Slashdot Mirror

What is the Slashdot Customer Profile?

Slashdot is owned by VA Linux, and VA Linux is a for-profit Corporation. This means that, like other corporations, Slashdot must maintain a customer profile for every user (yes, even you Anonymous Cowards!). These customer profiles are kept in Slashdot's master MySQL database, which is archived on a frequent basis to preserve VA Linux's valuable Intellectual Property rights to its' customer information. The Customer Profile contains many fields, such as the email address you used to register your Slashdot account. In addition, it contains these fields [slashdot.org] [slashdot.org] which are accessed in users.pl [slashcode.com] [slashcode.com], line 1898.

They're Tracking WHAT?

You may have noticed that the Customer Profile contains a field called $iplist. You're not dreaming, this is a list of every IP address anyone has used to access Slasdot - ever. Slashdot has a perfectly legitimate reason [slashdot.org] [slashdot.org] for maintaining these detailed records on every customer. However, while every Slashdot user understands that the privacy of each Slashdot user is paramount to the current management of Slashdot, we must also understand that Slashdot is property, and that it has been bought - and sold - before. Therefore we must not consider the implication of the existence of Slashdot Customer Profiling under the existing management, but rather the implications under any future management.

Who Would Want my IP?

Let's assume, for the sake of argument only, that VA Linux decides to sell Slashdot to DoubleClick [doubleclick.com] [doubleclick.com] in order to boost its' short-term cash supply. Doubeclick would be looking at Slashdot mainly as an Intellectual Property asset, and its' customer database as the primary portion of that asset (because Slaschode is GPL'd). How, then, can VA Linux maximize the resale value of Slashdot's Intellectual Property assets? By tracking every possible piece of information. The list of IP addresses used by every Slashdot user, reverse-correlated by email, would provide a very lucrative marketing tool to a would-be buyer of Slashdot. Doubleclick could use this Intellectual Property to:

• Correlate web hits to member sites by IP address, sending an email to every Slashdot user who visits a target site.
• Correlate web hits by IP address and present customized content to each Slashdot user who visits a target site, for instance: "Welcome to Superdomains.com, Slashdot user Jamie!"
  
  

It is easy to see why recording the IP profiles of every Slashdot customer maximizes the value of the Slashdot Customer Database. The question is, should you be given the option to opt-out?

What is the Slashdot Customer Profile?

Slashdot is owned by VA Linux, and VA Linux is a for-profit Corporation. This means that, like other corporations, Slashdot must maintain a customer profile for every user (yes, even you Anonymous Cowards!). These customer profiles are kept in Slashdot's master MySQL database, which is archived on a frequent basis to preserve VA Linux's valuable Intellectual Property rights to its' customer information. The Customer Profile contains many fields, such as the email address you used to register your Slashdot account. In addition, it contains these fields [slashdot.org] [slashdot.org] which are accessed in users.pl [slashcode.com] [slashcode.com], line 1898.

They're Tracking WHAT?

You may have noticed that the Customer Profile contains a field called $iplist. You're not dreaming, this is a list of every IP address anyone has used to access Slasdot - ever. Slashdot has a perfectly legitimate reason [slashdot.org] [slashdot.org] for maintaining these detailed records on every customer. However, while every Slashdot user understands that the privacy of each Slashdot user is paramount to the current management of Slashdot, we must also understand that Slashdot is property, and that it has been bought - and sold - before. Therefore we must not consider the implication of the existence of Slashdot Customer Profiling under the existing management, but rather the implications under any future management.

Who Would Want my IP?

Let's assume, for the sake of argument only, that VA Linux decides to sell Slashdot to DoubleClick [doubleclick.com] [doubleclick.com] in order to boost its' short-term cash supply. Doubeclick would be looking at Slashdot mainly as an Intellectual Property asset, and its' customer database as the primary portion of that asset (because Slaschode is GPL'd). How, then, can VA Linux maximize the resale value of Slashdot's Intellectual Property assets? By tracking every possible piece of information. The list of IP addresses used by every Slashdot user, reverse-correlated by email, would provide a very lucrative marketing tool to a would-be buyer of Slashdot. Doubleclick could use this Intellectual Property to:

• Correlate web hits to member sites by IP address, sending an email to every Slashdot user who visits a target site.
• Correlate web hits by IP address and present customized content to each Slashdot user who visits a target site, for instance: "Welcome to Superdomains.com, Slashdot user Jamie!"
  
  

It is easy to see why recording the IP profiles of every Slashdot customer maximizes the value of the Slashdot Customer Database. The question is, should you be given the option to opt-out?

What is the Slashdot Customer Profile?

Slashdot is owned by VA Linux, and VA Linux is a for-profit Corporation. This means that, like other corporations, Slashdot must maintain a customer profile for every user (yes, even you Anonymous Cowards!). These customer profiles are kept in Slashdot's master MySQL database, which is archived on a frequent basis to preserve VA Linux's valuable Intellectual Property rights to its' customer information. The Customer Profile contains many fields, such as the email address you used to register your Slashdot account. In addition, it contains these fields [slashdot.org] which are accessed in users.pl [slashcode.com], line 1898.

They're Tracking WHAT?

You may have noticed that the Customer Profile contains a field called $iplist. You're not dreaming, this is a list of every IP address anyone has used to access Slasdot - ever. Slashdot has a perfectly legitimate reason [slashdot.org] for maintaining these detailed records on every customer. However, while every Slashdot user understands that the privacy of each Slashdot user is paramount to the current management of Slashdot, we must also understand that Slashdot is property, and that it has been bought - and sold - before. Therefore we must not consider the implication of the existence of Slashdot Customer Profiling under the existing management, but rather the implications under any future management.

Who Would Want my IP?

Let's assume, for the sake of argument only, that VA Linux decides to sell Slashdot to DoubleClick [doubleclick.com] in order to boost its' short-term cash supply. Doubeclick would be looking at Slashdot mainly as an Intellectual Property asset, and its' customer database as the primary portion of that asset (because Slaschode is GPL'd). How, then, can VA Linux maximize the resale value of Slashdot's Intellectual Property assets? By tracking every possible piece of information. The list of IP addresses used by every Slashdot user, reverse-correlated by email, would provide a very lucrative marketing tool to a would-be buyer of Slashdot. Doubleclick could use this Intellectual Property to:

• Correlate web hits to member sites by IP address, sending an email to every Slashdot user who visits a target site.
• Correlate web hits by IP address and present customized content to each Slashdot user who visits a target site, for instance: "Welcome to Superdomains.com, Slashdot user Jamie!"
  
  

It is easy to see why recording the IP profiles of every Slashdot customer maximizes the value of the Slashdot Customer Database. The question is, should you be given the option to opt-out?

What is the Slashdot Customer Profile?

Slashdot is owned by VA Linux, and VA Linux is a for-profit Corporation. This means that, like other corporations, Slashdot must maintain a customer profile for every user (yes, even you Anonymous Cowards!). These customer profiles are kept in Slashdot's master MySQL database, which is archived on a frequent basis to preserve VA Linux's valuable Intellectual Property rights to its' customer information. The Customer Profile contains many fields, such as the email address you used to register your Slashdot account. In addition, it contains these fields [slashdot.org] which are accessed in users.pl [slashcode.com], line 1898.

They're Tracking WHAT?

You may have noticed that the Customer Profile contains a field called $iplist. You're not dreaming, this is a list of every IP address anyone has used to access Slasdot - ever. Slashdot has a perfectly legitimate reason [slashdot.org] for maintaining these detailed records on every customer. However, while every Slashdot user understands that the privacy of each Slashdot user is paramount to the current management of Slashdot, we must also understand that Slashdot is property, and that it has been bought - and sold - before. Therefore we must not consider the implication of the existence of Slashdot Customer Profiling under the existing management, but rather the implications under any future management.

Who Would Want my IP?

Let's assume, for the sake of argument only, that VA Linux decides to sell Slashdot to DoubleClick [doubleclick.com] in order to boost its' short-term cash supply. Doubeclick would be looking at Slashdot mainly as an Intellectual Property asset, and its' customer database as the primary portion of that asset (because Slaschode is GPL'd). How, then, can VA Linux maximize the resale value of Slashdot's Intellectual Property assets? By tracking every possible piece of information. The list of IP addresses used by every Slashdot user, reverse-correlated by email, would provide a very lucrative marketing tool to a would-be buyer of Slashdot. Doubleclick could use this Intellectual Property to:

• Correlate web hits to member sites by IP address, sending an email to every Slashdot user who visits a target site.
• Correlate web hits by IP address and present customized content to each Slashdot user who visits a target site, for instance: "Welcome to Superdomains.com, Slashdot user Jamie!"
  
  

It is easy to see why recording the IP profiles of every Slashdot customer maximizes the value of the Slashdot Customer Database. The question is, should you be given the option to opt-out?

What is the Slashdot Customer Profile?

Slashdot is owned by VA Linux, and VA Linux is a for-profit Corporation. This means that, like other corporations, Slashdot must maintain a customer profile for every user (yes, even you Anonymous Cowards!). These customer profiles are kept in Slashdot's master MySQL database, which is archived on a frequent basis to preserve VA Linux's valuable Intellectual Property rights to its' customer information. The Customer Profile contains many fields, such as the email address you used to register your Slashdot account. In addition, it contains these fields [slashdot.org] which are accessed in users.pl [slashcode.com], line 1898.

They're Tracking WHAT?

You may have noticed that the Customer Profile contains a field called $iplist. You're not dreaming, this is a list of every IP address anyone has used to access Slasdot - ever. Slashdot has a perfectly legitimate reason [slashdot.org] for maintaining these detailed records on every customer. However, while every Slashdot user understands that the privacy of each Slashdot user is paramount to the current management of Slashdot, we must also understand that Slashdot is property, and that it has been bought - and sold - before. Therefore we must not consider the implication of the existence of Slashdot Customer Profiling under the existing management, but rather the implications under any future management.

Who Would Want my IP?

Let's assume, for the sake of argument only, that VA Linux decides to sell Slashdot to DoubleClick [doubleclick.com] in order to boost its' short-term cash supply. Doubeclick would be looking at Slashdot mainly as an Intellectual Property asset, and its' customer database as the primary portion of that asset (because Slaschode is GPL'd). How, then, can VA Linux maximize the resale value of Slashdot's Intellectual Property assets? By tracking every possible piece of information. The list of IP addresses used by every Slashdot user, reverse-correlated by email, would provide a very lucrative marketing tool to a would-be buyer of Slashdot. Doubleclick could use this Intellectual Property to:

• Correlate web hits to member sites by IP address, sending an email to every Slashdot user who visits a target site.
• Correlate web hits by IP address and present customized content to each Slashdot user who visits a target site, for instance: "Welcome to Superdomains.com, Slashdot user Jamie!"
  
  

It is easy to see why recording the IP profiles of every Slashdot customer maximizes the value of the Slashdot Customer Database. The question is, should you be given the option to opt-out?

What is the Slashdot Customer Profile?

Slashdot is owned by VA Linux, and VA Linux is a for-profit Corporation. This means that, like other corporations, Slashdot must maintain a customer profile for every user (yes, even you Anonymous Cowards!). These customer profiles are kept in Slashdot's master MySQL database, which is archived on a frequent basis to preserve VA Linux's valuable Intellectual Property rights to its' customer information. The Customer Profile contains many fields, such as the email address you used to register your Slashdot account. In addition, it contains these fields [slashdot.org] which are accessed in users.pl [slashcode.com], line 1898.

They're Tracking WHAT?

You may have noticed that the Customer Profile contains a field called $iplist. You're not dreaming, this is a list of every IP address anyone has used to access Slasdot - ever. Slashdot has a perfectly legitimate reason [slashdot.org] for maintaining these detailed records on every customer. However, while every Slashdot user understands that the privacy of each Slashdot user is paramount to the current management of Slashdot, we must also understand that Slashdot is property, and that it has been bought - and sold - before. Therefore we must not consider the implication of the existence of Slashdot Customer Profiling under the existing management, but rather the implications under any future management.

Who Would Want my IP?

Let's assume, for the sake of argument only, that VA Linux decides to sell Slashdot to DoubleClick [doubleclick.com] in order to boost its' short-term cash supply. Doubeclick would be looking at Slashdot mainly as an Intellectual Property asset, and its' customer database as the primary portion of that asset (because Slaschode is GPL'd). How, then, can VA Linux maximize the resale value of Slashdot's Intellectual Property assets? By tracking every possible piece of information. The list of IP addresses used by every Slashdot user, reverse-correlated by email, would provide a very lucrative marketing tool to a would-be buyer of Slashdot. Doubleclick could use this Intellectual Property to:

• Correlate web hits to member sites by IP address, sending an email to every Slashdot user who visits a target site.
• Correlate web hits by IP address and present customized content to each Slashdot user who visits a target site, for instance: "Welcome to Superdomains.com, Slashdot user Jamie!"
  
  

It is easy to see why recording the IP profiles of every Slashdot customer maximizes the value of the Slashdot Customer Database. The question is, should you be given the option to opt-out?

What is the Slashdot Customer Profile?

Slashdot is owned by VA Linux, and VA Linux is a for-profit Corporation. This means that, like other corporations, Slashdot must maintain a customer profile for every user (yes, even you Anonymous Cowards!). These customer profiles are kept in Slashdot's master MySQL database, which is archived on a frequent basis to preserve VA Linux's valuable Intellectual Property rights to its' customer information. The Customer Profile contains many fields, such as the email address you used to register your Slashdot account. In addition, it contains these fields which are accessed in users.pl, line 1898.

They're Tracking WHAT?

You may have noticed that the Customer Profile contains a field called $iplist. You're not dreaming, this is a list of every IP address anyone has used to access Slasdot - ever. Slashdot has a perfectly legitimate reason for maintaining these detailed records on every customer. However, while every Slashdot user understands that the privacy of each Slashdot user is paramount to the current management of Slashdot, we must also understand that Slashdot is property, and that it has been bought - and sold - before. Therefore we must not consider the implication of the existence of Slashdot Customer Profiling under the existing management, but rather the implications under any future management.

Who Would Want my IP?

Let's assume, for the sake of argument only, that VA Linux decides to sell Slashdot to DoubleClick in order to boost its' short-term cash supply. Doubeclick would be looking at Slashdot mainly as an Intellectual Property asset, and its' customer database as the primary portion of that asset (because Slaschode is GPL'd). How, then, can VA Linux maximize the resale value of Slashdot's Intellectual Property assets? By tracking every possible piece of information. The list of IP addresses used by every Slashdot user, reverse-correlated by email, would provide a very lucrative marketing tool to a would-be buyer of Slashdot. Doubleclick could use this Intellectual Property to:

• Correlate web hits to member sites by IP address, sending an email to every Slashdot user who visits a target site.
• Correlate web hits by IP address and present customized content to each Slashdot user who visits a target site, for instance: "Welcome to Superdomains.com, Slashdot user Jamie!"
  
  

It is easy to see why recording the IP profiles of every Slashdot customer maximizes the value of the Slashdot Customer Database. The question is, should you be given the option to opt-out?

We're always interested in making our site more readable on different platforms. There's some good criticisms in the above comment. We need the suggestions to be more specific if we're going to address the issue.

Better yet, send us patches -- this code is open-source you know. Normally, we'd take a look at how popular those pages are, decide where it goes on our priority list, and when we get to it we'll get to it. But if someone sends us well-commented patches and explains why they're an improvement so even our mostly-non-Palm-using little brains can understand, this'll get bumped a lot higher on our priority list.

>The ThinkGeek ads are great

Same here. I don't normally check their site for new stuff. But the adds have caught my attention a number of times, enough so that I clicked on it and went looking at that product, and then others that caught my attention.

In my mind, that is *exactly* how any advertising campaign should work.

The OSDN navbar I did notice fairly quickly. Afterall, it's been on slash for a while now. It's only annoying in that it takes up valuable screen space, making me scroll more. That I don't like. But the thing at the bottom of the page, or shorten it up a lot.

Rob, could you take some time to discuss the recent changes with respect to storing IP profiles for every user, banning users, banning IP addresses, and banning entire subnets? Judging from the current updates posted to Sourceforge, it looks like you are working not just on filtering ACs but also on pre-filtering of logged in users, that is, preventing abusive users from posting. MySQL.pm in particular now contains this interesting code fragment:


#logem' so we can banem'
$self->sqlInsert("abusers", {
uid => $uid,
ipid => $ipid,
subnetid => $subnetid,
pagename => $script_name,
querystring => $query_string || '',
reason => $reason,
-ts => 'now()',

and

$submission->{subnetid} = getCurrentUser('subnetid');


Could you discuss who in particular you are logging and banning? Specifically, is it just those darn Windows advocates, or are you broadening the scope? Personally, I would really appreciate it if you could subnet ban those people for life.

Thanks,
-Sheldon.

There's also a post at slashcode.com.

My interface uses a proprietary, but "free as in beer" resource. spellchecker.net. I hear that the new beta version of slash uses ispell - but with a considerably less friendly UI. Joseph Elwell.

Yes, I am precisely doing that. The major blocks are only the style of the code and the use of some useless SQL extensions. I cannot say that the systems gain something from the port excluding a more reliable (IMHO) database engine: it could have been useful to use VIEWs and subselects in the Slash code, but the application has been written with MySql in mind - that's the main point.

If you are interested in Slashcode on PostgreSQL, please raise your voice at Slashcode.

I went to this link, and found the name slashdot's senior mysql guy: Brian Aker (aka krow). Seems slashdot has added code for doing better sql dumps in MySQL. If you recall back a few several hundred /. stories, you might remember that he also hacked out a method to have stored-procedure calls in MySQL. Also take note that when slashdot upgraded to version 2.1 of their infamous slashcode, Brian rewrote the schemas for InnoDB style. I'd say that we slashdot folks will see new toys based on some of this new technology because /. is so entrenched with mysql.

See.......... slashdot really is good for something... =)

Freedom of the press belongs to those that own a press. Thank God for the sclashcode and its clones.

What have you done today to alert people about the existence of alternatives? What have you done today to change things? Are you telling people about the EFF, Linux, Slashdot, etc...

Have you done anything? or are you just another apathetic "consumer" who thinks s/he is hip for reading /.

The NET has proven to be the most reliable medium of communication during this crisis! Why? Because you can read exactly what each official has to say, this is specially important for people in other countries, if the media in the US is pulling the BS they are pulling just imagine how distorted stuff will come out on the other side of the world, with the net people can read for themselves official info on the White Houses's web site or the pentagons, etc... For Americans that might not be a great deal, but for the rest of the world it is!

from the as-unstable-as-windows dept.
pff ... i bet it's stabler than slashcode

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SlashCode

Slashdot requires you to wait 20 seconds between
hitting 'reply' and submitting a comment.

It's been 16 seconds since you hit 'reply'!

If you this error seems to be incorrect, please provide the following in your report to
Source Forge:

• Browser type
• User ID/Nickname or AC
• What steps caused this error
• Whether or not you know your ISP to be using a proxy or some sort of service that gives you an IP that others
  are using simultaneously.
• How many posts to this form you successfully submitted during the day

I'd also like to throw in my public note of thanks to everyone who kept the site up on Tuesday. We thirsted for answers, and you were there to provide, as always. Your work and dedication are wholly appreciated.

It's been a couple of weeks since my last analysis of slashcode's deficiencies. We've all seen the evidence of Taco's totalitarian methods. Now let's look a little deeper at his incompetence and short-sightedness as a coder. To paraphrase Taco's words to Anne Tomlinson, was he dropped on his head at birth?

Part 1: Why is Slashdot the only site on the internet that DOS's itself?

I'm sure you've all noticed the frequent protracted outages over the last couple of weeks. Many have demanded an explanation, or at least an acknowledgement that something has gone wrong. Slashdot has been down for hours at a time, but the editors act as if nothing had happened. Since Rob "Cmdr. Whitewash" Malda and friends aren't willing to open up to their readers, it's up to me to give you the dope on why Slashdot is such a piece of crap.

The problem is of course, MySQL, as we have always suspected. mod_perl is another slice of the problem, with the last factor in the equation being unscaleable hardware.

MySQL + mod_perl + PC hardware = crash

MySQL has long been a favourite among people who want to set up a database backed web page, but are too cheap to pay for oracle. It has a reputation for serving up pages quickly, which it does admirably on sites that have low loads. As the number of connections to the DB increase past 50, MySQL seems to lose a lot of stability. In fact, it is not uncommon for it to crash and lose data in some circumstances.

In most circumstances, this isn't a problem for slashdot. It's rare for the site to reach more than 50 connections, however it does happen. It is at these times that slashdot has an increased tendency to experience the slashdot effect firsthand. The reason is that while mod_perl isn't quite a replacement for a proper middleware layer. mod_perl includes persistent database connections, but these are irrelevant. MySQL is known for it's high connection speed, and persistent connections don't really lift it's game much. They also don't solve the problem of handling excessive connections. When mod_perl runs out of open connections, it just opens another one. In other words, mod_perl does nothing to protect the MySQL database from overload.

The other problem is the hardware. A site like slashdot, receiving approximately 600 connections per minute should be running on high end enterprise hardware, not PC hardware. Taco has tried to overcome this with clustering, but this has limitations in an IO intensive area like running a website. PCs are not known for having good network performance, and this is one area that cannot help but cause a bottleneck, particularly when the site is running under load. One advantage of running on Sun or IBM hardware is that you get good IO performance combined with the ability to utilise multiprocessing. Running your site spread over 12+ low-end machines in a network just isn't anywhere near as good.

Compare slashdot to any other high traffic site. Amazon.com for instance. Have you ever seen amazon go down for four solid hours without being DOSed by canadian hackers? Amazon copes with their load because they run a sensible database, a well-designed front-end and hardware that can cope with the load. Thanks to the open-source ideology of this site, only one of these options are open to the administrators. PostGreSQL would reduce the number of crashes, however it is about 3 times at dealing with individual connections as slow as MySQL.

Essentially, we have a situation where the site is periodically hit with a large number of simultaneous connections, and they cause the database to keel over and die. This does not reflect well on Open Source software, and puts this site in the ironic position of bringing disrepute upon Open Source though their success at evangelism. It's no wonder the slashdot editors are unwilling to acknowledge their site's incredibly fragile nature.

I'd like to make it clear at this point that I don't actually know for sure that this is what's happening. For all I know, Taco is working on the code that is running on the actual slashdot server, and keeps breaking it. I'm just making educated guesses here.

As a bonus final note to the first half of this bumper double issue, has it occurred to anyone else that this site's codebase shares it's name with a slang term for homoerotic fan fiction? Linux gay conspiracy indeed!

Part 2: What in holy fuck?! search.pl under the microscope.

I have conclusive proof that Cmdr. Taco. is a gibbon. search.pl [slashcode.com] and Search.pm [slashcode.com]. Here's something cool for you to try at home: go to the search page, and search for all comments containing the word "competent". Now wait a few seconds. Wait a few minutes. Go grab a bite to eat. When you come back, it should be done.

Yep, this is the slowest search page in the universe. If you didn't believe me last time I told you that Malda has all the coding ability of a starving five year old from Ghana, you will believe me soon.

OK, you don't need to look at search.pl. All the meat is in Search.pm, and this time it's nicely placed at the top. Find the _keysearch function. Notice the for loop in there. What that loop is doing is constructing a "LIKE" clause to insert in a query string. It surrounds every word you entered into the search field with wildcards and uses them to search against comment text and title. This is then used in the findComments function as a clause in a select query which searches the entire comment database.

I have two major problems with what Taco has done here. They are as follows:

1. Even retards are laughing at him for writing code this fucken stupid.

2. LIKE queries are slow. They are text substring searches. They can't be optimized very well by databases like MySQL. These systems simply aren't designed with this sort of thing in mind, because for applications that aren't designed by twits, this functionality is seldom needed, and best implemented in an application specific way. Let me reiterate what's going on here. Slashcode is performing a substring search on every comment and comment title in the entire database. That is, too put it mildly, a shitload of text to search through. It cannot be done quickly, as our little demonstration should have proven to you. It is an idiotic thing to implement in a web page like slashdot, and Taco should be hanged by his testicles for having even had the idea.

