Slashdot Mirror
Special Interview: Rob Malda and Jeff Bates
The Andover.net IPO quiet period is finally over. A lot of you have had questions about Slashdot; what's happening, what's going to happen, and so on, that we weren't allowed to answer. Now those questions can be answered, and no one can answer them better than CmdrTaco and Hemos. They're already starting getting stacked up with interview requests from other media, but we decided that you, the loyal Slashdot readers, deserved first crack at them. Submitted questions will be selected by moderators and the usual hangers-on and will be submitted Wednesday afternoon EST. Answers will appear Thursday. (Friday is reserved for Steve Wozniak, who unquestionably deserves a day all to himself!)
Slashdot.org Purchase Agreement from the SEC filings:
;)
BTW - This is all public information.
The total consideration that will be paid is valued at $8.5 million and the maximum contingent consideration payable is $3.5 million. All consideration has been or will be paid to BlockStackers, Inc.
Under the terms of the Asset Purchase Agreement between BlockStackers, Inc. and Andover.Net, dated as of June 18, 1999, Andover.Net purchased those assets of BlockStackers relating to the Slashdot.org web site for $1.5 million in cash paid at closing and maximum future cash payments of $3.5 million payable over the next two years contingent on the continued employment of two key employees.
Maximum future stock consideration of $7.0 million is payable over a period of two years following this offering. For the purposes of these issuances, the number of shares of common stock to be issued is determined using an assumed initial public offering price of $16.50 per share.
In June 1999, Andover.net acquired substantially all of the assets and assumed certain liabilities relating to the Slashdot.org web site from BlockStackers, Inc. Slashdot.org is the largest online community for Linux/Open Source developers providing news, commentary, information and reviews.
The amount of stock consideration that is contingent on the achievement of performance milestones relating to traffic on the Slashdot.org web site and the continued employment of the key employees of Slashdot.org will be recognized upon the achievement of these milestones.
EMPLOYMENT AGREEMENTS
Robert Malda In connection with its acquisition of Slashdot.org, Andover.Net entered into an employment agreement with Robert Malda, a director of Andover.Net, on June 28, 1999, for a term of three years.
Mr. Malda is entitled to customary employee benefits.
Under the terms of the employment agreement, Mr. Malda has agreed that during the term of the agreement he will not participate in the management of any entity which is in competition with Andover.Net.
There is even more detail available and I have no intention of spotlighting Rob, so I'll leave some of the digging to you readers!
> "more adults" ?
> Can't think of anthing to say, but screw you.
> Age doesn't change the quality (whether high or
> low) of my posts.
No one said age did. "Adult" has nothing to do with age. Never has, really. A 30 year old can be childish and a 12 year old can offer mature insight.
Would you prefer the term "Mature Individuals" instead of "Adults"?
jeremy f wrote:
.com, .org and .net domains. A nonprofit organization can have a .com domain just as lawfully as a company can have an .org domain.
Legally, this place needs to change it's domain to slashdot.com -- there's money going into Rob & Jeff's pockets, guaranteed.
Legally, there's no difference between
The difference is a matter of convention, not law. It's reasonable for slashdot to not follow convention because:
* People are used to the current DNS name
* There is no pressing reason to switch
* The slashdot.com domain is owned by someone else (A Chris Richardson, in California).
----
----
Open mind, insert foot.
This I like! :)
(alan == user id 347)
Something for Rob:
Dude, I'm still sorry about the ketchup in the box thing, I swear it wasn't my idea!
As for a question, I'm wondering what you guys see as the next BIG things to watch for as far as software, technologies, and people. Anything that you guys (who see most of this stuff come in) feel will hit it big in the next bit?
The problem is, of course, what to do about the problem. Slashdot could revert to an unscored setup, but then the signal to noise ratio would be unbearable.
I've been advocating the implementation of "super moderators" for a while now -- a small group of hand-picked moderators who would act kind of like the Supreme Court of moderation. They could do things like yank Natelie Portman or "line noise" posts, assign points to posts at will, etc. You'd have to find the right people -- people who are both extremely good at handling power and who can step back and make "good" calls about unpopular points of view. It would also have to be closely supervised and reviewed, but I think it'd work.
----
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
http://www.andover.net/employment.html
I agree with you about the SlashDot software, but I don't think it's the whole story. My guess is if I had the SlashDot software (current version, not some old nasty thing) and put up a site it would not get the same response. Why? 'Cuz I'm an old codger and not likely to create a similar community. However, any entity that already HAS a community could make good use of it. I've been curious why the newest source is never posted, but the title reads "SlashDot - News for Nerds" not "SlashDot - News for the FSF". I don't recall ever reading Malda's feelings about open source for everything, but I think the source for SlashDot is the one saleable resource Andover has. They could easily sell it to ZDNET for instance; their "TalkBack" story comment feature is awful. Now, what happens if they do that? The zealots will get ugly, that's for sure. So they're in a weird place. I think this is one of the better cases to watch for the collision of Open Source and marketplace. If you're CmdTaco and company, does it make you happier to toe the line with the open source religion or to see your baby turned into a widely-used standard for discussion groups, each paying a nice licensing fee? My own position is that open source is great for the OS because it allows IBM and everybody to drop their own proprietary versions of Unix without losing face, but for apps like SlashDot the creators deserve fair market price, and they won't get it if they give it away.
The revolution will NOT be televised.
--
Code not created for public consumption often contains...ahhh..."commentary on the state of the computer industry in an informal, casual, and often rude manner."
;-)
Assuming that you're not the paragon of Mature and Uberprofessional Coding Practices, I'm sure you have more than a few sections of rather...blistering observations. Seeing as how this is News for Nerds, evil Perl most assuredly counts as Stuff That Matters. I'd like to see some segments of code before they were "Sanitized for Our Protection".
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
Some (if not many) of the problems I have seen (or heard others gripe about) concerning Slashdot recently have their origin in lack of resources. Do you have any plans to add more people: newsgathers, moderator managers, link checkers, etc? In other words, the equivalent of the publishing world's assistant editor(s)?
Any thought given to having a few full-time moderators? Just another take on the editor issue, really.
If no, is part of the concern libel/liability if you do add more editorial supervision to the content?
sPh
CmdrTaco and Hemos,
If you could change 1 or 2 things about what you have done with slashdot.org, what whould you change, and why?
Are you accepting volunteers yet???
Sorry, not anymore. I accepted one beautiful volunteer, and now she's positively reluctant to even let me interview additional applicants! Go figure.. *g*
Not only is this an idea I've been hunkering over for a while, but I think it's one of the only ideas that will keep Slashdot on top. Let's face it, Slashdot has taken more criticism of late (well, over the past 12 months?) over lack of good content and crappy replies (to which moderation has, for the most part, helped to control). By moderating the incoming news stories, not only could you filter out the bogus stuff, but, by moderation, increase the number of stories relevant to the Slashdot readership.
Some might claim that Slashdot will then be in the control of the Moderators (of which I participate, if given the chance.) However, I argue that it would give Slashdot readers (of which I am an avid one) more control over what stories they see. Of course, the Slashdot crew would and should have ultimate control of what gets posted, but at least we'd have an opportunity to tell the crew, "Hey, this story is lame. It's not geek stuff. It's not news for nerds and it certainly doesn't matter."
