regarding the voting and such, i’ve gone and made that optional. there are good things about slash, good things about kuro5hin (plenty of goodness there, IMHO), and plenty of good things about killoggs. I’m trying to package as much stuff into kludge-o (hence the name, i guess) as i can, and make it as configurable as possible.

theLocust started out in much the same way that Killoggs did. I didn’t want what the others did, so i wrote my own. After slap-dashing it together, i decided i could do this in a sensible manner, and develop it properly. and hence, we have kludge-o.

Yeah, its not anywhere as complex on the backend as something like (ugh) slash. Or even, (ugh ugh) phpNuke. There is a lot going on though, all the content is democratically dynamic. For example, the page titles, interesting links and quotes are member submitted from the member screen, and all members can vote on them. If their score drops to low, the item won’t appear… There are so many little things like that I want to add.

But, yeah. Killoggs is a community, it will never be something like Kludge-O, a package. I’d love to check out Kludge-O, when you get it finished. Sounds like an much better alternative to the above examples, which are not very good, in my opinion. Which is why I wrote my own code for Killoggs in the first place.

But considering that my intention for Kludge-O is to be released to a wide audience, to be openly hackable (the HTML clearly defined outside of the code, the ability to use more than one database vendor, etc), kludge-o needs that extra functionality, like the rating of posts for moderation purposes, the story queue, the ability to “vote” stories into publishing.

Killogg’s doesn’t need all that, and chances are, theLocust.org won’t need it either. I’m just trying to make kludge-o as flexible as possible. in my perfect world, it would fit killoggs just as well as Slashdot or kuro5hin.

So, where does Killoggs need improvement, in your eyes. I have a long list of things, but I’d be interested in hearing what other people think.