Your suggestions requested! Revamping the Daily Paul
Friends,
I had a post like this earlier soliciting ways to make the site better. Everyone came up with a lot of great ideas, but I had no way of implementing them at the time. I simply didn't have the technical skill to administer most of the requests, nor the money to pay someone else to do them. But now I'm ready to take the site to the next level. I can't do it myself, so I'm hiring the best consultants around. They're not going to be cheap, which is why I'm having this fundraiser and selling these posters.
I'm redesigning the site from the ground up, which means a faster more useful site for our movement. Now that we've been here for a year, I'd like to hear your suggestions again on how to make it better. I know that in many ways I am the bottleneck at this site. I get anywhere from 100 - 300 emails a day from the site, many marked "URGENT!" I simply can't deal with them all. People want their stuff on the site or on the front page. I have tried to deal with that by setting up the forums for people to post, but then we have the problem of spammers and plain offensive/off topic posts, and topics just getting lost under the deluge of posts. There are a lot of false positives with the spam filter, but unfortunately I don't have time to review them all. I've been getting a lot of complaints from that recently in my inbox (many of them marked URGENT! I am not a spammer!)
Unfortunately, the site doesn't make enough money from the ads that I can support myself, so I have to work a day job as well. What is sad for me is that I've become the spam chaser, policeman, peacemaker, and announcement poster, which is very draining. After listening to complaints all day via email ("you need to BAN so-n-so! He called me this!") I rarely have the time or energy to write, which is what I enjoy doing, and which is what I set the site up for in the first place! - sigh -
So my aim with hiring the high paid consultants/developer is to empower more of the users to do the work that I cannot, in terms of being moderators and administrators. I'd like to have a more complex voting system that would put individual bloggers' work on or off the front page, and hide (or show) the best (worst) comments. Also, there should be a way for users to build up credibility (sometimes known as 'karma') over time with many good posts, and lose it with many bad ones.
I have taken the first steps to initiate the work. I don't know how long it will take, or how much the final bill will be. If you can, please help me pay for it, with a small donation, or by buying a high quality poster.
I'd also like your help in trying to help me visualize the role that the Daily Paul should play going forward into the election and beyond. This a completely grassroots site, and I receive no funding nor guidance from the campaign itself. What has become clear to me - and what I will write about in the future - is that our movement will never get MSM press other than to marginalize us. We're going to have to do it all ourselves, peer-to-peer and one person at a time. It won't be easy, but I have no intention of giving up.
Please donate, and please let me know what how to best improve the Daily Paul.
Thank you for your patience and support.
Michael Nystrom
Editor
www.dailypaul.com
I hope
it is not the same firm that did infowars.con.
Tags for posts and comments
It would be great to see some option to add tags to posts and comments. Later on someone that missed the post or comment could search for it by one of the tag keywords. http://del.icio.us/ is a good example of this with links and tags.
I just finished watching a
I just finished watching a Frontline documentary on Journalism. http://www.pbs.org/wg... Part III specifically deals with the internet as the alternate (and only) source of news for 20-30 year olds. The success of sites (such as Google and Digg) is noteworthy because they don't create the content, they have merely created the framework for content to be presented. These new frameworks have had a profound effect on journalism.
There is a Digg clone called Drigg and it is a "plug-in" for Drupel (which is the open-source software the powers DailyPaul.com). I have set up a test on my own website: www.reclaim.org and you can see how it works. I think the DailyPaul site could do the a same thing.
Here is how it works:
- Vote up the links that you like,
- Vote down the links you dislike.
- You help decide what's popular!
/mark
www.RECLAIM.org - Las Vegas MEETUP
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unSpy.info
I love your site. Just some
I love your site. Just some more security and troll fighting..but not to the degree of complete censorship...in disagreement.
Ads
What about allowing 1/3 of the page to be banner ads so that you could generate more revenue (instead of the latest articles and recent blog posts)? The ads could be neatly stacked on each other and there would be room for more of them. I just think it would look a little cleaner to separate the ads from the posts but I don't know how realistic this is for you.