This is a very valid criticism. It could be argued that Slashdot *is* the Slashdot crew. Yes, we the readers are very important, but without anything to read or comment on, of what value is this site? So, does Andover have insurance?
Aside from the 1.5 mil the "two key employees" of slashdot.org got for the sellout, I'm wondering about that Intangable assets thing. Is the source code "Intangable Assets"? And when andover.net doesn't make money and cuts people out(as they can), do they keep the code? If I'm reading this right, they can. Can you two clairify this?
The idea is, if those with mod points want to view an article at 0 or higher, they would have to change it manually. This would assist moderators who browse at higher levels and would probably help balance out positive moderation somewhat. Since you mention it in your moderator guidelines, I figure it would be appropriate to put it in the code. How about it?
(Creeps off to run his home page through weblint...)
Why would the code need to be cleaned up? It looks good in lynx and netscape, which is surely a good enough practical acid test.
"just because it looks good on the surface"?! But the surface is all there is to a web page! HTML is a mark-up language; it is supposed to present page content, and that's all. If it does that well -- and /. does look well in any browser I've tried -- then it works. And you can't compare generated HTML code to, say, C code: issues of maintainability don't arise, for example. I don't see what you're getting so worked up about. Does /. work, or doesn't it? What are the practical effects of the generated code not always conforming to the spec? I like /., and I find it neither sloppy, nor incompetent, nor unprofessional. Your attitude seems extreme, compared to what you're actually saying. I should say that if you were criticising the perl code, that would be different.
Well, "org" is NOT only for nonprofits... but I agree that "com" is a more appropriate TLD for Slashdot at this point.
:)
Hey, if sunsite can change, I think we'll survive a Slashdot move, as well.
----
It would be interesting to see the results of others meta moderating my moderations; hopefully all comments ("2 fairs and 3 unfairs"), but at least the aggregate stats. Certainly NOT to include who did the meta moderating to me :-)
--
Infuriate left and right
I find that showing comments highest score first improves the S/N ration dramatically. I only see the grits posts when there are few comments, and it is easy enough to ignore them.
It's gotten to the point that I can actually rley on useful comments and get info from them.
--
Infuriate left and right
and speaking of that - what is the license and ownership of the code like since andover has gotten involved?
Bah, use Emacs and the latest GNUS (gnus?), it has an interface that makes slashdot articles look like a news group, etc etc..
I haven't posted back from it yet, but it *looks* cool :), and it's great for reading articles. (Gnus scoring on top of slashdot scoring... :)
:) Pack the bowie knife and listen up, it's in the Latest release of GNUs (5.8.2 I believe).
Errr, I'd check but at the moment, the gnus homepage appears to be replaced with a list of RFC's...
The slash-help mailing list. Home of the embittered would-be open-source slash contributors.
"Moderation is good, in theory."
-Larry Wall
There is no K5 cabal.
I am not the real rusty.
I know you're both nominally involved with Blockstackers and the Everything project. My question is, to what extent? Are you funding this, or letting your more involved roommates slide on the rent, or are you actively involved in the design, testing, and coding?
--
how to invest, a novice's guide
I doubt that very much. A month would get you something more or less working but not really much more than a prototype. I'd estimate it at about three months including testing and debugging, possibly more than that to get it almost 100% right.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
I agree though that its going to be difficult to make money out of the traffic. Traditional per-click banner advertising fees aren't much use, it requires massive volumes. I know the more serious financial web businesses are moving away from that model altogether, in favour of partnerships of various kinds involving referral fees and commissions. However, it's hard to imagine what could generate significant levels of income from a geek demographic. You can only buy so many toys etc. And most of us surely buy our hardware and software from sources we've sought out ourselves rather than on impulse after clicking on an ad.
Personally, I rarely pay any attention to banner ads at all, and the only way for a hardware or software seller to get *my* business is to be indexed effectively in my search engine of choice (at present that's google).
Some people commenting on this list have implied that Andover had difficulty getting the IPO because they still don't have the revenue to justify the share price they want. How can this be? Surely they had a *plan* in mind when they bought Slashdot? Was their plan simply to jump on the bandwagon and hope that someone else would figure it all out later?
I wounder how many internet companies filing for IPO's have done so in the knowledge that their business model was a pipe dream, and with the intention of using the capital thus raised to build a *real* business?
It's kind of reminiscent of the old story about the soup stone.
The upshot of all this has to be that unless businesses like Andover manage to find a completely new revenue model *very soon* that no-one's even thought of yet, their investors will surely wake up and realise that their trendy internet stocks have no underlying value.
Rob and Hemos may well find that they're running Slashdot as a hobby again before the year is out; if Andover owes them money they should try to get hold of it while they still can. Though they're probably going to get worthless stock options instead, that seems to be the way these things work. Everybody's paying each other in promises these days.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
A few weeks ago there was some MS-Led agitation for an MS friendly section on slashdot, which to those of us who've been hanging out here since the early days sounds akin to Satanists demanding a chapel for ritual human sacrifice in the Vatican. All Microsoft financed astroturfing aside, has corporate ownership increased pressures for this kind of thing, or made more acute the temptation to chase the profits mass markets unpopular or antithetical to the open source movement might offer? If so, what specific strategies do you employ to minimize its impact and keep slashdot true to its open source roots?
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Let me get this straight:
Your posts were meant to be mindlessly inane all along, just to prove how flawed the moderation is?
In that case, good job, man.
Silly me thought that you were under the impression that your posts really were insightful.
Whatever you say... It's just against the whole GPL, is all... To mandate anything beyond returning the code to the community. And rob says it's near the GPL with that one exception, and if you don't agree, send him money... that's not GPL. And nor is the untimeliness of his updates...
and not all kernel contributors get their due credit. and there's no clause saying if i host a site using linux, that i have to mention the fact, or anything... i think if you beleive what you're saying, you're letting rob set a double standard for himself.
SO many people here whine when a company opens it's source but creates a new almost opensource license... Corel linux is GPLed, but that didn't stop people from saying they were violating it when they didn't release the source to their beta immediately and for everyone.
I can give example after example about this, if you desire... Consider Rob payed for his time on slash... in case you didn't notice he's worth at least a few million dollars now... and if that's not enough for him, well, he shouldn't have even mentioned the GPL in his licensing page... Because it's no where near it.
Isn't it about time the moderation abuses and "first posters" are addressed?
Funny... "First post"ing can be considered an abuse of the posting system. Moderation is the answer to that. I read at threshold 1, and never see that stuff.
Widespread moderation led to abuses, and thus meta-moderation was born. Enough meta-moderation, and an abusive moderator will lose enough karma to be unable to moderate anymore.
Are you suggesting that these systems (moderation and meta-moderation) are totally ineffective? Or are their specific weaknesses you see in them, for which you want fixes?
Hi, OK, I still like Slashdot, still waste lotsa time on it, still learn from it. So you've been doing a great job for a long time.
I usually set my comment level at 3, mostly for time reasons (I don't usually want to spend time reading more than 10-20 comments). One thing I don't like at that level is a kind of uniformity of tone and opinion. I like to read wildly opposing opinions: in combination they're often more useful, not to mention more stimulating, than endless "slashdotically correct" prose.
So here's my idea to fix that, based on the Amazon.com feature: "people who purchased this book also purchased...", which I often find useful.
