Here's an idea, maybe not of huge importance but might be useful sometimes. On the OSnews "Submit News" page you can see suggested news by others. Why not give links there too? Sometimes, when I've submitted news, I've noticed there an interesting news article submitted by others. Usually the submitted news are so new that search engines like Google haven't yet indexed them and thus cannot find them if I try.
On the other hand, I could see one major headache and problem: spam and advertisements... The amount of spam in the submitted news might increase? But maybe that would not be an enormous problem after all?
(By the way, a submitted news article today that I might be interested in reading too, is "Accidental in-depth analysis of Ruby on Rails shortcomings". Does anyone know the link to that one?)
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Member since:
2005-04-01
You got it, the links are NOT displayed to prevent spamming the comments system. I've toyed with the idea of making them available to registered users or subscribers, and I haven't actually ruled it out entirely, but it raises some issues - such as when we modify news submissions (which is virtually every item) or if we refuse posts. We don't want to get caught up in the meta conversations about why we accepted one submission and rejected another.
We can discuss it and see what happens. I'm not opposed to revealing submissions or just links to registered and logged-in users.
Member since:2005-06-29
I'm squarely against putting links in there. We already get SO MUCH spam in the backend, and I do not want to encourage that behaviour. In addition, OSNews is a gatekeeping news website, and as such, it doesn't even make sense.
We have Digg for these kinds of things - and I don't mean that in a derogatory way.
Member since:2005-07-08
Ok. I can very well understand your point. Encouraging spammers is the last thing I would like to do anyway.
By the way - and to remind you about this too - the older topic that is already archived, mentioned, already over a month ago, about the weird characters showing in posts. The bug remains. (I don't want to start a new thread about it as it is a known problem already, so thought to mention it here as a side topic.) It is rather irritating as trying to change the character coding in browsers doesn't help a bit (probably quite a few visitors have been trying that without success and got frustrated). Any solutions in sight yet?