Slashdot Mirror

Given that vBulletin/phpBB have been around since the early 2000s, I'm guessing there's a lot of legacy code, wouldn't be surprised if they're still running CVS or Subversion without independent repositories like git has. They were not well designed with upgrades in mind. Newer forum software like Discourse are better that way, but again are only optimized for touch screens. Giant amounts of whitespace, infinite scroll and other features annoying and wasteful of screen estate for desktop users.

The ability of Slashdot (and Reddit, etc.) to sort conversations is very much predicated on the existence of threaded discussion. Without threaded discussion, the direct replies to a topic get lost and scattered, and may even end up before the post they were replying to, with all the temporal paradoxes that involves.

In my experience, there is nothing more controversial in the realm of online discussion boards as the for/against on threaded conversation. There are people (mostly older folks who remember Usenet) who adore threaded discussion. There are others who absolutely *loathe* threaded discussion, and wish it would die in a fire.

Jeff's very much in the anti-threading camp, (2) though mostly on a practical, rather than ideological basis: "I have yet find any threaded discussion format I like". So Discourse only has a very limited threading model - basically just a "WTF is this person replying to?" button.

Without the ability to directly look at the context of a post, sorting posts removes all sorts of context about the discussion. Conversation is all about context, so removing it destroys the ability of the conversation to function. Flat posting forums solve this issue in one of three ways - either by forcing all readers into the same - usually chronological - context; by inducing users to heavily quote context in each post (quoting being something that also generates a large amount of acrimony); or by discarding the concept of "discussion" entirely, meaning posts devolve into disconnected soliloquies, related to each other only tenuously.

So just because web pages work well for someone who recently spent $600 and up on a phone doesn't mean that it's not worth optimising them.

It's not just comparing a state of the art iPhone 6s to an old Android phone. The top of the line Galaxy S6 performs worse than the 2011 iPhone 5 when running JavaScript.

https://meta.discourse.org/t/t...

To give you an idea of how divergent it has become, try:

http://emberperf.eviltrout.com...
Complex list
Ember 1.11
This is the benchmark most representative of Discourse performance, and the absolute best known Android score for this benchmark is right at ~400ms on a Samsung Galaxy S6. That doesn't seem too bad until you compare..

iPhone 5 â' 340ms
iPhone 5s â' 175ms
iPhone 6 â' 140ms
iPad Air 2 â' 120ms
iPhone 6s â' 60-70ms
In a nutshell, the fastest known Android device available today -- and there are millions of Android devices much slower than that out there -- performs 5Ã-- slower than a new iPhone 6s, and a little worse than a 2012 era iPhone 5 in Ember. How depressing.

Jeff Atwood wrote this great article https://meta.discourse.org/t/the-state-of-javascript-on-android-in-2015-is-poor/33889 that shows how far Android has fallen behind.

Agile developers expect agile everything. Ubuntu happens to just be a happy compromise between agile and waterfall.

If you look at RHEL, it's 5-10 year old packages, kept alive by an enormous engineering team that backports fixes to old, dead software, which creates a huge pile of technical debt for any developer trying to use "modern", highly modular frameworks.

As far as developers go, In the Ruby, Python, and Node ecosystems, anything that's not the latest doesn't exist. They don't use the system package management, they use gem, pip, and npm. They really don't care about the underlying OS, until it gets in the way, and getting in the way is exactly what a decade-old OS does.

Just to throw out an example. Take some modern ruby on rails application, say Discourse. (discourse.org). Go download a tarball from github. Now try to make it work with nothing but software from the official RHEL repository. Let me know how that works out for you. After you tear out all your hair and skin trying to do that, try to get the pieces from 3rd party repos that will make that work. See how much you have to bring in as far as new libraries and new packages just to make it work. It's still a nightmare even with the 3rd party repos, and that RHEL support contract doesn't cover them - every single piece that's likely to break your application, is now outside of your support agreement, so your company is now wasting at least $799/year for support.

Here you go, seems straightforward and easy enough: https://meta.discourse.org/t/i...