Everybody can moderate, though, like today, only selected people's moderation gets used for the "general" slashdot comment scores. Now that you get everybody's opinion on various comments, you can determine groups of similarly minded moderators (you can also use meta-moderation input for this). You could then propose a view of slashdot moderated by people who think like me, or rather, who think about thinking like me. There'd always be the option to return to the general mass-view, of course.
This would encourage high-quality moderation and possibly return us to the more personal, small-scale slashdot experience we use to have. Moderation would be more spontaneous, selfish, and less ponderous. Groups might evolve for the politically correct, the humor-seekers, the crude, those who value originality, facts, who knows what? Possibly these self-generating "communities", once identified, could be very valuable, and maybe make you even more money, but I'm sure you'd see that as a side-effect of a neat idea.
k a i
I personally don't think much can be done at all, and not much should be done. Slashdot is not a medium suitable for discussions, there are more apropriate forums for that, such as News and mailing lists.
Slash uses a web-based front end for all that jazz, it's located at http://yoursite.tld/admin.pl
Password protected, and users have access levels, so some can do everything (100000 access level or something) while others can do almost nothing (any access level >1 IIRC).
The 100000 level allows them to add sections, links, stories, modify posted stories, etc. It all uses mysql, through the DBI perl module.
I tried to get it working decently, but to no avail. The code is messy, but it works. I, too, am waiting for a 0.4 release, just to play around.
PHPSlash is not bad at all, but it's very alpha (beta?) and isn't really very functional. There are other, similar web-based alternatives, but most don't have the versatility of slash.
slash code
-ed fisher
this
Unfortunately, /. is a business (and has been for longer than Andover acquired them). In a business, you have one goal: make the cash register ring. If there's no money coming into Slashdot (through advertising), there is no Slashdot. They need money to run the thing. If you want access to just the content, write some perl scripts that dump the comments into your reader of choice. It shouldn't be too hard. The rest of us will stick with a method that may not be convenient for YOU but is fine for US and also is an adequate balance of convenience and utility.
-Chris
Or, an even quicker fix that would take all of 2 seconds...People who have the +1 bonus must check a box if they want a +1 bonus. Right now, you must check a box if you DON'T want the +1 bonus. I think this is the wrong way to look at it. Make everyone's default score be 1, but those w/ enough karma can check "give me +1 bonus" if they think their post is "good enough" to get that. This way you are WILLFULLY giving yourself a +1 bonus, and can't say "Whoops! I didn't mean to post at default 2, I was in a hurry".
To the person asking if giving yourself a +1 gives you +1 karma points, no it does not (thankfully).
people that post at a default of 2 are not necessarily the people who post insightful and interesting posts (e.g. slashdot-terminal) but instead could be people who whored their way to 25 Karma
;).
I emailed Rob on this very issue a while back and his response was that if those posting on defult 2 aren't insightful, etc, then the moderators should moderate them "-1 Overrated". The problem is that moderators do not do this often enough. But the fact remains that they shouldn't have to. Users have the option to not give themselves a +1 bonus and normally just opt to get a default score of 2, because people want to be "heard". Since a lot of people browse at threshold 2, this guarentees their comment will be seen.
These two problems need to be corrected (I admit, I'm not helping that matter with this post) by us, not CmdrTaco or Hemos. However, since this seems unlikely given the amount this site has grown since I started reading, I'd just like to see an option to only view posts that have been moderated up, and nothing else. Right now, when I read at threshold 2, 80% of the posts are from people who have a default of 2. So I have to still weed through posts to read those people have deemed "interresting" or "insightful", etc. By only showing posts that have been moderated up, I can see only what I want, and even view AC posts that got moderated up to 1, but that I would normally miss browsing at 2. This option shouldn't have to be made because we should be able to control ourselves, but given the way things have been going, I think it's a quick solution that could solve a few of these issues (just a few tough
For example, you have a rather weak sounding disclaimer and there is a ton of editorial content in the messages that are posted. Yahoo has been involved in several cases where companies have felt wronged by anonymous posting. Do you worry that somebody could try to sue? Have you taken measures to help track down posters, even ACs, in the event that somebody wants to track down a poster of negative comments? I know several sites that do IP tracking and some cookie stuff to try and keep track of the anonymous people. You guys have had a strong record for defending anonymity and making changes to try and keep anonymous posting viable, has Andover or wealth changed any of that? You're a much bigger target now, has that changed anything? (I'm not trying to learn ways to circumvent things or anything, I'm just curious if you guys are really totally free to operate as normal, if you are then I will be the first to say that you may have the greatest job on the planet.) If Bolomag Corp. (Big Oranization with Lots Of Money And Guns) wants to track down that AC that said their products were unsafe and dropped the law suit word, would you help them? What if it was believed to be a Bolomag employee? I think this consists of one question.
Secondly, I view slashdot and a pretty cutting edge weblog/pseudo-portal. It has really defined the medium to me. I've watched over the years as slashdot has gone from a nerd news index (meta-news?) that essentially pointed to news articles that were about developments that nerds would find interesting in to more content development with the Katz articles, book reviews, and features and interviews and then customizable content with the slashboxes and the custom page creation. Slashdot is becoming a media. Is there any pressure to direct that? Alternatives to the weblog (irc.slashdot.org?) haven't really surfaced but do you think that there will be pressure to move slashdot to the "next thing" when it does? Andover has a hot commodity and they clearly wouldn't want it to lose its edge anymore than they would want to ruin it by making it corporate.
Then third, how does the editorial process work? From the viewer's prespective, slashdot seems to be fresh, interesting, prograssive and it is continually being adjusted and tweaked. Does someone have ultimate say over what is done? Is it a democracy? Have there been any big rows? Is there a policy or plan for when there is desire to do something that isn't "slashdot?"
This is my signature. There are many signatures like it but this one is mine..
I'm afraid I can't agree that the discussion content improving over time, I wouldn't make any claims for having read slashdot since day one whenever that was, but I have been reading for a long time and I'm stating my opinion here. I don't expect it to coincide with everyones. I certainly am not moaning.
I agree with you that moderation has solved certain problems but I feel it has created others. I have certainly seen examples of posts moderated severely by moderators who seem to not have understood the posters point or merely disagreed with its content. The "anyone praising Microsoft is a troll" syndrome.
I don't believe there is any perfect solution to any of these issues, but there is always room for improvement, and as we have been using the current solution for a while now I merely wished to know what the slashdot guys felt about the current posting standards, the moderation system and any plans to modify it further, given the much higher levels of traffic the site now attracts.
I'm sorry that my original post seems to have given you so much offence.
-- Oh Well
The recent addition of the special 'sections'(YRO, Ask Slashdot, Apache, etc.), combined with the increasingly custimizable moderation system, raises an interesting question: how diverse can Slashdot become? Rather than just a forum for the Linux/Open Source community, /. seems to be becoming more and more a general geek portal. Is this desirable? Is it something you're deliberately working towards? How far would you want the shift to go?
One notable diference between Slashdot and most of the comparable 'community news' sites out there is the absence of any 'standing forums'--ongoing discussions not pegged to any specific news story. Is this something y'all decided against having, or just haven't gotten around to implementing yet?
Had I any moderation points, they would all go to this post.
