Welcome to Slashdot 2.2

Welcome to Slashdot, now running Slashcode 2.2. Since we never upgraded Slashdot to 2.0, this is a huge deal. The changes are numerous, but non-obvious unless you happen to be a fairly frequent user who actually hits most of the functionality on the site. Read on for an executive summary of major features and random props to folks that made it happen.

Ok, lets start with a minor vanity thing that I love. Krow set it up so you can hit unix style homepages to get fellow user info pages. Its just nicer to look at and easier to remember. I love it.

Messaging is in place. If you're logged in, hit your user preferences page and you'll see the option to configure it. You'll see notification on the homepage when you have messages. There are a variety of message types, like notification of replies to your comments, or moderations done to you. You can choose from a couple of different delivery mechanisms currently, right now email and web. Eventually we'll offer other options, but if people submit patches from CVS, "Eventually" will be sooner. Jabber is definitely planned. Inter-User messaging should happen soon too. Also note that the messaging replaces the old headline-mailer. I think you'll enjoy some of the other stuff you see there. All this messaging is the 0th child of Pudge.

Journals are a long awaited feature that people on Slashcode.com really like, so we brought it over here. Everyone contributed bits and pieces to this sucker, and its fairly complex so don't be surprised if there are some bugs. Users can enable or disable comments. Journals also features Friends Lists. This will be extended in the future, but for now you can use it to track a quick list of journals you want to scan regularly. Eventually friends will be bigger, but we'll worry about that after 2.2 settles down.

Discussions can now be created to house your own little chats without bugging us. This replaces the old hidden sids which were bugs to some, and features to others.

There are rss feeds scattered throughout the site now that will need to be documented so people can find them. The user help stuff will be updated soon.

There are several new user options for comment display. I'll let you poke around them yourself and see how they work. Some you'll like, some you won't. You'll notice that the old 'Fake Email Address' is now gone. We decided that it simply was to easy to abuse, so instead we offer auto spam proofing of your real email address. Of course this is purely optional for you paranoid spam-free types. This is Jamie's, as was the new domain linking stuff, and countless other usability features.

Meta Moderation received an overall at the maniacal hands of Cliff. Under previous versions of Slashcode, meta moderations were single autonomous events, and therefore fairly easy to manipulate by malicious users. Now M2's are tallied and when a consensus is reached, judgement is made (and karma is adjusted appropriately).

The 1% of submissions that are accepted will show up on User Info pages now. So now the 99% of you who have your submissions rejected will have something else to complain about to me an average of 15 times a day.

Forgotten passwords can be resent even if you don't remember your nickname. I can't fathom how so many people could forget their nicks, but you sure did. CowboyNeal is dancing in the streets with Mic Jagger and David Bowie knowing that he will have to respond to half as many people who can't figure out how to login. Also, plain text passwords aren't sent in emails any more, so while we're still not pretending Slashdot is secure, its more secure then it was.

A huge new deal is the fact that all the old articles have been re-imported back into the database. 2 million of them. Old discussions will continue to be closed out as they age, but users will still be able to adjust order and threshold when they view them. This was a really nasty task for Cliff since he had to import nearly 4 years of HTML back into the database... including a dozen different comment formats that evolved over that time. A huge task, but one that he managed to pull off by the deadline. And I think any users who read older stories will appreciate it.

CaptTofu fixed tons of security issues and greatly improved a lot of the security stuff that most of you will never notice. But believe me it makes dealing with bots and denial of service attacks a lot easier now (for example, if a robot is hitting us as they so often do, we can ban them without restart httpd). Tofu also had to "Manage" the team, which makes cat herding seem like a party.

We have some new hardware too. Replacing our 6 600mhz web servers are 5 shiny new dual ghz boxes. OSDNs Netops staff mercilessly beat these things into submission. Thanks to Yazz, Kurt, Toad and Trish. And also props go out to Uriah on the West Si-eed for helping with some raid bios problems that messed with our database stuff and really though us for a loop.

We also gotta thank the guys at SourceForge for having a functional bug tracking system that we (and the trolls *sigh*) could use. We love you all, and we shouldn't let little things like a language barrier stand between us. Lets both port to ML. Its like switzerland for web pages!

I also wanna thank Hemos for being our man on the inside, and Richard French, OSDN boss-man for giving us the room to put this all together.

I know I forgot to thank someone, and I apologize, but its past midnight and I've been going for 16 hours today.

Allright this is only scratching the surface. There are so many more little things that you'll notice, and either submit thinking they are bugs, or hate, or love, or whatever. But we're not fooling ourselves by thinking that we're out of the woods yet. There are still several dozen significant bugs that need fixing so we're gonna keep going. And then we have to update the FAQ with all new FAQs and corrections to the old FAQs! The real test will be when loads pick up. We expect that there will continue to be brief periods of trouble for the next couple days, but it shouldn't be significant since we did a lot of load testing, and managed to get the new setup to handle 2x Slashdot's normal peak load. We think things will be all right, but thanks to you all for having patience.

Now holy shit, I'm gonna sleep.

Comments

Thanks for the hard work

[EvlG]

Just want to say thanks so much for all the hard work you guys have done to make Slashdot the community it is today. Looking forward to using all the new features and speed improvements!

Re:Thanks for the hard work

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, I just found the nickname I used so many years ago, by entering all my old email addresses into the thing. Too bad I don't have access to that email address anymore. :)

way cool

[mindpixel]

hey this is neat...

Awesome

[Rayban]

Looks good so far. It's a shame we don't have a moderated submission queue, though. :) Has anyone considered this?

Keep up the good work!

Re:Awesome

[AnalogBoy]

Such a queue would severely cut down the amount of propaganda and possibly increase the amount of "News for nerds" and "Stuff that matters". In other words, no, they will never have it here. :)

Re:Awesome

[mindpixel]

I've submitted 11 articles - 6 have been accepted - which I think is pretty damn good. But I would still like to see this become a true Direct Democracy.