If modern, highly modern frameworks are interested in getting into the big enterprise space, then they will dedicate the time to making their software work with RHEL. If a company is running Ubuntu in production, then they don't particularly care that much about stability, have a small server install base, or a team that can hack around enough to make things work.

They belong on personal blogs, or on Twitter or Tumblr or Reddit, where individuals build a full, searchable body of work and can be judged accordingly

This bit right here tells me the author doesn't know much about Twitter. Twitter has an almost identical problem. One person I follow (who happens to at least front as an African-American female), has a dedicated Twitter stalker who makes new accounts every day just so he can make sure she gets to greet each new day with a tweet calling her the N-word. Rape threats are endemic there for identified females too. A "searchable body of work" is only a concern for those of us who care about our reputation. Trolls don't care in the slightest.

The only even partial cure I know of for crap like this is reputation-based user moderation, like you find in sites like Slashdot or Stackexchange. This at least allows the manifold eyes of your readers to do some of their own policing, and provides for much more prompt cleanup. A dedicated troll can create a hopeless amount of soul-killing destruction for one or two poor beleaguered individuals. But against a community of hundreds (or more) moderators, the amortized work is manageable. More importantly, the troll isn't going to get much satisfaction, as almost nobody sees their handiwork before someone mods it away.

If you have an online commenting system, you really need a user moderation system to back it up. I'd suggest Discourse, but there are probably other drop-in solutions available.

Not quite the old hand you are, but I have been hanging here quite a while, and this is the first I'm hearing of Technocrat. If you start it up again, and I hear about it, I'll be there.

The really sad part about all this is that there actually is lots of room for improvement in they way Slashdot does things. I was here before the moderation system was introduced. It was really innovative at the time, and of course has been a huge success, but that was then and the world has moved on. StackOverflow took the concept, expanded it, and did some amazing things. Some of the same folks are looking to make similar advances with Discourse. There's no reason why Slashdot can't take some of those more modern user-moderation ideas back.

I've actually had no real problem with Slashdot UI upgrades in the past. Heck, if I didn't like learning new things, I'm definitely hanging out on the wrong website. And it is certainly time for some upgrades. For instance, why can't we vote on stories instead of just comments? Why can't we edit our own comments? Why can't high-karma users get more moderation perks? Why can't user-moderators do more than get an occasional miserly 5 votes (immediately rescinded when they want to comment, which is what got them the karma to get moderation votes in the first place).

But as near as I can tell, for this upgrade the operating principle instead of "our users' experience needs to be better", is "our advertisers' experience needs to be better".

Anyone played ForrumWarz?

Discourse was co-authored by the same developer, Robin Ward.
http://blog.discourse.org/2013/02/the-discourse-team/

Draw your own conclusions, but it should be incredibly stable under a heavy load, and randomly pelt you with evil flames from hell.

Did you take a look at it?

The discussion threading is terrible, and there's no keyboard navigation, not even as good as on slashdot (which is not good either). It's also got a very noisy design, with lots of colors and complexity. In short, Jeff appears to be learning all the wrong lessons from other sites.

I think I'll stick with other systems for now. There's no value proposition in being involved yet.

Did you take a look at it?

How about a seizure warning before posting that link next time!

Well, Discourse should get rid of some of my favorite annoyances about forums like /.

Do you really think so? Did you take a look at it? What's the point of putting all those avatar pictures on each row? Each forum row looks too busy as it is. And why are they trying to do everything with Javascript? In my opinion, they're just repeating the mistake of Slashdot in that area.

Hopefully, they'll listen to user feedback, and iterate away from what they have now. Their forum is not bad, but for now it's not that great either.

A couple of things are missing:

Technical articles and opinions should have a level of proof and logic behind them. Incomplete arguments should be noted, and invalid arguments should be immediately identifiable. Furthermore, authors should be forced to stand on the merits of their arguments rather than some alleged claim to authority such as, "I've been a teacher at a major University for 15 years..." And they should be forced to create psudonyms that don't imply and opinion. (For instance, no one named "Alexander Hamilton" should be allowed on the forum, and certainly not to comment on the Federal Budget.)

Do you think your advice would also apply to a forum on Legos or Barbie dolls?