My observation has been that as the net gets bigger, the more chaff that must be sorted through to get to the wheat. It happened to Usenet, it'll happen here - if left unchecked.
What sort of ideas do you have to stop this? (I think the moderation is a good idea, but, as already shown, at some critical mass, it too is overwhelmed.)
Have you considered having a fee-for-service area on the site? As much as I hate this solution, increasing the cost of entry to forums like this tends to be a good filter - in that not many people want to pay to write about Natalie Portman's petrified first-posting beowulf ASCII cluster. And I would be willing to enter such an area, provided the costs of entry aren't phenomenal.
Linux - Because Mommy taught me to Share.
Did andover.net pay Unisys to use GIFs on slashdot.org and its other sites? And, if so, why is a leading open source news site giving direct financial support to software patents?
-- Real free software sites don't use GIFs.
and how bout opening the slashdot input queue ? So everyone can at least read the stories that dont make the front page.
1) Will slashdot readers that have accounts - be receiving a letter in their mail informing them about the IPO and how it is going to effect them, and will the letter offer them the same options as the letter RedHat sent out?
/.'s position as a member of the press/ or effect its standing as an open source/ editorial site?
2) Will user data stay the same?
3) Will moderation change in any way, shape or form?
4) What restrictions do you business guys have?
5) Will Slash 0.4 be released?
6) Will the posting ability of AC change?
7) How well is Meta-Moderation working?
8) Will this change
Is it progress if a cannibal uses a fork?
As it stands, the current Slashdot interface is cluttered and somewhat unintuitive. What are your plans for redesigning Slashdot? A sans-serif font, better distinction between comments, and a revamp of color schemes for Slashdot Sections might be the first steps toward a more aesthetically-pleasing site.
Would you consider user-submitted layouts, or perhaps even implementing a 'theme' engine?
--
Sam
It seems like the quality of discussion on /. is going downhill very fast. The ACs are working very hard to disrupt threads with NATALIE/NAKED/COMMIE/GRITS posts. What plans do you have (if any) for bringing more adults into the slashdot fold and to try and make for a more inteligent discussion.
War is necrophilia.
AC: You overlooked something I wrote:
/. has a day, those advertisers are paying slash every time their banner is displayed, not when someone follows the link. However Jeff & Rob own stock in Andover, which owns slashdot. Therefore, Jeff & Rob are making money from their own company, money which is by very little doubt going into their own pockets, therefore they are turning a profit.
/. is selling a product. Their price? Free. Are they making money? Yes.
;)
"There's money going back into Jeff & Rob's pockets, guaranteed"
What happens when your nonprofit org starts making enough money that you start to take some of that home in profit? Is it no longer a nonprofit org?
Yes, I know the costs in running a website, even a major one such as slashdot. I also know how much revenues can be brought in by banner ads (not even necessary for banner clicks -- with the # of pageviews
I could be wrong on this one, because IANAIRS Agent, however aren't there tax exemptions for nonprofit orgs?
Like it or not --
I'd love to get ahold of some andover financial statements and find out just how MUCH money they're making, but there's a little something called "the law" and "privacy" getting in my way
Somebody suggested that submissions waiting to be looked at by the Slashdot gods, should be put in a queue which is accessible to Slashdotters. Slashdotters would them vote up those headlines they think are newsworthy and should make it to the front page.
HOWEVER, I think that this solution will just result in people rushing over to the headline queue and disregarding the front page because it will inevitably always have older news.
I suggest, instead, that articles are rated and able to be filtered out, like comments. The Slashdot gods can post anything reasonably sane, perhaps giving it an initial "confidence" rating. Then, subsequent viewers of the article can rate it up or down, of other viewers can set their masks so, for example, they only see articles that are rated X or better.
The drawback to this scheme is that the viewers who see the articles raw an uncut have the burden of rating up low articles (perhaps 'new' articles can have an initial value which degrades over time, giving people with high masks a chance to see and rate them?). This could be made easier by putting two small radio button either in the header or title of an article, or at the bottom, one labeled + one labeled - (for plus one or minus one). This would take up very little space and allow people to rate an article without much hassle:
*+ *- [rate]
Jazilla.org - the Java Mozilla
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Good idea! With enough eyeballs, all hoaxes and fake news are shallow!
Jazilla.org - the Java Mozilla
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Trolling has been increasing quite a bit as of late. Is there any plan to increase moderator points, or perhaps give the 5 points + an additional few points that can only be used to beat down the trollers?
Blessed are the pessimists, for they have made backups.
Because there ARE other browsers in the world.. I use Opera when I have to use 95, and sometimes the tables come out hugely indented, or other wierdness crops up.
Why should we follow the spec when the crap we got works in the most common place? Sounds an aweful like the "this webpage only works on win 95" type things everyone has been up in arms about..
Blessed are the pessimists, for they have made backups.
Will frequent Slashdot contributors/commenters/moderators be eligible to get in at the IPO price?
-
Now that you have money to burn, will there be a slasdot world tour?
//rdj
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
That's exactly right. Your Karma is the sum of the moderations done on you, no matter what score you start at. (Well, meta-moderation now plays a part in your Karma as well, but most of it is moderation.)
--
Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
I've been thinking about the troll problem for a bit and think I may have come up with a workable plan. What does everyone think about this:
/., so I say either make a -2 for Trolls score, or let it be a browsing option (view Trolls or not).
Why not seperate troll moderation from normal moderation completely? After all, trolls are generally very obvious to spot, and nearly everyone can agree on what is and isn't a troll, so it seems silly to require someone to waste moderator points that could be spent expressing an interesting opinion on what should be routine maintenance.
So, my proposal would be to let all (logged in, I suppose) users moderate trolls. I'm thinking just stick a little checkbox marked "Troll" on every comment. To prevent abuses, and people trying to use it to get rid of a comment which is really just off-topic or redundant or "wrong", just require that either a certain percentage of the people who view the comment check "Troll" before it gets marked Troll (I'd say around 50%, although we'd probably need trial and error to figure it out), as well as, say, at least 10 Troll votes, so it doesn't get wiped off by a couple of early votes.
If a comment does get a 50% Troll rating, then you can bet it deserves it, and even people who browse -1 won't want to see it. Still, I'm a strong believer that no one should get censored off
The only issue I can come up with against this is that I take a big memory hit (IE 5) whenever I have moderator status, from all the drop-down lists; I'm not sure if a checkbox on every comment would hurt as much, but it's something to think about.
So...what does everyone think?
Like many others, I think that too many people have too much karma. I routinely see posts that don't deserve to be a 2 but are because the poster has a high enough karma to get the +1 automatically (like me???). Have you give thought to any system to reduce the karma inflation (having karma "decay") or to reduce the abuse of the high karma +1 (perhaps a limited number of +1 points per time period, so people will think about whether this post needs to be +1).
Note: I'm posting this at +1 so that others who do as I do and read at 2 will see it and hopefully comment upon it.
www.eFax.com are spammers
So if I go to the beach in Holland, MI... generally I go to South Haven (but ever so rarely now), would I see any members of the Geek Compound?
:)
Now that you guys are going to be making money from your Perl scripts, would you say that is why you've been stalling producing the code? I mean, in the 1.2 years it has been since you last released the Slash code, it would've been trivial for you to change the licence to a non-GPL one, and thus keep your revinue stream strong for the near future.