I vote to open the submission queue to the public!!!

Re:Awesome

[Phork]

umm, then this wouldnt be slashdot, this would be k5. It really bothers me when new people demand magor changes to a site, if you dont like a site, go to another site.

Re:Awesome

[Anonymous Coward]

If you want a moderated submission queue, you know where to find it.

Re:Awesome

[Anonymous Coward]

You think THIS looks awesome, you should see how good this looks!

Re:Awesome

[j-pimp]

Just go to
http://www.kuro5hin.org.

Besides Slashdot is meant to be combination between a news site an a community. With the journal features people can post there own stories. Also, the editors do read the site, and in the end they need to make people happy with the site so they keep going with it.

Re:Awesome

[sulli]

Plastic does have this - you can access with karma > 100, I think (there's no cap). However, it leads to some groupthink as (in that case) libby-lib articles that bash GW Bush tend to make it out of the queue alive.

On geekizoid you can see any submissions in progress, even as an AC.

But both of these are relatively small sites. On /. I am doubtful that it would work - too much crap in the queue for anyone to want to wade through it.

Re:Awesome

[thejake316]

But then the only way to tell here and k5 apart would be correct spelling/grammar (at k5), original content (at k5) and first post posts (here). I think the /. "editorial staff" is trying to maintain their stranglehold on poor decisions on submitted articles, they don't trust the masses to maintain their 60% crap ratio. Don't clue them in, I like the "if you don't like slashdot go start your own site," it's lead to some very innovative and well-managed sites that have to work harder to attract eyeballs that are used to /. This is after all just a "post links to other sites' articles with one-liner editorial commentary" and as Rob has admitted the only reason /. is the biggest is 'cause they were first.
Oh yippie, "invalid form key" from submit button. Nice code you got here, kids.

Re:Awesome

[mikeyc666]

Maybe its just my eyes playing tricks on me, but the colours seem more vibrant...the whites are whiter and the greens are greener. The whole look of the site seems to sparkle. Its probably just me. Is this banjo this only backend stuff?

No 2.0?

[gad_zuki!]

I should fire up Netscape 6 and we'll have a perfect match!

Re:No 2.0?

[Anonymous Coward]

Can't you read?

"Welcome to Slashdot, now running Slashcode 2.2. Since we never upgraded Slashdot to 2.0, this is a huge deal."

Idiot.

What the...?

[J'raxis]

Two-millionth post!!! (nice bug!) :)

Re:What the...?

[floodle]

I think that they should keep this bug. Think about it. No more 'first post' losers popping up! By the time anyone could type in:

w00h00! I g0t th3 two b1ll10n, 0ne-hund3rd s3cond, thr33 hundred f0rty 3ight thou5and, s3ven hundr3d and f1r5t p0st!!!!

there would already be twenty or thirty posts. They'd stop trying after a while. Problem solved!

Re:What the...?

[J'raxis]

True, but see what I said here.

This seems to make the comment number completely useless however when I'm reading a story with, say, 200 comments, and I'm going by comment 150, I know where I am (75% done). But if I'm reading the story and the comment is numbered 2701450, well...

Re:What the...?

[Anonymous Coward]

Boo hoo. You know the page you're on and your position within the page (unless your browser doesn't have a scrollbar).

Re:What the...?

[Anonymous Coward]

This was done so people would stop noticing when michael deletes posts. fp will still be here, and this is not going to get rid of it.

Re:What the...?

[Anonymous Coward]

And it's easier to moderate stuff '-1 Redundant' with proper comment numbers.

Metamoderation

[bconway]

Is it now possible to claim 2 moderations as unfair without losing karma yourself? I thought that was a pretty piss-poor choice, especially with the rampant crackhead moderation that's been going on recently. Great work, guys.

Re:Metamoderation

[Anonymous Coward]

I just marked 2 as unfair and karma stayed the same. I never really investigated before - I always sort of assumed the limit was 5; ie 6 unfairs and you lose.

Re:Metamoderation

[zerocool^]

dude come on now, what if there are 2 moderations on your meta-moderation page that *are* unfair. That, to me, is the entire purpose of the MM page. You look at a series of comments, most of them are fair, but some are unfair, and with the number of moderators out there, there's bound to be a percentage of alterrior motives at work.

I just tell it like i see it, and if there's a comment that i feel that my personal judgement comes into play too heavily to decide without personal influence, i just leave it neutral. But if its an unfair moderation, i.e. off topic for something that is only slightly off topic (and that's kind of the spirit of slashdot, discussing topics and tangents) then i mod it unfair.

Re:Metamoderation

[bconway]

That was EXACTLY my point. In the old metamoderation system, if you marked two or more moderations as unfair (which was often the case) you would automatically lose a point of karma. That was quite ridiculous for those of us who actually metamoderated fairly.

Re:Metamoderation

[Anonymous Coward]

oh

n/m then, we see eye to eye.
MM is a good thing, and if that's something they're like doing away with, the its getting better.

color me dumb.

~zero

Re:Metamoderation

[RedWizzard]

I think the limit was three. I fairly commonly find two or three unfair moderations if there have a been a few incendiary stories lately and I've never been penalised. I can't remember if I ever did four unfair mods.

Re:Metamoderation

[theancient1]

I looked at the code once... if I remember correctly, it was something like 50% unfair and you lose points... some lesser percentage unfair and your metamods are silently discarded without penalty. Neutrals didn't count, so if you metamod 2 unfair and leave the rest neutral, you could lose points.

Of course, it was about a year ago that I looked, so I don't remember that clearly.

Re:Metamoderation

[Spunk]

Shit! So that's where all my karma went.

