I'm sorry, but I can't throw any support behind this endeavour at all. After all, I think it's time to go back and look at what was just said:

Hey guys! I'm more than willing to let you redesign this place. Oh, keep that shitty logotype, and that "Slashdot Green", and the crappily-compressed icons of yesteryear. Actually, what we want is you to just change things minimally, and we want to do as little work on the Slashcode backend (and information architecture) as possible.

The point you guys are missing here is twofold: first, a redesign is more than just skin-deep; second, it's hard to even get to the skin-deep side of things when you're stifling creativity to the point of where the only thing you want to see is exactly what you've got now. Just go do a find/replace and change section heads to Helvetica and body copy to Georgia, space out your line-height a bit more, and voila! instant Slashdot "redesign". I wouldn't even call it much of a facelift.

You guys are trying to compete with places that are obviously out of your league from a UI perspective at that. As my friend Stick_Fig said above, Digg works because it's drastically cleaner on the frontend, and the only way to get that cleanliness on Slashdot in a CSS change would be to add a ton of display: none; to the code. This offers no benefit in decreasing load time to the user and just makes the site that more frivolous.

You've already lost some part of your readerbase to sites like Digg (which is a forbidden term around these parts) and quick-access links lists like del.icio.us popular. Asking for a facelift isn't helping your cause.

Anyway, let's get to that point: Changing a CSS file is not a "redesign". Saying so is just fooling yourself. A true redesign would take into account plenty of information architecture, markup optimisation, and a total re-thinking of Slashcode's interface. It's not enough to simply change green to blue and underline your links with dotted borders. A redesign requires changes to the markup both for semantics/accessibility as well as to maintain a coherent architecture across the redesign. A redesign requires thinking outside of the box on comment layout, administrative interface, and site structure.

You should be allowing designers and developers to tweak Slashcode itself as well as the template's markup. This readerbase is more than talented enough to do so. Once the aging Slashcode dinosaur is brought into check and architecture has been optimised, things can move along smoothly on the CSS end of things. And no, that HTML/CSS thing that you guys did a few months back (that CmdrTaco is saying was so snazzy) really doesn't change much of anything. Changing markup and not changing any internal IA structure is useless, and this contest is exactly what designer Khoi Vinh complained about in October.

Slashdot, you're pretty much keeping yourself right on the same track. This is just as short-sighted as the original concept was, and I don't see anything changing drastically here in the near future. From the article on Publish.com:

Without the freedom to rethink, for instance, Slashdot's comment threading, or its presentation of search results, or its topic pages, the net effect of a redesign will be considerably less impactful than one might hope for: prettier but not sturdier. This is because the linchpin of effective online graphic design--a mindful awareness of architecture and usability--will be hampered by the existing code. There may very well be new improvements to these architectural challenges in development, but even the best design based on today's feature set will have difficulty adapting to significant future changes in the user experience. Like a lot of facelifts, this one may be pleasing at first glance, but will likely prove somehow unsatisfactory after prolonged gaze.

What, then, are we changing here with this? If I remember correctly, this article wasn't met with much fanfare here on Slashdot. The original point on Publish.com still stands, and this Redesign Contest is no better six months later.