If you've just been delaying because you're busy, it's understandable, but why don't you tar up the code & post, as a show of good faith to the community. I, for one, would certainly like to see the v0.4 code soon.
---
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
The Andover.net IPO quiet period is finally over I feel that I can finally start replying to the question asked of me by many strangers "Who is your daddy?"
I now find myself having trouble choosing between CmdrTaco and Hemos.
Can you shed any light on how to make this decision?
Will Slashdot remain a mainly text based media? Or will projects like Slashdot Radio possibly spawn other experiments like perhaps:
The Slashdot Show (video)
In perhaps a haphazard newsmagazine show like Slashdot Radio, where interviews from the site could be done in an audio or video format? With even fluffy little pieces like "A tour of RMS's home office!" and such. You could even do "Wallpapers of the Open Source and Famous."
While I'm joking about some of the stuff the main question stands: Will Slashdot try new experiments to see if it can also exist in other forms of media as well as the website?
Subscriptions to /. would be something that would force me to give up my account, and only post as an AC, forever, rather than be stuck with a "second-class" account with less privileges than the subscribers.
/. ever introduce classes of membership, I'll be destined for the lower ranks pretty much automatically.
I'm a student; I don't live in the US; I don't have a check book or a credit card account; *I don't have the money*!. These are all things that make it pretty damn certain that should
/. has always been free, and this has been a big drawing card. If you're really that desperate for money, ask for donations, I'm sure that those who can afford it will give generously. But no subscriptions.
First: Have you ever considered a live episode of Geeks in Space? How about doing a live session at LWE?
Second: How bad was the hangover New Years day?
.sig: Now legally binding!
Sloppy HTML coding hurts us all in a number of ways.
It makes browsers bigger, more complicated and buggy trying to deal with the non-grammatical crud out there that passes for HTML. This further goes on to make the cost of entry into the browser market very high.
I remember well when I had a program which occasionally generated BAD HTML (missing ) and my users immediately switched to MS IE because it included an implicit before subsequent tags or EOF. People didn't even report it to me, the user's had just shared the knowledge that IE worked better and I inadvertently sold a group on the merits of IE vs. Netscape. As a Netscape user, I was mortified and I immediately ran and killed the bug.
I've written programs to read, parse and interpret Web Pages. Bad HTML makes this problematic.
Careless, expedient engineering almost always has a price. Sometimes it's not obvious at first look, but under the surface, there's always a price. If nothing else, it's in forwarding the attitude that "good enough to pass" is good.
-Jordan Henderson
Hey, if sunsite can change, I think we'll survive a Slashdot move, as well. :)
If they do change to slashdot.com theres no reason to give up slashdot.org to do it. Even though sunsite changed to metalab, it's still accessible at the sunsite address. My feeling, really, is that Slashdot belongs in both domains.
numb
1. chaorganize
/. participants, (in the form of non-transferable right of participation.)
://user1.slashdot.com/re/GPLvBSD (save us time, let us avoid repetition and share *distilled* conclusion/opinions)
/. community currency, fully fungible with any other, like saxas, but open source, (secure)
propagate chaordic organization.. distribute equitable ownership to *all*
2. open source
practice the preach, perhaps with a modified BSD/GPL requesting (requiring?) attribution, link.
3. decentralize
a. grant users subdomains within slashdot.com allowing us to discuss [rejected] topics, and distill signal from noise within [accepted] topics. (open our data to user recombination, including alternative graphic "skin" overlays.)
b. insert topic directories allowing users to distill and share opinions on daily topics, ie: GPLvBSD, patents, namespace/trademarks, privacy/accountability, etc. ie: http
c. reboot karma to transcend groupthink
d. invite languages other than the english
4. monetize
a. find ways to fairly direct revenue streams to all participants who contribute value to slashdot.com
b. let us openly measure logs to learn whose reputations* gather whose *attention*
c. create a
d. have your suits propose licensing guidelines allowing paid (fairly shared) republishing of user commentary in other channels
comments?
I for one am an avid slashdot fan. So much so that I in times past tried to get most of the slashdot comments on paper at say oh 4 pt. Even with this method it started to become rather incomvienent to get everything in that manner. I then started to use Xemacs to read text output generated by the various browser programs out there (Netscape, IE, and lynx) Netscape did the best job by properly indenting the text for new comments to the thread in nested mode. However IE deviated even further from this by doing this for a while asnd then further in the thread deciding to just indent the subject of the comment thereby creating a nasty hard-to-figure-out nesting scheme. Lynx will plain to render anything even in nested mode and just prints the data almost like flat or plain mode. Anything that actually helps get this working is good.
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
Maybe something like if you post with the +1 bonus, and get moderated down, you lose double the Karma, on the theory that you should be more careful about what you post when you are using the bonus (I use my bonus about half the time). Or perhaps getting two moderations down on something posted with +1 will drop you back to 24 points so you can't use it.
--kevin
Have you found that working for a big company is better or worse that working for yourself. Do you miss being the sole points of contact or do you like having other people share responsibility for system administration, network admin, etc.
Does working for Andover give you more free time? If so, what will you do with it?
That which does not kill me only makes me whinier
Second, did it ever occur to you to stop pointing fingers at the person, and instead listen to him as he explains the problem? Don't kill the messenger! The moderation system is horribly flawed. I think I proved that several times over. Hating me accomplishes nothing (and yes, you're obviously irate about my karma like about 50 other people on /.).
How do I indicate that I hate you or are irate about your Karma?
The only benefit of high Karma is posting at a default of 2 which I already have. Since I don't know how much Karma you have, neither do you know how much I have, what would be the point of Karma envy?
I merely used as an example to prove my point, which is that karma whoring (is this the term that makes you think I don't like you) makes it easy to reach 25 Karma. Given the current moderation system, people that post at a default of 2 are not necessarily the people who post insightful and interesting posts (e.g. slashdot-terminal) but instead could be people who whored their way to 25 Karma (which even you must admit isn't that hard) and now post drivel which is stamped with pseudo-legitimacy because is posted at a default of 2. Increasing the level of Karma needed for a default of 2 would reduce the number of karma whores/dogma spewers who make it to a default of 2. Of course the moderation system could also be overhauled to fix this problem.
PS: Still don't understand why you'd think I have Karma envy, it's not like slashdot Karma gets you laid, puts money in your pocket or makes one better at Quake. So why would I care what your Karma is?
*shaking head in a puzzled manner*
PPS: Notice you don't use your default 2 posting priveleges...why is that?
First,
Dr. Taco, I would just like to say that I think you are doing a phenomenal job running slashdot. I check it between 4-15 times a day (as any geek should) and find that there has almost always been an update. I find the articles truely fascinating, and the current trend to have more stories with bodies (err..) excellent. Also, the interviews are incredible. Finally, geeks in space is my new fave radio show. You guys should do a morning edition one day! Also, I find that reading people's comments is wonderful, however there is so much crap out there, and almost all of it comes from Anonymous Cowards. SO my first real question is:
Would you ever consider not allowing Anonymous Cowards to post? Or atleast forcing people to register if they want to post anonymously? THis would cut down on alot of the garbage comments as well as forcing people to think themselves through.
