I happen to co-run a slash site. We started running it in the slashcode 1.x days (still using 1.x now, actually). 1.x can be a real pain to configure, otoh, it is a pretty scalable and flexible system. I've heard the Bender codebase (2.x) is a lot easier to use. As far as users submitting top-level posts/articles/stories, is this really a bad thing? You do have complete editorial control over what gets published in the slash system as a top-level content node (i.e. story/article).

I don't know if this is a factor, and I've heard it's changed in 2.x, but slashcode is a pain to virtual host.

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"I aim for the stars. Sometimes I hit London."
~ W. von Braun