You're probably thinking, "Hey, wait! Doesn't google do this sort of thing all the time, with incredible speed?" Yes, google does, but google's developers actually took the time to implement data storage methods geared towards fast search and retrieval of data based on substrings. Examples of this, for those who care, would be digital search tries and ternary trees. These are the best methods I know of off-hand for implementing the type of search slashdot is providing. Evidently Taco doesn't know of them, but that's hardly surprising, since gibbons can't read or study computer science. I also doubt that they can be implemented efficiently in perl.

I didn't think I'd be able to find a clear, simple example to top the postercomment compression filter's ability to demonstrate what an imbecile taco is, but I guess I understimated him. This is without a doubt, the dumbest thing I have ever seen in code anywhere.

It's been a couple of weeks since my last analysis of slashcode's deficiencies. We've all seen the evidence of Taco's totalitarian methods. Now let's look a little deeper at his incompetence and short-sightedness as a coder. To paraphrase Taco's words to Anne Tomlinson, was he dropped on his head at birth?

Part 1: Why is Slashdot the only site on the internet that DOS's itself?

I'm sure you've all noticed the frequent protracted outages over the last couple of weeks. Many have demanded an explanation, or at least an acknowledgement that something has gone wrong. Slashdot has been down for hours at a time, but the editors act as if nothing had happened. Since Rob "Cmdr. Whitewash" Malda and friends aren't willing to open up to their readers, it's up to me to give you the dope on why Slashdot is such a piece of crap.

The problem is of course, MySQL, as we have always suspected. mod_perl is another slice of the problem, with the last factor in the equation being unscaleable hardware.

MySQL + mod_perl + PC hardware = crash

MySQL has long been a favourite among people who want to set up a database backed web page, but are too cheap to pay for oracle. It has a reputation for serving up pages quickly, which it does admirably on sites that have low loads. As the number of connections to the DB increase past 50, MySQL seems to lose a lot of stability. In fact, it is not uncommon for it to crash and lose data in some circumstances.

In most circumstances, this isn't a problem for slashdot. It's rare for the site to reach more than 50 connections, however it does happen. It is at these times that slashdot has an increased tendency to experience the slashdot effect firsthand. The reason is that while mod_perl isn't quite a replacement for a proper middleware layer. mod_perl includes persistent database connections, but these are irrelevant. MySQL is known for it's high connection speed, and persistent connections don't really lift it's game much. They also don't solve the problem of handling excessive connections. When mod_perl runs out of open connections, it just opens another one. In other words, mod_perl does nothing to protect the MySQL database from overload.

The other problem is the hardware. A site like slashdot, receiving approximately 600 connections per minute should be running on high end enterprise hardware, not PC hardware. Taco has tried to overcome this with clustering, but this has limitations in an IO intensive area like running a website. PCs are not known for having good network performance, and this is one area that cannot help but cause a bottleneck, particularly when the site is running under load. One advantage of running on Sun or IBM hardware is that you get good IO performance combined with the ability to utilise multiprocessing. Running your site spread over 12+ low-end machines in a network just isn't anywhere near as good.

Compare slashdot to any other high traffic site. Amazon.com for instance. Have you ever seen amazon go down for four solid hours without being DOSed by canadian hackers? Amazon copes with their load because they run a sensible database, a well-designed front-end and hardware that can cope with the load. Thanks to the open-source ideology of this site, only one of these options are open to the administrators. PostGreSQL would reduce the number of crashes, however it is about 3 times at dealing with individual connections as slow as MySQL.

Essentially, we have a situation where the site is periodically hit with a large number of simultaneous connections, and they cause the database to keel over and die. This does not reflect well on Open Source software, and puts this site in the ironic position of bringing disrepute upon Open Source though their success at evangelism. It's no wonder the slashdot editors are unwilling to acknowledge their site's incredibly fragile nature.

I'd like to make it clear at this point that I don't actually know for sure that this is what's happening. For all I know, Taco is working on the code that is running on the actual slashdot server, and keeps breaking it. I'm just making educated guesses here.

As a bonus final note to the first half of this bumper double issue, has it occurred to anyone else that this site's codebase shares it's name with a slang term for homoerotic fan fiction? Linux gay conspiracy indeed!

Part 2: What in holy fuck?! search.pl under the microscope.

I have conclusive proof that Cmdr. Taco. is a gibbon. search.pl [slashcode.com] and Search.pm [slashcode.com]. Here's something cool for you to try at home: go to the search page, and search for all comments containing the word "competent". Now wait a few seconds. Wait a few minutes. Go grab a bite to eat. When you come back, it should be done.

Yep, this is the slowest search page in the universe. If you didn't believe me last time I told you that Malda has all the coding ability of a starving five year old from Ghana, you will believe me soon.

OK, you don't need to look at search.pl. All the meat is in Search.pm, and this time it's nicely placed at the top. Find the _keysearch function. Notice the for loop in there. What that loop is doing is constructing a "LIKE" clause to insert in a query string. It surrounds every word you entered into the search field with wildcards and uses them to search against comment text and title. This is then used in the findComments function as a clause in a select query which searches the entire comment database.

I have two major problems with what Taco has done here. They are as follows:

1. Even retards are laughing at him for writing code this fucken stupid.

2. LIKE queries are slow. They are text substring searches. They can't be optimized very well by databases like MySQL. These systems simply aren't designed with this sort of thing in mind, because for applications that aren't designed by twits, this functionality is seldom needed, and best implemented in an application specific way. Let me reiterate what's going on here. Slashcode is performing a substring search on every comment and comment title in the entire database. That is, too put it mildly, a shitload of text to search through. It cannot be done quickly, as our little demonstration should have proven to you. It is an idiotic thing to implement in a web page like slashdot, and Taco should be hanged by his testicles for having even had the idea.

You're probably thinking, "Hey, wait! Doesn't google do this sort of thing all the time, with incredible speed?" Yes, google does, but google's developers actually took the time to implement data storage methods geared towards fast search and retrieval of data based on substrings. Examples of this, for those who care, would be digital search tries and ternary trees. These are the best methods I know of off-hand for implementing the type of search slashdot is providing. Evidently Taco doesn't know of them, but that's hardly surprising, since gibbons can't read or study computer science. I also doubt that they can be implemented efficiently in perl.

I didn't think I'd be able to find a clear, simple example to top the postercomment compression filter's ability to demonstrate what an imbecile taco is, but I guess I understimated him. This is without a doubt, the dumbest thing I have ever seen in code anywhere.

It's been a couple of weeks since my last analysis of slashcode's deficiencies. We've all seen the evidence of Taco's totalitarian methods. Now let's look a little deeper at his incompetence and short-sightedness as a coder. To paraphrase Taco's words to Anne Tomlinson, was he dropped on his head at birth?

Part 1: Why is Slashdot the only site on the internet that DOS's itself?

I'm sure you've all noticed the frequent protracted outages over the last couple of weeks. Many have demanded an explanation, or at least an acknowledgement that something has gone wrong. Slashdot has been down for hours at a time, but the editors act as if nothing had happened. Since Rob "Cmdr. Whitewash" Malda and friends aren't willing to open up to their readers, it's up to me to give you the dope on why Slashdot is such a piece of crap.

The problem is of course, MySQL, as we have always suspected. mod_perl is another slice of the problem, with the last factor in the equation being unscaleable hardware.

MySQL + mod_perl + PC hardware = crash

MySQL has long been a favourite among people who want to set up a database backed web page, but are too cheap to pay for oracle. It has a reputation for serving up pages quickly, which it does admirably on sites that have low loads. As the number of connections to the DB increase past 50, MySQL seems to lose a lot of stability. In fact, it is not uncommon for it to crash and lose data in some circumstances.

In most circumstances, this isn't a problem for slashdot. It's rare for the site to reach more than 50 connections, however it does happen. It is at these times that slashdot has an increased tendency to experience the slashdot effect firsthand. The reason is that while mod_perl isn't quite a replacement for a proper middleware layer. mod_perl includes persistent database connections, but these are irrelevant. MySQL is known for it's high connection speed, and persistent connections don't really lift it's game much. They also don't solve the problem of handling excessive connections. When mod_perl runs out of open connections, it just opens another one. In other words, mod_perl does nothing to protect the MySQL database from overload.

The other problem is the hardware. A site like slashdot, receiving approximately 600 connections per minute should be running on high end enterprise hardware, not PC hardware. Taco has tried to overcome this with clustering, but this has limitations in an IO intensive area like running a website. PCs are not known for having good network performance, and this is one area that cannot help but cause a bottleneck, particularly when the site is running under load. One advantage of running on Sun or IBM hardware is that you get good IO performance combined with the ability to utilise multiprocessing. Running your site spread over 12+ low-end machines in a network just isn't anywhere near as good.

Compare slashdot to any other high traffic site. Amazon.com for instance. Have you ever seen amazon go down for four solid hours without being DOSed by canadian hackers? Amazon copes with their load because they run a sensible database, a well-designed front-end and hardware that can cope with the load. Thanks to the open-source ideology of this site, only one of these options are open to the administrators. PostGreSQL would reduce the number of crashes, however it is about 3 times as slow at dealing with individual connections as MySQL.

Essentially, we have a situation where the site is periodically hit with a large number of simultaneous connections, and they cause the database to keel over and die. This does not reflect well on Open Source software, and puts this site in the ironic position of bringing disrepute upon Open Source though their success at evangelism. It's no wonder the slashdot editors are unwilling to acknowledge their site's incredibly fragile nature.

I'd like to make it clear at this point that I don't actually know for sure that this is what's happening. For all I know, Taco is working on the code that is running on the actual slashdot server, and keeps breaking it. I'm just making educated guesses here.

As a bonus final note to the first half of this bumper double issue, has it occurred to anyone else that this site's codebase shares it's name with a slang term for homoerotic fan fiction? Linux gay conspiracy indeed!

Part 2: What in holy fuck?! search.pl under the microscope.

I have conclusive proof that Cmdr. Taco. is a gibbon. search.pl and Search.pm. Here's something cool for you to try at home: go to the search page, and search for all comments containing the word "competent". Now wait a few seconds. Wait a few minutes. Go grab a bite to eat. When you come back, it should be done.

Yep, this is the slowest search page in the universe. If you didn't believe me last time I told you that Malda has all the coding ability of a starving five year old from Ghana, you will believe me soon.

OK, you don't need to look at search.pl. All the meat is in Search.pm, and this time it's nicely placed at the top. Find the _keysearch function. Notice the for loop in there. What that loop is doing is constructing a "LIKE" clause to insert in a query string. It surrounds every word you entered into the search field with wildcards and uses them to search against comment text and title. This is then used in the findComments function as a clause in a select query which searches the entire comment database.

I have two major problems with what Taco has done here. They are as follows:

1. Even retards are laughing at him for writing code this fucken stupid.

2. LIKE queries are slow. They are text substring searches. They can't be optimized very well by databases like MySQL. These systems simply aren't designed with this sort of thing in mind, because for applications that aren't designed by twits, this functionality is seldom needed, and best implemented in an application specific way. Let me reiterate what's going on here. Slashcode is performing a substring search on every comment and comment title in the entire database. That is, to put it mildly, a shitload of text to search through. It cannot be done quickly, as our little demonstration should have proven to you. It is an idiotic thing to implement in a web page like slashdot, and Taco should be hanged by his testicles for having even had the idea.

You're probably thinking, "Hey, wait! Doesn't google do this sort of thing all the time, with incredible speed?" Yes, google does, but google's developers actually took the time to implement data storage methods geared towards fast search and retrieval of data based on substrings. Examples of this, for those who care, would be digital search tries and ternary trees. These are the best methods I know of off-hand for implementing the type of search slashdot is providing. Evidently Taco doesn't know of them, but that's hardly surprising, since gibbons can't read or study computer science. I also doubt that they can be implemented efficiently in perl.

I didn't think I'd be able to find a clear, simple example to top the postercomment compression filter's ability to demonstrate what an imbecile taco is, but I guess I understimated him. This is without a doubt, the dumbest thing I have ever seen in code anywhere.

XXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
XXX XXXX XX X
X X XX XXXX XXXXXXX
X XXX XXXXXXX XXXXXX
X XXX XX XX X
X XXX XX XXXXXXXXXXXX
X X XXX X X
XXX XXX XX XX
XXXXXXXXX XXXXX XXXXX

It's been a couple of weeks since my last analysis of slashcode's deficiencies. We've all seen the evidence of Taco's totalitarian methods. Now let's look a little deeper at his incompetence and short-sightedness as a coder. To paraphrase Taco's words to Anne Tomlinson, was he dropped on his head at birth?

Part 1: Why is Slashdot the only site on the internet that DOS's itself?

I'm sure you've all noticed the frequent protracted outages over the last couple of weeks. Many have demanded an explanation, or at least an acknowledgement that something has gone wrong. Slashdot has been down for hours at a time, but the editors act as if nothing had happened. Since Rob "Cmdr. Whitewash" Malda and friends aren't willing to open up to their readers, it's up to me to give you the dope on why Slashdot is such a piece of crap.

The problem is of course, MySQL, as we have always suspected. mod_perl is another slice of the problem, with the last factor in the equation being unscaleable hardware.

MySQL + mod_perl + PC hardware = crash

MySQL has long been a favourite among people who want to set up a database backed web page, but are too cheap to pay for oracle. It has a reputation for serving up pages quickly, which it does admirably on sites that have low loads. As the number of connections to the DB increase past 50, MySQL seems to lose a lot of stability. In fact, it is not uncommon for it to crash and lose data in some circumstances.

In most circumstances, this isn't a problem for slashdot. It's rare for the site to reach more than 50 connections, however it does happen. It is at these times that slashdot has an increased tendency to experience the slashdot effect firsthand. The reason is that while mod_perl isn't quite a replacement for a proper middleware layer. mod_perl includes persistent database connections, but these are irrelevant. MySQL is known for it's high connection speed, and persistent connections don't really lift it's game much. They also don't solve the problem of handling excessive connections. When mod_perl runs out of open connections, it just opens another one. In other words, mod_perl does nothing to protect the MySQL database from overload.

The other problem is the hardware. A site like slashdot, receiving approximately 600 connections per minute should be running on high end enterprise hardware, not PC hardware. Taco has tried to overcome this with clustering, but this has limitations in an IO intensive area like running a website. PCs are not known for having good network performance, and this is one area that cannot help but cause a bottleneck, particularly when the site is running under load. One advantage of running on Sun or IBM hardware is that you get good IO performance combined with the ability to utilise multiprocessing. Running your site spread over 12+ low-end machines in a network just isn't anywhere near as good.

Compare slashdot to any other high traffic site. Amazon.com for instance. Have you ever seen amazon go down for four solid hours without being DOSed by canadian hackers? Amazon copes with their load because they run a sensible database, a well-designed front-end and hardware that can cope with the load. Thanks to the open-source ideology of this site, only one of these options are open to the administrators. PostGreSQL would reduce the number of crashes, however it is about 3 times as slow at dealing with individual connections as MySQL.

Essentially, we have a situation where the site is periodically hit with a large number of simultaneous connections, and they cause the database to keel over and die. This does not reflect well on Open Source software, and puts this site in the ironic position of bringing disrepute upon Open Source though their success at evangelism. It's no wonder the slashdot editors are unwilling to acknowledge their site's incredibly fragile nature.

I'd like to make it clear at this point that I don't actually know for sure that this is what's happening. For all I know, Taco is working on the code that is running on the actual slashdot server, and keeps breaking it. I'm just making educated guesses here.

As a bonus final note to the first half of this bumper double issue, has it occurred to anyone else that this site's codebase shares it's name with a slang term for homoerotic fan fiction? Linux gay conspiracy indeed!

Part 2: What in holy fuck?! search.pl under the microscope.

I have conclusive proof that Cmdr. Taco. is a gibbon. search.pl and Search.pm. Here's something cool for you to try at home: go to the search page, and search for all comments containing the word "competent". Now wait a few seconds. Wait a few minutes. Go grab a bite to eat. When you come back, it should be done.

Yep, this is the slowest search page in the universe. If you didn't believe me last time I told you that Malda has all the coding ability of a starving five year old from Ghana, you will believe me soon.

OK, you don't need to look at search.pl. All the meat is in Search.pm, and this time it's nicely placed at the top. Find the _keysearch function. Notice the for loop in there. What that loop is doing is constructing a "LIKE" clause to insert in a query string. It surrounds every word you entered into the search field with wildcards and uses them to search against comment text and title. This is then used in the findComments function as a clause in a select query which searches the entire comment database.

I have two major problems with what Taco has done here. They are as follows:

1. Even retards are laughing at him for writing code this fucken stupid.

2. LIKE queries are slow. They are text substring searches. They can't be optimized very well by databases like MySQL. These systems simply aren't designed with this sort of thing in mind, because for applications that aren't designed by twits, this functionality is seldom needed, and best implemented in an application specific way. Let me reiterate what's going on here. Slashcode is performing a substring search on every comment and comment title in the entire database. That is, to put it mildly, a shitload of text to search through. It cannot be done quickly, as our little demonstration should have proven to you. It is an idiotic thing to implement in a web page like slashdot, and Taco should be hanged by his testicles for having even had the idea.

You're probably thinking, "Hey, wait! Doesn't google do this sort of thing all the time, with incredible speed?" Yes, google does, but google's developers actually took the time to implement data storage methods geared towards fast search and retrieval of data based on substrings. Examples of this, for those who care, would be digital search tries and ternary trees. These are the best methods I know of off-hand for implementing the type of search slashdot is providing. Evidently Taco doesn't know of them, but that's hardly surprising, since gibbons can't read or study computer science. I also doubt that they can be implemented efficiently in perl.

I didn't think I'd be able to find a clear, simple example to top the postercomment compression filter's ability to demonstrate what an imbecile taco is, but I guess I understimated him. This is without a doubt, the dumbest thing I have ever seen in code anywhere.

XXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
XXX XXXX XX X
X X XX XXXX XXXXXXX
X XXX XXXXXXX XXXXXX
X XXX XX XX X
X XXX XX XXXXXXXXXXXX
X X XXX X X
XXX XXX XX XX
XXXXXXXXX XXXXX XXXXX

It's been a couple of weeks since my last analysis of slashcode's deficiencies. We've all seen the evidence of Taco's totalitarian methods. Now let's look a little deeper at his incompetence and short-sightedness as a coder. To paraphrase Taco's words to Anne Tomlinson, was he dropped on his head at birth?

Part 1: Why is Slashdot the only site on the internet that DOS's itself?

I'm sure you've all noticed the frequent protracted outages over the last couple of weeks. Many have demanded an explanation, or at least an acknowledgement that something has gone wrong. Slashdot has been down for hours at a time, but the editors act as if nothing had happened. Since Rob "Cmdr. Whitewash" Malda and friends aren't willing to open up to their readers, it's up to me to give you the dope on why Slashdot is such a piece of crap.

The problem is of course, MySQL, as we have always suspected. mod_perl is another slice of the problem, with the last factor in the equation being unscaleable hardware.

MySQL + mod_perl + PC hardware = crash

MySQL has long been a favourite among people who want to set up a database backed web page, but are too cheap to pay for oracle. It has a reputation for serving up pages quickly, which it does admirably on sites that have low loads. As the number of connections to the DB increase past 50, MySQL seems to lose a lot of stability. In fact, it is not uncommon for it to crash and lose data in some circumstances.

In most circumstances, this isn't a problem for slashdot. It's rare for the site to reach more than 50 connections, however it does happen. It is at these times that slashdot has an increased tendency to experience the slashdot effect firsthand. The reason is that while mod_perl isn't quite a replacement for a proper middleware layer. mod_perl includes persistent database connections, but these are irrelevant. MySQL is known for it's high connection speed, and persistent connections don't really lift it's game much. They also don't solve the problem of handling excessive connections. When mod_perl runs out of open connections, it just opens another one. In other words, mod_perl does nothing to protect the MySQL database from overload.

The other problem is the hardware. A site like slashdot, receiving approximately 600 connections per minute should be running on high end enterprise hardware, not PC hardware. Taco has tried to overcome this with clustering, but this has limitations in an IO intensive area like running a website. PCs are not known for having good network performance, and this is one area that cannot help but cause a bottleneck, particularly when the site is running under load. One advantage of running on Sun or IBM hardware is that you get good IO performance combined with the ability to utilise multiprocessing. Running your site spread over 12+ low-end machines in a network just isn't anywhere near as good.

Compare slashdot to any other high traffic site. Amazon.com for instance. Have you ever seen amazon go down for four solid hours without being DOSed by canadian hackers? Amazon copes with their load because they run a sensible database, a well-designed front-end and hardware that can cope with the load. Thanks to the open-source ideology of this site, only one of these options are open to the administrators. PostGreSQL would reduce the number of crashes, however it is about 3 times as slow at dealing with individual connections as MySQL.

Essentially, we have a situation where the site is periodically hit with a large number of simultaneous connections, and they cause the database to keel over and die. This does not reflect well on Open Source software, and puts this site in the ironic position of bringing disrepute upon Open Source though their success at evangelism. It's no wonder the slashdot editors are unwilling to acknowledge their site's incredibly fragile nature.

I'd like to make it clear at this point that I don't actually know for sure that this is what's happening. For all I know, Taco is working on the code that is running on the actual slashdot server, and keeps breaking it. I'm just making educated guesses here.

As a bonus final note to the first half of this bumper double issue, has it occurred to anyone else that this site's codebase shares it's name with a slang term for homoerotic fan fiction? Linux gay conspiracy indeed!

Part 2: What in holy fuck?! search.pl under the microscope.

I have conclusive proof that Cmdr. Taco. is a gibbon. search.pl and Search.pm. Here's something cool for you to try at home: go to the search page, and search for all comments containing the word "competent". Now wait a few seconds. Wait a few minutes. Go grab a bite to eat. When you come back, it should be done.

Yep, this is the slowest search page in the universe. If you didn't believe me last time I told you that Malda has all the coding ability of a starving five year old from Ghana, you will believe me soon.

OK, you don't need to look at search.pl. All the meat is in Search.pm, and this time it's nicely placed at the top. Find the _keysearch function. Notice the for loop in there. What that loop is doing is constructing a "LIKE" clause to insert in a query string. It surrounds every word you entered into the search field with wildcards and uses them to search against comment text and title. This is then used in the findComments function as a clause in a select query which searches the entire comment database.

I have two major problems with what Taco has done here. They are as follows:

1. Even retards are laughing at him for writing code this fucken stupid.

2. LIKE queries are slow. They are text substring searches. They can't be optimized very well by databases like MySQL. These systems simply aren't designed with this sort of thing in mind, because for applications that aren't designed by twits, this functionality is seldom needed, and best implemented in an application specific way. Let me reiterate what's going on here. Slashcode is performing a substring search on every comment and comment title in the entire database. That is, too put it mildly, a shitload of text to search through. It cannot be done quickly, as our little demonstration should have proven to you. It is an idiotic thing to implement in a web page like slashdot, and Taco should be hanged by his testicles for having even had the idea.

You're probably thinking, "Hey, wait! Doesn't google do this sort of thing all the time, with incredible speed?" Yes, google does, but google's developers actually took the time to implement data storage methods geared towards fast search and retrieval of data based on substrings. Examples of this, for those who care, would be digital search tries and ternary trees. These are the best methods I know of off-hand for implementing the type of search slashdot is providing. Evidently Taco doesn't know of them, but that's hardly surprising, since gibbons can't read or study computer science. I also doubt that they can be implemented efficiently in perl.

I didn't think I'd be able to find a clear, simple example to top the postercomment compression filter's ability to demonstrate what an imbecile taco is, but I guess I understimated him. This is without a doubt, the dumbest thing I have ever seen in code anywhere.

XXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
XXX XXXX XX X
X X XX XXXX XXXXXXX
X XXX XXXXXXX XXXXXX
X XXX XX XX X
X XXX XX XXXXXXXXXXXX
X X XXX X X
XXX XXX XX XX
XXXXXXXXX XXXXX XXXXX

It's been a couple of weeks since my last analysis of slashcode's deficiencies. We've all seen the evidence of Taco's totalitarian methods. Now let's look a little deeper at his incompetence and short-sightedness as a coder. To paraphrase Taco's words to Anne Tomlinson, was he dropped on his head at birth?