Also, I would love (!!LOVE!!) it if the current slashdot source were released along with a document explianing the central algorithms used in slashdot as well as a discussion about how the user database is kept, and your personal views on penguins. The second real question is:
Would you ever consider releasing all of source to slashdot as well as a paper explaining how it works?
Also, in my readings of slashdot, I have found that most of the articles are Gee-Whiz type articles, that seem to say: "Look at this!!! Wow!!!," as opposed to the Heres-How-They_Work kind of article. As a representative member of the party of geeks, i personally find the Heres-How-They_Work type articles much more interesting and impressing. So, here comes question number 3:
WOuld you consider posting more Heres-How-They_Work type articles as opposed to the Gee-Whiz type article?
Along these same lines is the question of open discussion forums. I personally find the comments of articles such as: What do you think of Artificial Intelligence? incredible interesting to read. SO whithout further adue, question four:
Would You consider posting more discussion oriented articles, (like this one!)?
From here on in, the geek side of me is going to sleep for a while so the investor part of me can ask a few question about the Andover.net stock. My first question is:
Do you make money in any other way than advertising? About how many people have an Andover.Net site as their home page? About how many registered users are there on SLashdot? How many hits does Slashdot recieve a day?
THank you Dr. Taco and Mr. Hemos for everything. I can't wait to hear (see?) your responses///
-fosh
Since the andover aquisition of Slashdot, How much influence do they have over the comments which are posted to Slashdot....
In comparison to FreshMeat, which seems to be completely impartial to software submissions (they all get a listing) whereas on Slashdot only certain articles are chosen. What process is used to select articles to be posted on Slashdot and how does Andover influence these descisions.
Also, As many others have asked many times (including myself).. When will Slashdot begin to practice what they preach. When will the Slashdot source code become steadily available via CVS or an equiv. type system. Holding back this code, regardless of how sloppy or buggy it is makes Slashdot look like a bunch of hipocrates.
They are a threat to free speech and must be silenced! - Andrea Chen
Fish! LipHo
Is the following possible, if so, why not do it:
Use collaborative filtering to improve the moderation system so that each individual's definition of what makes a "good comment" can be used to filter through other comments.
Further, why not post more stories and allow users to rate each one, thereby creating a list of collaboratively filtered story-preferences for each user and further customizing Slashdot to the individual.
The major complaint that people make about Slashdot is that moderation and coverage is rather groupthinkish. A system implementing collaborative filtering would seem only to bring benefits. Also, if you guys couldn't program it yourselves, I'm sure that the community would contribute (if the current source were opened, etc.).
If you aren't familiar with collaborative filtering, check out Moviecritic.com. Collaborative filtering uses a small set of preferences to make generalizations about likely preferences over a large space of data. It's the perfect technology for a site like slashdot.
mmm
Amazing magic tricks
How did slashdot start out? Before you where getting the thousands of hits per day, what was it like?
How likly do you think the Joe-average would be able to start a web site that could provide enough revenue for cost of life?
Is there ever going to a be a slash movie?
"`Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.'" -THHGTTG
What restrictions do the business people put on you?
Firstly, I assume you're running Apache, and it must be generating logs of some such (like, IP address, time stamps, etc.). Is this information stored, and for how long? (Also assume I am anonymous coward and do not accept cookies). If somebody posted something defaming someone else / some other company and they took Slashdot to court to find out who wrote it, would you actually give up the logs? Do you ever process these logs in any way (yes, I know they must be huge, but so are Amazon's and Yahoo's and they do it ...).
Under whose laws are Slashdot content governed? If the poster is in Australia, is it Oz laws that apply or is it those from somewhere in America?
Has anyone ever tried to sue Slashdot over content? (libel, etc.). What would be your reaction then, and what would be it now, and does Andover have a hand in this?
On a totally different note, here is a suggestion: If an Anonymous Coward actually manages to get moderated up, could their comment then rise up to 2 rather than 1, where it is lost in a barage of pointless digressions? I prefer to surf at 3 nowadays, so I miss all people with karma above 30 who set their default level to 2 and are no better than the ones posting at level 1.
On another note, who took the decision to wipe out the sudden growth of personalised sid=me, and why?
Other folks have written about editorial independence and about the quality of the stories; this is an entirely different question. A related question would be: could you perhaps identify more clearly which items are news, which are columns, which are editorials, and which are fluff? Traditional (i.e., "dead") media is adept at giving this kind of context to their stories, and it would be most helpful to your readers.
It sounds like becomming a physician is what Hemos has always and still always wants to do, whether you listen to Geeks in Space or read the posts. Sometimes a taste of the real world is all it takes to make you realize changing out of something was a bad idea.
Currently /. generates ad revenue and creates a fuzzy 'brand value'.
/. into a complete geek-focused portal with not just news and trivia but incorporating everything from freemail services and cheesy 'yourname.slashdot.org' web space to a peronsalised geek calendar and movie review service?
Is there a scheme to move to something else? To move to subscriptions for certain features (e.g. making the ability to filter out AC posts or low moderation posts a subscription-only features)
Or maybe to do more commercial tie-ins - such as interviews with Major hardware manufacturers, or QA sessions with corporate sponsorship.
Or to boost the ad revenue by turning
Or, maybe andover.net is just looking to get bought out by one of the media industry's big players like VNU or Disney or ZD or whatever?
-----
Obviously, you guys get a lot of submissions for stories everyday, all day long. You, being the entire Slashdot team, have to wade through all of these to find the ones "most worthy" of getting posted to the main page. I have submitted quite a few stories myself that I was interested in and I'm sure other geeks/nerds would have found them interesting as well, yet they were never posted. Obviously, you cannot post every story submitted, but if I've submitted stories that I found interesting and they were never posted, I have wonder how many other geeks posted stories that I would have been interested in and never had the opportunity to read?
My question: Is there some way we, the readers, could view a larger portion of the submitted stories whether they get posted to the main page or not?
Kind of an overflow buffer, if you will. Obviously, duplicates and nonsense stories referencing "grits" would have to be done away with, but I feel that Slashdot could provide much more information than it currently does. From the reader perspective, more quality content is definitely better and from a business standpoint, more stories equals more valid page hits for Slashdot. We would all benefit.
----------------
"Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds." - Albert Einstein
Co-founder and designer at Music Nearby: http://musicnearby.com
Have you thought of moving to a more enlightened state (pun intended) such as California (things like cheap broadband, and more peers)?
Do you see slashdot staying primarily as it's been in the past (collecting links to news on other sites and having discussions), or are you planning on running with the idea of gathering new material as you have recently with the interviews? In short, do you see slashdot doing more original journalism in the future?
For those of you not familiar with EDGAR, this is the on-line database that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission provides so that investors have access to the legally required filings of companies that have gone public.
I played around with it today, and this is the most effective query that I could compose. You should be able to just click the following link and see all of the documents related to Andover. Some of these documents discuss the how nature of Rob's contract with Andover, the relationship between Andover and Blockstackers, and related subjects.
http://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/sr ch-edgar?ANDOVER+ADJ+NET
--
Dave Aiello
-- Dave Aiello
What is going to be your policy on:
1.(l)User data.
2. Advertisements:
2.1. Are you going to continue to handle advertisements yourself?
2.2. Are you going to allow companies like doubleclick to handle advertising on slashdot?
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
Yes.. I know that you are thinking I probably got the two sites mixed up in the title...