I metamod far more often than I moderate or comment. And yes, frequently I mark things as unfair.
Now I know what happened. I'm keeping the "willing to moderate" box unchecked now, thank you.

Re:Metamoderation

[evilviper]

Hey dude, you owe me some karma... I metamoderated your 'Troll' Rating as unfair. The irony is just too amazing.

Re:Metamoderation

[bconway]

Thanks for your appropriate metamoderation.

congrats!

[chuqui]

(clap clap clap clap clap)

well done -- looks good so far.

Seems to be loading faster for me.

[Rop]

Is there any reason for this? I mean was anything done in terms of speed for slashcode 2.x ?

Re:Seems to be loading faster for me.

[anotherone]

they replaced their 6 500 mhz machines with 5 gigahertz machines.

Neato!

[Sloppy]

Well done, dudes.

There's certainly a few kinks

[Dancin_Santa]

that need to be worked out, but I'm sure you guys are going to do a really good job getting those ironed out.

Good work sir, carry on.

Dancin Santa

You've reached your maximum number of comments you

[Anonymous Coward]

You've reached your maximum number of comments you can post: 33 comments over 4 hours.

What is the meaning of this you fucks?

Hey you wanker wannabe coders fix the anon account already.

caffeine

[cornflux]

Now holy shit, I'm gonna sleep.

Sleep? Isn't that what we needed before there was caffeinated water and mints?? Hmm...

Well, enjoy the rest...

Re:caffeine

[tenman]

and after only 16 hours...

Can I still use journals

[Hairy_Potter]

if I'm stuck with a non-journaling file system,like Win 98?

Re:Can I still use journals

[aliebrah]

Windows 98 is a file system?

Re:Can I still use journals

[sharkey]

No, it's a door-stop, but it still doesn't journal.

Re:Can I still use journals

[RetroGeek]

So how many bits does it take to stop a door? How high do they need to be piled?

Hmmm, must used higher massed bits.....

Re:Can I still use journals

[sharkey]

I can only give you a ballpark, but my 486DX2-100, running MS-DOS 6.2 + Win3.1, my P5-166 MMX running RedHat 6.2 and my P5-200MMX running Win9x all perform at about the same level when it comes to holding open doors.

Re:Can I still use journals

[Trepidity]

and ext2 is a journaling filesystem?

Great

[mind21_98]

...but will it be stable for more than a month at a time?

Re:Great

[__aawavt7683]

Even if not it'll still outlast Windows...

-DrkShadow

The new trolltalk has been created

[Anonymous Coward]

Trolltalk has moved to http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=20352

Is the look ever going to change?

[Xafloc]

I mean come on...Slashdot has looked the same forever. Are we ever going to get some visual changes. Something to keep the site looking fresh?

I am not sure about the rest of you, but I think Slashdot is looking just a bit out-dated. Now, I am not saying let's go make Slashdot look like the millions of phpnuke site and there look-alikes, but I am sure with all the talent over there that they can come up with something new.

Maybe it's just me

Re: Is the look ever going to change?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've thought the same thing. I think that it would be neat to be able to set custom colours, like at My Yahoo!. I know that things are customizable now, but there could be more variety IMO.

Re:Is the look ever going to change?

[quartz]

Dude, who needs THEM to change the way Slashdot looks? Whenever I get bored with the current look of Slashdot I do some hacking to Konq's stylesheets, and voila! a new and improved Slashskin. :-) But shh! don't tell them. They might sue me for "modifying their content without authorization" or something. Remember the fuss they made over Smart Tags?

Re:Is the look ever going to change?

[Villain]

I find it somewhat refreshing to find a site that doesn't feel the need to reinvent itself every few months. We all know exactly where to find everything when it comes down to it, I think most of us would prefer a functional old design over some crappy flash intro or other garbage everyone would just skip over anyway.

Re:Is the look ever going to change?

[localman]

Aw man! One of the reasons I love Slashdot is that it has stuck by it's guns and remained one of the gawd awfulest looking sites on the web!

Seriously, though, I'm sick of website (and application) appearance makeovers. 9 times out of 10 they decrease functionality and increase the level of annoyance.

However, I've been happy with the same woman for ten years now so I guess I'm not the average guy.

Re:Is the look ever going to change?

[Snuffub]

Hey are you the same "Local Man" who the people at the onion always write about??? can i get your autograph?

Re:Is the look ever going to change?

[NonSequor]

I don't think Slashdot is terrible looking, but I do wish the frontpage used the soothing blue color used for the Developers section.

Re:Is the look ever going to change?

[scrytch]

I *like* slashdot's look -- when it's slashdot green and not some godawful khaki/mauve category "theme". I like the subtle grey header bars that go all the way across as opposed to advogato's neon bars of varying widths. I like the subdued colors over the garishness of most nuke sites.

Other comments: automunging the real email address and ditching the fake one. What slash munges, a spambot can unmunge. You do know that most spambots already auto-unmunge the standard munging done to listserv archives? Now I'm going to have to get a throwaway account just for slashdot.

Lameness filters are still lame.

Running post numbers are nice, I just hope it really didn't have anything to do with FP and more about unique id's. "first post" still means "first post" after all.

Would be nice to support some javascript in the clients if they're capable of it. Glasscode's async scoring mechanism is a nice example of what you can do with javascript.

Re:Is the look ever going to change?

[Sloppy]

Change your browser preferences. Then the whole darn web, along with Slashdot, will get a brand new look.

Re:Is the look ever going to change?

[iomud]

I really like the developers section colors, light grey and blue. I agree that slashdot is in need of a new look perhaps user selectable themes so that each user can pick from a number of slashdot layouts to looks at.

Re:Is the look ever going to change?

[chuqui]

You're right. they need to update slashdot.

