Slashdot Mirror

While I mention some ways to achieve this, I thought more about the problem and the qualities a solution would need, than the solution itself.

If interested, more can be found here.

I am happy /. user and pretty sure I will be a subscriber soon. For now, the ads are completely no bother, so I dont really have any particular motivation.

However, something I would love, would be the possibility of viewing the comments with expand/collapse buttons. I like to view at threshold 0, so one thread can get biig, and I easily loose track of what sub-thread I am reading. What I would like to do would be to collapse the thread, so I can immediatly skip to the next one. This means every single comment which has sub-comments, would be expand/collapsable.

Another improvement: When I have mod points, it always bothers me that I have to select the comments I want to mod, and then, at the end of the page, I submit. Often I forget, and follow a link somewhere. A system I think works a lot better in this respect, is that of Half-Empty. When you see a comment you want to rate, you do so immediatly, but the page handling the rating is opened in a new tiny window in the background. This way I immediatly vote, and I dont move away from the discussion Im interested in, or forget to mod.

Kentucky Navy!

Even better, try Half-Empty where anyone can post a story, and (so far) haven't tried any lame AFJ's.

[Alternatives to Slashdot:] Everything2.com

Everything 2 is more like Wikipedia than it is like Slashdot.
Read more: Is E2 just like Slashdot?

Juro5hin.com

You mean Kuro5hin.org. If you really want a first post, take your time; you have 20 seconds, after all.

By the way, if you cross K5 with a bit of E2, you get .5e.

Now, SA trolls are a different story. Take for example, this post in a thread in which somebody asked for a brief review of Red Alert 2, a popular RTS game by Westwood.

FlameHead
Registered: 06-01

westwood suck.

Me? I've got a fat red I CHEAT AT COUNTER-STRIKE custom title.

Now, SA trolls are a different story. Take for example, this post in a thread in which somebody asked for a brief review of Red Alert 2, a popular RTS game by Westwood.

FlameHead
Registered: 06-01

westwood suck.

Me? I've got a fat red I CHEAT AT COUNTER-STRIKE custom title.

I actually spend most of my time at The Awful Forums, which are now $9.95/account. The admission fee is very useful for keeping the signal/noise ratio high, although not as high as .5e. It seems that trolls and retards don't like having to pay $10 to get their login back after they get banned for being an idiot.

We have:

Half Empty, aka .5e, land of the pot heads. Actually most of the people on the site are pretty cool, they're just too damn small. If you've ever seen people like BonzoEsc, Uruk, Krellis, or Nebby modded up on a comment here at /., then you know what type of people hang out at .5e.

Kuro5hin, land of the pretentious fucks. It'll probably come down to having to pay money just to avoid hanging out with these losers.

BBC News, what I believe is the most objective western news site. The problem is that there's no discussion system even worth wasting time with.

I'm going to sign up just for access to the rejected submissions bin. That's where the real news for nerds lies.

A site with sections and story queue is good. Open moderation to stories and comments is its' own problem though kuro5hin seems to function quite well. Comment moderation categories just opens the door to quibbling over whether it's genuinely offtopic, or funny - allowing respondants to HiLaRiOuSlY acuse the moderator of being on crack. Ha! Crack! Genius! Not tired at all!

E2's messaging is good.

Zope's slash rip-off (I forget the name, it used to run on technocrat.net) allowed file attachments. That's useful for any distributed software development team.

A wiki, like any flat data structure, doesn't push old content into depths (something the slash-a-likes are guilty of, being linear, though for a news site it's probably necessary).

Drupal.org and Half Empty are kinda nice engines. I'm working on my own ("in every mans life there must be one php/mysql weblog - and this is mine").

Interface wise I have a preference for calenders. I like URLs that are clean looking. I like engines that aren't crufty like PHPnuke.

Personally, I can't stand it. It was ok in the beginning, but now its kind of repetitive. You've got a fairly high User ID so you probably don't know who Signal 11 is (i'm not going to explain him here, if you want to know, email me), but if you do....its essentially a lot of him and people like him. The site has been down for a bit(reasons why can be read about by going to the site) but should be up again soon.

Another similar site to K5 is Half-Empty. The site was done completely in Java and is a little better done community-wise than K5 (IMHO).

Man, I'm so glad I never got obsessed with .5e. Your user classification system alone fits so well into the evily addicting MUD archetype.

Man, I'm so glad I never got obsessed with .5e. Your user classification system alone fits so well into the evily addicting MUD archetype.

Seeing everything from modding ads to new payments schemes has been discussed today, I will add my tiny suggestion for improving slashdot.

When I am a moderator, I find the pull-down mod system terrible. I like modding, but I don't want to spend all day on it. What sux is this: I view a story, see a good post and change the pull-down to "interesting". However, I don't want to go aaaaall the way down to click "moderate", because it takes 2-3 seconds of my life for the page to reload - and then I can't find where I got in the text. So I keep reading, just in case I spot another mod worthy post. If I see a sub-thread which isn't expanded, I can't go in there, cuz then the uncached page would forget the post I wanted to mod when I go back. Too often I end up going on a mod rampage, and just mod down trolls, but I would really prefer just to immidiatly vote for a post I saw, without getting disrupted.