/. and FM very few people actually HEARD of andover at all..
/. to non technical issues and some even more radical posibilities.
Slashdot is, imho, more influential then all the sites Andover owns put together. Untill this linux/Open-source craze came along and Andover.net bought
Andover is now a public company, and as such it holds certain responsabilities to it's shareholders, growth being the most obvious one.
To do this Andover needs to exploite Slashdot's brand, as I see very little other value within Andover's arsenal. The current situation of Andovers stock is a good indication of pressure that might build on you guys to "sell out" in various ways (some of them might actually be good, IMHO) like expanding the focus of
how do you guys see Slashdot and that your small insignificate Andover part collaborating together, through this? what's going to happen? should I buy the stock or not?? (just kidding)
--------------------------------
1) What is the deal with the slash source code? It would pacify a lot of criticism if the current slash code were released, even if it were broken, ugly, and full of syntax errors. I suggested a public CVS setup in another thread, is this something you're looking at?
2) Has the andover.net acquisiton gone as well as you hoped it would, as far as making the site better?
have you ever considered changing the base slash code to something other than straight perl? i'm wondering if you've considered changing to a mod_perl or java servlet world which, with some improvements to the html, would result in a much faster slashdot? i check slashdot multiple times a day on a t1 and still have some speed issues when requesting the site. i would have to believe that something like java servlets would greatly increase the speed of the site.
jesse.
<rant quality="weary">
Is there really any other industry on earth that would put up with sloppy, incompetent, unprofessional workmanship just because it looked good on the surface? I mean, come off it. I like
And it isn't any sort of excuse to claim that the majority of websites (particularly expensive ones) are also produced by sloppy incompetents who wouldn't know what an RFC was if it fell out of a tree on them. This is true. We know it. We can do better. And if we can't do better, what claim do we really have to being techs?
</rant>
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
Seriously -- this place is no longer a nonprofit org. They sell advertisements, they hold contests (with $10,000-$30,000 being the prize range), and they hold stock in the web page itself (okay, so they hold stock in Andover).
Legally, this place needs to change it's domain to slashdot.com -- there's money going into Rob & Jeff's pockets, guaranteed.
I'm curious when/if you plan on releasing a newer version of the slash code? How far behind is the stuff that you've released?
Key to financial independence: Spend less than you earn. Save and invest the difference. Do it for a long time.
will we EVER be able to moderate him down???- ---
----------------------------------------
Please give your mod points to others, Im at the cap. They will appreciate it more
I for one really like to be able to browse comments what are sorted by moderation, largely to get rid of the offtopic stuff, but it's gives a distorted view of what slashdot readers really think.
I think this is a great idea, but it would be very important that no AC's were allowed to comment on the incoming stories and we would have to control ourselves to commenting on them only if they're a hoax or otherwise not /. material.
Then when a story was actually posted the comments on its validity as a story could be removed or available separately. This would also give people some lead time on their comments and allow those dedicated enough to do some real research.
"Share your knowledge. It's a way to achieve immortality." -- Dalai Lama
For instance, oftentimes there will be a delay of as must as two days (as with the Uri Geller story) from the time that I see an article on Linux Today or another news site and when I see it here. I've been around /. for a while now, and this wasn't always the case.
Is this just a case of waiting for a "slow news day", or is it something more insideous like ANDN wanting to maintain some editorial control over /.? For that matter, has ANDN imposed any other constraints that we're not aware of? Are there any circumstances where you'd see yourself having to remove libelous posts or posts which violate SEC rules (read here: stock manipulation)? Or has Andover been a benevolant king which is dedicated to protecting the happy-go-lucky days of Slashdot using its deep pockets to keep your legal butts covered?
----
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
How will this affect the direction of Slashdot? (In other words, will you need to avoid topics which could adversely affect Andover's share price? Will you need to become more "mainstream"? Or will it be more "business as usual"?)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
What new and wonderful reasources will andover bring to slashdot. More Hardware? More employees? More slashdot native news articles/"reporters"?
- Xabbu
- Jimbob
What important changes do you plan on making to the whole discussion thing?
Isn't it about time the moderation abuses and "first posters" are addressed?
Will we ever be able to moderate or score the articles themselves?
The secret of success is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake those, you've got it made. (Marx)
What is the release date for the (latest) Slash source code?
What license will it be released under?
Will it be immediately forked into "public" and "private" versions (i.e., will Slashdot be running the with patches submitted by users)?
If/When patches are rejected/not-applied to the main tree, will an explanation be given (similar to Linux) or will they just be dropped (similar to Slashdot story submissions)?
---
Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
What is the status of the both of you with BlockStackers? Is there a relationship between BlockStackers and Andover.net?
J
to slashdot.com?
(moderators: not meant as flamebait!)
I use Macs for work, Linux for education, and Windows for cardplaying.
I think the moderation system has been improved to a point where, with my threshold set to 2, I don't see anything I don't want to see.
I do think there is one part of Slashdot that is still unfairly biased towards the site operators and their opinions. I'm sure Slashdot gets a few hundred article submissions per day, but we are limited to reading maybe 12-15 articles per day, and those are the ones which the folks in charge are interested in or what they think we are interested in. This is a commonplace system, but I still find fault with it, if the site is truly going to be an "open forum."
Is there any site reorganization in the works, or perhaps an expansion of the moderation system to include the approval and rejection of article submissions?
John
also, please don't take away AC posting, I've posted as an AC for privacy several times and think that everyone should have that right.
" A company can be judged by the size of their lawsuits "
Since most of the technical questions have been asked: how has the whole recent experience affected you guys personally? It seems that being acquired by Andover.net was followed, relatively, quickly by the IPO. I'm just wondering if the whole adventure has changed your overall outlook, future plans, drinking habits,...etc. You know, the little stuff that matters.
"shop smart:shop s-mart" ash
It seems like whenever we embark on some crazy job, there ends up being one day we always remember, one set of circumstances that we could never have experienced without beginning that journey but never have predicted in advance.
Since the creation and subsequent explosion of Slashdot, what one day stands out in your mind as the most randomly odd of them all?
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
Which of the following would be the most effective course of action to get you to release (current!) Slash source code?
/. article
1. Post annoying reminders to every
2. Using the word "hypocrites" a lot
3. Slay the Andover Alien Masters and destroy their Mind Control Ray
4. Procure many beautiful women dedicated to the open source cause
5. Crack slashdot.org, download source code, leave kewl hAx0r d00d cracked page to brag from
6. Bribe Hemos
7. Get a lab insider to "innocently" copy code to an unclassified server
8. Dress up as Rob, go to Andover, claim "Hello, my name is CmdrTaco. I misplaced my copy of the Slashdot code, can I make another?"
9. Send the Slashdot gang a free case of beer.
10. Poison the beer, use the antidote as a bargaining chip.
11. Cry
12. Get Nitrozac to cry
"my college project turned into a huge success, so now i'm going to __________."
"since the recent monster ipo we've found it much easier to pick up ________."
"in spite of it all, my parents still wish i would _______."
"if you had it all to do over again, the name of your site would be ________."
and lastly, i'm sure it's been asked a hundred times already, but what's you're favourite linux system call and why?
US Citizen living abroad? Register to vote!