I suggest that the slashdot folks improve the site. At the very minimum, they need to add: a splash page we have to click through before getting to the main page ("welcome to slashdot!)

frames

15K of javascript to make sure the cursor gets to the correct text entry field, since we're incapable of finding it otherwise.

A new Slashdot logo, which will be animated and rendered in Flash. Must be at least 250K in size.

Every time you visit slashdot, it'll send you a 100K sound file of CmdrTaco saying "howdy! welcome to slashdot!"

A new privacy statement which points out they plan to sell everything you say, in 2 point type. Hidden behind a java applet. In swahili. And opt-out.

Yup. We really need to bring slashdot in line with current th current web standards. can't just have something that sits there and works....

Re:Is the look ever going to change?

[XRayX]

Change the look (and feel) of slashdot? Are you serious? Slashdot has to stay as is, cause it's kinda symbol for nerds and geeks. If you know change the look completely (with flash?), you would destroy this symbol and somehow the cult about this homepage!
X

Re:Is the look ever going to change?

[Anonymous Pancake]

I think they should change the backround to goat.cx man

Re:Is the look ever going to change?

[Darth_Burrito]

Slashdot's current interface is pretty damn good. I like the fact that the site is simple, consistent, and reasonably intuitive. Why would you want to change it?

If you would like to see something in particular changed then suggest it. Otherwise there's not much point in a complaint like this. It's kind of sad that after all the work people have put into this, the first comment is a complaint.

Personally, I think it looks great so far.

Re:Is the look ever going to change?

[zarmok]

I for one don't care how slashdot looks.

for years, I've set slashdot to deliver the 'light' version to me.

that way, it loads lightening fast even on a 33.6 modem link, which I'm frequently on.

it's probably just the new setup at the moment, but it does seem a little slower :(

RB

Re:Is the look ever going to change?

[suwain_2]

I really have to agree with you. Everyone's arguing that loads of flash will load the page down, and that makeovers are invariably worse...

I don't think anyone is advocating use of Flash, massive JavaScript crap, or anything like that. Take a look at the themes on SourceForge. There's one that uses some graphics and has a real pleasing look, one without graphics that looks a bit bland but is quicker, and a real small version.

The simple ability to change your color scheme would please me. I agree, actually, with your comments about the developers' section; it would just require a couple extra lines in their backend code to check the color. Of course, I suppose that has teh potential to slow things down.

Themes or not, I've gotta hand it to them for a job well done with the upgrade.

Re:Is the look ever going to change?

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobody's suggesting anything remotely like that, dumbass. All we want is a color scheme that isn't offensive to the eyes, a layout that isn't muddled and overpacked (ever heard of padding, Taco?) and for God's sake, those drop-shadowed icons are trite, lame and pathetically dated. When the sites most notorious trolls can knock together a more aesthetically pleasing website, you know it's time to update the design.

Now where in that did I mention javascript, frames, etc? Stop being defensive and start being sensible. Slashdot is a god-ugly mess, and it doesn't work aesthetically, or at this point technically (although I'm sure we are just experiencing glitches). In the future, try to learn to handle constructive criticism a little better.

Re:Is the look ever going to change?

[follower-fillet]

> At the very minimum, they need to add:
> a splash page we have to click through before
> getting to the main page
> ("welcome to slashdot!)
Wouldn't that be "Welcome to Splashdot"?

It could redirect you to a whole new domain splashdot.org...

Hey, splash pages are old news, now let's talk about them splash *sites*!

BTW I intend to hold a patent on this concept, and it's real-soon-now implementation on slashdot.org

Re:Is the look ever going to change?

[AgentUSA]

I like the default slashcode look with the tables around the comments and wish they would use it for slashdot. Maybe they could also add some basic support for skins in the next release. This way, you can keep the current look or change it if you want.

Re:Is the look ever going to change?

[sharkey]

And, as a plus, the new messaging could be jazzed a little. When one of your comments is moderated as a troll, the notification should automatically redirect you to The Amish Rake Fight, just to let you know the general feeling about you.

Re:Is the look ever going to change?

[Anonymous Coward]

Amen to that... I wish every page used that color.

Speaking of which, who the hell created the purple and yellow layout? That has got to be the ugliest web design ever.

Re:Is the look ever going to change?

[dbarclay10]

I am *all* for improving "look and feel". However, I really hate it when things are changed, but they make things worse ;)

For instance, look at Linux.com. A good long while ago, they had a very neat, very clean layout. Everything was easily accessible.

Then they changed it :| It was horrible. Obviously it was - because they changed it AGAIN. And you know what? This most recent layout *still* isn't as good as the one that existed when I first started visiting the site.

Quite frankly, I only visit there very rarely. I think you can look at the number of non-staff submissions/comments and see that I'm not the only one.

Anyways, the moral? Come up with something better, then put it somewhere so that we can all poke and prod at it ;)

Re:Is the look ever going to change?

[Sarcasmooo!]

I think slashdot would look really cool if it were purple with flames down the sides.

Re:Is the look ever going to change?

[Dwonis]

How the hell did that get moderated Insightful? Funny, yes, but Insightful? That's a stretch.

Re:Is the look ever going to change?

[zpengo]

In fact, our boys on the front might do well to take a look at some other work that has been done with Slash. There are some slick looking sites out there, not the least of which is Slashcode.net

Re:Is the look ever going to change?

[Erasmus Darwin]

"How the hell did that get moderated Insightful?"

Despite the fact that the comment used humor, it still pointed out the fundamental absurdity of the previous poster's appeal to give Slashdot a fresh, new look. Visual change just for the sake of novelty is somewhat couter-productive in a group that's frequently known for preferring function over form.

Re:Is the look ever going to change?

[Anonymous Coward]

For example, Corel changed their logo about a year ago...

Re:Is the look ever going to change?