Any solutions? You bet! If you check out half-empty, the solution chosen there is simply a small button or link for every vote option. Click on any of them and a little window opens in the background, which handles the modding. It's beautifully simple and solves all the problems mentioned here. It even stimulates modding.

It's pretty much a balance of quantity vs quality- ./ has a new (but quite often lame and stupid) article to read every hour or so, while K5 and .5e the articles are much better, but less quantity. I can't stop but keep checking ./ every couple hours, but the others are something I only check once or twice a day.

Just waiting for something to get better. Either here or them, some reason to keep or stop going here.

• 802.11b Range Boost
  
• Yagi Antenna Design
  
• Build a dish antenna for $10!
  
• This server is running over a 10-mile 802.11b link
  
• Nokia Rooftop Technology
  
• community-supported, sustainable wireless nets
  

Ok first off I am not an "open source person" :) Secondly, the Ogg Vorbis idea is not something I would ever have the time, energy, or resources to do.

Anyway, the concept would basically be two things. Take the gnutella network and 1) Make a client that looked and felt exactly like Napster and 2) (not necessary) filter all but Ogg Vorbis files. Perhaps make it an alternative network for speed reason. The problem with the "geek" clients such as gnutella et al not being used by the average dude like Napster was is because they're unaware that they exist or they're too hard to use. If you made a Napster replacement using gnutella you would get around the legal reprecussions (no central server, nobody can shut it down) while letting all the ex-Napster users jump right in. The RIAA couldn't go after anyone except the software developer, and even then, they have no case since the software developer isn't running the network.

Filtering in the Ogg Vorbis stuff exclusively would be an additional benefit in getting the .ogg format to be the standard instead of .mp3.. not necessarily my goal (I'm too busy running a site and building another) but a goal many "open source people" have undoubtedly.

Oh, I see: "We are doing this because we Care about you." Translation: Let us scare the shit out of you so you are so full of fear you can't function and are therefore under our control 24/7. Then we will feel that we have done a good job as a parent.

Parents might do well to note that the danger is not that Other kids will watch Mighty Morphin Power Rangers and kung-fu someone to death on the playground, but that their own kid will snap under the oppressive and anxiety-ridden lifestyle they have chosen for them, grab the gun from under Dad's bed, and start shooting up the school, thereby dealing with the insane pressure in the way his peers taught him.

For a quick example of how someone can lose touch with reality and his own sense of self-worth, here is one of those poor souls. The poor guy has lost touch with himself, and feels that there is no where to turn. How many of our children are lost like that? And how is monitoring their life day after day going to help them become the strong adults we hope to raise?

Insanity heaped upon insanity, that's what it is...

I have been a member of .5e (half-empty) since I saw it on /. It's a really cool weblog and more like kiro5hin than /. The community there is very helpful and active. The kind of ideas ppl come up with gets pretty far out at times - well worth a visit.

Just a shame the release is overshadowed by Slashcodes... hmm...

-Kraft

Ironically enough, last night I released the latest version of Glasscode. It's the third release since 1.0 which was announced here on Slashdot a few months ago.

The FM announcement is here.

For those interested, have fun :)

Ironically enough, last night I released the latest version of Glasscode. It's the third release since 1.0 which was announced here on Slashdot a few months ago.

The FM announcement is here.

For those interested, have fun :)

stop your bitching, half empty is infinitely better than kuro5hin

Peace,
Amit
ICQ 77863057

Also, as a side note, you can dramatically decrease bandwidth for pages with lots of HTML (like half-empty's front page) and only some small (cachable) sparse images via GZip compression. In the past when I've mentioned this to webmasters they're usually pretty surprised, never hearing of it before. Netscape 4, IE5, and Mozilla all support client side page decompression via GZip, and all it takes is an Apache plugin (or for servlets, I had to write it myself) to send the right headers along with the compressed data. It won't break on older browsers, it's just sends the uncompressed pages. A 35k front page (something I was feeling REALLY guilty about) now serves up at around 6k, and everyone breathes a lot easier.

I'm definitely going to be one of the first buying the Nintendo GameCube when it is released over here in the UK. I've been buying all the Nintendo consoles and haven't been disappointed in any.
I don't think the GameCube will change Nintendo's flow of dominance in the gaming market. The last report I read about it, proved that Nintendo GameCube will out perform any other.

Head over to .5e (half empty). Since it's 'mindless drivel for the masses', you can only add, not subtract from our community :)

Peace,
Amit
ICQ 77863057

Congrats on the 100,000th node guys. I have a few e2 nodes, here's to node 1,000,000. :) It's pretty amazing what you can type in there and find.. it's usually the case that I have a hard time typing something that doesn't have a node.

Half-empty just passed it's 1000th Idea post. It's kind of a hybrid between slashdot and everything2..

There was a good thread on this competition a while ago at Half-Empty titled FIRST 2001 Strategies.

Tell me what makes you so afraid
Of all those people you say you hate

The Assayer - free-information book reviews

This would actually be great.

