After many hours of playing the worlds best MMORPGs progress quest ,hearing rumours about some game called second life and reading that article about the new abuse reporting system, it occurred to me that kuro5hin could be turned into a MMORPG.

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Yesterday I suggested that K5 needed a new FP poll. The subsequent discussion produced an excellent idea: a new "Polls" section.

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Who:  All members of this site, their friends, family, boyfriends, girlfriends, and pets

What:  The 1st annual K5 picnic

When:  September 5th, 2005 at 12 noon

Where:  Sheep Meadow, Central Park, New York City, USA

Why:  We're a great fun community with interesting people from all walks of life.  Come chat, enjoy drinks and food, celebrate our Natalee-related accomplishments, and just relax and enjoy the end of summer!

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A story entitled "Fuck Natalee Holloway" was posted to our site a few days ago.

It is already the 2nd highest-ranked link on a Google search for "natalee".

Searching for her full name shows her official missing persons site 1st and our link as 2nd.

As such, the administration at K5 has received more hate mail than ever before.

Members have demanded that it be published in its near entirety, so here are all email responses received to date.

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There is a science story posted on Kuro5hin now that belongs with discussion of New-Age crystals and astral travel.

I'm resigned to this now, but for a while I was pretty annoyed about it. But, it started a train of thought in me that I felt was worth committing to ASCII. I went through five stages.

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I have been a "full membership" subscriber to K5, if my memory serves, for about two or three years now, and a member of the community for even longer. My subscription ran out yesterday and I'm debating whether it makes sense to renew it.

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Or What You Can Do to Keep K5 From Becoming the Next Adequacy

the ghost of rmg said regarding the response my comments have elicited in Earn High by Playing it Clean:

this is the reason that people who produce decent content left this site in droves. these people are targetted precisely because they take pride in what they do -- which is to say, they do a good job at it. these are the people who are vulnerable to these sorts of tactics because people with self-respect, i.e. people who care about what they do and try to do a good job, are not willing to put up with that kind of crap and have better things to do.

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Kuro5hin is in danger of losing its relevance. What makes a website like this worth visiting is if there are many users contributing to it and currently there are not enough contributions to this site to keep it interesting. Whilst in its heydey in 2001 it clocked up approximately 100 million page views per day and had almost half a billion regular users, the current statistics are less exciting. Only six comments have been posted in the past year and usually there is only one page view per week, from the monkeys in Berlin zoo who have internet in their cage. The site needs to be much more dynamic. We need to think up ways to get more users contributing. Below are a few ideas which I think may help:

Pay people to contribute.

Disguise Kuro5hin as a more popular website and trick people into contributing.

Employ bots which will mimic real users, posting randomly-generated comments and stories.

Make Kuro5hin ultra-hip and then use viral marketing to promote it.

Cause the passage of time to be accelerated so that the site seems to be more busy.

Promote Kuro5hin in establishments such as mental hospitals, nursing homes and prisons, where people don't have much to do but have interesting opinions.

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I have a three part suggestion for improving the quality and quantity of K5 article submissions:

1. Give constructive editorial advice in the edit queue, and nothing else and nowhere else.
2. Hold your topical comments until an article is voted up.
3. Debate article's worthiness in the voting phase, and nothing else and nowhere else.

These suggestions are not meant to be exhaustive; they focus on the simplest things we can do to improve the site while doing the most common activity on the site: posting responses to stories.

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Diaries should be allowed to turn into story submissions given enough demand. Readers should be able to click 'move to edit queue' on diaries that the author has flagged to allow this. Like 'move to vote', once enough votes are accrued, the action is taken.

Also, Dead stories should always turn into diaries that can't be moved to the edit queue again. This is better than deletion, for sure!

That is all.

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