[Anonymous Coward]

What about changing the font to something sans-serif? I hear that's easier to read on a computer screen.

Re:Is the look ever going to change?

[theancient1]

Do spambots really unmunge email addresses? If I were a spambot, I would look at an address like mark@diespammers.hotmail.com and say, "gee, that guy really hates spam, I'd better not piss him off." It doesn't make sense to aggrivate someone who is clearly opposed to spam.

(Then again, I'd never entrust my real email address to anything that could possibly be deciphered.)

And you forgot to mention my favourite new feature, the anti-goatse.cx mechanism. (Well, it doesn't show up in the preview, but you should see the link domain in square brackets after the link.)

Note: I kept getting an "Invalid form key: FrFL8CgHVg !" when I tried to submit this... I had to hit "reply to this" again. A bug?

Re:Is the look ever going to change?

[AiX2]

+5 Interesting

I guess the moderation system hasn't been reworked in 2.2.

Re:Is the look ever going to change?

[Mr. Slippery]

And you forgot to mention my favourite new feature [slashdot.org], the anti-goatse.cx mechanism. (Well, it doesn't show up in the preview, but you should see the link domain in square brackets after the link.)

I'm really befuddled by the claimed need for something like this. I put my mouse pointer over a link, I see the URL in the status window. Are there browsers that don't do this or something?

Re:Is the look ever going to change?

[blair1q]

I still do Usenet in a VT100-emulating terminal on a UNIX box using rn.

--Blair
"A flaming logo would be cool."

Re:Is the look ever going to change?

[Tarpan]

I put my mouse pointer over a link, I see the URL in the status window. Are there browsers that don't do this or something?

You can turn it off in atleast one (Opera). I really don't either see the reason for this feature, i just think it's a tad bit confusing...

Re:Is the look ever going to change?

[Anonymous Coward]

test

Re:Is the look ever going to change?

[Anonymous Coward]

">test

Re:Is the look ever going to change?

[Mr Spot]

What I think would be good if /. supported user customisable CSS sheets, the same way that we have a custom slashbox. That way, everyone could change slashdot to look good to them, and no one would be complaining that it looks like shit.

Although I think disk space might be a limiting factor (if every user had an extra 2kB of preferences, that would add up fast), I think it would be a very cool idea.

Re:Is the look ever going to change?

[andy@petdance.com]

Do spambots really unmunge email addresses? If I were a spambot, I would look at an address like mark@diespammers.hotmail.com and say, "gee, that guy really hates spam, I'd better not piss him off." It doesn't make sense to aggrivate someone who is clearly opposed to spam.

I suspect that harvesters and spammers are often not the same, and that those who harvest are more interested in getting a CD-ROM full of email addresses that will go thru than email addresses that are for people who want to hear about their message.

Remember, spamming is a numbers game. It's all about covering the most area. It costs NudeAsianTeens.com just as much to send to 10,000,000 addresses as 9,000,000, so they might as well hit more.

good job

[tophernet]

things look good. keep up the good work.

Journals, etc.

[Alien54]

I didn't like the journals in Slash 2.0 from an admin viewpoint, mostly because of abuse (goatsex, etc) (Journals are not moderatable, of course, and this makes sense in that context), and the fact of the added drive space this can use up on a smaller system (such as provided by slashhosting.com)

I would like to see more toggle on/off configuration for the plugins.

here is some advice

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like real trouble. You're going to need plenty of legal advice before this thing is over.
As your attorney, I advise you to rent a very fast car with no top. And you'll need the cocaine.
Tape recorder for special music. Acapulco shirts. Get the hell out of LA for at least 48 hours.

Congrats.

[pcwhalen]

Finally, slashdot won't get slashdotted.

I'm loving the changes already!

[whiteranger99x]

What can i say without sounding redundant?
I am very impressed with the new features of the new system Slashdot is using...I'm already experiencing better response and load times.

What impresses me most is better interactivity potentials with other /. users courtesy of the Journals, and Friends Lists :D

However, what would REALLY kick ass is an ability to change the color scheme of the site, i'll give you guys time ;)

THANKS AGAIN SLASHDOT for the fun! :D

Re:I'm loving the changes already!

[ackthpt]

Not only that, but hyperlinks show the site you're going to. Less easy for those sneaky old goatse.cx tricks links.

Re:I'm loving the changes already!

[Anonymous Coward]

test

Unf

[PrdgmShift]

Unf

Kudos on a Good Job

[ackthpt]

But I miss a few things:

My fake email address :)

Single spacing on the user page

#1-#9999 message numbers

Thanks to whomever for moving it to the GHz machines, hope this means less bogging down in heavy traffic.

Re:Kudos on a Good Job

[Anonymous Coward]

#1-#9999 message numbers

I Agree! It just seem strange without them...

Re:Kudos on a Good Job

[Pinball Wizard]

#1-#9999 message numbers

yeah, but technically, no more First Posts.

You are a moron

[Anonymous Coward]

Gee...

Could it be the faster servers they installed as it says above?!

Sometimes I wish people would think before they spurt out crap!

Read the whole fucking story moron!

Re:You are a moron

[Rop]

Ohhhh an anonymous dumbass can insult!!! DUH that is why i asked it if was ALSO do to the code lord ass!

Now go to bed!

Did you upgrade cowboyneal?

[defence budget]

Which version of cowboyneal is /. currently using?

I had to change my subject for the lameness filter

[RESPAWN]

Whoa! What's with the comment numbers? No more first posts? What are all the /. trolls going to do now? /. will end up losing half it's readership because of this oversight. Bad choice, Mr. Taco.

-----

Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted! Reason: What do you want? A medal?

Subject: No first posts?

Actually, I want you to let me post my frickin' comment.

