Come this summer, Slyck.com will enjoy its fifth year online. Those with us from the beginning will remember our roots began a year earlier in June 2000 as Slyway.com. Since that time Slyck.com has remained anything but stagnant, as the rapidly changing face of file-sharing technology has been reflected in our community. As we look forward to our first decade online, Slyck.com is ready to meet the challenges ahead with several major announcements.

The most dramatic change will be a complete back and front end overhaul of Slyck.com. Since our inception in 2000, the general layout of Slyck.com has remained similar, save for the addition of the forums and the occasional aesthetic upgrade. That’s all about to change.

The new Slyck.com, which is feverishly nearing completion, will implement several new technologies that will revolutionize the experience for our users. When released, Slyck.com will utilize the Web 2.0 philosophy, bringing greater user interaction to the file-sharing news experience.

Perhaps the greatest implementation of Web 2.0 philosophy will be a complete retooling of our guides. However as Web 2.0 philosophy dictates, that responsibility will fall on the Slyck.com community. The future of all our guides – and indeed upcoming guides – will be the dependent on the community via Wiki technology. To ensure quality, Slyck.com will nominate a member of the community per guide to approve all changes and/or submissions.

Furthering the importance of community interaction, we recognize many of our members are very articulate – if not overly vocal – on many of the issues in the file-sharing world. Sadly these intelligently worded posts are often overlooked in the hectic forums. To remedy this, we will offer a feature sure to accommodate our most vocal members – individual web blogs. Interested members of the Slyck.com community can then post news worthy articles independently of the user forums.

The new Slyck.com will also benefit from dozens of other upgrades and enhancements, especially the reorganization of our file-sharing programs/utilities and dictionary. Slyck.com’s original news and “more news from around the web” will also be redesigned and reorganized, allowing the end user to more easily navigate the volumes of file-sharing and technology related news.

In addition to the visual and back-end changes to Slyck.com, there is some disheartening news we also must share. It is with great sadness that Nick Parker (SlyckNick) is no longer part of the Slyck.com writing team. Losing any member of the Slyck.com team is always a difficult time for us. We will miss his contributions and dedication to Slyck.com. However, creative and operational differences made it impossible to continue our working relationship.

Back to good news. Although I was always the de facto editor-in-chief, the original plan for Slyway.com and Slyck.com was to make the lead writer and editor-in-chief separate positions – understaffing prevented this. Owner Ray Hoffman will substantially increase his role in Slyck.com’s daily operations and transition into handling most of the editing responsibilities. This change will redistribute our workload more appropriately and allow myself to concentrate on directing our original news and leading the writing team.

The upcoming changes are simply a foundation of things to come. The rest will be up to the Slyck.com community to fully realize our great potential.

Sorry about the loss of SlyckNick.

I'm psyched as hell about the changes to be made.

wow, cant wait to see how it turns out.

so you guys must have really had a falling out with Nick as he isn't just "not posting news anymore", he's gone all together...so sad

anyways, I just cant wait to get my own slyck blog

wooohuuuu!!! slyck 2.0- fuck yeah!!
Sad to hear Nick will no longer be part of the team.

We're definately excited about the new changes also...I'm sure there's a lot of members looking forward to the blog feature!

I'll certainly miss Nick's informative contributions to Slyck.
The changes sound very good and I'm looking forward to seeing the new look. The blogging feature also sounds good and will no doubt raise a few eyebrows around here.

We'll have a screen shot of it up soon.

Very nice!!

Can we expect an update on the statistics as well?

Cheers

SlyckTom wrote:We'll have a screen shot of it up soon.

Great.

The future of all our guides – and indeed upcoming guides – will be the dependent on the community via Wiki technology. To ensure quality, Slyck.com will nominate a member of the community per guide to approve all changes and/or submissions.

Need volunteers?

Absolutely! I'll keep you and anyone else interested in the loop.

Why is Nick no longer part of the team. Is he having some personal or family problems? He seemed in good mood a couple of weeks ago when I was talking to him!

Macker wrote:Why is Nick no longer part of the team. Is he having some personal or family problems? He seemed in good mood a couple of weeks ago when I was talking to him!

if it was something they wanted to discuss I imagine Tom would have elaborated in his post...I think its safe to assume that this is/was about a difference in opinion that was not reconciled

It is unfortunate that Slyck loses one of its best writers. SlyckNick is a really good bloke, knowledgeable about a lot of issues and his legal expertise is going to be sorely missed. I think that it is tragic to lose him.

On the issue of Slyck 2.0, I hope it is going to be a great success. I hope that there will be a diet of more variety when it comes to the writing of original news. Having the same point of view does not do Slyck justice. We need to hear from the "other" side - as in the enemy - writing about why they feel that p2p is soooo bad, and I for one would love to see guest writers like Michael Geist (even though I don't always agree with him), Bill Thompson and the like. It would be to Slyck's advantage to see that.

Thanks for the update, Tom. Great things to come, it seems. Nick, you'll be sorely missed. .

Yes I'm sad to hear Nick is gone also I enjoyed his posts Slyck 2.0 sounds like a great idea looking forward to it.

Is Nick off the posts though?
Sounds like he only left the staff...though I guess one could assume we may not see much of him.

he posted in my thread two weeks ago.....

Umm im not sure about this, but did Nick go to TPB...and now works for them or is a part of their team or something??

And that made the falling out

http://www.slyck.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=20465

look at his sigs and avators

let the rumors begin

100 bucks says im right

ok...heads i win, tails you lose.

Aww, I'll take that bet. He's been having that for a while now...at least since I joined...got nothing to do with it I'm sure...however I like reading dramatic posts so get on with the rumors

let the rumors end. It has nothing to do with that and we have no idea what Nick's future plans are, but we wish him the best in whatever they are.

As for the site, i've been plunging myself into Web2.0 technology and built the site advertised at the bottom of every slyck page (joemap.com) entirely on web2.0 technology. This is great stuff and not having to refresh the page to do simple tasks is gonna make the new slyck sexier than ever. We are gonna highlight Scratch's great article artwork on the new site with large pics for the top 4 articles.

The blogs, wiki style guides, and multimedia news are other things we are very excited about. And additionally all the news will soon be broken down into categories as well... The backend has almost been finished and we are gonna put it all together over the next 2 weeks and then unleash it.. can't wait. btw is there anything i've missed?

Ray

[Edited, senseless rumors]