Part 1: Why is Slashdot the only site on the internet that DOS's itself?

I'm sure you've all noticed the frequent protracted outages over the last couple of weeks. Many have demanded an explanation, or at least an acknowledgement that something has gone wrong. Slashdot has been down for hours at a time, but the editors act as if nothing had happened. Since Rob "Cmdr. Whitewash" Malda and friends aren't willing to open up to their readers, it's up to me to give you the dope on why Slashdot is such a piece of crap.

The problem is of course, MySQL, as we have always suspected. mod_perl is another slice of the problem, with the last factor in the equation being unscaleable hardware.

MySQL + mod_perl + PC hardware = crash

MySQL has long been a favourite among people who want to set up a database backed web page, but are too cheap to pay for oracle. It has a reputation for serving up pages quickly, which it does admirably on sites that have low loads. As the number of connections to the DB increase past 50, MySQL seems to lose a lot of stability. In fact, it is not uncommon for it to crash and lose data in some circumstances.

In most circumstances, this isn't a problem for slashdot. It's rare for the site to reach more than 50 connections, however it does happen. It is at these times that slashdot has an increased tendency to experience the slashdot effect firsthand. The reason is that while mod_perl isn't quite a replacement for a proper middleware layer. mod_perl includes persistent database connections, but these are irrelevant. MySQL is known for it's high connection speed, and persistent connections don't really lift it's game much. They also don't solve the problem of handling excessive connections. When mod_perl runs out of open connections, it just opens another one. In other words, mod_perl does nothing to protect the MySQL database from overload.

The other problem is the hardware. A site like slashdot, receiving approximately 600 connections per minute should be running on high end enterprise hardware, not PC hardware. Taco has tried to overcome this with clustering, but this has limitations in an IO intensive area like running a website. PCs are not known for having good network performance, and this is one area that cannot help but cause a bottleneck, particularly when the site is running under load. One advantage of running on Sun or IBM hardware is that you get good IO performance combined with the ability to utilise multiprocessing. Running your site spread over 12+ low-end machines in a network just isn't anywhere near as good.

Compare slashdot to any other high traffic site. Amazon.com for instance. Have you ever seen amazon go down for four solid hours without being DOSed by canadian hackers? Amazon copes with their load because they run a sensible database, a well-designed front-end and hardware that can cope with the load. Thanks to the open-source ideology of this site, only one of these options are open to the administrators. PostGreSQL would reduce the number of crashes, however it is about 3 times as slow at dealing with individual connections as MySQL.

Essentially, we have a situation where the site is periodically hit with a large number of simultaneous connections, and they cause the database to keel over and die. This does not reflect well on Open Source software, and puts this site in the ironic position of bringing disrepute upon Open Source though their success at evangelism. It's no wonder the slashdot editors are unwilling to acknowledge their site's incredibly fragile nature.

I'd like to make it clear at this point that I don't actually know for sure that this is what's happening. For all I know, Taco is working on the code that is running on the actual slashdot server, and keeps breaking it. I'm just making educated guesses here.

As a bonus final note to the first half of this bumper double issue, has it occurred to anyone else that this site's codebase shares it's name with a slang term for homoerotic fan fiction? Linux gay conspiracy indeed!

Part 2: What in holy fuck?! search.pl under the microscope.

I have conclusive proof that Cmdr. Taco. is a gibbon. search.pl and Search.pm. Here's something cool for you to try at home: go to the search page, and search for all comments containing the word "competent". Now wait a few seconds. Wait a few minutes. Go grab a bite to eat. When you come back, it should be done.

Yep, this is the slowest search page in the universe. If you didn't believe me last time I told you that Malda has all the coding ability of a starving five year old from Ghana, you will believe me soon.

OK, you don't need to look at search.pl. All the meat is in Search.pm, and this time it's nicely placed at the top. Find the _keysearch function. Notice the for loop in there. What that loop is doing is constructing a "LIKE" clause to insert in a query string. It surrounds every word you entered into the search field with wildcards and uses them to search against comment text and title. This is then used in the findComments function as a clause in a select query which searches the entire comment database.

I have two major problems with what Taco has done here. They are as follows:

1. Even retards are laughing at him for writing code this fucken stupid.

2. LIKE queries are slow. They are text substring searches. They can't be optimized very well by databases like MySQL. These systems simply aren't designed with this sort of thing in mind, because for applications that aren't designed by twits, this functionality is seldom needed, and best implemented in an application specific way. Let me reiterate what's going on here. Slashcode is performing a substring search on every comment and comment title in the entire database. That is, too put it mildly, a shitload of text to search through. It cannot be done quickly, as our little demonstration should have proven to you. It is an idiotic thing to implement in a web page like slashdot, and Taco should be hanged by his testicles for having even had the idea.

You're probably thinking, "Hey, wait! Doesn't google do this sort of thing all the time, with incredible speed?" Yes, google does, but google's developers actually took the time to implement data storage methods geared towards fast search and retrieval of data based on substrings. Examples of this, for those who care, would be digital search tries and ternary trees. These are the best methods I know of off-hand for implementing the type of search slashdot is providing. Evidently Taco doesn't know of them, but that's hardly surprising, since gibbons can't read or study computer science. I also doubt that they can be implemented efficiently in perl.

I didn't think I'd be able to find a clear, simple example to top the postercomment compression filter's ability to demonstrate what an imbecile taco is, but I guess I understimated him. This is without a doubt, the dumbest thing I have ever seen in code anywhere.

XXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
XXX XXXX XX X
X X XX XXXX XXXXXXX
X XXX XXXXXXX XXXXXX
X XXX XX XX X
X XXX XX XXXXXXXXXXXX
X X XXX X X
XXX XXX XX XX
XXXXXXXXX XXXXX XXXXX

It's been a couple of weeks since my last analysis of slashcode's deficiencies. We've all seen the evidence of Taco's totalitarian methods. Now let's look a little deeper at his incompetence and short-sightedness as a coder. To paraphrase Taco's words to Anne Tomlinson, was he dropped on his head at birth?

Part 1: Why is Slashdot the only site on the internet that DOS's itself?

I'm sure you've all noticed the frequent protracted outages over the last couple of weeks. Many have demanded an explanation, or at least an acknowledgement that something has gone wrong. Slashdot has been down for hours at a time, but the editors act as if nothing had happened. Since Rob "Cmdr. Whitewash" Malda and friends aren't willing to open up to their readers, it's up to me to give you the dope on why Slashdot is such a piece of crap.

The problem is of course, MySQL, as we have always suspected. mod_perl is another slice of the problem, with the last factor in the equation being unscaleable hardware.

MySQL + mod_perl + PC hardware = crash

MySQL has long been a favourite among people who want to set up a database backed web page, but are too cheap to pay for oracle. It has a reputation for serving up pages quickly, which it does admirably on sites that have low loads. As the number of connections to the DB increase past 50, MySQL seems to lose a lot of stability. In fact, it is not uncommon for it to crash and lose data in some circumstances.

In most circumstances, this isn't a problem for slashdot. It's rare for the site to reach more than 50 connections, however it does happen. It is at these times that slashdot has an increased tendency to experience the slashdot effect firsthand. The reason is that while mod_perl isn't quite a replacement for a proper middleware layer. mod_perl includes persistent database connections, but these are irrelevant. MySQL is known for it's high connection speed, and persistent connections don't really lift it's game much. They also don't solve the problem of handling excessive connections. When mod_perl runs out of open connections, it just opens another one. In other words, mod_perl does nothing to protect the MySQL database from overload.

The other problem is the hardware. A site like slashdot, receiving approximately 600 connections per minute should be running on high end enterprise hardware, not PC hardware. Taco has tried to overcome this with clustering, but this has limitations in an IO intensive area like running a website. PCs are not known for having good network performance, and this is one area that cannot help but cause a bottleneck, particularly when the site is running under load. One advantage of running on Sun or IBM hardware is that you get good IO performance combined with the ability to utilise multiprocessing. Running your site spread over 12+ low-end machines in a network just isn't anywhere near as good.

Compare slashdot to any other high traffic site. Amazon.com for instance. Have you ever seen amazon go down for four solid hours without being DOSed by canadian hackers? Amazon copes with their load because they run a sensible database, a well-designed front-end and hardware that can cope with the load. Thanks to the open-source ideology of this site, only one of these options are open to the administrators. PostGreSQL would reduce the number of crashes, however it is about 3 times at dealing with individual connections as slow as MySQL.

Essentially, we have a situation where the site is periodically hit with a large number of simultaneous connections, and they cause the database to keel over and die. This does not reflect well on Open Source software, and puts this site in the ironic position of bringing disrepute upon Open Source though their success at evangelism. It's no wonder the slashdot editors are unwilling to acknowledge their site's incredibly fragile nature.

I'd like to make it clear at this point that I don't actually know for sure that this is what's happening. For all I know, Taco is working on the code that is running on the actual slashdot server, and keeps breaking it. I'm just making educated guesses here.

As a bonus final note to the first half of this bumper double issue, has it occurred to anyone else that this site's codebase shares it's name with a slang term for homoerotic fan fiction? Linux gay conspiracy indeed!

Part 2: What in holy fuck?! search.pl under the microscope.

I have conclusive proof that Cmdr. Taco. is a gibbon. search.pl and Search.pm. Here's something cool for you to try at home: go to the search page, and search for all comments containing the word "competent". Now wait a few seconds. Wait a few minutes. Go grab a bite to eat. When you come back, it should be done.

Yep, this is the slowest search page in the universe. If you didn't believe me last time I told you that Malda has all the coding ability of a starving five year old from Ghana, you will believe me soon.

OK, you don't need to look at search.pl. All the meat is in Search.pm, and this time it's nicely placed at the top. Find the _keysearch function. Notice the for loop in there. What that loop is doing is constructing a "LIKE" clause to insert in a query string. It surrounds every word you entered into the search field with wildcards and uses them to search against comment text and title. This is then used in the findComments function as a clause in a select query which searches the entire comment database.

I have two major problems with what Taco has done here. They are as follows:

1. Even retards are laughing at him for writing code this fucken stupid.

2. LIKE queries are slow. They are text substring searches. They can't be optimized very well by databases like MySQL. These systems simply aren't designed with this sort of thing in mind, because for applications that aren't designed by twits, this functionality is seldom needed, and best implemented in an application specific way. Let me reiterate what's going on here. Slashcode is performing a substring search on every comment and comment title in the entire database. That is, too put it mildly, a shitload of text to search through. It cannot be done quickly, as our little demonstration should have proven to you. It is an idiotic thing to implement in a web page like slashdot, and Taco should be hanged by his testicles for having even had the idea.

You're probably thinking, "Hey, wait! Doesn't google do this sort of thing all the time, with incredible speed?" Yes, google does, but google's developers actually took the time to implement data storage methods geared towards fast search and retrieval of data based on substrings. Examples of this, for those who care, would be digital search tries and ternary trees. These are the best methods I know of off-hand for implementing the type of search slashdot is providing. Evidently Taco doesn't know of them, but that's hardly surprising, since gibbons can't read or study computer science. I also doubt that they can be implemented efficiently in perl.

I didn't think I'd be able to find a clear, simple example to top the postercomment compression filter's ability to demonstrate what an imbecile taco is, but I guess I understimated him. This is without a doubt, the dumbest thing I have ever seen in code anywhere.

XXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
XXX XXXX XX X
X X XX XXXX XXXXXXX
X XXX XXXXXXX XXXXXX
X XXX XX XX X
X XXX XX XXXXXXXXXXXX
X X XXX X X
XXX XXX XX XX
XXXXXXXXX XXXXX XXXXX

It's been a couple of weeks since my last analysis of slashcode's deficiencies. We've all seen the evidence of Taco's totalitarian methods. Now let's look a little deeper at his incompetence and short-sightedness as a coder. To paraphrase Taco's words to Anne Tomlinson, was he dropped on his head at birth?

Part 1: Why is Slashdot the only site on the internet that DOS's itself?

I'm sure you've all noticed the frequent protracted outages over the last couple of weeks. Many have demanded an explanation, or at least an acknowledgement that something has gone wrong. Slashdot has been down for hours at a time, but the editors act as if nothing had happened. Since Rob "Cmdr. Whitewash" Malda and friends aren't willing to open up to their readers, it's up to me to give you the dope on why Slashdot is such a piece of crap.

The problem is of course, MySQL, as we have always suspected. mod_perl is another slice of the problem, with the last factor in the equation being unscaleable hardware.

MySQL + mod_perl + PC hardware = crash

MySQL has long been a favourite among people who want to set up a database backed web page, but are too cheap to pay for oracle. It has a reputation for serving up pages quickly, which it does admirably on sites that have low loads. As the number of connections to the DB increase past 50, MySQL seems to lose a lot of stability. In fact, it is not uncommon for it to crash and lose data in some circumstances.

In most circumstances, this isn't a problem for slashdot. It's rare for the site to reach more than 50 connections, however it does happen. It is at these times that slashdot has an increased tendency to experience the slashdot effect firsthand. The reason is that while mod_perl isn't quite a replacement for a proper middleware layer. mod_perl includes persistent database connections, but these are irrelevant. MySQL is known for it's high connection speed, and persistent connections don't really lift it's game much. They also don't solve the problem of handling excessive connections. When mod_perl runs out of open connections, it just opens another one. In other words, mod_perl does nothing to protect the MySQL database from overload.

The other problem is the hardware. A site like slashdot, receiving approximately 600 connections per minute should be running on high end enterprise hardware, not PC hardware. Taco has tried to overcome this with clustering, but this has limitations in an IO intensive area like running a website. PCs are not known for having good network performance, and this is one area that cannot help but cause a bottleneck, particularly when the site is running under load. One advantage of running on Sun or IBM hardware is that you get good IO performance combined with the ability to utilise multiprocessing. Running your site spread over 12+ low-end machines in a network just isn't anywhere near as good.

Compare slashdot to any other high traffic site. Amazon.com for instance. Have you ever seen amazon go down for four solid hours without being DOSed by canadian hackers? Amazon copes with their load because they run a sensible database, a well-designed front-end and hardware that can cope with the load. Thanks to the open-source ideology of this site, only one of these options are open to the administrators. PostGreSQL would reduce the number of crashes, however it is about 3 times at dealing with individual connections as slow as MySQL.

Essentially, we have a situation where the site is periodically hit with a large number of simultaneous connections, and they cause the database to keel over and die. This does not reflect well on Open Source software, and puts this site in the ironic position of bringing disrepute upon Open Source though their success at evangelism. It's no wonder the slashdot editors are unwilling to acknowledge their site's incredibly fragile nature.

I'd like to make it clear at this point that I don't actually know for sure that this is what's happening. For all I know, Taco is working on the code that is running on the actual slashdot server, and keeps breaking it. I'm just making educated guesses here.

As a bonus final note to the first half of this bumper double issue, has it occurred to anyone else that this site's codebase shares it's name with a slang term for homoerotic fan fiction? Linux gay conspiracy indeed!

Part 2: What in holy fuck?! search.pl under the microscope.

I have conclusive proof that Cmdr. Taco. is a gibbon. search.pl and Search.pm. Here's something cool for you to try at home: go to the search page, and search for all comments containing the word "competent". Now wait a few seconds. Wait a few minutes. Go grab a bite to eat. When you come back, it should be done.

Yep, this is the slowest search page in the universe. If you didn't believe me last time I told you that Malda has all the coding ability of a starving five year old from Ghana, you will believe me soon.

OK, you don't need to look at search.pl. All the meat is in Search.pm, and this time it's nicely placed at the top. Find the _keysearch function. Notice the for loop in there. What that loop is doing is constructing a "LIKE" clause to insert in a query string. It surrounds every word you entered into the search field with wildcards and uses them to search against comment text and title. This is then used in the findComments function as a clause in a select query which searches the entire comment database.

I have two major problems with what Taco has done here. They are as follows:

1. Even retards are laughing at him for writing code this fucken stupid.

2. LIKE queries are slow. They are text substring searches. They can't be optimized very well by databases like MySQL. These systems simply aren't designed with this sort of thing in mind, because for applications that aren't designed by twits, this functionality is seldom needed, and best implemented in an application specific way. Let me reiterate what's going on here. Slashcode is performing a substring search on every comment and comment title in the entire database. That is, too put it mildly, a shitload of text to search through. It cannot be done quickly, as our little demonstration should have proven to you. It is an idiotic thing to implement in a web page like slashdot, and Taco should be hanged by his testicles for having even had the idea.

You're probably thinking, "Hey, wait! Doesn't google do this sort of thing all the time, with incredible speed?" Yes, google does, but google's developers actually took the time to implement data storage methods geared towards fast search and retrieval of data based on substrings. Examples of this, for those who care, would be digital search tries and ternary trees. These are the best methods I know of off-hand for implementing the type of search slashdot is providing. Evidently Taco doesn't know of them, but that's hardly surprising, since gibbons can't read or study computer science. I also doubt that they can be implemented efficiently in perl.

I didn't think I'd be able to find a clear, simple example to top the postercomment compression filter's ability to demonstrate what an imbecile taco is, but I guess I understimated him. This is without a doubt, the dumbest thing I have ever seen in code anywhere.

XXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
XXX XXXX XX X
X X XX XXXX XXXXXXX
X XXX XXXXXXX XXXXXX
X XXX XX XX X
X XXX XX XXXXXXXXXXXX
X X XXX X X
XXX XXX XX XX
XXXXXXXXX XXXXX XXXXX

It's been a couple of weeks since my last analysis of slashcode's deficiencies. We've all seen the evidence of Taco's totalitarian methods. Now let's look a little deeper at his incompetence and short-sightedness as a coder. To paraphrase Taco's words to Anne Tomlinson, was he dropped on his head at birth?

Part 1: Why is Slashdot the only site on the internet that DOS's itself?

I'm sure you've all noticed the frequent protracted outages over the last couple of weeks. Many have demanded an explanation, or at least an acknowledgement that something has gone wrong. Slashdot has been down for hours at a time, but the editors act as if nothing had happened. Since Rob "Cmdr. Whitewash" Malda and friends aren't willing to open up to their readers, it's up to me to give you the dope on why Slashdot is such a piece of crap.

The problem is of course, MySQL, as we have always suspected. mod_perl is another slice of the problem, with the last factor in the equation being unscaleable hardware.

MySQL + mod_perl + PC hardware = crash

MySQL has long been a favourite among people who want to set up a database backed web page, but are too cheap to pay for oracle. It has a reputation for serving up pages quickly, which it does admirably on sites that have low loads. As the number of connections to the DB increase past 50, MySQL seems to lose a lot of stability. In fact, it is not uncommon for it to crash and lose data in some circumstances.

In most circumstances, this isn't a problem for slashdot. It's rare for the site to reach more than 50 connections, however it does happen. It is at these times that slashdot has an increased tendency to experience the slashdot effect firsthand. The reason is that while mod_perl may implement persistant connections, it isn't quite a replacement for a proper middleware layer. mod_perl includes persistent database connections, but these are irrelevant. MySQL is known for it's high connection speed, and persistent connections don't really lift it's game much. They also don't solve the problem of handling excessive connections. When mod_perl runs out of open connections, it just opens another one. In other words, mod_perl does nothing to protect the MySQL database from overload.

The other problem is the hardware. A site like slashdot, receiving approximately 600 connections per minute should be running on high end enterprise hardware, not PC hardware. Taco has tried to overcome this with clustering, but this has limitations in an IO intensive area like running a website. PCs are not known for having good network performance, and this is one area that cannot help but cause a bottleneck, particularly when the site is running under load. One advantage of running on Sun or IBM hardware is that you get good IO performance combined with the ability to utilise multiprocessing. Running your site spread over 12+ low-end machines in a network just isn't anywhere near as good.

Compare slashdot to any other high traffic site. Amazon.com for instance. Have you ever seen amazon go down for four solid hours without being DOSed by canadadian hackers? Amazon copes with their load because they run a sensible database, a well-designed front-end and hardware that can cope with the load. Thanks to the open-source ideology of this site, only one of these options are open to the administrators. PostGreSQL would reduce the number of crashes, however it is about 3 times at dealing with individual connections as slow as MySQL.

Essentially, we have a situation where the site is periodically hit with a large number of simultaneous connections, and they cause the database to keel over and die. This does not reflect well on Open Source software, and puts this site in the ironic position of bringing disrepute upon Open Source though their success at evangelism. It's no wonder the slashdot editors are unwilling to acknowledge their site's incredibly fragile nature.

I'd like to make it clear at this point that I don't actually know for sure that this is what's happening. For all I know, Taco is working on the code that is running on the actual slashdot server, and keeps breaking it. I'm just making educated guesses here.

As a bonus final note to the first half of this bumper double issue, has it occurred to anyone else that this site's codebase shares it's name with a slang term for homoerotic fan fiction? Linux gay conspiracy indeed!

Part 2: What in holy fuck?! search.pl under the microscope.

I have conclusive proof that Cmdr. Taco. is a gibbon. search.pl and Search.pm. Here's something cool for you to try at home: go to the search page, and search for all comments containing the word "competent". Now wait a few seconds. Wait a few minutes. Go grab a bite to eat. When you come back, it should be done.

Yep, this is the slowest search page in the universe. If you didn't believe me last time I told you that Malda has all the coding ability of a starving five year old from Ghana, you will believe me soon.

OK, you don't need to look at search.pl. All the meat is in Search.pm, and this time it's nicely placed at the top. Find the _keysearch function. Notice the for loop in there. What that loop is doing is constructing a "LIKE" clause to insert in a query string. It surrounds every word you entered into the search field with wildcards and uses them to search against comment text and title. This is then used in the findComments function as a clause in a select query which searches the entire comment database. You give it a set of data to search for and it returns the relevant rows from the database.

I have two major problems with what Taco has done here. They are as follows:

1. Even retards are laughing at him for writing code this fucken stupid.

2.LIKE queries are slow. They are text substring searches. They can't be optimized very well by databases like MySQL. These systems simply aren't designed with this sort of thing in mind, because for applications that aren't designed by twits, this functionality is seldom needed, and best implemented in an application specific way. Let me reiterate what's going on here. Slashcode is performing a substring search on every comment and comment title in the entire database. That is, too put it mildly, a shitload of text to search through. It cannot be done quickly, as our little demonstration should have proven to you. It is an idiotic thing to implement in a web page like slashdot, and Taco should be hanged by his testicles for having even had the idea.

You're probably thinking, "Hey, wait! Doesn't google do this sort of thing all the time, with incredible speed?" Yes, google does, but google's developers actually took the time to implement data storage methods geared towards fast search and retrieval of data based on substrings. Examples of this, for those who care, would be digital search tries and ternary trees. These are the best methods I know of off-hand for implementing the type of search slashdot is providing. Evidently Taco doesn't know of them, but that's hardly surprising, since gibbons can't read or study computer science. I also doubt that they can be implemented efficiently in perl.

I didn't think I'd be able to find a clear, simple example to top the postercomment compression filter's ability to demonstrate what an imbecile taco is, but I guess I understimated him. This is without a doubt, the dumbest thing I have ever seen in code anywhere.

XXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
XXX XXXX XX X
X X XX XXXX XXXXXXX
X XXX XXXXXXX XXXXXX
X XXX XX XX X
X XXX XX XXXXXXXXXXXX
X X XXX X X
XXX XXX XX XX
XXXXXXXXX XXXXX XXXXX

It's been a couple of weeks since my last analysis of slashcode's deficiencies. We've all seen the evidence of Taco's totalitarian methods. Now let's look a little deeper at his incompetence and short-sightedness as a coder. To paraphrase Taco's words to Anne Tomlinson, was he dropped on his head at birth?

Part 1: Why is Slashdot the only site on the internet that DOS's itself?

I'm sure you've all noticed the frequent protracted outages over the last couple of weeks. Many have demanded an explanation, or at least an acknowledgement that something has gone wrong. Slashdot has been down for hours at a time, but the editors act as if nothing had happened. Since Rob "Cmdr. Whitewash" Malda and friends aren't willing to open up to their readers, it's up to me to give you the dope on why Slashdot is such a piece of crap.

The problem is of course, MySQL, as we have always suspected. mod_perl is another slice of the problem, with the last factor in the equation being unscaleable hardware.

