4. Pester the design group to make news system more visible to users, especially the 'submit' system, and the bbs.
5. I want a page that formats news similarly to the register - headline and then first paragraph of a whole bunch of items.
6. An 'article to a page' view, with the comments thread expanded below it - similar to eurogamer.
7. Redesign: Easy to find static URLs for every article. Include a 'how to link to our articles' page somewhere.
8. Polls. Lame, I know - but a good way to guage how much interest we are holding. Offer instant gratification with piccies (not just the graphs, a 'you voted for' reward) after voting. Entice people in with 'if you had voted last week, here is what you could have seen' Also give a link to all the images after a vote, to stop people going back and voting for each in turn to see all of the pictures.
9. A tag, say <#postId> which is replaced even if found inside other html to allow for, for example, links to the forum thread without having to post, refresh, find the id, go back and edit...
10. How about us being able to vote on ennui's priority queue to decide which things are most important to do next ;)
11. Although yes, us coders are unreliable and slow, having us able to view and edit stuff would get stuff done (slightly) faster than not. Let more people be a part of team-ennui.
12. Lead by example. You'll notice I've started doing this. But every time I post five articles and three columns it pokes other people into thinking 'oh yeah, I should probably post something'. Eventually, maybe they will.
13. I don't think anyone should be required to do work, unless they are right at the 'top admin' level. Most people will just post articles for approval as and when they feel like it. If they post high quality stuff fairly regularly, then we offer them a post as an editor, to approve other peoples articles if they like - but mostly just so that they can bypass the waiting for other people to improve. If they do that job decently for a while, then we ask if they would like to be a voting admin and participate in discussions over where to go with the system. And eventually they can take on the burden of having the power to add new admins, and being obligated to put in a bit of effort regularly.

PR Blitz

We need a PR blitz if we want to get big enough to actually be able to recruit writers. I want to recruit at least enough writers that I don't feel that I have to post.

1. Get people writing for us

   Pester personal contacts. Pester in irc. Keep begging in the news. Guilt people into posting even a half as much as I do

2. Get people reading us

   Post on forums. I hate to suggest this, but mailshot MORAT members. We could do this as a part of the 'cleaning out abusive and dead sites' thing. Oooh, since we offer an rdf feed, perhaps we could offer a newsletter too?

3. Get people writing for us

   Get our writers to approach other writers. Blind-shot good writers on other forums, and from our clan sites. Possibly even posters on other sites? At this stage, we can actually offer them an audience, so we are an attractive proposition for anyone who wants to get their thoughts out there.

4. Get people reading us

   Mail other news sites, telling htem that we have had an overhaul. Now that we have original content, we should be able to get some of them to issue headlines which link to us. We can start issuing advisories (hey csnation, here's a treatise on the uses for hostages) Put up side-bar links to other news sites, and ask if they would link back to us By this point we must not be using news from other sites without properly accrediting them. (ie. explain to people the correct way to give credit)

In Closing