MT version of dKos is now obsolete

Greetings. It's been clear for some time that I needed to do something to ensure the continued viability of Daily Kos. The message boards -- the heart and sould of this site -- were becoming unruly. Flame wars were getting out of hand, people were stealing handles from the regulars, and freeper attacks were getting increasingly more difficult to contain.

It was time to evolve.

This version of Daily Kos uses Movable Type, an amazing piece of software. But I needed something that allowed for greater community moderation and control.

So I have rebuilt Daily Kos in Scoop, a heavy-duty content management system. Aesthetically, the site will look mostly the same (I've made some tweaks, hopefully for the better). Functionally, things will be much more different.

1. User accounts: All posters will have to register an account. This will ensure that no one can steal anyone else's handle, while also enabling powerful community moderation features.

2. Community Moderation: The community will be able to moderate itself, eliminating trolls via collective action. I've set up safeguards to ensure that Dean supporters or Clark supporters don't try and hijack the threads by collectively banning the other side. It may take some tweaking, but it should work mostly okay.

3. Mojo: Users who are consistently ranked high by other users will see higher "mojo" ratings. In addition to the prestige of being a highly ranked community member, they will also get extra community moderation powers. It's your community, Scoop will allow you to take responsibility for it.

4. Story Polls: Scoop allows me to attach an Internet poll to every story I (or a guest poster) writes. Not every story will have a poll, but many will. This feature will help make the site even more interactive. Should be cool.

5. Customizable Homepage: The new dKos will allow you to customize the homepage. Early customizing will be minimal, but will grow over time. Still, you'll be able to set how many stories you want on the homepage, and whether to sport various features on the columns.

   You will also be to automatically place RSS feeds of your favorite blogs and news sources. In other words, you can have Atrios and Guardian UK headlines automatically displayed on your customized dKos homepage. And bloggers can submit their own RSS feeds for inclusion.

6. Tradeoffs: There is no perfect solution. The tradeoffs: comments won't pop-up in a new box. I may try to hack the system to make this happen later on, but for now, that handy little feature we're all so used to will no longer be available. Also, Trackback, an MT-only feature, will no longer be available.

   One other thing -- I won't be transferring the content from this site to the new one. I don't think it's possible without major hacking. Instead, I will maintain this "legacy" version of Daily Kos at dailykos.net, mostly for historical purposes. The Scoop dKos will be located at dailykos.com.

Now you may see some weirdness over the next 48 hours as I do some tricky navigation between DNS changes. Don't worry if you don't know what that means. In short, one person may see the new site, one person may see the old one, and yet another may see nothing but an empty page. Image links may suddenly break.

In short, the transition may be clean, or it may be a total clusterfuck. I don't know which, but be prepared for the worst. And expect light posting during the transition.

And finally, there will probably be bugs. So we'll work together and get through this, like we've gotten through every past challenge. I believe strongly the end result will be worth whatever hassle we might endure.

This is going to be really cool.

Posted October 13, 2003 06:33 PM | Comments (167)