MySQL + mod_perl + PC hardware = crash

MySQL has long been a favourite among people who want to set up a database backed web page, but are too cheap to pay for oracle. It has a reputation for serving up pages quickly, which it does admirably on sites that have low loads. As the number of connections to the DB increase past 50, MySQL seems to lose a lot of stability. In fact, it is not uncommon for it to crash and lose data in some circumstances.

In most circumstances, this isn't a problem for slashdot. It's rare for the site to reach more than 50 connections, however it does happen. It is at these times that slashdot has an increased tendency to experience the slashdot effect firsthand. The reason is that while mod_perl may implement persistant connections, it isn't quite a replacement for a proper middleware layer. mod_perl includes persistent database connections, but these are irrelevant. MySQL is known for it's high connection speed, and persistent connections don't really lift it's game much. They also don't solve the problem of handling excessive connections. When mod_perl runs out of open connections, it just opens another one. In other words, mod_perl does nothing to protect the MySQL database from overload.

The other problem is the hardware. A site like slashdot, receiving approximately 600 connections per minute should be running on high end enterprise hardware, not PC hardware. Taco has tried to overcome this with clustering, but this has limitations in an IO intensive area like running a website. PCs are not known for having good network performance, and this is one area that cannot help but cause a bottleneck, particularly when the site is running under load. One advantage of running on Sun or IBM hardware is that you get good IO performance combined with the ability to utilise multiprocessing. Running your site spread over 12+ low-end machines in a network just isn't anywhere near as good.

Compare slashdot to any other high traffic site. Amazon.com for instance. Have you ever seen amazon go down for four solid hours without being DOSed by canadadian hackers? Amazon copes with their load because they run a sensible database, a well-designed front-end and hardware that can cope with the load. Thanks to the open-source ideology of this site, only one of these options are open to the administrators. PostGreSQL would reduce the number of crashes, however it is about 3 times at dealing with individual connections as slow as MySQL.

Essentially, we have a situation where the site is periodically hit with a large number of simultaneous connections, and they cause the database to keel over and die. This does not reflect well on Open Source software, and puts this site in the ironic position of bringing disrepute upon Open Source though their success at evangelism. It's no wonder the slashdot editors are unwilling to acknowledge their site's incredibly fragile nature.

I'd like to make it clear at this point that I don't actually know for sure that this is what's happening. For all I know, Taco is working on the code that is running on the actual slashdot server, and keeps breaking it. I'm just making educated guesses here.

As a bonus final note to the first half of this bumper double issue, has it occurred to anyone else that this site's codebase shares it's name with a slang term for homoerotic fan fiction? Linux gay conspiracy indeed!

Part 2: What in holy fuck?! search.pl under the microscope.

I have conclusive proof that Cmdr. Taco. is a gibbon. search.pl and Search.pm. Here's something cool for you to try at home: go to the search page, and search for all comments containing the word "competent". Now wait a few seconds. Wait a few minutes. Go grab a bite to eat. When you come back, it should be done.

Yep, this is the slowest search page in the universe. If you didn't believe me last time I told you that Malda has all the coding ability of a starving five year old from Ghana, you will believe me soon.

OK, you don't need to look at search.pl. All the meat is in Search.pm, and this time it's nicely placed at the top. Find the _keysearch function. Notice the for loop in there. What that loop is doing is constructing a "LIKE" clause to insert in a query string. It surrounds every word you entered into the search field with wildcards and uses them to search against comment text and title. This is then used in the findComments function as a clause in a select query which searches the entire comment database. You give it a set of data to search for and it returns the relevant rows from the database.

I have two major problems with what Taco has done here. They are as follows:

1. Even retards are laughing at him for writing code this fucken stupid.

2.LIKE queries are slow. They are text substring searches. They can't be optimized very well by databases like MySQL. These systems simply aren't designed with this sort of thing in mind, because for applications that aren't designed by twits, this functionality is seldom needed, and best implemented in an application specific way. Let me reiterate what's going on here. Slashcode is performing a substring search on every comment and comment title in the entire database. That is, too put it mildly, a shitload of text to search through. It cannot be done quickly, as our little demonstration should have proven to you. It is an idiotic thing to implement in a web page like slashdot, and Taco should be hanged by his testicles for having even had the idea.

You're probably thinking, "Hey, wait! Doesn't google do this sort of thing all the time, with incredible speed?" Yes, google does, but google's developers actually took the time to implement data storage methods geared towards fast search and retrieval of data based on substrings. Examples of this, for those who care, would be digital search tries and ternary trees. These are the best methods I know of off-hand for implementing the type of search slashdot is providing. Evidently Taco doesn't know of them, but that's hardly surprising, since gibbons can't read or study computer science. I also doubt that they can be implemented efficiently in perl.

I didn't think I'd be able to find a clear, simple example to top the postercomment compression filter's ability to demonstrate what an imbecile taco is, but I guess I understimated him. This is without a doubt, the dumbest thing I have ever seen in code anywhere.

XXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
XXX XXXX XX X
X X XX XXXX XXXXXXX
X XXX XXXXXXX XXXXXX
X XXX XX XX X
X XXX XX XXXXXXXXXXXX
X X XXX X X
XXX XXX XX XX
XXXXXXXXX XXXXX XXXXX

OK, many of you have probably noticed a lot of ascii art flooding this board lately. You're no doubt wondering why CmdrTaco's much encountered "lameness filters" are ineffective against it. To answer that question, I'm going to take you on a Perl journey, deep into slashcode. Think of it as being a bit like "Heart of Darkness", or if you're a typical slashdot pleb, "Apocalypse Now!"

The first files we'll be looking at are the infamous "bitchslap" and "modslap". I think these are a pretty decent introduction to how Rob's mind works when he's coding angry: Here's bitchslap . Scroll down to the section labelled "main program logic". BTW. "main program logic" is a ridiculously grandiloquent phrase for what we are seeing here.

Note how draconian this is. I like to think of this code as a memorial to slashdot-terminal, it's first victim. You can see how Malda deliberately broke his "self-regulating" moderation system, to give the admins of slashdot dictatorial powers. This code allows any admin using it to drop a user's default threshold to -1 instantly, and drop his karma down to a level from which it is unlikely to recover. I've heard that this script has been used on slashdot in a modified form, with the -defaultpoints set to less than -1, completely eliminating a user's post from normal viewing, unless people edit their query string manually.

On to modslap ]. Scroll down to "main program logic" again.

OK, what you're seeing here is Taco's method of restricting the flow of crack to moderators, to keep them nice and jumpy. If you don't mod the way he likes, you're moderating days are over, and your karma plummets to bitchslap levels. An ugly tool.

To recap, the man we are dealing with here is obviously an anti-democratic tyrant. Censorship is his weapon, and he is vigilantly watching his censors, to ensure that no freedom is allowed to enter his domain. I believe he also lives in a hut with a man driven crazy by his proximity. The hut is surrounded by skulls on poles, but the skulls face inward. Remember that.

We're nearing the locus of my investigation now. You've heard the legends, now gaze into the face of comments.pl's so-called "troll detection code!"

comments.pl : Scroll down to the section under "here begins the troll detection code".

You may be wondering why it's such an ungodly piece of crap. I feel that we are seeing evidence of an ingrained unwillingness to think before coding.

The first few tests are fairly simple, based on regexps and length. They're pretty laughable, from an information theory perspective. If you don't believe me, the parent of this post should supply adequate evidence of what I'm talking about. Language is a complex thing, and a few simple tests are insufficient to distinguish English from ascii art, especially when the ascii artists are willing to take extreme measures to see their work posted. Regular posters do not have the patience for such chicanery.

The final test is my favourite, though. It begins under the comment ending with this charming sentence: "These ratios are _very_ conservative a comment has to be absolute shit to trip this off". An interesting claim. Considering the number of posts I've tripped this filter on, without doing anything out of the ordinary, I'd say "conservative" means the same thing to Taco as it means to George W. Bush, nb. "nazi". What we are talking about here, is the postercomment compression test. (The horror! The horror!) "postercomment" is just the name of the field your comments are sent in, by the way. It isn't cool top secret slashspeak. It's just a variable name.

What this does is, it actually compresses you're comment using zlib, then checks the change in size to decide if you are a troll or not! Furthermore, the code comments indicate that if you trip this test, slashcode thinks you are a "luser". Code like this makes it pretty clear that it takes one to know one, Rob!

As someone who as actually seen Rob Malda use the phrase "it won't scale" to dismiss questions about why parts of the moderation system weren't done in a more equitable fshion, I'd like to take this opportunity to laugh until I give myself a hernia.

Anyone who has studied information theory knows that the redundancy of english is estimated at about 50%. This value is fairly key in what we are seeing here, it determines a fair estimate of how effective compression of english text can be before we start to lose information. Taco's estimates were based, in his words, on "...testing out several paragraphs of text...". Doesn't sound like a particularly large sample group. What's more, it's indicative of poor software engineering practice. As is the recent bout of outages.

A few final criticisms. Firstly, there are far better, less memory intensive, and above all, less stupid methods of performing textual analysis than checking it's compression ratio. If Taco had any idea about computer science, he might have investigated a few before making a fool of himself in public like this. It's pretty clear that he's getting more and more frustrated with the situation on slashdot, and doesn't realise that if he ruled with an even hand, rather than a bitchslapping script and an army of trained thought police, the problems would not be so grave.

Secondly, I thought of a much more effective method of eliminating asci art posts, and it will never cause problems for genuine posters. What's more, it's extremely compact and doesn't even require regexps. I won't reveal it here, as I am not willing to assist in a reign of terror that I find to be reprehensible.

As further evidence of the lengths Malda and Co. may be willing to go to, you can find a commented out section that enables the deletion of posts and their descendant threads. We have no reason to believe that this will not be employed on slashdot.

Editorial notes: I don't use Perl and this is really the first time I've examined it closely. It's pretty much convinced me that I'm not missing much. I use real languages such as C and C++ and occasionaly asm to do most of my work, and I, along with 95% of the enterprise world, find Java to be the best solution for web programming. For most scripting tasks, shell script suffices. For more complicated scripting tasks, Python provides a more sensibly designed scripting environment. Additionally, as if to provide further evidence of Malda's incompetence as a programmer, I've hit the junk character post every single time I've previewed this comment, and am now forced to resort to edit it. Regretfully, I have been forced to replace the Perl fragments I was using with hyperlinks. Very unsatisfactory.

OK, many of you have probably noticed a lot of ascii art flooding this board lately. You're no doubt wondering why CmdrTaco's much encountered "lameness filters" are ineffective against it. To answer that question, I'm going to take you on a Perl journey, deep into slashcode. Think of it as being a bit like "Heart of Darkness", or if you're a typical slashdot pleb, "Apocalypse Now!"

The first files we'll be looking at are the infamous "bitchslap" and "modslap". I think these are a pretty decent introduction to how Rob's mind works when he's coding angry: Here's bitchslap . Scroll down to the section labelled "main program logic". BTW. "main program logic" is a ridiculously grandiloquent phrase for what we are seeing here.

Note how draconian this is. I like to think of this code as a memorial to slashdot-terminal, it's first victim. You can see how Malda deliberately broke his "self-regulating" moderation system, to give the admins of slashdot dictatorial powers. This code allows any admin using it to drop a user's default threshold to -1 instantly, and drop his karma down to a level from which it is unlikely to recover. I've heard that this script has been used on slashdot in a modified form, with the -defaultpoints set to less than -1, completely eliminating a user's post from normal viewing, unless people edit their query string manually.

On to modslap ]. Scroll down to "main program logic" again.

OK, what you're seeing here is Taco's method of restricting the flow of crack to moderators, to keep them nice and jumpy. If you don't mod the way he likes, you're moderating days are over, and your karma plummets to bitchslap levels. An ugly tool.

To recap, the man we are dealing with here is obviously an anti-democratic tyrant. Censorship is his weapon, and he is vigilantly watching his censors, to ensure that no freedom is allowed to enter his domain. I believe he also lives in a hut with a man driven crazy by his proximity. The hut is surrounded by skulls on poles, but the skulls face inward. Remember that.

We're nearing the locus of my investigation now. You've heard the legends, now gaze into the face of comments.pl's so-called "troll detection code!"

comments.pl : Scroll down to the section under "here begins the troll detection code".

You may be wondering why it's such an ungodly piece of crap. I feel that we are seeing evidence of an ingrained unwillingness to think before coding.

The first few tests are fairly simple, based on regexps and length. They're pretty laughable, from an information theory perspective. If you don't believe me, the parent of this post should supply adequate evidence of what I'm talking about. Language is a complex thing, and a few simple tests are insufficient to distinguish English from ascii art, especially when the ascii artists are willing to take extreme measures to see their work posted. Regular posters do not have the patience for such chicanery.

The final test is my favourite, though. It begins under the comment ending with this charming sentence: "These ratios are _very_ conservative a comment has to be absolute shit to trip this off". An interesting claim. Considering the number of posts I've tripped this filter on, without doing anything out of the ordinary, I'd say "conservative" means the same thing to Taco as it means to George W. Bush, nb. "nazi". What we are talking about here, is the postercomment compression test. (The horror! The horror!) "postercomment" is just the name of the field your comments are sent in, by the way. It isn't cool top secret slashspeak. It's just a variable name.

What this does is, it actually compresses you're comment using zlib, then checks the change in size to decide if you are a troll or not! Furthermore, the code comments indicate that if you trip this test, slashcode thinks you are a "luser". Code like this makes it pretty clear that it takes one to know one, Rob!

As someone who as actually seen Rob Malda use the phrase "it won't scale" to dismiss questions about why parts of the moderation system weren't done in a more equitable fshion, I'd like to take this opportunity to laugh until I give myself a hernia.

Anyone who has studied information theory knows that the redundancy of english is estimated at about 50%. This value is fairly key in what we are seeing here, it determines a fair estimate of how effective compression of english text can be before we start to lose information. Taco's estimates were based, in his words, on "...testing out several paragraphs of text...". Doesn't sound like a particularly large sample group. What's more, it's indicative of poor software engineering practice. As is the recent bout of outages.

A few final criticisms. Firstly, there are far better, less memory intensive, and above all, less stupid methods of performing textual analysis than checking it's compression ratio. If Taco had any idea about computer science, he might have investigated a few before making a fool of himself in public like this. It's pretty clear that he's getting more and more frustrated with the situation on slashdot, and doesn't realise that if he ruled with an even hand, rather than a bitchslapping script and an army of trained thought police, the problems would not be so grave.

Secondly, I thought of a much more effective method of eliminating asci art posts, and it will never cause problems for genuine posters. What's more, it's extremely compact and doesn't even require regexps. I won't reveal it here, as I am not willing to assist in a reign of terror that I find to be reprehensible.

As further evidence of the lengths Malda and Co. may be willing to go to, you can find a commented out section that enables the deletion of posts and their descendant threads. We have no reason to believe that this will not be employed on slashdot.

Editorial notes: I don't use Perl and this is really the first time I've examined it closely. It's pretty much convinced me that I'm not missing much. I use real languages such as C and C++ and occasionaly asm to do most of my work, and I, along with 95% of the enterprise world, find Java to be the best solution for web programming. For most scripting tasks, shell script suffices. For more complicated scripting tasks, Python provides a more sensibly designed scripting environment. Additionally, as if to provide further evidence of Malda's incompetence as a programmer, I've hit the junk character post every single time I've previewed this comment, and am now forced to resort to edit it. Regretfully, I have been forced to replace the Perl fragments I was using with hyperlinks. Very unsatisfactory.

OK, many of you have probably noticed a lot of ascii art flooding this board lately. You're no doubt wondering why CmdrTaco's much encountered "lameness filters" are ineffective against it. To answer that question, I'm going to take you on a Perl journey, deep into slashcode. Think of it as being a bit like "Heart of Darkness", or if you're a typical slashdot pleb, "Apocalypse Now!"

The first files we'll be looking at are the infamous "bitchslap" and "modslap". I think these are a pretty decent introduction to how Rob's mind works when he's coding angry: Here's bitchslap . Scroll down to the section labelled "main program logic". BTW. "main program logic" is a ridiculously grandiloquent phrase for what we are seeing here.

Note how draconian this is. I like to think of this code as a memorial to slashdot-terminal, it's first victim. You can see how Malda deliberately broke his "self-regulating" moderation system, to give the admins of slashdot dictatorial powers. This code allows any admin using it to drop a user's default threshold to -1 instantly, and drop his karma down to a level from which it is unlikely to recover. I've heard that this script has been used on slashdot in a modified form, with the -defaultpoints set to less than -1, completely eliminating a user's post from normal viewing, unless people edit their query string manually.

On to modslap ]. Scroll down to "main program logic" again.

OK, what you're seeing here is Taco's method of restricting the flow of crack to moderators, to keep them nice and jumpy. If you don't mod the way he likes, you're moderating days are over, and your karma plummets to bitchslap levels. An ugly tool.

To recap, the man we are dealing with here is obviously an anti-democratic tyrant. Censorship is his weapon, and he is vigilantly watching his censors, to ensure that no freedom is allowed to enter his domain. I believe he also lives in a hut with a man driven crazy by his proximity. The hut is surrounded by skulls on poles, but the skulls face inward. Remember that.

We're nearing the locus of my investigation now. You've heard the legends, now gaze into the face of comments.pl's so-called "troll detection code!"

comments.pl : Scroll down to the section under "here begins the troll detection code".

You may be wondering why it's such an ungodly piece of crap. I feel that we are seeing evidence of an ingrained unwillingness to think before coding.

The first few tests are fairly simple, based on regexps and length. They're pretty laughable, from an information theory perspective. If you don't believe me, the parent of this post should supply adequate evidence of what I'm talking about. Language is a complex thing, and a few simple tests are insufficient to distinguish English from ascii art, especially when the ascii artists are willing to take extreme measures to see their work posted. Regular posters do not have the patience for such chicanery.

The final test is my favourite, though. It begins under the comment ending with this charming sentence: "These ratios are _very_ conservative a comment has to be absolute shit to trip this off". An interesting claim. Considering the number of posts I've tripped this filter on, without doing anything out of the ordinary, I'd say "conservative" means the same thing to Taco as it means to George W. Bush, nb. "nazi". What we are talking about here, is the postercomment compression test. (The horror! The horror!) "postercomment" is just the name of the field your comments are sent in, by the way. It isn't cool top secret slashspeak. It's just a variable name.

What this does is, it actually compresses you're comment using zlib, then checks the change in size to decide if you are a troll or not! Furthermore, the code comments indicate that if you trip this test, slashcode thinks you are a "luser". Code like this makes it pretty clear that it takes one to know one, Rob!

As someone who as actually seen Rob Malda use the phrase "it won't scale" to dismiss questions about why parts of the moderation system weren't done in a more equitable fshion, I'd like to take this opportunity to laugh until I give myself a hernia.

Anyone who has studied information theory knows that the redundancy of english is estimated at about 50%. This value is fairly key in what we are seeing here, it determines a fair estimate of how effective compression of english text can be before we start to lose information. Taco's estimates were based, in his words, on "...testing out several paragraphs of text...". Doesn't sound like a particularly large sample group. What's more, it's indicative of poor software engineering practice. As is the recent bout of outages.

A few final criticisms. Firstly, there are far better, less memory intensive, and above all, less stupid methods of performing textual analysis than checking it's compression ratio. If Taco had any idea about computer science, he might have investigated a few before making a fool of himself in public like this. It's pretty clear that he's getting more and more frustrated with the situation on slashdot, and doesn't realise that if he ruled with an even hand, rather than a bitchslapping script and an army of trained thought police, the problems would not be so grave.

Secondly, I thought of a much more effective method of eliminating asci art posts, and it will never cause problems for genuine posters. What's more, it's extremely compact and doesn't even require regexps. I won't reveal it here, as I am not willing to assist in a reign of terror that I find to be reprehensible.

As further evidence of the lengths Malda and Co. may be willing to go to, you can find a commented out section that enables the deletion of posts and their descendant threads. We have no reason to believe that this will not be employed on slashdot.

Editorial notes: I don't use Perl and this is really the first time I've examined it closely. It's pretty much convinced me that I'm not missing much. I use real languages such as C and C++ and occasionaly asm to do most of my work, and I, along with 95% of the enterprise world, find Java to be the best solution for web programming. For most scripting tasks, shell script suffices. For more complicated scripting tasks, Python provides a more sensibly designed scripting environment. Additionally, as if to provide further evidence of Malda's incompetence as a programmer, I've hit the junk character post every single time I've previewed this comment, and am now forced to resort to edit it. Regretfully, I have been forced to replace the Perl fragments I was using with hyperlinks. Very unsatisfactory.

OK, many of you have probably noticed a lot of ascii art flooding this board lately. You're no doubt wondering why CmdrTaco's much encountered "lameness filters" are ineffective against it. To answer that question, I'm going to take you on a Perl journey, deep into slashcode. Think of it as being a bit like "Heart of Darkness", or if you're a typical slashdot pleb, "Apocalypse Now!"

The first files we'll be looking at are the infamous "bitchslap" and "modslap". I think these are a pretty decent introduction to how Rob's mind works when he's coding angry: Here's bitchslap . Scroll down to the section labelled "main program logic". BTW. "main program logic" is a ridiculously grandiloquent phrase for what we are seeing here.

Note how draconian this is. I like to think of this code as a memorial to slashdot-terminal, it's first victim. You can see how Malda deliberately broke his "self-regulating" moderation system, to give the admins of slashdot dictatorial powers. This code allows any admin using it to drop a user's default threshold to -1 instantly, and drop his karma down to a level from which it is unlikely to recover. I've heard that this script has been used on slashdot in a modified form, with the -defaultpoints set to less than -1, completely eliminating a user's post from normal viewing, unless people edit their query string manually.

On to modslap ]. Scroll down to "main program logic" again.

OK, what you're seeing here is Taco's method of restricting the flow of crack to moderators, to keep them nice and jumpy. If you don't mod the way he likes, you're moderating days are over, and your karma plummets to bitchslap levels. An ugly tool.

To recap, the man we are dealing with here is obviously an anti-democratic tyrant. Censorship is his weapon, and he is vigilantly watching his censors, to ensure that no freedom is allowed to enter his domain. I believe he also lives in a hut with a man driven crazy by his proximity. The hut is surrounded by skulls on poles, but the skulls face inward. Remember that.

We're nearing the locus of my investigation now. You've heard the legends, now gaze into the face of comments.pl's so-called "troll detection code!"

comments.pl : Scroll down to the section under "here begins the troll detection code".

You may be wondering why it's such an ungodly piece of crap. I feel that we are seeing evidence of an ingrained unwillingness to think before coding.

The first few tests are fairly simple, based on regexps and length. They're pretty laughable, from an information theory perspective. If you don't believe me, the parent of this post should supply adequate evidence of what I'm talking about. Language is a complex thing, and a few simple tests are insufficient to distinguish English from ascii art, especially when the ascii artists are willing to take extreme measures to see their work posted. Regular posters do not have the patience for such chicanery.

The final test is my favourite, though. It begins under the comment ending with this charming sentence: "These ratios are _very_ conservative a comment has to be absolute shit to trip this off". An interesting claim. Considering the number of posts I've tripped this filter on, without doing anything out of the ordinary, I'd say "conservative" means the same thing to Taco as it means to George W. Bush, nb. "nazi". What we are talking about here, is the postercomment compression test. (The horror! The horror!) "postercomment" is just the name of the field your comments are sent in, by the way. It isn't cool top secret slashspeak. It's just a variable name.

What this does is, it actually compresses you're comment using zlib, then checks the change in size to decide if you are a troll or not! Furthermore, the code comments indicate that if you trip this test, slashcode thinks you are a "luser". Code like this makes it pretty clear that it takes one to know one, Rob!

As someone who as actually seen Rob Malda use the phrase "it won't scale" to dismiss questions about why parts of the moderation system weren't done in a more equitable fshion, I'd like to take this opportunity to laugh until I give myself a hernia.

Anyone who has studied information theory knows that the redundancy of english is estimated at about 50%. This value is fairly key in what we are seeing here, it determines a fair estimate of how effective compression of english text can be before we start to lose information. Taco's estimates were based, in his words, on "...testing out several paragraphs of text...". Doesn't sound like a particularly large sample group. What's more, it's indicative of poor software engineering practice. As is the recent bout of outages.