There used to be a slashdot page where we could see the daily hit count by browser and OS. While sometimes depressing (2/3's browsing from Windows!), it was very interesting. Is there any chance we will see this again? Is this now information that you feel you need to keep private for some reason? What about the number of registered slashdot users? Could we find that out?
"Moderation is good, in theory."
-Larry Wall
There is no K5 cabal.
I am not the real rusty.
I think it would be interesting to be able to view the story submission queue. That is, what type of stories are being submitted, which stories are being rejected and why, and other interesting trivia. Would you allow users to be able to view this queue, and if not, why?
The DVDCA named /. as a John Doe in the DeCSS case. Will you guys be personally fighting this battle, or letting others? Will you be donating $ to EFF to help fight this battle?
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
I would hope, for the sake of your survival, that you have a certain ammount of legal expertise on board now. Does "all comments are owned by those who posted them" really cover all legal possibilities? Are there still circumstances where you would have to delete a comment? What about slanderous / copyrighted / government secret material? Now that you actually have money, you are probably more of a target for legal action...
Thank you for not thinking.
How well is Meta-Moderation working? What pergentage of Meta-Mods are unfair? Do you think that it has improved Moderation on /.?
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
I am finding it less and less worthwhile and enjoyable to follow the discussions , as well as less coherent.
Have you any plans to further deal with this sort of thing, above and beyond moderation ?
Is it time for the end of AC posting, esp seeing as there is the post anonymously option ?
And lastly, do you find these trends a little depressing?
I know I do and I'm just a reader.
-- Oh Well
Lately we've been seeing more features and interviews and other forms of Direct Reporting (hint! This is good!). Now that SlashDot has more resources at it's disposal, is this content generation likely to keep increasing? I still enjoy lots of linked stories, but sometimes it's nice to have a geek point of view alongside the normal media...
---
Play Six Pack Man. I
The W3C made a tool to clean up HTML called HTML Tidy. Just for kicks, I tried it on Slashdot. It blew a fuse after logging several thousand violations. :) Usually works great though.
Any idea if Slashdot's code will ever be cleaned up? Would open sourcing help things?
"There's so much left to know/ and I'm on the road to find out." -Cat Stevens
What will Andover be doing to make sure we can continue to trust that Slashdot Editorial policy is not in thrall to advertisers' concerns?
-Jordan Henderson
So, now that you guys are on the brink of obscene wealth, and slashdotters have put up with well, stuff for so long (and the Natalie Portman trolls, and the ACs from hell, and. . . and. . . ), instead of granting Mod Points, will you be handing out Andover.net shares, too? ;-)
Oh, shit, Signal11 is gonna be rich. . . .
Rafe
V^^^^V
Rafe
Opinions expressed by the author may not actually exist in the wild.
How crucial are the two of you to Andover's vision of /.? Do you have a clause like Charles Schultz' that says that nobody else can edit slashdot? What happens if the whole thing stops being fun for you (as it very well might)? Do Andover suck in the loss, or do we get introduced to "Scrappy-Doo and SuperGeek, the ALL NEW slashdot crew"? Has Andover.net taken out critical person insurance on you in case something dreeadful happens? Could they, in principle, fire your asses, or force you to resign on matter of principle?
etc, etc, (thud)
jsm
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The Wall St. Journal, two weeks ago, devoted considerable space to the Andover IPO--strongly suggesting that the only perceptible value in the company was SlashDot, and demonstrating the unorthodox steps that Andover took to get the IPO underwritten. (Notably, the WSJ reports that when Andover initially tried to get underwriting it owed the two of you more money than the entire assets of the firm.) The WSJ has subsequently referred to Andover, by name, as an example of an IPO with a stratospheric share price, but no substance. Nobody, anywhere, has suggested that there is any commercial value to Andover other than SlashDot.
Much as I appreciate the sense of humor you have, and the contributions of the SlashDot community, it seems to me that the really valuable thing about SlashDot is the software--the database system that permits posting, moderation, meta-moderation, etc. It is a work of genius. And, a very valuable thing.
The Wall St. Journal has all but called Andover a bubble--(or, to be less kind, a pump 'n dump). The only way to prove them wrong is to achieve corporate earnings that support the current share price. The only real asset of Andover is SlashDot--and the only real asset of SlashDot is the software. And the software is supposed to be Open Source.
So how are you guys going to make earnings?
The first one is related to a thread created by slashdot's worst troll ever. Even though I do not like the posters methods the question he raises is interesting...especially since I'm a CS geek. Here goes:
...
1.) Right now slashdot is rather inefficient in that we download the same comments over and over again when rereading an article searching for new comments. Is there anything in the works to deal with this inefficiency or will we be allowed to toy with this in the slashdot source (if it ever comes out) and submit these modifications? Will an NNTP slashdot be considered to deal with this?
My second question has to do with Karma
2.) Is there a chance that the amount of Karma needed for a default posting of 2 be increased to at least twice the current value(25)?
I ask this because I already post at a default of 2, which implies I must be a knowledgeable member of the slashdot community which I do not believe I am. Especially considering the fact that it is relatively easy to spew dogma for a month or so and get 25 Karma then revert to one's true self (Signal 11 has proved the value of spewing dogma and karma whoring for triple digit Karma). I would feel more comfortable if the Karma needed for a default posting off 2 was higher so that there is more chance that the person posting is actually an intelligent member of the slashdot community who posts are interesting and insightful instead of a karma whore who has no true value to add to a discussion. Because of this I now read posts at a moderation of 3 or higher.
3a.)What is the slashdot official position on the phantom discussion groups e.g. Trolltalk or Moderation?
I notice that some of the early posts to these discussions have disappeared (probably archived);
3b.)How do I get to read the old posts to the phantom groups since there's no assosciated story to do a search on?
And finally I have only moderated once and this was about a month after I got an account. Since then I have not moderated...
4a.)I would like to know if this is because of the rule that users who view slashdot excessively don't get to moderate?
4b.)And if so exactly how many page views per day/week/month is viewed as excessive by whatever algorithm does the selection?
(this is not a yes/no question)
I guess this is a question for both of you:
How's life in meatspace?
Lets just lay all technical issues aside for a moment. I want to know Who You Are, as people, not webmasters.
We have a pretty good idea of the comings and goings of your professional lives, but what about your friends, family, and groupies? Mmmm... groupies.
I guess this is more of a request for a biography than any particular question, but don't let that put you off.
Oh, one other question: Any plans on visiting KLUG any time soon?
--Mark
While others have commented on the degrading S/N ratio of the user comments, I would like to bring attention to the degrading S/N ratio of the stories.
I believe Slashdot got much of its "mature" geek following back when most of the headlines were apolotical in nature. A couple years ago, the biggest threads were generated while discussing new microarchitectures, physical limits of the lithography process, the size of the universe, and other *real* high-tech news. Since the stories were less subject to political debate, the S/N ratio was good. Now, the only "tech" stories are about nanotech (thanks hemos!) or the Aibo.
With Andover.net now owning Slashdot, am I just SOL? I know that most of the stories are going to be Linux/GPL/Open Source related, and that's fine. But please, Please, *PLEASE*, don't forget that many of your readers are well educated, and would like to spend time thinking about something new and exciting in the tech world rather than reading 500 posts ending with M$ $ucks...
Dan