Here at the Daily Kos International Command Silo, we work hard every day to improve the site experience for you, our valued members. For many months, we've been working on a new and improved version of the site, codenamed "Daily Kos 5," which we've designed to address some of the complaints and concerns that many of you have communicated to us about the current iteration of the site, called Daily Kos 4. We're pleased to announce that the new version of the site is almost ready for beta testing, and we're ready to retire the "Daily Kos 5" codename and take the wraps off the final name.
Introducing... Daily Kos 3.
Daily Kos 3 will feature a number of improvements over Daily Kos 4, including:
Scoop. Daily Kos 4 runs on custom software that we've developed in-house and is expensive to maintain and improve. Daily Kos 3 is based on Scoop, an open-source content management system (CMS) used by many of the top community websites from the early 2000s. We believe that moving to an open-source platform will allow us to benefit from the cooperative work of the worldwide community of Scoop developers, or at least as many of them as are still alive.
Only one diary per day. We welcome diaries from all of our members, but some particularly narcissistic Kossacks have insisted on abusing the diary privilege to post diaries 3, 4, or even more times in a day. When Daily Kos 3 launches, every member will be allowed to post one diary per day, and no more. Better make it a good one! To help keep the recent diaries list from being cluttered up with garbage, Kossacks will be encouraged to respond to low-quality diaries with comments such as "Not a diary," "Already diaried--please delete," "This is a comment, not a diary," and "Delete this POS."
New users must wait 24 hours before posting. Many of you have complained about the flood of spammers that have inundated the site recently. As a spam-fighting measure, when Daily Kos 3 launches, newly registered users will be required to wait 24 hours before posting a comment or a diary. This is also expected to cut down on the occurrence of trolls and infiltrators from RedState.
UIDs are here to stay. Some of you responded negatively to news that numeric UIDs would be retired in Daily Kos 5. You spoke, and we listened! Daily Kos 3 will feature UIDs just as prominently as they are featured now.
Previous Tag Versions. Have you ever wished you could find out who's been monkeying with the tags in your latest diary? A new feature in Daily Kos 3 called "Previous Tag Versions" will let trusted users see exactly who changed the tags, and when.
More effective comment searching and sorting. Searching on Daily Kos 4 can be inefficient in ways that aren't always obvious. For example, in comment searches, you have to specify a range of one year or less, or your search will return no results. With Daily Kos 3, you will be able to search using any date range, or without using a date range at all. Advanced search operators will allow you to sort the results list by subject, author, date posted, number of recs, or number of HRs.
More responsive Ajax. Don't you hate how the list of comments in a diary gets updated at random, widely-spaced intervals, especially when you're composing a comment? In Daily Kos 3, the comment list will update much more regularly and frequently. Moreover, when you bring a page or tab to the foreground, you'll be able to instantly see a list of all the comments that were added to the diary when the page was in the background.
No more groups. Too often, groups have been used as the basis for cliques, which are inherently exclusionary and not in keeping with the spirit of this site. At times, this has even led to users being ganged up on and harassed by organized mobs. Groups will not be supported in Daily Kos 3, which we hope will lead to a fairer and more equitable community for all.
No more profiles, streams, or badges. No one cares about those things anyway.
Troll rating. The term "hide rating" is confusing and tends to obscure the real reason people use HRs anyway. In Daily Kos 3, hide ratings will be called "troll ratings," or "TRs," and members will be encouraged to use them on people who are being trolls.
edscan. We're very pleased to announce that edscan, one of our community's most beloved diarists, has agreed to return to the site. You can expect to see edscan's free-verse missives as soon as Daily Kos 3 launches. We're also in talks with Maryscott O'Connor, RealityBias, and ErrinF to bring their contributions back to Daily Kos 3, and will announce any developments as they happen.
This is just a sample of the many improvements that Daily Kos 3 will bring to this website and this community, and we're already planning more. For example, in a future version of the Daily Kos software, codenamed "Daily Kos 2," we're considering enhancements to the comment recommendation system that will do away with binary "up/down" recs and allow members to grade comments individually on a scale from 0 to 4.
We hope that you like these changes we have planned for you, and that you will be able to use these improvements effectively to help Daily Kos carry out its true mission: getting Howard Dean elected President.