A few final criticisms. Firstly, there are far better, less memory intensive, and above all, less stupid methods of performing textual analysis than checking it's compression ratio. If Taco had any idea about computer science, he might have investigated a few before making a fool of himself in public like this. It's pretty clear that he's getting more and more frustrated with the situation on slashdot, and doesn't realise that if he ruled with an even hand, rather than a bitchslapping script and an army of trained thought police, the problems would not be so grave.

Secondly, I thought of a much more effective method of eliminating asci art posts, and it will never cause problems for genuine posters. What's more, it's extremely compact and doesn't even require regexps. I won't reveal it here, as I am not willing to assist in a reign of terror that I find to be reprehensible.

As further evidence of the lengths Malda and Co. may be willing to go to, you can find a commented out section that enables the deletion of posts and their descendant threads. We have no reason to believe that this will not be employed on slashdot.

Editorial notes: I don't use Perl and this is really the first time I've examined it closely. It's pretty much convinced me that I'm not missing much. I use real languages such as C and C++ and occasionaly asm to do most of my work, and I, along with 95% of the enterprise world, find Java to be the best solution for web programming. For most scripting tasks, shell script suffices. For more complicated scripting tasks, Python provides a more sensibly designed scripting environment. Additionally, as if to provide further evidence of Malda's incompetence as a programmer, I've hit the junk character post every single time I've previewed this comment, and am now forced to resort to edit it. Regretfully, I have been forced to replace the Perl fragments I was using with hyperlinks. Very unsatisfactory.

OK, many of you have probably noticed a lot of ascii art flooding this board lately. You're no doubt wondering why CmdrTaco's much encountered "lameness filters" are ineffective against it. To answer that question, I'm going to take you on a Perl journey, deep into slashcode. Think of it as being a bit like "Heart of Darkness", or if you're a typical slashdot pleb, "Apocalypse Now!"

The first files we'll be looking at are the infamous "bitchslap" and "modslap". I think these are a pretty decent introduction to how Rob's mind works when he's coding angry: Here's bitchslap . Scroll down to the section labelled "main program logic". BTW. "main program logic" is a ridiculously grandiloquent phrase for what we are seeing here.

Note how draconian this is. I like to think of this code as a memorial to slashdot-terminal, it's first victim. You can see how Malda deliberately broke his "self-regulating" moderation system, to give the admins of slashdot dictatorial powers. This code allows any admin using it to drop a user's default threshold to -1 instantly, and drop his karma down to a level from which it is unlikely to recover. I've heard that this script has been used on slashdot in a modified form, with the -defaultpoints set to less than -1, completely eliminating a user's post from normal viewing, unless people edit their query string manually.

On to modslap ]. Scroll down to "main program logic" again.

OK, what you're seeing here is Taco's method of restricting the flow of crack to moderators, to keep them nice and jumpy. If you don't mod the way he likes, you're moderating days are over, and your karma plummets to bitchslap levels. An ugly tool.

To recap, the man we are dealing with here is obviously an anti-democratic tyrant. Censorship is his weapon, and he is vigilantly watching his censors, to ensure that no freedom is allowed to enter his domain. I believe he also lives in a hut with a man driven crazy by his proximity. The hut is surrounded by skulls on poles, but the skulls face inward. Remember that.

We're nearing the locus of my investigation now. You've heard the legends, now gaze into the face of comments.pl's so-called "troll detection code!"

comments.pl : Scroll down to the section under "here begins the troll detection code".

You may be wondering why it's such an ungodly piece of crap. I feel that we are seeing evidence of an ingrained unwillingness to think before coding.

The first few tests are fairly simple, based on regexps and length. They're pretty laughable, from an information theory perspective. If you don't believe me, the parent of this post should supply adequate evidence of what I'm talking about. Language is a complex thing, and a few simple tests are insufficient to distinguish English from ascii art, especially when the ascii artists are willing to take extreme measures to see their work posted. Regular posters do not have the patience for such chicanery.

The final test is my favourite, though. It begins under the comment ending with this charming sentence: "These ratios are _very_ conservative a comment has to be absolute shit to trip this off". An interesting claim. Considering the number of posts I've tripped this filter on, without doing anything out of the ordinary, I'd say "conservative" means the same thing to Taco as it means to George W. Bush, nb. "nazi". What we are talking about here, is the postercomment compression test. (The horror! The horror!) "postercomment" is just the name of the field your comments are sent in, by the way. It isn't cool top secret slashspeak. It's just a variable name.

What this does is, it actually compresses you're comment using zlib, then checks the change in size to decide if you are a troll or not! Furthermore, the code comments indicate that if you trip this test, slashcode thinks you are a "luser". Code like this makes it pretty clear that it takes one to know one, Rob!

As someone who as actually seen Rob Malda use the phrase "it won't scale" to dismiss questions about why parts of the moderation system weren't done in a more equitable fshion, I'd like to take this opportunity to laugh until I give myself a hernia.

Anyone who has studied information theory knows that the redundancy of english is estimated at about 50%. This value is fairly key in what we are seeing here, it determines a fair estimate of how effective compression of english text can be before we start to lose information. Taco's estimates were based, in his words, on "...testing out several paragraphs of text...". Doesn't sound like a particularly large sample group. What's more, it's indicative of poor software engineering practice. As is the recent bout of outages.

A few final criticisms. Firstly, there are far better, less memory intensive, and above all, less stupid methods of performing textual analysis than checking it's compression ratio. If Taco had any idea about computer science, he might have investigated a few before making a fool of himself in public like this. It's pretty clear that he's getting more and more frustrated with the situation on slashdot, and doesn't realise that if he ruled with an even hand, rather than a bitchslapping script and an army of trained thought police, the problems would not be so grave.

Secondly, I thought of a much more effective method of eliminating asci art posts, and it will never cause problems for genuine posters. What's more, it's extremely compact and doesn't even require regexps. I won't reveal it here, as I am not willing to assist in a reign of terror that I find to be reprehensible.

As further evidence of the lengths Malda and Co. may be willing to go to, you can find a commented out section that enables the deletion of posts and their descendant threads. We have no reason to believe that this will not be employed on slashdot.

Editorial notes: I don't use Perl and this is really the first time I've examined it closely. It's pretty much convinced me that I'm not missing much. I use real languages such as C and C++ and occasionaly asm to do most of my work, and I, along with 95% of the enterprise world, find Java to be the best solution for web programming. For most scripting tasks, shell script suffices. For more complicated scripting tasks, Python provides a more sensibly designed scripting environment. Additionally, as if to provide further evidence of Malda's incompetence as a programmer, I've hit the junk character post every single time I've previewed this comment, and am now forced to resort to edit it. Regretfully, I have been forced to replace the Perl fragments I was using with hyperlinks. Very unsatisfactory.

OK, many of you have probably noticed a lot of ascii art flooding this board lately. You're no doubt wondering why CmdrTaco's much encountered "lameness filters" are ineffective against it. To answer that question, I'm going to take you on a Perl journey, deep into slashcode. Think of it as being a bit like "Heart of Darkness", or if you're a typical slashdot pleb, "Apocalypse Now!"

The first files we'll be looking at are the infamous "bitchslap" and "modslap". I think these are a pretty decent introduction to how Rob's mind works when he's coding angry: Here's bitchslap . Scroll down to the section labelled "main program logic". BTW. "main program logic" is a ridiculously grandiloquent phrase for what we are seeing here.

Note how draconian this is. I like to think of this code as a memorial to slashdot-terminal, it's first victim. You can see how Malda deliberately broke his "self-regulating" moderation system, to give the admins of slashdot dictatorial powers. This code allows any admin using it to drop a user's default threshold to -1 instantly, and drop his karma down to a level from which it is unlikely to recover. I've heard that this script has been used on slashdot in a modified form, with the -defaultpoints set to less than -1, completely eliminating a user's post from normal viewing, unless people edit their query string manually.

On to modslap ]. Scroll down to "main program logic" again.

OK, what you're seeing here is Taco's method of restricting the flow of crack to moderators, to keep them nice and jumpy. If you don't mod the way he likes, you're moderating days are over, and your karma plummets to bitchslap levels. An ugly tool.

To recap, the man we are dealing with here is obviously an anti-democratic tyrant. Censorship is his weapon, and he is vigilantly watching his censors, to ensure that no freedom is allowed to enter his domain. I believe he also lives in a hut with a man driven crazy by his proximity. The hut is surrounded by skulls on poles, but the skulls face inward. Remember that.

We're nearing the locus of my investigation now. You've heard the legends, now gaze into the face of comments.pl's so-called "troll detection code!"

comments.pl : Scroll down to the section under "here begins the troll detection code".

You may be wondering why it's such an ungodly piece of crap. I feel that we are seeing evidence of an ingrained unwillingness to think before coding.

The first few tests are fairly simple, based on regexps and length. They're pretty laughable, from an information theory perspective. If you don't believe me, the parent of this post should supply adequate evidence of what I'm talking about. Language is a complex thing, and a few simple tests are insufficient to distinguish English from ascii art, especially when the ascii artists are willing to take extreme measures to see their work posted. Regular posters do not have the patience for such chicanery.

The final test is my favourite, though. It begins under the comment ending with this charming sentence: "These ratios are _very_ conservative a comment has to be absolute shit to trip this off". An interesting claim. Considering the number of posts I've tripped this filter on, without doing anything out of the ordinary, I'd say "conservative" means the same thing to Taco as it means to George W. Bush, nb. "nazi". What we are talking about here, is the postercomment compression test. (The horror! The horror!) "postercomment" is just the name of the field your comments are sent in, by the way. It isn't cool top secret slashspeak. It's just a variable name.

What this does is, it actually compresses you're comment using zlib, then checks the change in size to decide if you are a troll or not! Furthermore, the code comments indicate that if you trip this test, slashcode thinks you are a "luser". Code like this makes it pretty clear that it takes one to know one, Rob!

As someone who as actually seen Rob Malda use the phrase "it won't scale" to dismiss questions about why parts of the moderation system weren't done in a more equitable fshion, I'd like to take this opportunity to laugh until I give myself a hernia.

Anyone who has studied information theory knows that the redundancy of english is estimated at about 50%. This value is fairly key in what we are seeing here, it determines a fair estimate of how effective compression of english text can be before we start to lose information. Taco's estimates were based, in his words, on "...testing out several paragraphs of text...". Doesn't sound like a particularly large sample group. What's more, it's indicative of poor software engineering practice. As is the recent bout of outages.

A few final criticisms. Firstly, there are far better, less memory intensive, and above all, less stupid methods of performing textual analysis than checking it's compression ratio. If Taco had any idea about computer science, he might have investigated a few before making a fool of himself in public like this. It's pretty clear that he's getting more and more frustrated with the situation on slashdot, and doesn't realise that if he ruled with an even hand, rather than a bitchslapping script and an army of trained thought police, the problems would not be so grave.

Secondly, I thought of a much more effective method of eliminating asci art posts, and it will never cause problems for genuine posters. What's more, it's extremely compact and doesn't even require regexps. I won't reveal it here, as I am not willing to assist in a reign of terror that I find to be reprehensible.

As further evidence of the lengths Malda and Co. may be willing to go to, you can find a commented out section that enables the deletion of posts and their descendant threads. We have no reason to believe that this will not be employed on slashdot.

Editorial notes: I don't use Perl and this is really the first time I've examined it closely. It's pretty much convinced me that I'm not missing much. I use real languages such as C and C++ and occasionaly asm to do most of my work, and I, along with 95% of the enterprise world, find Java to be the best solution for web programming. For most scripting tasks, shell script suffices. For more complicated scripting tasks, Python provides a more sensibly designed scripting environment. Additionally, as if to provide further evidence of Malda's incompetence as a programmer, I've hit the junk character post every single time I've previewed this comment, and am now forced to resort to edit it. Regretfully, I have been forced to replace the Perl fragments I was using with hyperlinks. Very unsatisfactory.

First i thought it was an anti-trolling mechanism which would prevent people from submitting very very long comments which would screwup the layout when browsing at -1.

I even wrote a comment but before I posted it I checked one of the comments containing the erronous whitespace. I found that slash inserts a space even if there is a space immediately preceding it.

So I registered with SourceForge and checked the bug list. Couldn't find anything. Eventually I got smart and checked slashcode which provided a possible answer when I did a search for "spaces".

According to Pudge;
"Sounds like a browser "bug". We use WRAP="VIRTUAL" for the TEXTAREA boxes, which means that when the browser wraps text, those "newlines" are not passed to the server when the form is submitted. However, not all browsers support VIRTUAL wraps.

Here's the URL (probably has whitespace ;)

http://slashcode.com/article.pl?sid=00/10/24/174 32 04&mode=thread&threshold=

Shout out the The O.P.P.!!! WASSUP YO!

OK, many of you have probably noticed a lot of ascii art flooding this board lately. You're no doubt wondering why CmdrTaco's much encountered "lameness filters" are ineffective against it. To answer that question, I'm going to take you on a Perl journey, deep into slashcode. Think of it as being a bit like "Heart of Darkness", or if you're a typical slashdot pleb, "Apocalypse Now!"

The first files we'll be looking at are the infamous "bitchslap" and "modslap". I think these are a pretty decent introduction to how Rob's mind works when he's coding angry: Here's bitchslap [slashcode.com]. Scroll down to the section labelled "main program logic". BTW. "main program logic" is a ridiculously grandiloquent phrase for what we are seeing here.

Note how draconian this is. I like to think of this code as a memorial to slashdot-terminal, it's first victim. You can see how Malda deliberately broke his "self-regulating" moderation system, to give the admins of slashdot dictatorial powers. This code allows any admin using it to drop a user's default threshold to -1 instantly, and drop his karma down to a level from which it is unlikely to recover. I've heard that this script has been used on slashdot in a modified form, with the -defaultpoints set to less than -1, completely eliminating a user's post from normal viewing, unless people edit their query string manually.

On to modslap [slashcode.com]. Scroll down to "main program logic" again.

OK, what you're seeing here is Taco's method of restricting the flow of crack to moderators, to keep them nice and jumpy. If you don't mod the way he likes, your moderating days are over, and your karma plummets to bitchslap levels. An ugly tool.

To recap, the man we are dealing with here is obviously an anti-democratic tyrant. Censorship is his weapon, and he is vigilantly watching his censors, to ensure that no freedom is allowed to enter his domain. I believe he also lives in a hut with a man driven crazy by his proximity. The hut is surrounded by skulls on poles, but the skulls face inward. Remember that.

We're nearing the locus of my investigation now. You've heard the legends, now gaze into the face of comments.pl's so-called "troll detection code!"

comments.pl [slashcode.com]: Scroll down to the section under "here begins the troll detection code".

You may be wondering why it's such an ungodly piece of crap. I feel that we are seeing evidence of an ingrained unwillingness to think before coding.

The first few tests are fairly simple, based on regexps and length. They're pretty laughable, from an information theory perspective. If you don't believe me, the flood of ascii art should supply adequate evidence of what I'm talking about. Language is a complex thing, and a few simple tests are insufficient to distinguish English from ascii art, especially when the ascii artists are willing to take extreme measures to see their work posted. Regular posters do not have the patience for such chicanery.

The final test is my favourite, though. It begins under the comment ending with this charming sentence: "These ratios are _very_ conservative a comment has to be absolute shit to trip this off". An interesting claim. Considering the number of posts I've tripped this filter on without doing anything out of the ordinary, I'd say "conservative" means the same thing to Taco as it means to George W. Bush, nb. "nazi". What we are talking about here, is the postercomment compression test. (The horror! The horror!) "postercomment" is just the name of the field your comments are sent in, by the way. It isn't cool top secret slashspeak. It's just a variable name.

What this does is, it actually compresses your comment using zlib, then checks the change in size to decide if you are a troll or not! Furthermore, the code comments indicate that if you trip this test, slashcode thinks you are a "luser". Code like this makes it pretty clear that it takes one to know one, Rob!

As someone who as actually seen Rob Malda use the phrase "it won't scale" to dismiss questions about why parts of the moderation system weren't done in a more equitable fshion, I'd like to take this opportunity to laugh until I give myself a hernia.

Anyone who has studied information theory knows that the redundancy of english is estimated at about 50%. This value is fairly key in what we are seeing here, it determines a fair estimate of how effective compression of english text can be before we start to lose information. Taco's estimates were based, in his words, on "...testing out several paragraphs of text...". Doesn't sound like a particularly large sample group. What's more, it's indicative of poor software engineering practice. As is the recent bout of outages.

A few final criticisms. Firstly, there are far better, less memory intensive, and above all, less stupid methods of performing textual analysis than checking it's compression ratio. If Taco had any idea about computer science, he might have investigated a few before making a fool of himself in public like this. It's pretty clear that he's getting more and more frustrated with the situation on slashdot, and doesn't realise that if he ruled with an even hand, rather than a bitchslapping script and an army of trained thought police, the problems would not be so grave.

Secondly, I thought of a much more effective method of eliminating asci art posts, and it will never cause problems for genuine posters. What's more, it's extremely compact and doesn't even require regexps. I won't reveal it here, as I am not willing to assist in a reign of terror that I find to be reprehensible.

As further evidence of the lengths Malda and Co. may be willing to go to, you can find a commented out section that enables the deletion of posts and their descendant threads. We have no reason to believe that this will not be employed on slashdot.

Editorial notes: I don't use Perl and this is really the first time I've examined it closely. It's pretty much convinced me that I'm not missing much. I use real languages such as C and C++ and occasionaly asm to do most of my work, and I, along with 95% of the enterprise world, find Java to be the best solution for web programming. For most scripting tasks, shell script suffices. For more complicated scripting tasks, Python provides a more sensibly designed scripting environment. Additionally, as if to provide further evidence of Malda's incompetence as a programmer, I've hit the junk character post every single time I've previewed this comment, and am now forced to resort to edit it. Regretfully, I have been forced to replace the Perl fragments I was using with hyperlinks. Very unsatisfactory.

Shout out the The O.P.P.!!! WASSUP YO!

OK, many of you have probably noticed a lot of ascii art flooding this board lately. You're no doubt wondering why CmdrTaco's much encountered "lameness filters" are ineffective against it. To answer that question, I'm going to take you on a Perl journey, deep into slashcode. Think of it as being a bit like "Heart of Darkness", or if you're a typical slashdot pleb, "Apocalypse Now!"

The first files we'll be looking at are the infamous "bitchslap" and "modslap". I think these are a pretty decent introduction to how Rob's mind works when he's coding angry: Here's bitchslap [slashcode.com]. Scroll down to the section labelled "main program logic". BTW. "main program logic" is a ridiculously grandiloquent phrase for what we are seeing here.

Note how draconian this is. I like to think of this code as a memorial to slashdot-terminal, it's first victim. You can see how Malda deliberately broke his "self-regulating" moderation system, to give the admins of slashdot dictatorial powers. This code allows any admin using it to drop a user's default threshold to -1 instantly, and drop his karma down to a level from which it is unlikely to recover. I've heard that this script has been used on slashdot in a modified form, with the -defaultpoints set to less than -1, completely eliminating a user's post from normal viewing, unless people edit their query string manually.

On to modslap [slashcode.com]. Scroll down to "main program logic" again.

OK, what you're seeing here is Taco's method of restricting the flow of crack to moderators, to keep them nice and jumpy. If you don't mod the way he likes, your moderating days are over, and your karma plummets to bitchslap levels. An ugly tool.

To recap, the man we are dealing with here is obviously an anti-democratic tyrant. Censorship is his weapon, and he is vigilantly watching his censors, to ensure that no freedom is allowed to enter his domain. I believe he also lives in a hut with a man driven crazy by his proximity. The hut is surrounded by skulls on poles, but the skulls face inward. Remember that.

We're nearing the locus of my investigation now. You've heard the legends, now gaze into the face of comments.pl's so-called "troll detection code!"

comments.pl [slashcode.com]: Scroll down to the section under "here begins the troll detection code".

You may be wondering why it's such an ungodly piece of crap. I feel that we are seeing evidence of an ingrained unwillingness to think before coding.

The first few tests are fairly simple, based on regexps and length. They're pretty laughable, from an information theory perspective. If you don't believe me, the flood of ascii art should supply adequate evidence of what I'm talking about. Language is a complex thing, and a few simple tests are insufficient to distinguish English from ascii art, especially when the ascii artists are willing to take extreme measures to see their work posted. Regular posters do not have the patience for such chicanery.

The final test is my favourite, though. It begins under the comment ending with this charming sentence: "These ratios are _very_ conservative a comment has to be absolute shit to trip this off". An interesting claim. Considering the number of posts I've tripped this filter on without doing anything out of the ordinary, I'd say "conservative" means the same thing to Taco as it means to George W. Bush, nb. "nazi". What we are talking about here, is the postercomment compression test. (The horror! The horror!) "postercomment" is just the name of the field your comments are sent in, by the way. It isn't cool top secret slashspeak. It's just a variable name.

What this does is, it actually compresses your comment using zlib, then checks the change in size to decide if you are a troll or not! Furthermore, the code comments indicate that if you trip this test, slashcode thinks you are a "luser". Code like this makes it pretty clear that it takes one to know one, Rob!

As someone who as actually seen Rob Malda use the phrase "it won't scale" to dismiss questions about why parts of the moderation system weren't done in a more equitable fshion, I'd like to take this opportunity to laugh until I give myself a hernia.

Anyone who has studied information theory knows that the redundancy of english is estimated at about 50%. This value is fairly key in what we are seeing here, it determines a fair estimate of how effective compression of english text can be before we start to lose information. Taco's estimates were based, in his words, on "...testing out several paragraphs of text...". Doesn't sound like a particularly large sample group. What's more, it's indicative of poor software engineering practice. As is the recent bout of outages.

A few final criticisms. Firstly, there are far better, less memory intensive, and above all, less stupid methods of performing textual analysis than checking it's compression ratio. If Taco had any idea about computer science, he might have investigated a few before making a fool of himself in public like this. It's pretty clear that he's getting more and more frustrated with the situation on slashdot, and doesn't realise that if he ruled with an even hand, rather than a bitchslapping script and an army of trained thought police, the problems would not be so grave.

Secondly, I thought of a much more effective method of eliminating asci art posts, and it will never cause problems for genuine posters. What's more, it's extremely compact and doesn't even require regexps. I won't reveal it here, as I am not willing to assist in a reign of terror that I find to be reprehensible.

As further evidence of the lengths Malda and Co. may be willing to go to, you can find a commented out section that enables the deletion of posts and their descendant threads. We have no reason to believe that this will not be employed on slashdot.

Editorial notes: I don't use Perl and this is really the first time I've examined it closely. It's pretty much convinced me that I'm not missing much. I use real languages such as C and C++ and occasionaly asm to do most of my work, and I, along with 95% of the enterprise world, find Java to be the best solution for web programming. For most scripting tasks, shell script suffices. For more complicated scripting tasks, Python provides a more sensibly designed scripting environment. Additionally, as if to provide further evidence of Malda's incompetence as a programmer, I've hit the junk character post every single time I've previewed this comment, and am now forced to resort to edit it. Regretfully, I have been forced to replace the Perl fragments I was using with hyperlinks. Very unsatisfactory.

Shout out the The O.P.P.!!! WASSUP YO!

OK, many of you have probably noticed a lot of ascii art flooding this board lately. You're no doubt wondering why CmdrTaco's much encountered "lameness filters" are ineffective against it. To answer that question, I'm going to take you on a Perl journey, deep into slashcode. Think of it as being a bit like "Heart of Darkness", or if you're a typical slashdot pleb, "Apocalypse Now!"

The first files we'll be looking at are the infamous "bitchslap" and "modslap". I think these are a pretty decent introduction to how Rob's mind works when he's coding angry: Here's bitchslap [slashcode.com]. Scroll down to the section labelled "main program logic". BTW. "main program logic" is a ridiculously grandiloquent phrase for what we are seeing here.

Note how draconian this is. I like to think of this code as a memorial to slashdot-terminal, it's first victim. You can see how Malda deliberately broke his "self-regulating" moderation system, to give the admins of slashdot dictatorial powers. This code allows any admin using it to drop a user's default threshold to -1 instantly, and drop his karma down to a level from which it is unlikely to recover. I've heard that this script has been used on slashdot in a modified form, with the -defaultpoints set to less than -1, completely eliminating a user's post from normal viewing, unless people edit their query string manually.