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"We will never give up. We will never give in." - Dr. Ron Paul
I don't know how hard it would be but maybe
you could seperate your online users into states, or have their state they reside in after their nickname. This would help us to be able to contact people in our own state and possibly unify us a little more. Maybe we could all change our dailypaul info to include the state behind our nickname. This would allow us to maybe meet locally. Keep up the great work.
Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must. like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it.-Thomas Paine
The R3volution requires action, not observation!!!!
I am completely opposed to this!
because then my name would have to be "alaskaron alaska", and that would just be redundant! ;-)
j/k. Good idea.
RP2012!
BeaReady - OH .....
BeaReady - OH .....
Trust in God, but tie your camel tight.
"Socialism needs two legs on which to stand; a right and a left. While appearing to be in complete opposition to one another,they both march in the same direction." - Paul Proctor
Hey!
You made me feel special : )
"If humanity can grasp the basic concept of 'Infinite Diversity In Infinite Combinations', and then accept it for what it is, then there may yet be hope. If not, then the destruction of mankind, at it's own hand, is inevitable." - Anonymous
one word: PYTHON PYTHON PYTHON PYTHON!
Hi Michael:
I've been thinking about your technical problems for a while and highly suggest you watch this video from Cuong Do, one of the original architects of YouTube that talked about the difficulties of scaling, and optimizing finite resources to serve more users.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6304964351441328559...
It's about an hour long, but is completely worth watching and hope that you'll get some ideas/inspiration from it. Do's main point of the talk--eliminate bottlenecks at every possible level--from the app level down to the network. It's the same advice David Heinemeier Hansson gave Twitter people about bottlenecks in Ruby on Rails. Simply put, YouTube runs on Python.
From an aesthetic standpoint, it'd be great to see a more text-based site that takes full advantage of the browser window instead of having all the content within a middle column. The site should be optimized for rapid dissemination and discussion from the community. Offload all graphics and image assets onto a separate server or a CDN, but the site must be fast.
Also, while I haven't contributed much to the forum, again the whitespace bothers me when I'm looking at article comments. There's too much whitespace and I would like to see greater density in text in the space provided.
Dare I say that Daily Paul should look more like Craigslist, but perhaps with some nice slick AJAX implementations? I like the look of a clean site that's optimized for information and doesn't have much ads.
Not sure if I want to get a poster or just make a donation, but hope you'll find this information useful. Thanks and keep it up!
Get Volunteer Moderators
Spreading accurate information, developing a concerted effort and focusing the REVOLUTION on practical goals should be the mission of DailyPaul.
Please get moderators to help out to limit those who attack others when people ask questions or disagree with an issue.
Also, look at the Ron Paul Grassroots projects and be sure to promote them.
Perhaps you could get State Coordinators to pass the information from the boots on the ground level all the way to national exposure.
I have lots of ideas but quite busy, if you'd like to talk directly to me please message me. I'm very involved in the movement, host meetups and do way too many things rather than work :) (I need to be working though)
Well Ryan i actually agree
Well Ryan i actually agree with you on this one good job
Dr. Steve Parent
www.buckforchuck.com
www.whokilledtheconstitution.com
www.revolutionbroadcasting.com
Dr. Steve Parent
Whuffie
Employ the currency of whuffie, as put forth by BoingBoing's Cory Doctorow in his novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, an excellent book available as a free download and for derivative uses under Creative Commons. Details of how whuffie works is here, but the basic idea is this:
"Whuffie is the ephemeral, reputation-based currency of Cory Doctorow's sci-fi novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. (...) A person's current Whuffie is instantly viewable to anyone, as everybody has a brain-implant giving them an interface with the Net. (...) "Whuffie recaptured the true essence of money: in the old days, if you were broke but respected, you wouldn't starve; contrariwise, if you were rich and hated, no sum could buy you security and peace. By measuring the thing that money really represented — your personal capital with your friends and neighbors — you more accurately gauged your success"."
