Slashcode

Democracy Now! a U.S. based morning TV and radio news program launched it new site, based on a heavily modified cvs version of slash. (Hacked together and hosted by openflows.)
As they become more comfortable with the system, and people on staff there get the hang of how slash works, we hope to add in the more community/interactive features of slash. For now it is simply a content management system, in the future it will become much more.

In just the first few days the traffic and audience response has been overwhelming.
stats from the second day the site was live:
IPIDs     Pages
11193   55190

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?