Slashcode

I am trying to use Slash to set up an events-based discussion forum. Ideally I'd like it to be hosted by a turn-key hosting company with fairly punctual customer support. My internet connections are either behind a firewall or 56k modem, so speedy shell access is out of the question. Ideally the host would be friendly towards freedom of information and healthily disrespectful of authority (the site will NOT contain anything illegal, links or insight to anything illegal, but will be acting against the policy of a well-funded British institution whose ground-floor members support and are behind it). I would rather the host didn't drop me just because 'someone' asked them to. Who would you recommend for this?
I'd like to modify Slash slightly by arranging it around the date of the event, rather than the posting date. Would it be as simple as an extra data entry and changing a couple of lines of code, or would that go against everything Slash is designed to do?
Thanks for your help.

I'm really happy with how the BLOB support in slash is working. I can now add images and files, and I move the select level up so registered users can only access files. It's great.

I'd like to see how hard it would be to have Krow or someone add in placement tags for images. So you can "ALIGN=LEFT" or Right images and the like.

Thanks!

The Power Vacuum[powervacuum.org] is a news site with a definite anti-liberal slant to it. Providing both domestic and international News analysis, and explaining why US liberals are wrong! We encourage liberal counter-analysis from members in addition to our conservative counterparts.

This site is hosted by Vlad and the wonderful crew at LRSE Hosting.

It is possible to allow a Slash site to use a seperate authentication method like authenticating against a billing service? I'm thinking about using Slash on one of my member sites that uses CCBill for authentication. I'm tinkering with the idea of building the entire site around Slash. Is it possible for Slash to use the authentication provided by the CCBill CGI to authenticate to Slash?

I don't know of a way to auto-create accounts for new members when they sign up unfortunately. This could be the limiting factor. Not being a Slash buff, I'm not sure if this is required or not. I'm thinking of using the forum arrangement to get member feedback on the data in each article. The idea of using Slash to post site content updates might be a bad idea as well. Is this too far fetched to work?

Installed Slash today (version R_2_3_0_62 which was called latest stable) and logged in as admin. The admin menu at the top of the page seemed quite sparse compared to what I expected after reading the O'Reilly book, no 'Sections', 'Blocks', 'Variables' or 'Site_Colors'. And looking at the templates I know now this was intended. Is there a different way to access these sections (apart from inputing the link into the browser by hand)? Any reason why this was done?

Oh, and by clicking on 'Index' in the Section Editor I get an error in the main display, probably the result of a misconstructed select statement (the logfile tells me):
"SELECT topics.tid,topics.alttext FROM topics, section_topics WHERE AND section_topics.tid=topics.tid"

Since updating section.pl from CVS didn't do anything I wanted to know if this bug is known, fixed, unfixed or never heard of.