Obviously, we'd forgo the brain-implant portion of it (ha!!), but the concept of whuffie is one that many are clamoring for here, as expressed by desires for "karma" or "digg-like" voting, etc.
And who can disagree that "whuffie" is more fun than "karma" or "Digg-like voting"? ;)
Line Length Limit
Yes, indeed, great idea. A limited line length for the Active Forum Topics would be just the ticket that would allow more topics to be displayed in that column space.
The karma (silver, gold stars?) idea could encompass performance ratings, etc. The Libertarian web site has the world's shortest political test. Something akin to that idea - short and sweet. The beliefnet.com has a short quiz that categorizes religious belief systems. (It could be improved upon.) That idea could be converted to a political evaluation and coupled with performance evaluations on this site.
site
always been partial to http://www.invisionpower.com/community/board/index.html myself. Wish every blog/board/forum used it.
First encountered it at http://www.unexplained-mysteries.com/forum/
My suggestions would be. 1:
My suggestions would be.
1: Get rid of the flag button and add an ignore button instead because the flag button is used for the wrong purpose : example : It allows 7 non supporters to flag and shut down very important information that needs to stay up.
2: Ad 1 or 2 or 3 moderators to help keep some order here that can be trusted to keep the integrity of this site where it needs to be and keep the bad people that are spreading misinformation in this critical time.
Dr. Steve Parent
www.buckforchuck.com
www.whokilledtheconstitution.com
www.revolutionbroadcasting.com
Dr. Steve Parent
Look at some other Succesful sites
The ones I like are Slashdot, Dailykos, and Kuro5hin. Each has some advantages, and some problems.
First, the front page. It would be nice if there were an easier way to move things to the front page that are popular. these other sites allow user moderation, so that if a story gets enough votes, it will go to the front page - this can cause trollwars, but it also encourages people to put more time into there posts. There can be a section of simple short posts that is different from the front page.
It would be nice to have moderated and unmoderated sections, where the better posts can make it to the front page, hit some newsfeeds, etc. and the day to day rattling can be unmoderated, and buried a page into the site for subscribers.
I'd also suggest you consider a small subscription fee. This could be $ 10 - 15, and would allow people to post items that, if they survive moderation, would get to the front page. Non subscribers could only post Comments, not original stories.
From what I have seen on other forums, the subscription fee is important, not just in insuring payment for bandwidth, etc if the use of the site goes down for a short time, it also provides a check against people that would sign up for multiple accounts to moderate their stories up, or others stories down.
I suppose another method would be to go for something more like a E-zine, with editors, etc. and a forum one page inside for members.
Two Ideas
1. It's understandable that people want to talk about all kinds of things here; they need to vent, want to be heard, want to help out, and have useful stuff for us all.
But for that reason this site has become an information management nightmare (nobody's fault) and so it's very hard to keep a coherent picture in view of who is doing what, where, when, and what is more important, less important, etc. It has become one part useful and two parts confusion.
The site needs to be directory- and subject-driven, so that all related material is easily accessible, and in chronological order—a relational database type of format is what I'm trying to say. Web-enabled relational database programs are common and well developed; I don't see why this site needs to be written from scratch. Rapid development tools such as FileMaker Pro should work just fine...
There also needs to be security—not just in the sense of being hacker proof, but a secure way to discuss certain matters privately... don't have any idea how that would work.
2. While a project of this sort creates certain nominal expenses, and we certainly should be prepared to cover them, I also believe there must be some HTML, Flash and other types of "coders" out there who could donate their time and skill in lieu of cash contributions. Don't be bashful about putting the call out to them.
I could volunteer to help with the structural and/or visual design of the site, and guarantee tangible results quickly.
Let's go....
yes?
Site
I know this a Drupal site I run a few of them, you do not need to write code from scratch. There are lots of modules that you can plug-in to give it the functions that you need. It's just a matter of knowing how to use them. I would be happy to lend you a hand with this for free just some ad space would be fine.
Tom Savino
Savino Solutions
http://www.savinosolutions.com
I just noticed you recommended Filemaker
Not a lot of people are aware of this program but it is an excellent development tool, I've been using it for over 10 years and recommend it highly.