On to modslap [slashcode.com]. Scroll down to "main program logic" again.

OK, what you're seeing here is Taco's method of restricting the flow of crack to moderators, to keep them nice and jumpy. If you don't mod the way he likes, your moderating days are over, and your karma plummets to bitchslap levels. An ugly tool.

To recap, the man we are dealing with here is obviously an anti-democratic tyrant. Censorship is his weapon, and he is vigilantly watching his censors, to ensure that no freedom is allowed to enter his domain. I believe he also lives in a hut with a man driven crazy by his proximity. The hut is surrounded by skulls on poles, but the skulls face inward. Remember that.

We're nearing the locus of my investigation now. You've heard the legends, now gaze into the face of comments.pl's so-called "troll detection code!"

comments.pl [slashcode.com]: Scroll down to the section under "here begins the troll detection code".

You may be wondering why it's such an ungodly piece of crap. I feel that we are seeing evidence of an ingrained unwillingness to think before coding.

The first few tests are fairly simple, based on regexps and length. They're pretty laughable, from an information theory perspective. If you don't believe me, the flood of ascii art should supply adequate evidence of what I'm talking about. Language is a complex thing, and a few simple tests are insufficient to distinguish English from ascii art, especially when the ascii artists are willing to take extreme measures to see their work posted. Regular posters do not have the patience for such chicanery.

The final test is my favourite, though. It begins under the comment ending with this charming sentence: "These ratios are _very_ conservative a comment has to be absolute shit to trip this off". An interesting claim. Considering the number of posts I've tripped this filter on without doing anything out of the ordinary, I'd say "conservative" means the same thing to Taco as it means to George W. Bush, nb. "nazi". What we are talking about here, is the postercomment compression test. (The horror! The horror!) "postercomment" is just the name of the field your comments are sent in, by the way. It isn't cool top secret slashspeak. It's just a variable name.

What this does is, it actually compresses your comment using zlib, then checks the change in size to decide if you are a troll or not! Furthermore, the code comments indicate that if you trip this test, slashcode thinks you are a "luser". Code like this makes it pretty clear that it takes one to know one, Rob!

As someone who as actually seen Rob Malda use the phrase "it won't scale" to dismiss questions about why parts of the moderation system weren't done in a more equitable fshion, I'd like to take this opportunity to laugh until I give myself a hernia.

Anyone who has studied information theory knows that the redundancy of english is estimated at about 50%. This value is fairly key in what we are seeing here, it determines a fair estimate of how effective compression of english text can be before we start to lose information. Taco's estimates were based, in his words, on "...testing out several paragraphs of text...". Doesn't sound like a particularly large sample group. What's more, it's indicative of poor software engineering practice. As is the recent bout of outages.

A few final criticisms. Firstly, there are far better, less memory intensive, and above all, less stupid methods of performing textual analysis than checking it's compression ratio. If Taco had any idea about computer science, he might have investigated a few before making a fool of himself in public like this. It's pretty clear that he's getting more and more frustrated with the situation on slashdot, and doesn't realise that if he ruled with an even hand, rather than a bitchslapping script and an army of trained thought police, the problems would not be so grave.

Secondly, I thought of a much more effective method of eliminating asci art posts, and it will never cause problems for genuine posters. What's more, it's extremely compact and doesn't even require regexps. I won't reveal it here, as I am not willing to assist in a reign of terror that I find to be reprehensible.

As further evidence of the lengths Malda and Co. may be willing to go to, you can find a commented out section that enables the deletion of posts and their descendant threads. We have no reason to believe that this will not be employed on slashdot.

Editorial notes: I don't use Perl and this is really the first time I've examined it closely. It's pretty much convinced me that I'm not missing much. I use real languages such as C and C++ and occasionaly asm to do most of my work, and I, along with 95% of the enterprise world, find Java to be the best solution for web programming. For most scripting tasks, shell script suffices. For more complicated scripting tasks, Python provides a more sensibly designed scripting environment. Additionally, as if to provide further evidence of Malda's incompetence as a programmer, I've hit the junk character post every single time I've previewed this comment, and am now forced to resort to edit it. Regretfully, I have been forced to replace the Perl fragments I was using with hyperlinks. Very unsatisfactory.

Dedicated to The O.P.P!!!

OK, many of you have probably noticed a lot of ascii art flooding this board lately. You're no doubt wondering why CmdrTaco's much encountered "lameness filters" are ineffective against it. To answer that question, I'm going to take you on a Perl journey, deep into slashcode. Think of it as being a bit like "Heart of Darkness", or if you're a typical slashdot pleb, "Apocalypse Now!"

The first files we'll be looking at are the infamous "bitchslap" and "modslap". I think these are a pretty decent introduction to how Rob's mind works when he's coding angry: Here's bitchslap [slashcode.com]. Scroll down to the section labelled "main program logic". BTW. "main program logic" is a ridiculously grandiloquent phrase for what we are seeing here.

Note how draconian this is. I like to think of this code as a memorial to slashdot-terminal, it's first victim. You can see how Malda deliberately broke his "self-regulating" moderation system, to give the admins of slashdot dictatorial powers. This code allows any admin using it to drop a user's default threshold to -1 instantly, and drop his karma down to a level from which it is unlikely to recover. I've heard that this script has been used on slashdot in a modified form, with the -defaultpoints set to less than -1, completely eliminating a user's post from normal viewing, unless people edit their query string manually.

On to modslap [slashcode.com]. Scroll down to "main program logic" again.

OK, what you're seeing here is Taco's method of restricting the flow of crack to moderators, to keep them nice and jumpy. If you don't mod the way he likes, your moderating days are over, and your karma plummets to bitchslap levels. An ugly tool.

To recap, the man we are dealing with here is obviously an anti-democratic tyrant. Censorship is his weapon, and he is vigilantly watching his censors, to ensure that no freedom is allowed to enter his domain. I believe he also lives in a hut with a man driven crazy by his proximity. The hut is surrounded by skulls on poles, but the skulls face inward. Remember that.

We're nearing the locus of my investigation now. You've heard the legends, now gaze into the face of comments.pl's so-called "troll detection code!"

comments.pl [slashcode.com]: Scroll down to the section under "here begins the troll detection code".

You may be wondering why it's such an ungodly piece of crap. I feel that we are seeing evidence of an ingrained unwillingness to think before coding.

The first few tests are fairly simple, based on regexps and length. They're pretty laughable, from an information theory perspective. If you don't believe me, the flood of ascii art should supply adequate evidence of what I'm talking about. Language is a complex thing, and a few simple tests are insufficient to distinguish English from ascii art, especially when the ascii artists are willing to take extreme measures to see their work posted. Regular posters do not have the patience for such chicanery.

The final test is my favourite, though. It begins under the comment ending with this charming sentence: "These ratios are _very_ conservative a comment has to be absolute shit to trip this off". An interesting claim. Considering the number of posts I've tripped this filter on without doing anything out of the ordinary, I'd say "conservative" means the same thing to Taco as it means to George W. Bush, nb. "nazi". What we are talking about here, is the postercomment compression test. (The horror! The horror!) "postercomment" is just the name of the field your comments are sent in, by the way. It isn't cool top secret slashspeak. It's just a variable name.

What this does is, it actually compresses your comment using zlib, then checks the change in size to decide if you are a troll or not! Furthermore, the code comments indicate that if you trip this test, slashcode thinks you are a "luser". Code like this makes it pretty clear that it takes one to know one, Rob!

As someone who as actually seen Rob Malda use the phrase "it won't scale" to dismiss questions about why parts of the moderation system weren't done in a more equitable fshion, I'd like to take this opportunity to laugh until I give myself a hernia.

Anyone who has studied information theory knows that the redundancy of english is estimated at about 50%. This value is fairly key in what we are seeing here, it determines a fair estimate of how effective compression of english text can be before we start to lose information. Taco's estimates were based, in his words, on "...testing out several paragraphs of text...". Doesn't sound like a particularly large sample group. What's more, it's indicative of poor software engineering practice. As is the recent bout of outages.

A few final criticisms. Firstly, there are far better, less memory intensive, and above all, less stupid methods of performing textual analysis than checking it's compression ratio. If Taco had any idea about computer science, he might have investigated a few before making a fool of himself in public like this. It's pretty clear that he's getting more and more frustrated with the situation on slashdot, and doesn't realise that if he ruled with an even hand, rather than a bitchslapping script and an army of trained thought police, the problems would not be so grave.

Secondly, I thought of a much more effective method of eliminating asci art posts, and it will never cause problems for genuine posters. What's more, it's extremely compact and doesn't even require regexps. I won't reveal it here, as I am not willing to assist in a reign of terror that I find to be reprehensible.

As further evidence of the lengths Malda and Co. may be willing to go to, you can find a commented out section that enables the deletion of posts and their descendant threads. We have no reason to believe that this will not be employed on slashdot.

Editorial notes: I don't use Perl and this is really the first time I've examined it closely. It's pretty much convinced me that I'm not missing much. I use real languages such as C and C++ and occasionaly asm to do most of my work, and I, along with 95% of the enterprise world, find Java to be the best solution for web programming. For most scripting tasks, shell script suffices. For more complicated scripting tasks, Python provides a more sensibly designed scripting environment. Additionally, as if to provide further evidence of Malda's incompetence as a programmer, I've hit the junk character post every single time I've previewed this comment, and am now forced to resort to edit it. Regretfully, I have been forced to replace the Perl fragments I was using with hyperlinks. Very unsatisfactory.

Dedicated to The O.P.P!!!

OK, many of you have probably noticed a lot of ascii art flooding this board lately. You're no doubt wondering why CmdrTaco's much encountered "lameness filters" are ineffective against it. To answer that question, I'm going to take you on a Perl journey, deep into slashcode. Think of it as being a bit like "Heart of Darkness", or if you're a typical slashdot pleb, "Apocalypse Now!"

The first files we'll be looking at are the infamous "bitchslap" and "modslap". I think these are a pretty decent introduction to how Rob's mind works when he's coding angry: Here's bitchslap [slashcode.com]. Scroll down to the section labelled "main program logic". BTW. "main program logic" is a ridiculously grandiloquent phrase for what we are seeing here.

Note how draconian this is. I like to think of this code as a memorial to slashdot-terminal, it's first victim. You can see how Malda deliberately broke his "self-regulating" moderation system, to give the admins of slashdot dictatorial powers. This code allows any admin using it to drop a user's default threshold to -1 instantly, and drop his karma down to a level from which it is unlikely to recover. I've heard that this script has been used on slashdot in a modified form, with the -defaultpoints set to less than -1, completely eliminating a user's post from normal viewing, unless people edit their query string manually.

On to modslap [slashcode.com]. Scroll down to "main program logic" again.

OK, what you're seeing here is Taco's method of restricting the flow of crack to moderators, to keep them nice and jumpy. If you don't mod the way he likes, your moderating days are over, and your karma plummets to bitchslap levels. An ugly tool.

To recap, the man we are dealing with here is obviously an anti-democratic tyrant. Censorship is his weapon, and he is vigilantly watching his censors, to ensure that no freedom is allowed to enter his domain. I believe he also lives in a hut with a man driven crazy by his proximity. The hut is surrounded by skulls on poles, but the skulls face inward. Remember that.

We're nearing the locus of my investigation now. You've heard the legends, now gaze into the face of comments.pl's so-called "troll detection code!"

comments.pl [slashcode.com]: Scroll down to the section under "here begins the troll detection code".

You may be wondering why it's such an ungodly piece of crap. I feel that we are seeing evidence of an ingrained unwillingness to think before coding.

The first few tests are fairly simple, based on regexps and length. They're pretty laughable, from an information theory perspective. If you don't believe me, the flood of ascii art should supply adequate evidence of what I'm talking about. Language is a complex thing, and a few simple tests are insufficient to distinguish English from ascii art, especially when the ascii artists are willing to take extreme measures to see their work posted. Regular posters do not have the patience for such chicanery.

The final test is my favourite, though. It begins under the comment ending with this charming sentence: "These ratios are _very_ conservative a comment has to be absolute shit to trip this off". An interesting claim. Considering the number of posts I've tripped this filter on without doing anything out of the ordinary, I'd say "conservative" means the same thing to Taco as it means to George W. Bush, nb. "nazi". What we are talking about here, is the postercomment compression test. (The horror! The horror!) "postercomment" is just the name of the field your comments are sent in, by the way. It isn't cool top secret slashspeak. It's just a variable name.

What this does is, it actually compresses your comment using zlib, then checks the change in size to decide if you are a troll or not! Furthermore, the code comments indicate that if you trip this test, slashcode thinks you are a "luser". Code like this makes it pretty clear that it takes one to know one, Rob!

As someone who as actually seen Rob Malda use the phrase "it won't scale" to dismiss questions about why parts of the moderation system weren't done in a more equitable fshion, I'd like to take this opportunity to laugh until I give myself a hernia.

Anyone who has studied information theory knows that the redundancy of english is estimated at about 50%. This value is fairly key in what we are seeing here, it determines a fair estimate of how effective compression of english text can be before we start to lose information. Taco's estimates were based, in his words, on "...testing out several paragraphs of text...". Doesn't sound like a particularly large sample group. What's more, it's indicative of poor software engineering practice. As is the recent bout of outages.

A few final criticisms. Firstly, there are far better, less memory intensive, and above all, less stupid methods of performing textual analysis than checking it's compression ratio. If Taco had any idea about computer science, he might have investigated a few before making a fool of himself in public like this. It's pretty clear that he's getting more and more frustrated with the situation on slashdot, and doesn't realise that if he ruled with an even hand, rather than a bitchslapping script and an army of trained thought police, the problems would not be so grave.

Secondly, I thought of a much more effective method of eliminating asci art posts, and it will never cause problems for genuine posters. What's more, it's extremely compact and doesn't even require regexps. I won't reveal it here, as I am not willing to assist in a reign of terror that I find to be reprehensible.

As further evidence of the lengths Malda and Co. may be willing to go to, you can find a commented out section that enables the deletion of posts and their descendant threads. We have no reason to believe that this will not be employed on slashdot.

Editorial notes: I don't use Perl and this is really the first time I've examined it closely. It's pretty much convinced me that I'm not missing much. I use real languages such as C and C++ and occasionaly asm to do most of my work, and I, along with 95% of the enterprise world, find Java to be the best solution for web programming. For most scripting tasks, shell script suffices. For more complicated scripting tasks, Python provides a more sensibly designed scripting environment. Additionally, as if to provide further evidence of Malda's incompetence as a programmer, I've hit the junk character post every single time I've previewed this comment, and am now forced to resort to edit it. Regretfully, I have been forced to replace the Perl fragments I was using with hyperlinks. Very unsatisfactory.

Dedicated to The O.P.P!!!

OK, many of you have probably noticed a lot of ascii art flooding this board lately. You're no doubt wondering why CmdrTaco's much encountered "lameness filters" are ineffective against it. To answer that question, I'm going to take you on a Perl journey, deep into slashcode. Think of it as being a bit like "Heart of Darkness", or if you're a typical slashdot pleb, "Apocalypse Now!"

The first files we'll be looking at are the infamous "bitchslap" and "modslap". I think these are a pretty decent introduction to how Rob's mind works when he's coding angry: Here's bitchslap [slashcode.com]. Scroll down to the section labelled "main program logic". BTW. "main program logic" is a ridiculously grandiloquent phrase for what we are seeing here.

Note how draconian this is. I like to think of this code as a memorial to slashdot-terminal, it's first victim. You can see how Malda deliberately broke his "self-regulating" moderation system, to give the admins of slashdot dictatorial powers. This code allows any admin using it to drop a user's default threshold to -1 instantly, and drop his karma down to a level from which it is unlikely to recover. I've heard that this script has been used on slashdot in a modified form, with the -defaultpoints set to less than -1, completely eliminating a user's post from normal viewing, unless people edit their query string manually.

On to modslap [slashcode.com]. Scroll down to "main program logic" again.

OK, what you're seeing here is Taco's method of restricting the flow of crack to moderators, to keep them nice and jumpy. If you don't mod the way he likes, your moderating days are over, and your karma plummets to bitchslap levels. An ugly tool.

To recap, the man we are dealing with here is obviously an anti-democratic tyrant. Censorship is his weapon, and he is vigilantly watching his censors, to ensure that no freedom is allowed to enter his domain. I believe he also lives in a hut with a man driven crazy by his proximity. The hut is surrounded by skulls on poles, but the skulls face inward. Remember that.

We're nearing the locus of my investigation now. You've heard the legends, now gaze into the face of comments.pl's so-called "troll detection code!"

comments.pl [slashcode.com]: Scroll down to the section under "here begins the troll detection code".

You may be wondering why it's such an ungodly piece of crap. I feel that we are seeing evidence of an ingrained unwillingness to think before coding.

The first few tests are fairly simple, based on regexps and length. They're pretty laughable, from an information theory perspective. If you don't believe me, the flood of ascii art should supply adequate evidence of what I'm talking about. Language is a complex thing, and a few simple tests are insufficient to distinguish English from ascii art, especially when the ascii artists are willing to take extreme measures to see their work posted. Regular posters do not have the patience for such chicanery.

The final test is my favourite, though. It begins under the comment ending with this charming sentence: "These ratios are _very_ conservative a comment has to be absolute shit to trip this off". An interesting claim. Considering the number of posts I've tripped this filter on without doing anything out of the ordinary, I'd say "conservative" means the same thing to Taco as it means to George W. Bush, nb. "nazi". What we are talking about here, is the postercomment compression test. (The horror! The horror!) "postercomment" is just the name of the field your comments are sent in, by the way. It isn't cool top secret slashspeak. It's just a variable name.

What this does is, it actually compresses your comment using zlib, then checks the change in size to decide if you are a troll or not! Furthermore, the code comments indicate that if you trip this test, slashcode thinks you are a "luser". Code like this makes it pretty clear that it takes one to know one, Rob!

As someone who as actually seen Rob Malda use the phrase "it won't scale" to dismiss questions about why parts of the moderation system weren't done in a more equitable fshion, I'd like to take this opportunity to laugh until I give myself a hernia.

Anyone who has studied information theory knows that the redundancy of english is estimated at about 50%. This value is fairly key in what we are seeing here, it determines a fair estimate of how effective compression of english text can be before we start to lose information. Taco's estimates were based, in his words, on "...testing out several paragraphs of text...". Doesn't sound like a particularly large sample group. What's more, it's indicative of poor software engineering practice. As is the recent bout of outages.

A few final criticisms. Firstly, there are far better, less memory intensive, and above all, less stupid methods of performing textual analysis than checking it's compression ratio. If Taco had any idea about computer science, he might have investigated a few before making a fool of himself in public like this. It's pretty clear that he's getting more and more frustrated with the situation on slashdot, and doesn't realise that if he ruled with an even hand, rather than a bitchslapping script and an army of trained thought police, the problems would not be so grave.

Secondly, I thought of a much more effective method of eliminating asci art posts, and it will never cause problems for genuine posters. What's more, it's extremely compact and doesn't even require regexps. I won't reveal it here, as I am not willing to assist in a reign of terror that I find to be reprehensible.

As further evidence of the lengths Malda and Co. may be willing to go to, you can find a commented out section that enables the deletion of posts and their descendant threads. We have no reason to believe that this will not be employed on slashdot.

Editorial notes: I don't use Perl and this is really the first time I've examined it closely. It's pretty much convinced me that I'm not missing much. I use real languages such as C and C++ and occasionaly asm to do most of my work, and I, along with 95% of the enterprise world, find Java to be the best solution for web programming. For most scripting tasks, shell script suffices. For more complicated scripting tasks, Python provides a more sensibly designed scripting environment. Additionally, as if to provide further evidence of Malda's incompetence as a programmer, I've hit the junk character post every single time I've previewed this comment, and am now forced to resort to edit it. Regretfully, I have been forced to replace the Perl fragments I was using with hyperlinks. Very unsatisfactory.

(I've decided to make one last post of this so that anyone who didn't catch it the first two times has a chance to read it. I think it's pretty important that as many people in the community read this as possible, as it affects all of us. Slashback seems to be the correct place to revisit issues that have been discussed in the last week, so I'm posting it here. Thanks.)

OK, many of you have probably noticed a lot of ascii art flooding this board lately. You're no doubt wondering why CmdrTaco's much encountered "lameness filters" are ineffective against it. To answer that question, I'm going to take you on a Perl journey, deep into slashcode. Think of it as being a bit like "Heart of Darkness", or if you're a typical slashdot pleb, "Apocalypse Now!"

The first files we'll be looking at are the infamous "bitchslap" and "modslap". I think these are a pretty decent introduction to how Rob's mind works when he's coding angry: Here's bitchslap. Scroll down to the section labelled "main program logic". BTW. "main program logic" is a ridiculously grandiloquent phrase for what we are seeing here.

Note how draconian this is. I like to think of this code as a memorial to slashdot-terminal, it's first victim. You can see how Malda deliberately broke his "self-regulating" moderation system, to give the admins of slashdot dictatorial powers. This code allows any admin using it to drop a user's default threshold to -1 instantly, and drop his karma down to a level from which it is unlikely to recover. I've heard that this script has been used on slashdot in a modified form, with the -defaultpoints set to less than -1, completely eliminating a user's post from normal viewing, unless people edit their query string manually.

On to modslap. Scroll down to "main program logic" again.

OK, what you're seeing here is Taco's method of restricting the flow of crack to moderators, to keep them nice and jumpy. If you don't mod the way he likes, your moderating days are over, and your karma plummets to bitchslap levels. An ugly tool.

To recap, the man we are dealing with here is obviously an anti-democratic tyrant. Censorship is his weapon, and he is vigilantly watching his censors, to ensure that no freedom is allowed to enter his domain. I believe he also lives in a hut with a man driven crazy by his proximity. The hut is surrounded by skulls on poles, but the skulls face inward. Remember that.

We're nearing the locus of my investigation now. You've heard the legends, now gaze into the face of comments.pl's so-called "troll detection code!"

comments.pl: Scroll down to the section under "here begins the troll detection code".

You may be wondering why it's such an ungodly piece of crap. I feel that we are seeing evidence of an ingrained unwillingness to think before coding.

The first few tests are fairly simple, based on regexps and length. They're pretty laughable, from an information theory perspective. If you don't believe me, the flood of ascii art should supply adequate evidence of what I'm talking about. Language is a complex thing, and a few simple tests are insufficient to distinguish English from ascii art, especially when the ascii artists are willing to take extreme measures to see their work posted. Regular posters do not have the patience for such chicanery.

The final test is my favourite, though. It begins under the comment ending with this charming sentence: "These ratios are _very_ conservative a comment has to be absolute shit to trip this off". An interesting claim. Considering the number of posts I've tripped this filter on without doing anything out of the ordinary, I'd say "conservative" means the same thing to Taco as it means to George W. Bush, nb. "nazi". What we are talking about here, is the postercomment compression test. (The horror! The horror!) "postercomment" is just the name of the field your comments are sent in, by the way. It isn't cool top secret slashspeak. It's just a variable name.

What this does is, it actually compresses your comment using zlib, then checks the change in size to decide if you are a troll or not! Furthermore, the code comments indicate that if you trip this test, slashcode thinks you are a "luser". Code like this makes it pretty clear that it takes one to know one, Rob!

As someone who as actually seen Rob Malda use the phrase "it won't scale" to dismiss questions about why parts of the moderation system weren't done in a more equitable fshion, I'd like to take this opportunity to laugh until I give myself a hernia.

Anyone who has studied information theory knows that the redundancy of english is estimated at about 50%. This value is fairly key in what we are seeing here, it determines a fair estimate of how effective compression of english text can be before we start to lose information. Taco's estimates were based, in his words, on "...testing out several paragraphs of text...". Doesn't sound like a particularly large sample group. What's more, it's indicative of poor software engineering practice. As is the recent bout of outages.

A few final criticisms. Firstly, there are far better, less memory intensive, and above all, less stupid methods of performing textual analysis than checking it's compression ratio. If Taco had any idea about computer science, he might have investigated a few before making a fool of himself in public like this. It's pretty clear that he's getting more and more frustrated with the situation on slashdot, and doesn't realise that if he ruled with an even hand, rather than a bitchslapping script and an army of trained thought police, the problems would not be so grave.