For a good look at some user-based slashbox-like entities, check out half-empty.org.

Useful glassboxes (as they're called):

• Favorite Ideas (Favorite People or something would be more appropriate here)
• Newsboxes (CNN, Slashdot, anything with RDF)
• Current score
• User score tiers (and a rarely-used Top Ten Users)
• A chatterbox (that mainly links to the Java and Javascript chat)

Another feature that might be nice is allowing users to rate posts so that we can skim for the good ones. That's pretty subjective, though.

You might be interested in reading my rant on half-empty.

Though it's still pretty ugly, and apparently not as elegant, my servlet forum software might interest you.

Just to add another name to the pot, Glasscode (java servlet based) was released yesterday or the day before. I'd provide a link here but if you can't look for the story link that's still more than likely on the front page yer just being laaaa-zeee. ;-)

http://glasscode.half-empty.org/gcservlet/LoadPage .

I haven't tried it out yet, but plan to before the weekend is out. Wife and kids catching the flu have postponed my tests so far this weekend. Some things take priority.

why do you need a government to tell you what is right and what is wrong. The government is there to put people in jail and you have to justify why someone should be put in jail before it is any of the government's concern. Your calls to "protect the children" are thinly vailed calls for paternalistic government and you can read my rather extensive thoughts about this on half-empty. As for whether a newspaper can pass lies off as truth, we'll we seem to have a pretty good system in place right now which hardly ever involves the use of liberal law suits. If you scream loud enough, people will know that said newspaper is not very credible and will soon go out of business. As for someone following you around, sending you letters and calling you in the middle of the night, up to a few years ago there was nothing you could do about this and people survived. Deal with it.

Libertarianism is a political theory. The Liberterian Party, like all political parties, has a strategic goal and they make compromises to achieve that goal. There are a lot of people who call themselves liberterians, but they all agree on one thing, you may not use force (including the force of the state) to forward your views and it is the responsibility of government to hold the only force in society, and that is the force to jail those who use force on other members of the society. This is called the "minimalist state" or the "night watch-man of the libertarian state".

If you want to take a look at it you can dl the tar.gz at ftp://ftp.half-empty.org/pub/glasscode/1.0.1/glass code-1.0.1.tar.gz

echo $email | sed s/[A-Z]//g | rot13

You don't really need a book to learn servlets, especially if you've coded cgi scripts in Perl or Python or whatever. You just need to sit for an hour and learn the API, just like anything else (the servlet API is pretty dang small)

I don't know JSP pages, so they might be worthy of an entire book.. but servlets were something I picked up in a day or two.

My site runs Glasscode, a Slash/Scoop like engine and then some written in servlets. The abstraction you can provide with OOP made certain features pretty easy, such as droppable components and "Glassboxes" similar to slash's slashboxes. The OOP Java provides also makes it rather expandable.

It's going GPL sometime around new years.

I'm slowly building a new type of universal online community over at http://www.half-empty.org. It's been linked via a K5 article (which was linked on /.) a while back.

The site allows users to post whatever is on their minds or what they want to contribute for discussion, and uses a democratic style rating system to keep out trolls and reward popular posters with more posting ability. So far it seems to be working, and it's an interesting read nontheless.

I look through the forum here, and I can see a bunch of people who have obviously never run a professional website.

This thing you call the Internet, while yes, originally came about because of hackers and geeks, thrives today not only because of them, but because of invested capital in companies based upon projected profits from advertising. This is the case with not just e-commerce sites but many sites that you probably use daily and take for granted that they exist.

I'm so tired of people bitching about advertising on the internet. Yes, you can ignore it. You can turn off javascript, and outside banners, or whatever. That's fine and good, but it's also pretty damn inconsiderate when you realize that while it is an annoyance, it is what is driving the people (alot of the time) to keep the site running.

I run a site that has a very promising future. I posted an article on k5 about it, and it was completely bashed because the site has banner ads. I was shocked at how naive everyone was about the magnitute of revenue ads generate and their purpose. Bandwidth isn't free. Hardware isn't free. My ad revenue doesn't even get mailed to me, it gets mailed to my provider since they're DONATING bandwidth since they have so much faith in my site and are LOSING money because of it.

Once again, the geeks come out in droves and show me how spoiled they are. This Internet revolution is possible not only because of the software and design, but because of the money that's been dumped into it as well.

I'm pretty sure k5 sets a limit of <100 queries on a page before they start worrying about performance. At least that's what Rusty said if I remember correctly. I'm guessing they probably run about 10-20 queries on most pages, however.

My site runs about 10-20, but thats only after caching lots of data in memory.

So you wish you had mod points right now. How would you like to have mod points all the time? Look at Kuro5hin. Every logged-in user can rate every comment between Score=1 and Score=5. In systems like Half-empty's Glasscode and Everything, every user can rate every comment +1 or -1 (like on Slashdot).

Glasscode does it :)

• I love how interesting articles get abandoned yet repeat articles get posted.. I really don't understand.

Alex Bischoff
---

By the way, Half-Empty has something of the sort, except they take it to the extreme of letting most anyone instant-post a story.

Give the system discussed a try here