Hey Ralph!
Maybe we're onto something here...
Coding is not my strong suit, but info management and graphic design I do pretty well... let's hope some other will come on board, at least conceptually, so we can begin to problem solve...
yes?
BTW: There are already some good ideas farther down this page...
I think the guy that reccomended Drupal
is probably the best solution for this site. However, let me know if you have any Filemaker projects or questions.
"Most Popular Forum Topics"
People can rate a post....1 to 10. That would be a way of "bumping" a post without making a comment. Leave "Active Forum Topics" as it is, but add "Most Popular Forum Topics" as well. If possible, make the ratings expire after a week to keep it fresh, but only the best posts will stay at the top and the turnover will be much lower.
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"No man has a natural right to commit aggression on the equal
rights of another, and this is all from which the laws ought to restrain him." --Thomas Jefferson
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Libertas, Pax, Prosperitas
Manystrom - 3 suggestions
I think you have an excellent site, like all computer programing projects you are really never finished because there are always some tweaks you can make.
I have three suggestions:
1. Create more defined forums like campaign news and tactics, political philosophy and history, and the kitchen sink. This will provide a more constructive organization and keep from mixing topics like the philosophy of Lincoln with the intricacies of gardening.
2. Establish some rules of free speech that reflect the constitution and positions of RP.
3. Establish some direct link with RP HQ like someone from HQ who officially visits at a regular time where they can directly converse with the DP constituents.
Thanks Again
Sargent Pepper
PS - An automatic spell checker would be nice too!
Cool suggestions but there is a spell checker already
Haven't you noticed the red lines underneath the word when you make a spelling mistake?
"What does conservatism today stand for? It stands for war. It stands for power. It stands for spying, jailing without trial, torture, counterfeiting without limit, and lying from morning to night."
Lew Rockwell
I do not have that feature
Someone said before you have to install firefox which I did and still don't have it, does anyone know what is wrong?
Trackable posts by
Trackable posts by email.
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"It is not the abuse of power, it is the power to abuse."
- Michael Cloud, Libertarian
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"It is not the abuse of power, it is the power to abuse."
- Michael Cloud, Libertarian
Out of sight out of mind.
I've noticed good posts getting pushed off the main page by many new and often pointless and off topic posts. Increase the length of the Active Forum Topics column would help with this. The way it is now infiltrators and trolls can too easily push good posts out of sight by posting numerous not-so-good posts.
Where the bullet is on the Topic Title listed in the Active Forum Topics put the number of replies and a rating number. Add a button or hyperlink to open a tiny window to view the first lines of the post without having to actually track it down or switch pages to see it. This one feature would help with bandwidth issues. Add a "See Similar" button or hyperlink to a data dump of similar posts posted within X time frame.
All in all this forum and its format is excellent and if you ever get it where you want it perhaps the software can be made available to others for use on their web sites and specific topics?
PS: I think the "karma" idea would be great from a moderator's standpoint - if you can make it work properly, fairly and appropriately.
agree with dalesvp
I'll note something I want to explore after I read one thing and when I come back poof! its dropped off the page.
Also limiting the subject line! People don't need these huge topics, it gobbles up space in the Active Forum Topics.
It would be nice if the more feature continued the forum topics specifically.
with much appreciation, Thank-You
The DP is proof that the grassroots support for Ron Paul and his peaceful message of individual liberty is large, real, and not going away!
"Most Popular Forum Topics"
People can rate a post....1 to 10. That would be a way of "bumping" a post without making a comment. Leave "Active Forum Topics" as it is, but add "Most Popular Forum Topics" as well. If possible, make the ratings expire after a week to keep it fresh, but only the best posts will stay at the top and the turnover will be much lower.
--------------------------------------------------------
"No man has a natural right to commit aggression on the equal
rights of another, and this is all from which the laws ought to restrain him." --Thomas Jefferson
--------------------------------------------------------
Libertas, Pax, Prosperitas