Secondly, I thought of a much more effective method of eliminating asci art posts, and it will never cause problems for genuine posters. What's more, it's extremely compact and doesn't even require regexps. I won't reveal it here, as I am not willing to assist in a reign of terror that I find to be reprehensible.

As further evidence of the lengths Malda and Co. may be willing to go to, you can find a commented out section that enables the deletion of posts and their descendant threads. We have no reason to believe that this will not be employed on slashdot.

Editorial notes: I don't use Perl and this is really the first time I've examined it closely. It's pretty much convinced me that I'm not missing much. I use real languages such as C and C++ and occasionaly asm to do most of my work, and I, along with 95% of the enterprise world, find Java to be the best solution for web programming. For most scripting tasks, shell script suffices. For more complicated scripting tasks, Python provides a more sensibly designed scripting environment. Additionally, as if to provide further evidence of Malda's incompetence as a programmer, I've hit the junk character post every single time I've previewed this comment, and am now forced to resort to edit it. Regretfully, I have been forced to replace the Perl fragments I was using with hyperlinks. Very unsatisfactory.

(I've decided to make one last post of this so that anyone who didn't catch it the first two times has a chance to read it. I think it's pretty important that as many people in the community read this as possible, as it affects all of us. Slashback seems to be the correct place to revisit issues that have been discussed in the last week, so I'm posting it here. Thanks.)

OK, many of you have probably noticed a lot of ascii art flooding this board lately. You're no doubt wondering why CmdrTaco's much encountered "lameness filters" are ineffective against it. To answer that question, I'm going to take you on a Perl journey, deep into slashcode. Think of it as being a bit like "Heart of Darkness", or if you're a typical slashdot pleb, "Apocalypse Now!"

The first files we'll be looking at are the infamous "bitchslap" and "modslap". I think these are a pretty decent introduction to how Rob's mind works when he's coding angry: Here's bitchslap. Scroll down to the section labelled "main program logic". BTW. "main program logic" is a ridiculously grandiloquent phrase for what we are seeing here.

Note how draconian this is. I like to think of this code as a memorial to slashdot-terminal, it's first victim. You can see how Malda deliberately broke his "self-regulating" moderation system, to give the admins of slashdot dictatorial powers. This code allows any admin using it to drop a user's default threshold to -1 instantly, and drop his karma down to a level from which it is unlikely to recover. I've heard that this script has been used on slashdot in a modified form, with the -defaultpoints set to less than -1, completely eliminating a user's post from normal viewing, unless people edit their query string manually.

On to modslap. Scroll down to "main program logic" again.

OK, what you're seeing here is Taco's method of restricting the flow of crack to moderators, to keep them nice and jumpy. If you don't mod the way he likes, your moderating days are over, and your karma plummets to bitchslap levels. An ugly tool.

To recap, the man we are dealing with here is obviously an anti-democratic tyrant. Censorship is his weapon, and he is vigilantly watching his censors, to ensure that no freedom is allowed to enter his domain. I believe he also lives in a hut with a man driven crazy by his proximity. The hut is surrounded by skulls on poles, but the skulls face inward. Remember that.

We're nearing the locus of my investigation now. You've heard the legends, now gaze into the face of comments.pl's so-called "troll detection code!"

comments.pl: Scroll down to the section under "here begins the troll detection code".

You may be wondering why it's such an ungodly piece of crap. I feel that we are seeing evidence of an ingrained unwillingness to think before coding.

The first few tests are fairly simple, based on regexps and length. They're pretty laughable, from an information theory perspective. If you don't believe me, the flood of ascii art should supply adequate evidence of what I'm talking about. Language is a complex thing, and a few simple tests are insufficient to distinguish English from ascii art, especially when the ascii artists are willing to take extreme measures to see their work posted. Regular posters do not have the patience for such chicanery.

The final test is my favourite, though. It begins under the comment ending with this charming sentence: "These ratios are _very_ conservative a comment has to be absolute shit to trip this off". An interesting claim. Considering the number of posts I've tripped this filter on without doing anything out of the ordinary, I'd say "conservative" means the same thing to Taco as it means to George W. Bush, nb. "nazi". What we are talking about here, is the postercomment compression test. (The horror! The horror!) "postercomment" is just the name of the field your comments are sent in, by the way. It isn't cool top secret slashspeak. It's just a variable name.

What this does is, it actually compresses your comment using zlib, then checks the change in size to decide if you are a troll or not! Furthermore, the code comments indicate that if you trip this test, slashcode thinks you are a "luser". Code like this makes it pretty clear that it takes one to know one, Rob!

As someone who as actually seen Rob Malda use the phrase "it won't scale" to dismiss questions about why parts of the moderation system weren't done in a more equitable fshion, I'd like to take this opportunity to laugh until I give myself a hernia.

Anyone who has studied information theory knows that the redundancy of english is estimated at about 50%. This value is fairly key in what we are seeing here, it determines a fair estimate of how effective compression of english text can be before we start to lose information. Taco's estimates were based, in his words, on "...testing out several paragraphs of text...". Doesn't sound like a particularly large sample group. What's more, it's indicative of poor software engineering practice. As is the recent bout of outages.

A few final criticisms. Firstly, there are far better, less memory intensive, and above all, less stupid methods of performing textual analysis than checking it's compression ratio. If Taco had any idea about computer science, he might have investigated a few before making a fool of himself in public like this. It's pretty clear that he's getting more and more frustrated with the situation on slashdot, and doesn't realise that if he ruled with an even hand, rather than a bitchslapping script and an army of trained thought police, the problems would not be so grave.

Secondly, I thought of a much more effective method of eliminating asci art posts, and it will never cause problems for genuine posters. What's more, it's extremely compact and doesn't even require regexps. I won't reveal it here, as I am not willing to assist in a reign of terror that I find to be reprehensible.

As further evidence of the lengths Malda and Co. may be willing to go to, you can find a commented out section that enables the deletion of posts and their descendant threads. We have no reason to believe that this will not be employed on slashdot.

Editorial notes: I don't use Perl and this is really the first time I've examined it closely. It's pretty much convinced me that I'm not missing much. I use real languages such as C and C++ and occasionaly asm to do most of my work, and I, along with 95% of the enterprise world, find Java to be the best solution for web programming. For most scripting tasks, shell script suffices. For more complicated scripting tasks, Python provides a more sensibly designed scripting environment. Additionally, as if to provide further evidence of Malda's incompetence as a programmer, I've hit the junk character post every single time I've previewed this comment, and am now forced to resort to edit it. Regretfully, I have been forced to replace the Perl fragments I was using with hyperlinks. Very unsatisfactory.

(I've decided to make one last post of this so that anyone who didn't catch it the first two times has a chance to read it. I think it's pretty important that as many people in the community read this as possible, as it affects all of us. Slashback seems to be the correct place to revisit issues that have been discussed in the last week, so I'm posting it here. Thanks.)

OK, many of you have probably noticed a lot of ascii art flooding this board lately. You're no doubt wondering why CmdrTaco's much encountered "lameness filters" are ineffective against it. To answer that question, I'm going to take you on a Perl journey, deep into slashcode. Think of it as being a bit like "Heart of Darkness", or if you're a typical slashdot pleb, "Apocalypse Now!"

The first files we'll be looking at are the infamous "bitchslap" and "modslap". I think these are a pretty decent introduction to how Rob's mind works when he's coding angry: Here's bitchslap. Scroll down to the section labelled "main program logic". BTW. "main program logic" is a ridiculously grandiloquent phrase for what we are seeing here.

Note how draconian this is. I like to think of this code as a memorial to slashdot-terminal, it's first victim. You can see how Malda deliberately broke his "self-regulating" moderation system, to give the admins of slashdot dictatorial powers. This code allows any admin using it to drop a user's default threshold to -1 instantly, and drop his karma down to a level from which it is unlikely to recover. I've heard that this script has been used on slashdot in a modified form, with the -defaultpoints set to less than -1, completely eliminating a user's post from normal viewing, unless people edit their query string manually.

On to modslap. Scroll down to "main program logic" again.

OK, what you're seeing here is Taco's method of restricting the flow of crack to moderators, to keep them nice and jumpy. If you don't mod the way he likes, your moderating days are over, and your karma plummets to bitchslap levels. An ugly tool.

To recap, the man we are dealing with here is obviously an anti-democratic tyrant. Censorship is his weapon, and he is vigilantly watching his censors, to ensure that no freedom is allowed to enter his domain. I believe he also lives in a hut with a man driven crazy by his proximity. The hut is surrounded by skulls on poles, but the skulls face inward. Remember that.

We're nearing the locus of my investigation now. You've heard the legends, now gaze into the face of comments.pl's so-called "troll detection code!"

comments.pl: Scroll down to the section under "here begins the troll detection code".

You may be wondering why it's such an ungodly piece of crap. I feel that we are seeing evidence of an ingrained unwillingness to think before coding.

The first few tests are fairly simple, based on regexps and length. They're pretty laughable, from an information theory perspective. If you don't believe me, the flood of ascii art should supply adequate evidence of what I'm talking about. Language is a complex thing, and a few simple tests are insufficient to distinguish English from ascii art, especially when the ascii artists are willing to take extreme measures to see their work posted. Regular posters do not have the patience for such chicanery.

The final test is my favourite, though. It begins under the comment ending with this charming sentence: "These ratios are _very_ conservative a comment has to be absolute shit to trip this off". An interesting claim. Considering the number of posts I've tripped this filter on without doing anything out of the ordinary, I'd say "conservative" means the same thing to Taco as it means to George W. Bush, nb. "nazi". What we are talking about here, is the postercomment compression test. (The horror! The horror!) "postercomment" is just the name of the field your comments are sent in, by the way. It isn't cool top secret slashspeak. It's just a variable name.

What this does is, it actually compresses your comment using zlib, then checks the change in size to decide if you are a troll or not! Furthermore, the code comments indicate that if you trip this test, slashcode thinks you are a "luser". Code like this makes it pretty clear that it takes one to know one, Rob!

As someone who as actually seen Rob Malda use the phrase "it won't scale" to dismiss questions about why parts of the moderation system weren't done in a more equitable fshion, I'd like to take this opportunity to laugh until I give myself a hernia.

Anyone who has studied information theory knows that the redundancy of english is estimated at about 50%. This value is fairly key in what we are seeing here, it determines a fair estimate of how effective compression of english text can be before we start to lose information. Taco's estimates were based, in his words, on "...testing out several paragraphs of text...". Doesn't sound like a particularly large sample group. What's more, it's indicative of poor software engineering practice. As is the recent bout of outages.

A few final criticisms. Firstly, there are far better, less memory intensive, and above all, less stupid methods of performing textual analysis than checking it's compression ratio. If Taco had any idea about computer science, he might have investigated a few before making a fool of himself in public like this. It's pretty clear that he's getting more and more frustrated with the situation on slashdot, and doesn't realise that if he ruled with an even hand, rather than a bitchslapping script and an army of trained thought police, the problems would not be so grave.

Secondly, I thought of a much more effective method of eliminating asci art posts, and it will never cause problems for genuine posters. What's more, it's extremely compact and doesn't even require regexps. I won't reveal it here, as I am not willing to assist in a reign of terror that I find to be reprehensible.

As further evidence of the lengths Malda and Co. may be willing to go to, you can find a commented out section that enables the deletion of posts and their descendant threads. We have no reason to believe that this will not be employed on slashdot.

Editorial notes: I don't use Perl and this is really the first time I've examined it closely. It's pretty much convinced me that I'm not missing much. I use real languages such as C and C++ and occasionaly asm to do most of my work, and I, along with 95% of the enterprise world, find Java to be the best solution for web programming. For most scripting tasks, shell script suffices. For more complicated scripting tasks, Python provides a more sensibly designed scripting environment. Additionally, as if to provide further evidence of Malda's incompetence as a programmer, I've hit the junk character post every single time I've previewed this comment, and am now forced to resort to edit it. Regretfully, I have been forced to replace the Perl fragments I was using with hyperlinks. Very unsatisfactory.

OK, many of you have probably noticed a lot of ascii art flooding this board lately. You're no doubt wondering why CmdrTaco's much encountered "lameness filters" are ineffective against it. To answer that question, I'm going to take you on a Perl journey, deep into slashcode. Think of it as being a bit like "Heart of Darkness", or if you're a typical slashdot pleb, "Apocalypse Now!"

The first files we'll be looking at are the infamous "bitchslap" and "modslap". I think these are a pretty decent introduction to how Rob's mind works when he's coding angry: Here's bitchslap. Scroll down to the section labelled "main program logic". BTW. "main program logic" is a ridiculously grandiloquent phrase for what we are seeing here.

Note how draconian this is. I like to think of this code as a memorial to slashdot-terminal, it's first victim. You can see how Malda deliberately broke his "self-regulating" moderation system, to give the admins of slashdot dictatorial powers. This code allows any admin using it to drop a user's default threshold to -1 instantly, and drop his karma down to a level from which it is unlikely to recover. I've heard that this script has been used on slashdot in a modified form, with the -defaultpoints set to less than -1, completely eliminating a user's post from normal viewing, unless people edit their query string manually.

On to modslap. Scroll down to "main program logic" again.

OK, what you're seeing here is Taco's method of restricting the flow of crack to moderators, to keep them nice and jumpy. If you don't mod the way he likes, your moderating days are over, and your karma plummets to bitchslap levels. An ugly tool.

To recap, the man we are dealing with here is obviously an anti-democratic tyrant. Censorship is his weapon, and he is vigilantly watching his censors, to ensure that no freedom is allowed to enter his domain. I believe he also lives in a hut with a man driven crazy by his proximity. The hut is surrounded by skulls on poles, but the skulls face inward. Remember that.

We're nearing the locus of my investigation now. You've heard the legends, now gaze into the face of comments.pl's so-called "troll detection code!"

comments.pl: Scroll down to the section under "here begins the troll detection code".

You may be wondering why it's such an ungodly piece of crap. I feel that we are seeing evidence of an ingrained unwillingness to think before coding.

The first few tests are fairly simple, based on regexps and length. They're pretty laughable, from an information theory perspective. If you don't believe me, the flood of ascii art should supply adequate evidence of what I'm talking about. Language is a complex thing, and a few simple tests are insufficient to distinguish English from ascii art, especially when the ascii artists are willing to take extreme measures to see their work posted. Regular posters do not have the patience for such chicanery.

The final test is my favourite, though. It begins under the comment ending with this charming sentence: "These ratios are _very_ conservative a comment has to be absolute shit to trip this off". An interesting claim. Considering the number of posts I've tripped this filter on without doing anything out of the ordinary, I'd say "conservative" means the same thing to Taco as it means to George W. Bush, nb. "nazi". What we are talking about here, is the postercomment compression test. (The horror! The horror!) "postercomment" is just the name of the field your comments are sent in, by the way. It isn't cool top secret slashspeak. It's just a variable name.

What this does is, it actually compresses your comment using zlib, then checks the change in size to decide if you are a troll or not! Furthermore, the code comments indicate that if you trip this test, slashcode thinks you are a "luser". Code like this makes it pretty clear that it takes one to know one, Rob!

As someone who as actually seen Rob Malda use the phrase "it won't scale" to dismiss questions about why parts of the moderation system weren't done in a more equitable fshion, I'd like to take this opportunity to laugh until I give myself a hernia.

Anyone who has studied information theory knows that the redundancy of english is estimated at about 50%. This value is fairly key in what we are seeing here, it determines a fair estimate of how effective compression of english text can be before we start to lose information. Taco's estimates were based, in his words, on "...testing out several paragraphs of text...". Doesn't sound like a particularly large sample group. What's more, it's indicative of poor software engineering practice. As is the recent bout of outages.

A few final criticisms. Firstly, there are far better, less memory intensive, and above all, less stupid methods of performing textual analysis than checking it's compression ratio. If Taco had any idea about computer science, he might have investigated a few before making a fool of himself in public like this. It's pretty clear that he's getting more and more frustrated with the situation on slashdot, and doesn't realise that if he ruled with an even hand, rather than a bitchslapping script and an army of trained thought police, the problems would not be so grave.

Secondly, I thought of a much more effective method of eliminating asci art posts, and it will never cause problems for genuine posters. What's more, it's extremely compact and doesn't even require regexps. I won't reveal it here, as I am not willing to assist in a reign of terror that I find to be reprehensible.

As further evidence of the lengths Malda and Co. may be willing to go to, you can find a commented out section that enables the deletion of posts and their descendant threads. We have no reason to believe that this will not be employed on slashdot.

Editorial notes: I don't use Perl and this is really the first time I've examined it closely. It's pretty much convinced me that I'm not missing much. I use real languages such as C and C++ and occasionaly asm to do most of my work, and I, along with 95% of the enterprise world, find Java to be the best solution for web programming. For most scripting tasks, shell script suffices. For more complicated scripting tasks, Python provides a more sensibly designed scripting environment. Additionally, as if to provide further evidence of Malda's incompetence as a programmer, I've hit the junk character post every single time I've previewed this comment, and am now forced to resort to edit it. Regretfully, I have been forced to replace the Perl fragments I was using with hyperlinks. Very unsatisfactory.

OK, many of you have probably noticed a lot of ascii art flooding this board lately. You're no doubt wondering why CmdrTaco's much encountered "lameness filters" are ineffective against it. To answer that question, I'm going to take you on a Perl journey, deep into slashcode. Think of it as being a bit like "Heart of Darkness", or if you're a typical slashdot pleb, "Apocalypse Now!"

The first files we'll be looking at are the infamous "bitchslap" and "modslap". I think these are a pretty decent introduction to how Rob's mind works when he's coding angry: Here's bitchslap. Scroll down to the section labelled "main program logic". BTW. "main program logic" is a ridiculously grandiloquent phrase for what we are seeing here.

Note how draconian this is. I like to think of this code as a memorial to slashdot-terminal, it's first victim. You can see how Malda deliberately broke his "self-regulating" moderation system, to give the admins of slashdot dictatorial powers. This code allows any admin using it to drop a user's default threshold to -1 instantly, and drop his karma down to a level from which it is unlikely to recover. I've heard that this script has been used on slashdot in a modified form, with the -defaultpoints set to less than -1, completely eliminating a user's post from normal viewing, unless people edit their query string manually.

On to modslap. Scroll down to "main program logic" again.

OK, what you're seeing here is Taco's method of restricting the flow of crack to moderators, to keep them nice and jumpy. If you don't mod the way he likes, your moderating days are over, and your karma plummets to bitchslap levels. An ugly tool.

To recap, the man we are dealing with here is obviously an anti-democratic tyrant. Censorship is his weapon, and he is vigilantly watching his censors, to ensure that no freedom is allowed to enter his domain. I believe he also lives in a hut with a man driven crazy by his proximity. The hut is surrounded by skulls on poles, but the skulls face inward. Remember that.

We're nearing the locus of my investigation now. You've heard the legends, now gaze into the face of comments.pl's so-called "troll detection code!"

comments.pl: Scroll down to the section under "here begins the troll detection code".

You may be wondering why it's such an ungodly piece of crap. I feel that we are seeing evidence of an ingrained unwillingness to think before coding.

The first few tests are fairly simple, based on regexps and length. They're pretty laughable, from an information theory perspective. If you don't believe me, the flood of ascii art should supply adequate evidence of what I'm talking about. Language is a complex thing, and a few simple tests are insufficient to distinguish English from ascii art, especially when the ascii artists are willing to take extreme measures to see their work posted. Regular posters do not have the patience for such chicanery.

The final test is my favourite, though. It begins under the comment ending with this charming sentence: "These ratios are _very_ conservative a comment has to be absolute shit to trip this off". An interesting claim. Considering the number of posts I've tripped this filter on without doing anything out of the ordinary, I'd say "conservative" means the same thing to Taco as it means to George W. Bush, nb. "nazi". What we are talking about here, is the postercomment compression test. (The horror! The horror!) "postercomment" is just the name of the field your comments are sent in, by the way. It isn't cool top secret slashspeak. It's just a variable name.

What this does is, it actually compresses your comment using zlib, then checks the change in size to decide if you are a troll or not! Furthermore, the code comments indicate that if you trip this test, slashcode thinks you are a "luser". Code like this makes it pretty clear that it takes one to know one, Rob!

As someone who as actually seen Rob Malda use the phrase "it won't scale" to dismiss questions about why parts of the moderation system weren't done in a more equitable fshion, I'd like to take this opportunity to laugh until I give myself a hernia.

Anyone who has studied information theory knows that the redundancy of english is estimated at about 50%. This value is fairly key in what we are seeing here, it determines a fair estimate of how effective compression of english text can be before we start to lose information. Taco's estimates were based, in his words, on "...testing out several paragraphs of text...". Doesn't sound like a particularly large sample group. What's more, it's indicative of poor software engineering practice. As is the recent bout of outages.

A few final criticisms. Firstly, there are far better, less memory intensive, and above all, less stupid methods of performing textual analysis than checking it's compression ratio. If Taco had any idea about computer science, he might have investigated a few before making a fool of himself in public like this. It's pretty clear that he's getting more and more frustrated with the situation on slashdot, and doesn't realise that if he ruled with an even hand, rather than a bitchslapping script and an army of trained thought police, the problems would not be so grave.

Secondly, I thought of a much more effective method of eliminating asci art posts, and it will never cause problems for genuine posters. What's more, it's extremely compact and doesn't even require regexps. I won't reveal it here, as I am not willing to assist in a reign of terror that I find to be reprehensible.

As further evidence of the lengths Malda and Co. may be willing to go to, you can find a commented out section that enables the deletion of posts and their descendant threads. We have no reason to believe that this will not be employed on slashdot.

Editorial notes: I don't use Perl and this is really the first time I've examined it closely. It's pretty much convinced me that I'm not missing much. I use real languages such as C and C++ and occasionaly asm to do most of my work, and I, along with 95% of the enterprise world, find Java to be the best solution for web programming. For most scripting tasks, shell script suffices. For more complicated scripting tasks, Python provides a more sensibly designed scripting environment. Additionally, as if to provide further evidence of Malda's incompetence as a programmer, I've hit the junk character post every single time I've previewed this comment, and am now forced to resort to edit it. Regretfully, I have been forced to replace the Perl fragments I was using with hyperlinks. Very unsatisfactory.

OK, many of you have probably noticed a lot of ascii art flooding this board lately. You're no doubt wondering why CmdrTaco's much encountered "lameness filters" are ineffective against it. To answer that question, I'm going to take you on a Perl journey, deep into slashcode. Think of it as being a bit like "Heart of Darkness", or if you're a typical slashdot pleb, "Apocalypse Now!"

The first files we'll be looking at are the infamous "bitchslap" and "modslap". I think these are a pretty decent introduction to how Rob's mind works when he's coding angry: Here's bitchslap. Scroll down to the section labelled "main program logic". BTW. "main program logic" is a ridiculously grandiloquent phrase for what we are seeing here.

Note how draconian this is. I like to think of this code as a memorial to slashdot-terminal, it's first victim. You can see how Malda deliberately broke his "self-regulating" moderation system, to give the admins of slashdot dictatorial powers. This code allows any admin using it to drop a user's default threshold to -1 instantly, and drop his karma down to a level from which it is unlikely to recover. I've heard that this script has been used on slashdot in a modified form, with the -defaultpoints set to less than -1, completely eliminating a user's post from normal viewing, unless people edit their query string manually.

On to modslap. Scroll down to "main program logic" again.

OK, what you're seeing here is Taco's method of restricting the flow of crack to moderators, to keep them nice and jumpy. If you don't mod the way he likes, your moderating days are over, and your karma plummets to bitchslap levels. An ugly tool.

To recap, the man we are dealing with here is obviously an anti-democratic tyrant. Censorship is his weapon, and he is vigilantly watching his censors, to ensure that no freedom is allowed to enter his domain. I believe he also lives in a hut with a man driven crazy by his proximity. The hut is surrounded by skulls on poles, but the skulls face inward. Remember that.

We're nearing the locus of my investigation now. You've heard the legends, now gaze into the face of comments.pl's so-called "troll detection code!"

comments.pl: Scroll down to the section under "here begins the troll detection code".

