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Re:Java Not Required by Blakey+Rat · 2011-10-04 13:14 · Score: -1, Troll · on Looking Back On a Year of LibreOffice

Hah. A year ago I tried it, after all these re-assurances that it doesn't require Java. What's the absolute first thing it pops up after being installed?

"OpenOffice requires a Java Runtime to perform this task"

If it actually doesn't require Java, like you and so many others claim, it's doing a piss-poor job of working without it. Me? I'll believe my own eyeballs: OpenOffice requires Java.

Re:Less is romantic, it isn't more by Blakey+Rat · 2010-10-09 07:20 · Score: 1 · on Word Processors — One Writer's Further Retreat

You can put Word 2007 into an extremely minimal writing mode in 2 clicks:

http://schend.net/images/screenshots/minimal_word.png

(Using Word here, because it's most people's example of a "bloated" writing tool. I wager every word processor has a similarly-minimal fullscreen mode.)

Re:Gee, what does that tell you? by Blakey+Rat · 2010-09-29 05:28 · Score: 1 · on Game Reviewers Face Odd Bribery From Publishers

Adding a rich text command field is useless for the half dozen of HTML tags you can insert. Adding more tags would be counter-productive - the existing ones already let you structure your post, which is the important part; enabling style changes for each comment would make the site unreadable.

Of course I should have expected the grumpy "we hate technology even though we visit a tech site" and "we absolutely hate anything that makes software more usable" crowd to support that idea, so big mistake on my part. At the very least, they could get rid of the "HTML" comment formatting mode, which is not only completely useless, but frequently results in "giant paragraph of death" posts because new users think it's required to add HTML tags to the post.

But seriously, this site *badly* needs a usability review and revision. Other than SourceForge itself, this is by far the least usable website I've visited in the last 5 years.

So that's not really important. I would prefer if they fixed the CSS for Idle - the comment textarea still doesn't use the whole width.

That idle bug is in their bugtracker, but since they never actually *read* their own bugtracker, it's still not fixed. If you care, here's a bunch of screenshots I made for bugs I entered about Slashdot-- of those 10-12 bugs, I think maybe 4-5 are fixed, and they were fixed by accident. (That is, they were fixed as a side-effect of another change, not because any Slashdot devs actually read the bugtracker.) If you really care, I could dig up the SourceForge bug links, too.

The sad fact is that nobody at Slashdot really cares at all. The people writing the code don't care to fix bugs or increase usability. The editors don't care enough to actually edit. And most of the submissions are nothing but people promoting their own projects, and also they don't care enough to actually edit. They just don't care.

Re:Why Slashdot generally avoids this by Blakey+Rat · 2010-08-09 05:48 · Score: 1 · on Buried By The Brigade At Digg

Yeah, but Slashdot's system has a lot of stupidities and quirks (probably bugs) in it as well. For instance, stick around long enough and you'll:
1) Never be asked to meta-mod again
2) Never be given mod points

When I was new here, I got mod points and was asked to meta-mod pretty frequently. Now, neither happens-- for about the last 2-3 years. I'm assuming that getting mod points has something to do with participating in meta-mod, but that's kind of hard when the site doesn't let me meta-mod either. :) Maybe this is supposed to be a "reward"? (Like the ability to turn off ads?)

There's also the awful "overrated" and "underrated" mods, which I don't think should exist. Then of course, there's the modders, who will gladly assign "informative" to a post which is only a single sentence, or "insightful" to the same argument we've heard 50,000 different times-- but I guess there's nothing the code can do about that. And Flamebait is applied to everything.

Here are some ideas I have:
1) Fix the bug where longstanding users aren't involved in the mod system at all. Or, if that's done intentionally, give them the option to participate in modding again.

2) Negative mods should be harder to use than positive ones. I think a +1 should cost 1 mod point, and a -1 should cost 2 mod points. To prevent confusion, display a confirmation before a negative mod is made: "Moderating this post as -1 Flamebait will cost 2 mod points, continue? Yes/No"

3) Unrelated to modding, but please, please make Slashcode at least a *tiny* bit smarter. How about an integrated Preview tab, so we can preview our posts without having to reload a couple times? How about fixing the obvious bugs in the parser, like how it won't display a less-than even if typed in "Plain Old Text" mode? How about fixing the broken layout when submitting comments in Idle? How about fixing ANY of the bugs I put in your database 2-3 years ago now? (See: http://schend.net/images/index.php?path=screenshots/slashdot/ )

Re:My apologies for a threadjack. by Anonymous Coward · 2010-03-03 08:28 · Score: 0 · on FlightGear Reaches v2.0

Just so you know, the weird oval depicted here: http://schend.net/images/screenshots/slashdot/weird_blue_oval.png

That oval is supposed to hold a '!', enabling you to tag it as "not this" basically. I believe this one has been corrected recently, or at least has in my browser.

Re:My apologies for a threadjack. by Blakey+Rat · 2010-02-27 06:12 · Score: 1, Offtopic · on FlightGear Reaches v2.0