Re:Kikes

[famillionaire]

It gives me a strange feeling of happiness to see that you've gotten the first post on this new incarnation of slashcode. It's like that confirmation I needed that this is, indeed, the same old slashdot that I, and I think all of us, have come to know and love.

Seems to rock so far.

[Chakat]

The journal looks cool, other than a bug which I have dutifully submitted. The hardware seems impressive (can you imagine a beowulf of /. clusters?). I haven't had a chance to play around with the archives yet, that'll probably be the next thing I do; god I hated digging through the archive's viewing mode. Nested viewing is SO much better than the flat mode.

One question, though. What kind of CSS is allowed with that <DIV> tag? Anything fun, or is it one of those you could tell me but then you'd have to kill me sort of deals?

Congrats all around, you guys kick ass!

fake e-mail address vs auto spamproofing

[jesser]

There are several new user options for comment display. I'll let you poke around them yourself and see how they work. Some you'll like, some you won't. You'll notice that the old 'Fake Email Address' is now gone. We decided that it simply was to easy to abuse, so instead we offer auto spam proofing of your real email address. Of course this is purely optional for you paranoid spam-free types. This is Jamie's, as was the new domain linking stuff, and countless other usability features.

How was the fake e-mail address field "abused"? And how can automatic spam-proofing possibly be good enough that a clever spammer wouldn't be able to get around (especially with the source code visible)?

Re:fake e-mail address vs auto spamproofing

[tswinzig]

How was the fake e-mail address field "abused"? And how can automatic spam-proofing possibly be good enough that a clever spammer wouldn't be able to get around (especially with the source code visible)?

There's this thing called RANDOM. And even though you know it's happening, you can't predict its outcome.

Cool, huh?

My Yahoo

[Mac Nazgul]

Ohhh yeah, I have seen the quality pages with the black backgrounds and hot pink titles that people have made of their custom home page portals.

It's called a brand, and considering the amount of work down to improve the underlying content, you can't expect much more for a fairly minor number release.

journaling

[quannump]

jeez ... journaling looks pretty complicated, good job /. team and thanks for making me waste my time at work so well

Aaaaaaah

[Dutchie]

Finally /. runs at a decent speed again!

Did you really have to take a bunch of systems from the original cluster in order to build the new one?!?!

Nice !

[ferratus]

It's quite difficult to say anything in this discussion without being redundant but I really want to say that the update is really good.

It seems to be quite solid except for a few request that takes some time (/.'ed ?). Congratulation on the great work. Now you just need to add those other 2 billions features that didn't make it in 2.2 :)

As someone else already said, I think a skin system would be neat for the next update. (Who needs sleep anyway ?)

Take That, You Tricksters!

[Kaio]

Display the URL of every link automatically! No more goatse.cx for me! Bwa ha ha ha ha!

Re:Take That, You Tricksters!

[jedwards]

Yeah, thank god it is foolproof

i0n

[s0ma]

fp on 2.2!

Oh no!

[metrazol]

Slashdot is turning into Everything 3! Run for the hills, the node police are going to hunt me here too!

Posting error.

[gooberguy]

GAH, I kept on getting an error when I try to post. :(

D/\ Gooberguy

VIA Chipset

[GigsVT]

Hope the new cluster isn't P4's with the VIA chipset. :)

lameness filters

[jesser]

The lameness filters are really getting on my nerves. More than half of my comments over the last few weeks hit some filter or another before I managed to get the comment through.

• Every time I screw up in a comment -- trigger some other lameness filter, forget to put a subject, anything -- I get a "it hasn't been 20 seconds since you hit reply".
• I like to read the entire article before posting to make sure I'm not putting up something redundant with an existing score:3 post, but if I use that strategy and then end up deciding to post two comments, I invariably get "it's been less than two minutes since your last comment post."
• I got a cryptic message about "postersubj compression" when I tried to reply to this comment. Changing the subject of my reply made the error message go away, but it took me 5 minutes to figure out how to get aroudn the filter (mostly because of the 20 second rule).

Others have complained about shell scripts being rejected as "junk posts", and having comments rejected as having been posted before slashdot existed. Some of these are just Bugs, but many seem to be intentional. Does the lameness filter serve any purpose that moderation doesn't?

IMO, there should be two filters:

1. No duplicate posts. Not so much to filter out "lameness", but to help people who accidentally hit "Submit" twice or hit it again when slashdot forgets to respond to the first post.
2. No more than five comments from one poster within two minutes.

Re:lameness filters

[IvyMike]

I agree; I've been hit with lameness filters on several posts, and I think no reasonable human would have agreed with the filter. I'm hoping that the slashdot crew occasionally views what the filters are culling, and perhaps make adjustments in the future. ( I would not like the feature to go away, but I do think it's overly draconian right now. There is a happy medium, but it will take constant adjustment to reach it.)

Re:lameness filters

[Nastard]

You could always hang out at my little slash-site for a year...

Re:lameness filters

[Tom7]

Sorry to 'me too', but I've seen this several times too. In fact, very recently when posting a piece of source code to a programming-languages discussion article, with the "code" post type set, it complained that I violated the lameness filter. Ugh.

At least the source is available, so it's pretty easy to see what it's doing. =)

Thanks guys

[jabagi]

I really don't care about the lack of visual changes. The look of this site is something I have grown very accustomed to. I was bothered with messaging just last night, it is funny that just 8 hours later it's here.
I'll go fiddle with my homepage options now...
Thanks people for Slashdot 2.2

Good job all!

[x136]

Looking good!
I've noticed quite a few little things that I like already.
Now it loads at a respectable speed on my poor old 132MHz 604 also.

What cluster?

[Antoshka]

I wonder whether /. uses any existing cluster like Beowulf or Mosix?

But does it run on Windows?

