How about an NNTP news gateway?

I'd love to, but there are several problems that complicate this: first is the time to program it. An NNTP gateway is definitely on the TO-DO list, but it's lower on the priority list then many other things. Second is advertising: Slashdot costs a lot to run each month, and our performance is measured in terms of dollars and pages. If we can figure out a way to put advertising (and don't worry, it'd be reasonably minimal) into the NNTP comments cleanly, we'd be all set. Finally, the moderation system really doesn't have a counterpart in NNTP.

This is a frequently requested feature that has several variations that essentially have the same answer: Time and Abuse.

Time is a resource that we always lack, so anything that we do that increases the amount of time required to maintain Slashdot has to be weighed carefully. A good example is the existing submission monitoring functionality. The amount of email I got regarding rejected submissions more then doubled when I added notification. I'm afraid that a public forum for pending/rejected stories would simply complicate the life of our authors.

Abuse is much worse. We get hundreds of submissions a day: we don't need more submissions, we need better ones. A public forum that gets the kind of traffic we get tends to be abused (like, say, the Slashdot comments for example). We don't want to be deleting "First Posts" and "Natalie Portman" type trolls and spams from the submission bin: we're busy enough as is.

This is a fair request. As it stands, people merely see "Rejected" or "Accepted". The reasons are simply left to their imagination. A simple reason like Offtopic, Boring, Badly Written, Repeat etc would go a long ways towards alleviating that problem. But again, this is more work for our authors: right now we delete 3000 submissions a week. Each takes a half a second to click a button. Even if this adds only 10 seconds of upkeep to each submission, that adds a full day of work each week! So, the answer is "someday".

Slashdot is a very open community; in the user comments our readers are free to say whatever they please. But we feel that the unique nature of Slashdot is largely because the contents of the homepage are determined by a handful of people.

I'm sure a very cool website could be developed based on the concept of allowing public voting to determine the content of the homepage, but that website wouldn't be "Slashdot". If we tried to do it "by committee" it would suffer from the same problem that most projects done by committee suffer from: it would get bland.

Let me put this another way: in the comments, any pro-Linux or anti-MS comment is probably gonna get rated up. Any time Microsoft does anything even slightly naughty, it gets submitted 50 times. Does that mean that it should be posted to the Slashdot homepage? For me personally, I don't want to read the "Bitch at Microsoft" website, but if ruled by popular consensus, Slashdot would very likely degenerate to this point. Since the days of Chips & Dips and the first days of Slashdot, my first goal has always been to post stories that I thought were interesting. I think a lot of people share my idea of interesting, and that's part of why Slashdot became successful.

Sure, it's a great idea, but it has a lot of implications. For example, commercial sites rely on their banner ads to generate revenue. If I cache one of their pages, this will mess with their statistics, and mess with their banner ads. In other words, this will piss them off.

Of course, most of the time, the commercial sites that actually have income from banner ads easily withstand the Slashdot Effect. So perhaps we could draw the line at sites that don't have ads. They are, after all, much more likely to buckle under the pressure of all those unexpected hits. But what happens if I cache the site, and they update themselves? Once again, I'm transmitting data that I shouldn't be, only this time my cache is out of date!

I could try asking permission, but do you want to wait 6 hours for a cool breaking story while we wait for permission to link someone?