h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I think they should have waited until after sorting out all the bugs before selling h2g2. At least sort out the smiley problem.

The smiley problem was fixed in the latest release.

Ben

Nope, it's still messed up in Opera, click on a smiley, then press return for a new line, and you get another smiley. yay.

Clicking on a smiley take the focus away from the message box, but doesn't return it once it's populated the smiley code.

I for one am disgusted by the advert, specifically this part:

"The H2G2 community is the heart of the site and *largely self-managing*"

Surely the phrase that should have been used is Mostly Harmless.

I think that's a different bug, Pastey. That's to do with those Smiley buttons.

The bug that was fixed was the one where if you put a smiley into a conversation by any means, the post will usually be rejected by the profanity filter.

The wording is the wording, and Im glad I wasnt the one who had to write it. However, while its nice to be described as *largely self managing* it also makes us sound a little ... introverted, no? I wonder if its clear that without the community there would be no content at all?

Any prospective buyers will learn. Sooner or later, theyll learn.

Whatever was written, we could probably find fault with it. I think it's not bad though. It's short and sweet, puts the onus on the buyer to find out more about the site, and clearly states that is not a deal where they can buy the place and ignore the community until we leave. The BBC want the new owner to demonstrate how they will take care of us. And I like that.

Realistically anyone who is interested in buying the site will not know of the sale because it is in New Media Age. They will be the sort of person who has seen it on The Register, or Slashdot, or just knows about it anyway because they stay in touch with h2g2.
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--> lets test this fix

Posting from Barlesque,

Maybe we can combine "largely self-managing" with "mostly harmless."
The result would be something lile "largely mostly."

Or "Mostly Large".

We're fools if we think that only a niche new media outfit can run this site. Any number of publishing outfits could run it successfully.

The Irish among us can be "largely marmless".

Quick, someone contact the Great Publishing Houses of Ursa Minor. Surely one of them will be interested.

(Just not Conde Naste, unless they agree to actually support the place.)

Seriously, do we want to be a minnow in a big pond? We've spent 10 years being just that, and ahve been constrained on what we can write and how we can write it, we've been under-resourced technically, and watched while we went from cutting edge to lame duck in terms of features, gazing wistfully on at Wikipaedia and Facebook and wondering just how we missed that particular train.

Going it alone, we'd be technically under-resourced and having an open source platform would help hugely with that. And but we could take democratic control over the Guidelines, house rules for acceptable behaviour, and even which bell or whistle came next.

How likely is it that a Publishing company would give us the same levels of freedom the Beeb gave us? I'm with Taff, I don't think a Great Big Publishing House is the answer.

There are times when I'm largely gormless.

But it isn't necessarily an either/or situation. There may well be other organisations interested.
And who's to say a big corp will be as restrictive?

It depends on the publishing house, of course. I've seen other sites owned by publishers that gave them pretty much free reign; maybe not as much capital support as they deserve, but few restraints nonetheless.

This may be an heretical statement in these days of variously flavoured and coloured popular revolutions, but . . .



I'm not sure I want democracy.

There's all sort of talk about attracting attention and new users, but what happens when the 'immigrants' outnumber we who have been here for a long time? What protection will the original point of H2G2 have without a 'king'? What will keep H2G2 from becoming 4chan, if the majority wants 4chan?


http://xkcd.com/591/