[BagMan2]

well?

bloody hell

[Anonymous Coward]

I never even noticed any difference

Presenting SleepDot 2.2

[kleenx]

Let's all thank the krew of slashdot for spending yet another late nite improving the quality of the way we recieve our news :)

*clap clap clap*

I would like to raise a toast... for me, its gonna be one stiff drink and praise the creators, virtual god if we even wanted to call it.

Let's let all the guys know that they should sleep now, and hope that all the bugs get found by morning, BEFORE the main stream rush. If not? Well, we'll all have some more news to keep our eyes on ;)

Thanks everybody!! ;)

Hey...

[Electric Angst]

I'm just curious, how many bugs from old slash, or new, were first discovered by trolls? Do you feel that the trolls did you a service, like the way white-hat hackers reveal holes in certain software?

Re:Hey...

[jamiemccarthy]

"how many bugs from old slash, or new, were first discovered by trolls"

None that I know of. Maybe other sites get good trolls. Slashdot's trolls are exclusively destructive, contributing nothing to the site. We do have helpful users who find bugs and exploits (like 11233) but they're not trolls.

Re:Hey...

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course. 11233 is not a troll. Riiiiiiight.

comment number# allocation is illogical & brok

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, I've got a big problem with this. I don't want each article for a story being displayed as number #2.3million. What happened to each story having its articles starting from #1 up? It's absolutely chaotic having everything labled a number starting from Slashdot's very conception! Please fix this, or it will drive _all_of_us_mad_. It makes it damned downright difficult to navigate through a story's comments.

Rant over :)

some annoying filters ain't gonna save this place

[Anonymous Coward]

Ya the filters are getting pretty lame. I think the old quote favorite among slashdotters is true now "those who would trade a little liberty for a little safety deserve neither". Well putting on these stupid filters and pissing off hundreds of legitimate users and it doens't even stop the trolls. This is bullshit. But it's not just that. I'm all around getting bored with slashdot. I think it's time to move on. I read it less and less. I always do that hang around some site for like a year and then get sick of it and go some other place on those coffee breaks or moments of boredom. I think i'm pretty much done with this site. It's not just all the bugs and lame filters, it's just i'm bored of all the stupid propoganda, half of the discussion is not about anything in reality. Some very non-newsworthy thing or another gets posted then some paranoid teenagers blow it out of proportion. For a while i thought this site was for professional programmers and open source developers. I realized a while ago that it's really for teenagers with no friends and college kids that are to uptight to actually go out to a kegger or something. Just dumb asses. I dont remember who said it but i think it was summed up best as "He's not gonna see that, Smart people don't actually read slashdot, dude". It still didn't lose it's charm, the childish shannigans can lighten up a rough day. But as they say "the thrill is gone". I mean when it's a battle just to get a post through, bleh, screw it.

Feature: filter out certain comments?

[occam]

Cmdr, is it possible to filter out "Humor" comments with this new version? For some threads that's about half of the (supposedly) high value comments, but I'd really just like to read info. I've looked through the preferences without finding that feature.

Thanks,

= Joe =

Re:Feature: filter out certain comments?

[Anonymous Coward]

The humour is the only thing of value on here my friend. Thanks to this silly little karma system, people make up all kinds of shit just in hope of getting a +3 informative. I have seen so many +3-5 informative/insightfuls with fake crap in it. But the stupid little teen mods don't know the difference. If it's long and has a nice format and uses a few big words and no swears they'll believe it. Using slashdot posts as a source of information is a really bad idea.

Re:Feature: filter out certain comments?

[J'raxis]

I'd like to see a full-blown filter system à la Usenet killfiles. Currently we can killfile story authors, why not users in general? Would probably be more useful than moderation as you make your own decisions as to what's crap and what's not.

Re:Feature: filter out certain comments?

[Joe Decker]

I'm not sure you'd get the effect you want. It sounds like you want to filter out comments that are lacking information, not comments that contain humor. The sets are not identical, though, I see a reasonable number of comments that are informative and humorous, and get marked that way as well.
--j

Re:Feature: filter out certain comments?

[sulli]

Many useful articles are modded "Funny" as well as insightful/interesting/flamebait. I don't think there's any way to do this without missing a large number of good comments.

Re:Feature: filter out certain comments?

[Erasmus Darwin]

"Many useful articles are modded "Funny" as well as insightful/interesting/flamebait."

Of course many useful articles are also unmoderated, causing them to fall below some users' moderation thresholds. However, that doesn't change the fact that it boils down to user choice. Sorting by score and hard filtering comments below 1 is a trade-off that I'm comfortable with -- it's my decision on how to spend my time reading Slashdot.

That being said, you could just have a number of options. "Normal" mode would be like it is now. "Ignore funny" would cause funny moderation to not add to an article's moderation score. "Ignore exclusive funny" would cause articles only positively moderated with funny to be boosted in score.

Re:Feature: filter out certain comments?

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course, it's the teenagers who are the only idiots in the world. Thanks for pointing that out.

Re:Feature: filter out certain comments?

[opspin]

How about an option to filter all but "funny" comments, most of the time I only read the funny comments.

Re:I had to change my subject for the lameness fil

[J'raxis]

Nah, now they'll just complete to get posts like #2,172,000 or #3,000,000 or whatever.

So this isn't a bug. Heh. I see that now after browsing through the old, old stories and seeing lower (but still large) comment numbers. I had thought it was just a bug like that "you already submitted this comment 2387467324320975 hours ago" thing I saw a week ago.

Where's the name from?

[Anderlan]

It makes me think of this.

Friends

[Lando]

Hmmm,
Wondered how the friends worked so I started digging. Apparently to add a friend you must click on someone's journal entry. From there you are able to select add a friend.

I don't see a method of adding a friend unless they have made a journal entry.

As far as looking up user pages, is there any way of doing a search for users?

Lando

Re:Friends

[Lando]

Further notes on friends.