You may be wondering why it's such an ungodly piece of crap. I feel that we are seeing evidence of an ingrained unwillingness to think before coding.

The first few tests are fairly simple, based on regexps and length. They're pretty laughable, from an information theory perspective. If you don't believe me, the flood of ascii art should supply adequate evidence of what I'm talking about. Language is a complex thing, and a few simple tests are insufficient to distinguish English from ascii art, especially when the ascii artists are willing to take extreme measures to see their work posted. Regular posters do not have the patience for such chicanery.

The final test is my favourite, though. It begins under the comment ending with this charming sentence: "These ratios are _very_ conservative a comment has to be absolute shit to trip this off". An interesting claim. Considering the number of posts I've tripped this filter on without doing anything out of the ordinary, I'd say "conservative" means the same thing to Taco as it means to George W. Bush, nb. "nazi". What we are talking about here, is the postercomment compression test. (The horror! The horror!) "postercomment" is just the name of the field your comments are sent in, by the way. It isn't cool top secret slashspeak. It's just a variable name.

What this does is, it actually compresses your comment using zlib, then checks the change in size to decide if you are a troll or not! Furthermore, the code comments indicate that if you trip this test, slashcode thinks you are a "luser". Code like this makes it pretty clear that it takes one to know one, Rob!

As someone who as actually seen Rob Malda use the phrase "it won't scale" to dismiss questions about why parts of the moderation system weren't done in a more equitable fshion, I'd like to take this opportunity to laugh until I give myself a hernia.

Anyone who has studied information theory knows that the redundancy of english is estimated at about 50%. This value is fairly key in what we are seeing here, it determines a fair estimate of how effective compression of english text can be before we start to lose information. Taco's estimates were based, in his words, on "...testing out several paragraphs of text...". Doesn't sound like a particularly large sample group. What's more, it's indicative of poor software engineering practice. As is the recent bout of outages.

A few final criticisms. Firstly, there are far better, less memory intensive, and above all, less stupid methods of performing textual analysis than checking it's compression ratio. If Taco had any idea about computer science, he might have investigated a few before making a fool of himself in public like this. It's pretty clear that he's getting more and more frustrated with the situation on slashdot, and doesn't realise that if he ruled with an even hand, rather than a bitchslapping script and an army of trained thought police, the problems would not be so grave.

Secondly, I thought of a much more effective method of eliminating asci art posts, and it will never cause problems for genuine posters. What's more, it's extremely compact and doesn't even require regexps. I won't reveal it here, as I am not willing to assist in a reign of terror that I find to be reprehensible.

As further evidence of the lengths Malda and Co. may be willing to go to, you can find a commented out section that enables the deletion of posts and their descendant threads. We have no reason to believe that this will not be employed on slashdot.

Editorial notes: I don't use Perl and this is really the first time I've examined it closely. It's pretty much convinced me that I'm not missing much. I use real languages such as C and C++ and occasionaly asm to do most of my work, and I, along with 95% of the enterprise world, find Java to be the best solution for web programming. For most scripting tasks, shell script suffices. For more complicated scripting tasks, Python provides a more sensibly designed scripting environment. Additionally, as if to provide further evidence of Malda's incompetence as a programmer, I've hit the junk character post every single time I've previewed this comment, and am now forced to resort to edit it. Regretfully, I have been forced to replace the Perl fragments I was using with hyperlinks. Very unsatisfactory.

OK, many of you have probably noticed a lot of ascii art flooding this board lately. You're no doubt wondering why CmdrTaco's much encountered "lameness filters" are ineffective against it. To answer that question, I'm going to take you on a Perl journey, deep into slashcode. Think of it as being a bit like "Heart of Darkness", or if you're a typical slashdot pleb, "Apocalypse Now!"

The first files we'll be looking at are the infamous "bitchslap" and "modslap". I think these are a pretty decent introduction to how Rob's mind works when he's coding angry: Here's bitchslap [slashcode.com]. Scroll down to the section labelled "main program logic". BTW. "main program logic" is a ridiculously grandiloquent phrase for what we are seeing here.

Note how draconian this is. I like to think of this code as a memorial to slashdot-terminal, it's first victim. You can see how Malda deliberately broke his "self-regulating" moderation system, to give the admins of slashdot dictatorial powers. This code allows any admin using it to drop a user's default threshold to -1 instantly, and drop his karma down to a level from which it is unlikely to recover. I've heard that this script has been used on slashdot in a modified form, with the -defaultpoints set to less than -1, completely eliminating a user's post from normal viewing, unless people edit their query string manually.

On to modslap [slashcode.com]. Scroll down to "main program logic" again.

OK, what you're seeing here is Taco's method of restricting the flow of crack to moderators, to keep them nice and jumpy. If you don't mod the way he likes, you're moderating days are over, and your karma plummets to bitchslap levels. An ugly tool.

To recap, the man we are dealing with here is obviously an anti-democratic tyrant. Censorship is his weapon, and he is vigilantly watching his censors, to ensure that no freedom is allowed to enter his domain. I believe he also lives in a hut with a man driven crazy by his proximity. The hut is surrounded by skulls on poles, but the skulls face inward. Remember that.

We're nearing the locus of my investigation now. You've heard the legends, now gaze into the face of comments.pl's so-called "troll detection code!"

comments.pl [slashcode.com]: Scroll down to the section under "here begins the troll detection code".

You may be wondering why it's such an ungodly piece of crap. I feel that we are seeing evidence of an ingrained unwillingness to think before coding.

The first few tests are fairly simple, based on regexps and length. They're pretty laughable, from an information theory perspective. If you don't believe me, the parent of this post should supply adequate evidence of what I'm talking about. Language is a complex thing, and a few simple tests are insufficient to distinguish English from ascii art, especially when the ascii artists are willing to take extreme measures to see their work posted. Regular posters do not have the patience for such chicanery.

The final test is my favourite, though. It begins under the comment ending with this charming sentence: "These ratios are _very_ conservative a comment has to be absolute shit to trip this off". An interesting claim. Considering the number of posts I've tripped this filter on, without doing anything out of the ordinary, I'd say "conservative" means the same thing to Taco as it means to George W. Bush, nb. "nazi". What we are talking about here, is the postercomment compression test. (The horror! The horror!) "postercomment" is just the name of the field your comments are sent in, by the way. It isn't cool top secret slashspeak. It's just a variable name.

What this does is, it actually compresses you're comment using zlib, then checks the change in size to decide if you are a troll or not! Furthermore, the code comments indicate that if you trip this test, slashcode thinks you are a "luser". Code like this makes it pretty clear that it takes one to know one, Rob!

As someone who as actually seen Rob Malda use the phrase "it won't scale" to dismiss questions about why parts of the moderation system weren't done in a more equitable fshion, I'd like to take this opportunity to laugh until I give myself a hernia.

Anyone who has studied information theory knows that the redundancy of english is estimated at about 50%. This value is fairly key in what we are seeing here, it determines a fair estimate of how effective compression of english text can be before we start to lose information. Taco's estimates were based, in his words, on "...testing out several paragraphs of text...". Doesn't sound like a particularly large sample group. What's more, it's indicative of poor software engineering practice. As is the recent bout of outages.

A few final criticisms. Firstly, there are far better, less memory intensive, and above all, less stupid methods of performing textual analysis than checking it's compression ratio. If Taco had any idea about computer science, he might have investigated a few before making a fool of himself in public like this. It's pretty clear that he's getting more and more frustrated with the situation on slashdot, and doesn't realise that if he ruled with an even hand, rather than a bitchslapping script and an army of trained thought police, the problems would not be so grave.

Secondly, I thought of a much more effective method of eliminating asci art posts, and it will never cause problems for genuine posters. What's more, it's extremely compact and doesn't even require regexps. I won't reveal it here, as I am not willing to assist in a reign of terror that I find to be reprehensible.

As further evidence of the lengths Malda and Co. may be willing to go to, you can find a commented out section that enables the deletion of posts and their descendant threads. We have no reason to believe that this will not be employed on slashdot.

Editorial notes: I don't use Perl and this is really the first time I've examined it closely. It's pretty much convinced me that I'm not missing much. I use real languages such as C and C++ and occasionaly asm to do most of my work, and I, along with 95% of the enterprise world, find Java to be the best solution for web programming. For most scripting tasks, shell script suffices. For more complicated scripting tasks, Python provides a more sensibly designed scripting environment. Additionally, as if to provide further evidence of Malda's incompetence as a programmer, I've hit the junk character post every single time I've previewed this comment, and am now forced to resort to edit it. Regretfully, I have been forced to replace the Perl fragments I was using with hyperlinks. Very unsatisfactory.

OK, many of you have probably noticed a lot of ascii art flooding this board lately. You're no doubt wondering why CmdrTaco's much encountered "lameness filters" are ineffective against it. To answer that question, I'm going to take you on a Perl journey, deep into slashcode. Think of it as being a bit like "Heart of Darkness", or if you're a typical slashdot pleb, "Apocalypse Now!"

The first files we'll be looking at are the infamous "bitchslap" and "modslap". I think these are a pretty decent introduction to how Rob's mind works when he's coding angry: Here's bitchslap [slashcode.com]. Scroll down to the section labelled "main program logic". BTW. "main program logic" is a ridiculously grandiloquent phrase for what we are seeing here.

Note how draconian this is. I like to think of this code as a memorial to slashdot-terminal, it's first victim. You can see how Malda deliberately broke his "self-regulating" moderation system, to give the admins of slashdot dictatorial powers. This code allows any admin using it to drop a user's default threshold to -1 instantly, and drop his karma down to a level from which it is unlikely to recover. I've heard that this script has been used on slashdot in a modified form, with the -defaultpoints set to less than -1, completely eliminating a user's post from normal viewing, unless people edit their query string manually.

On to modslap [slashcode.com]. Scroll down to "main program logic" again.

OK, what you're seeing here is Taco's method of restricting the flow of crack to moderators, to keep them nice and jumpy. If you don't mod the way he likes, you're moderating days are over, and your karma plummets to bitchslap levels. An ugly tool.

To recap, the man we are dealing with here is obviously an anti-democratic tyrant. Censorship is his weapon, and he is vigilantly watching his censors, to ensure that no freedom is allowed to enter his domain. I believe he also lives in a hut with a man driven crazy by his proximity. The hut is surrounded by skulls on poles, but the skulls face inward. Remember that.

We're nearing the locus of my investigation now. You've heard the legends, now gaze into the face of comments.pl's so-called "troll detection code!"

comments.pl [slashcode.com]: Scroll down to the section under "here begins the troll detection code".

You may be wondering why it's such an ungodly piece of crap. I feel that we are seeing evidence of an ingrained unwillingness to think before coding.

The first few tests are fairly simple, based on regexps and length. They're pretty laughable, from an information theory perspective. If you don't believe me, the parent of this post should supply adequate evidence of what I'm talking about. Language is a complex thing, and a few simple tests are insufficient to distinguish English from ascii art, especially when the ascii artists are willing to take extreme measures to see their work posted. Regular posters do not have the patience for such chicanery.

The final test is my favourite, though. It begins under the comment ending with this charming sentence: "These ratios are _very_ conservative a comment has to be absolute shit to trip this off". An interesting claim. Considering the number of posts I've tripped this filter on, without doing anything out of the ordinary, I'd say "conservative" means the same thing to Taco as it means to George W. Bush, nb. "nazi". What we are talking about here, is the postercomment compression test. (The horror! The horror!) "postercomment" is just the name of the field your comments are sent in, by the way. It isn't cool top secret slashspeak. It's just a variable name.

What this does is, it actually compresses you're comment using zlib, then checks the change in size to decide if you are a troll or not! Furthermore, the code comments indicate that if you trip this test, slashcode thinks you are a "luser". Code like this makes it pretty clear that it takes one to know one, Rob!

As someone who as actually seen Rob Malda use the phrase "it won't scale" to dismiss questions about why parts of the moderation system weren't done in a more equitable fshion, I'd like to take this opportunity to laugh until I give myself a hernia.

Anyone who has studied information theory knows that the redundancy of english is estimated at about 50%. This value is fairly key in what we are seeing here, it determines a fair estimate of how effective compression of english text can be before we start to lose information. Taco's estimates were based, in his words, on "...testing out several paragraphs of text...". Doesn't sound like a particularly large sample group. What's more, it's indicative of poor software engineering practice. As is the recent bout of outages.

A few final criticisms. Firstly, there are far better, less memory intensive, and above all, less stupid methods of performing textual analysis than checking it's compression ratio. If Taco had any idea about computer science, he might have investigated a few before making a fool of himself in public like this. It's pretty clear that he's getting more and more frustrated with the situation on slashdot, and doesn't realise that if he ruled with an even hand, rather than a bitchslapping script and an army of trained thought police, the problems would not be so grave.

Secondly, I thought of a much more effective method of eliminating asci art posts, and it will never cause problems for genuine posters. What's more, it's extremely compact and doesn't even require regexps. I won't reveal it here, as I am not willing to assist in a reign of terror that I find to be reprehensible.

As further evidence of the lengths Malda and Co. may be willing to go to, you can find a commented out section that enables the deletion of posts and their descendant threads. We have no reason to believe that this will not be employed on slashdot.

Editorial notes: I don't use Perl and this is really the first time I've examined it closely. It's pretty much convinced me that I'm not missing much. I use real languages such as C and C++ and occasionaly asm to do most of my work, and I, along with 95% of the enterprise world, find Java to be the best solution for web programming. For most scripting tasks, shell script suffices. For more complicated scripting tasks, Python provides a more sensibly designed scripting environment. Additionally, as if to provide further evidence of Malda's incompetence as a programmer, I've hit the junk character post every single time I've previewed this comment, and am now forced to resort to edit it. Regretfully, I have been forced to replace the Perl fragments I was using with hyperlinks. Very unsatisfactory.

OK, many of you have probably noticed a lot of ascii art flooding this board lately. You're no doubt wondering why CmdrTaco's much encountered "lameness filters" are ineffective against it. To answer that question, I'm going to take you on a Perl journey, deep into slashcode. Think of it as being a bit like "Heart of Darkness", or if you're a typical slashdot pleb, "Apocalypse Now!"

The first files we'll be looking at are the infamous "bitchslap" and "modslap". I think these are a pretty decent introduction to how Rob's mind works when he's coding angry: Here's bitchslap [slashcode.com]. Scroll down to the section labelled "main program logic". BTW. "main program logic" is a ridiculously grandiloquent phrase for what we are seeing here.

Note how draconian this is. I like to think of this code as a memorial to slashdot-terminal, it's first victim. You can see how Malda deliberately broke his "self-regulating" moderation system, to give the admins of slashdot dictatorial powers. This code allows any admin using it to drop a user's default threshold to -1 instantly, and drop his karma down to a level from which it is unlikely to recover. I've heard that this script has been used on slashdot in a modified form, with the -defaultpoints set to less than -1, completely eliminating a user's post from normal viewing, unless people edit their query string manually.

On to modslap [slashcode.com]. Scroll down to "main program logic" again.

OK, what you're seeing here is Taco's method of restricting the flow of crack to moderators, to keep them nice and jumpy. If you don't mod the way he likes, you're moderating days are over, and your karma plummets to bitchslap levels. An ugly tool.

To recap, the man we are dealing with here is obviously an anti-democratic tyrant. Censorship is his weapon, and he is vigilantly watching his censors, to ensure that no freedom is allowed to enter his domain. I believe he also lives in a hut with a man driven crazy by his proximity. The hut is surrounded by skulls on poles, but the skulls face inward. Remember that.

We're nearing the locus of my investigation now. You've heard the legends, now gaze into the face of comments.pl's so-called "troll detection code!"

comments.pl [slashcode.com]: Scroll down to the section under "here begins the troll detection code".

You may be wondering why it's such an ungodly piece of crap. I feel that we are seeing evidence of an ingrained unwillingness to think before coding.

The first few tests are fairly simple, based on regexps and length. They're pretty laughable, from an information theory perspective. If you don't believe me, the parent of this post should supply adequate evidence of what I'm talking about. Language is a complex thing, and a few simple tests are insufficient to distinguish English from ascii art, especially when the ascii artists are willing to take extreme measures to see their work posted. Regular posters do not have the patience for such chicanery.

The final test is my favourite, though. It begins under the comment ending with this charming sentence: "These ratios are _very_ conservative a comment has to be absolute shit to trip this off". An interesting claim. Considering the number of posts I've tripped this filter on, without doing anything out of the ordinary, I'd say "conservative" means the same thing to Taco as it means to George W. Bush, nb. "nazi". What we are talking about here, is the postercomment compression test. (The horror! The horror!) "postercomment" is just the name of the field your comments are sent in, by the way. It isn't cool top secret slashspeak. It's just a variable name.

What this does is, it actually compresses you're comment using zlib, then checks the change in size to decide if you are a troll or not! Furthermore, the code comments indicate that if you trip this test, slashcode thinks you are a "luser". Code like this makes it pretty clear that it takes one to know one, Rob!

As someone who as actually seen Rob Malda use the phrase "it won't scale" to dismiss questions about why parts of the moderation system weren't done in a more equitable fshion, I'd like to take this opportunity to laugh until I give myself a hernia.

Anyone who has studied information theory knows that the redundancy of english is estimated at about 50%. This value is fairly key in what we are seeing here, it determines a fair estimate of how effective compression of english text can be before we start to lose information. Taco's estimates were based, in his words, on "...testing out several paragraphs of text...". Doesn't sound like a particularly large sample group. What's more, it's indicative of poor software engineering practice. As is the recent bout of outages.

A few final criticisms. Firstly, there are far better, less memory intensive, and above all, less stupid methods of performing textual analysis than checking it's compression ratio. If Taco had any idea about computer science, he might have investigated a few before making a fool of himself in public like this. It's pretty clear that he's getting more and more frustrated with the situation on slashdot, and doesn't realise that if he ruled with an even hand, rather than a bitchslapping script and an army of trained thought police, the problems would not be so grave.

Secondly, I thought of a much more effective method of eliminating asci art posts, and it will never cause problems for genuine posters. What's more, it's extremely compact and doesn't even require regexps. I won't reveal it here, as I am not willing to assist in a reign of terror that I find to be reprehensible.

As further evidence of the lengths Malda and Co. may be willing to go to, you can find a commented out section that enables the deletion of posts and their descendant threads. We have no reason to believe that this will not be employed on slashdot.

Editorial notes: I don't use Perl and this is really the first time I've examined it closely. It's pretty much convinced me that I'm not missing much. I use real languages such as C and C++ and occasionaly asm to do most of my work, and I, along with 95% of the enterprise world, find Java to be the best solution for web programming. For most scripting tasks, shell script suffices. For more complicated scripting tasks, Python provides a more sensibly designed scripting environment. Additionally, as if to provide further evidence of Malda's incompetence as a programmer, I've hit the junk character post every single time I've previewed this comment, and am now forced to resort to edit it. Regretfully, I have been forced to replace the Perl fragments I was using with hyperlinks. Very unsatisfactory.

OK, many of you have probably noticed a lot of ascii art flooding this board lately. You're no doubt wondering why CmdrTaco's much encountered "lameness filters" are ineffective against it. To answer that question, I'm going to take you on a Perl journey, deep into slashcode. Think of it as being a bit like "Heart of Darkness", or if you're a typical slashdot pleb, "Apocalypse Now!"

The first files we'll be looking at are the infamous "bitchslap" and "modslap". I think these are a pretty decent introduction to how Rob's mind works when he's coding angry: Here's bitchslap [slashcode.com]. Scroll down to the section labelled "main program logic". BTW. "main program logic" is a ridiculously grandiloquent phrase for what we are seeing here.

Note how draconian this is. I like to think of this code as a memorial to slashdot-terminal, it's first victim. You can see how Malda deliberately broke his "self-regulating" moderation system, to give the admins of slashdot dictatorial powers. This code allows any admin using it to drop a user's default threshold to -1 instantly, and drop his karma down to a level from which it is unlikely to recover. I've heard that this script has been used on slashdot in a modified form, with the -defaultpoints set to less than -1, completely eliminating a user's post from normal viewing, unless people edit their query string manually.

On to modslap [slashcode.com]. Scroll down to "main program logic" again.

OK, what you're seeing here is Taco's method of restricting the flow of crack to moderators, to keep them nice and jumpy. If you don't mod the way he likes, you're moderating days are over, and your karma plummets to bitchslap levels. An ugly tool.

To recap, the man we are dealing with here is obviously an anti-democratic tyrant. Censorship is his weapon, and he is vigilantly watching his censors, to ensure that no freedom is allowed to enter his domain. I believe he also lives in a hut with a man driven crazy by his proximity. The hut is surrounded by skulls on poles, but the skulls face inward. Remember that.

We're nearing the locus of my investigation now. You've heard the legends, now gaze into the face of comments.pl's so-called "troll detection code!"

comments.pl [slashcode.com]: Scroll down to the section under "here begins the troll detection code".

You may be wondering why it's such an ungodly piece of crap. I feel that we are seeing evidence of an ingrained unwillingness to think before coding.

The first few tests are fairly simple, based on regexps and length. They're pretty laughable, from an information theory perspective. If you don't believe me, the parent of this post should supply adequate evidence of what I'm talking about. Language is a complex thing, and a few simple tests are insufficient to distinguish English from ascii art, especially when the ascii artists are willing to take extreme measures to see their work posted. Regular posters do not have the patience for such chicanery.

The final test is my favourite, though. It begins under the comment ending with this charming sentence: "These ratios are _very_ conservative a comment has to be absolute shit to trip this off". An interesting claim. Considering the number of posts I've tripped this filter on, without doing anything out of the ordinary, I'd say "conservative" means the same thing to Taco as it means to George W. Bush, nb. "nazi". What we are talking about here, is the postercomment compression test. (The horror! The horror!) "postercomment" is just the name of the field your comments are sent in, by the way. It isn't cool top secret slashspeak. It's just a variable name.

What this does is, it actually compresses you're comment using zlib, then checks the change in size to decide if you are a troll or not! Furthermore, the code comments indicate that if you trip this test, slashcode thinks you are a "luser". Code like this makes it pretty clear that it takes one to know one, Rob!

As someone who as actually seen Rob Malda use the phrase "it won't scale" to dismiss questions about why parts of the moderation system weren't done in a more equitable fshion, I'd like to take this opportunity to laugh until I give myself a hernia.

Anyone who has studied information theory knows that the redundancy of english is estimated at about 50%. This value is fairly key in what we are seeing here, it determines a fair estimate of how effective compression of english text can be before we start to lose information. Taco's estimates were based, in his words, on "...testing out several paragraphs of text...". Doesn't sound like a particularly large sample group. What's more, it's indicative of poor software engineering practice. As is the recent bout of outages.

A few final criticisms. Firstly, there are far better, less memory intensive, and above all, less stupid methods of performing textual analysis than checking it's compression ratio. If Taco had any idea about computer science, he might have investigated a few before making a fool of himself in public like this. It's pretty clear that he's getting more and more frustrated with the situation on slashdot, and doesn't realise that if he ruled with an even hand, rather than a bitchslapping script and an army of trained thought police, the problems would not be so grave.

Secondly, I thought of a much more effective method of eliminating asci art posts, and it will never cause problems for genuine posters. What's more, it's extremely compact and doesn't even require regexps. I won't reveal it here, as I am not willing to assist in a reign of terror that I find to be reprehensible.

As further evidence of the lengths Malda and Co. may be willing to go to, you can find a commented out section that enables the deletion of posts and their descendant threads. We have no reason to believe that this will not be employed on slashdot.

Editorial notes: I don't use Perl and this is really the first time I've examined it closely. It's pretty much convinced me that I'm not missing much. I use real languages such as C and C++ and occasionaly asm to do most of my work, and I, along with 95% of the enterprise world, find Java to be the best solution for web programming. For most scripting tasks, shell script suffices. For more complicated scripting tasks, Python provides a more sensibly designed scripting environment. Additionally, as if to provide further evidence of Malda's incompetence as a programmer, I've hit the junk character post every single time I've previewed this comment, and am now forced to resort to edit it. Regretfully, I have been forced to replace the Perl fragments I was using with hyperlinks. Very unsatisfactory.