Hello,
I have some exciting news about the Free Talk Live website! Our techs have been working behind the scenes on a major upgrade to the site's functionality: Reddit integration! Want to help us beta test it? Here are instructions and beneath that, why the change is happening:
HOW TO USE REDDIT ON FREETALKLIVE.COM
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0. You will need a Reddit account, so if you don't have one, get one at
https://ssl.reddit.com/login before continuing with these instructions.
1. Log in to
http://freetalklive.com the normal way using the Login button at the top right (Next to the search field).
2. Change the URL address in your browser to
https://www.freetalklive.com/subreddit/subreddit3. Click on the "Reddit Log in" on the left side bar under "Listen Live".
4. Continue to log in to Reddit if required.
5. Click "Allow" to allow FTL to vote on your behalf.
6. Browse back to
https://www.freetalklive.com/subreddit/subreddit if you aren't there already.
7. Use the "Up" and "Down" buttons to vote.
8. To submit a new link, use the link on the left sidebar above the login button called "Submit Link to Reddit" OR browse to thehttps://www.freetalklive.com/subreddit/submit URL.
WHY THE CHANGE?
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Back when we launched FTL 2.0 in early 2010, it was a big change from our old "we tell you what's important"-style (web 1.0) site. FTL 2.0 reversed that, and focused our site on you telling us what is important by allowing you to submit content and vote it up or down. Content that received enough votes would make it to the front page. It was a big improvement, but not without its own set of problems.
Some issues that have been ever-present:
-Once an item was front-paged, its ranking had nothing to do with the amount of votes.
-Paltry amounts of votes.
-Sometimes voting or the captcha for submitting content would break in some browsers.
-Constant spambot submissions
Many of the causes of these problems was the fact that the software we chose for the guts of the voting system, "Drigg" hasn't been developed since 2007. It's literally ancient in internet terms.
What were our options?
We could have scrapped the voting system entirely, but despite it not being a new idea, it's a good idea. Drigg is just a less-than-stellar implementation of it. I wanted to keep the voting feature, because it's a great way for you to share your show prep ideas with the show's hosts.
We also could have replaced Drigg with a different voting system designed for Drupal. However, those could also decide to halt development and they really didn't offer anything more than solving Drigg's issues, maybe.
Finally, we decided that dumping Drigg and moving to a Reddit implementation means we would be using a reliable voting system that is one of the most popular sites in the world, meaning that your submissions and votes would not only show up on FTL's site, but also on the new FTL subreddit at
http://www.reddit.com/r/freetalklive/ That should mean more votes and more participation, since anyone with a Reddit account will be able to see your stories and vote as well.
I hope you like the new system. Please report all bugs you discover via the BBS's bug reports forum:
http://bbs.freetalklive.com/in-progress/Ian
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