Friends can by added with no journal entry by locating the user and entering their slashdot user # in the url below.

http://slashdot.org/journal.pl?op=addmeta&uid=[U se r #]

Re:comment number# allocation is illogical & b

[lemox]

Yeah, but it makes "first post!"'s a thing of the past.

I hope...

[Anonymous Coward]

your new servers are running MS software, you know, for the stability and security features.

Old servers?

[lmd]

What will happen to the old servers?

Cmdr you wussie

[IvyMike]

Its past midnight and I've been going for 16 hours today.

This has to be a typo, right? I pretty much do this every single day of my life, as do most of the people here. ( Except for the college students, who stay up past 4am and have been going for 36 hours.) Or maybe you've been working for 16 hours, which while it probably isn't an everyday occurance for most of us, isn't exactly uncommon either.

Complaining about 16 hours or work isn't going to impress anyone. Re-read some of JWZ's stories to recalibrate your "that was lots of work" meter.

P.S. Don't get me wrong, I do like the new features a bunch. Rock on.

Can I have my old nick back?

[Ungrounded Lightning]

Is the limit on nick size still there and still too short for "Ungrounded Lightning Rod"?

I'd like to update my Sig but I don't plan on doing that unless/until I can get the 'ol nick back.

(While we're at it, is the limit on sig size still so small that I have to abbreviate? You didn't shrink it any more did you?)

(We'll see momentarily...)

Re:Can I have my old nick back?

[blair1q]

Try reading through www.safeweb.com. It blocks cookies for you, if you configure it to do that.

Could be that's why I'm having so much trouble with slash today...

--Blair

Re:Can I have my old nick back?

[JLouder]

I once was "Ungrounded Lightning Rod" but /. slashed off my " Rod".

I'd be pissed, too, if someone slashed off my rod.

The new cluster...

[ergo98]

It certainly feels very, very speedy now, though perhaps that's because everyone went to bed (of course I'm stereotyping that everyone lives in -05:00) when it was screwing up earlier. While there has been no "update" about how the upgrade went, it was apparent earlier that it neither happened in the one hour period, and when it did come up a multitude of quirks surfaced. I say this not to criticize but rather to poke fun at our profession: If a software developer tells you it'll take an hour, presume 4. :-)

Overall?

[goldfndr]

Meta Moderation received an overall at the maniacal hands of Cliff.

Yeah, I thought it was getting too big for its britches.

User names in index mode

[CaptainCarrot]

They ain't there. That is, I no longer see the name of the user who posted the comment when the discussion is being displayed in index mode. Bug or feature? Or is there a prefs setting that controls this that I haven't found yet?

Re:User names in index mode

[j7953]

Yeah, I also find this annoying. Especially on topics like this, where I would like to quickly identify those replies made by the /. crew, but also in other discussions I think it's bad when you can't see if the original poster replied to for example a poster who had a different opinion or asked for a clarification.

One criticism

[ergo98]

&ltHumor&gt Now all my favourites (bookmarks for the non-IE crowd) pointing to AC posts I made slamming someone or other [in an ever so clever manner!] are bogus with the reindexing of post #s, etc. Damn. &lt/Humor&gt Now how will I see whether the private school kid who's got the "high IQ" comes back with a brilliant rejoinder?

Old articles

[sulli]

This is really, really nice. Thanks!

A cookie per page

[ewen]

The most obvious change is that now every single page sends a brand new cookie to accept/reject (unlike the old code which sent one only when you logged in or didn't supply a cookie). This is one of my pet hates on websites -- being bugged by new cookies with every single page -- and rapidly makes an otherwise good website too annoying to bother with.

Surely with a one year expiry time on the cookies it is only necessary to send them once a month or so at the most? Or perhaps this is the Slashcode version of Chinese Water Torture.

Re:A cookie per page

[koreth]

Sounds like a browser deficiency to me -- the "do you want this cookie?" popup should give you the option of suppressing future instances of itself. I know Opera does; there's a button for "make my accept/refuse choice apply to all cookies from this site." I'm sure one of the open-source browsers out there either already does something similar or could be made to do so without Herculean effort.

It's not the site that's putting cookie popups in your face, after all; it's your browser (and your chosen configuration of your browser, at that).

Re:A cookie per page

[ShootThemLater]

... This is one of my pet hates on websites -- being bugged by new cookies with every single page -- and rapidly makes an otherwise good website too annoying to bother with.

So use a browser like Mozilla that handles this for you or get hold of Cookie Pal or similar.

Re:A cookie per page

[Swordfish]

I agree 100%

Either the cookies go. Or slashdot goes!

Not happy!

Re:A cookie per page

[Omnifarious]

Except, I don't want to willy-nilly accept cookies from this site. Mozilla has that option too, but I don't use it for this site. I wish I had a 'they're only allowed to modify already accepted cookies' option.

Re:A cookie per page

[nuhonda]

i'm sorry, i really don't mean to troll,
but c'mon.

asking a user to have a browser that supports cookies at a minimum isn't too much.

if you're that paranoid; that you need to monitor every single cookie that every site uses, i strongly suggest you turn off the 'puter, and walk away slowly. they're already watching you.

give me a break

Re:A cookie per page

[goodtim]

Either the cookies go. Or slashdot goes!

Freak.

Ok enough of that. Really man, you need to lighten up. Cookies, while annoying at times, arn't the end of the world. Just deal with it, or just set your browser to accept all cookies. To say that we sould get rid of one of the greatest websites of all time cause they use cookies is insane.

Re:A cookie per page

[Sax Maniac]

Here's a tip for you Junkbuster folks (and if you're not, why the hell are you surfing naked?). After logging in, put this into your cookies.ini file:

>slashdot.org

Re:A cookie per page

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, they're purposefully trying to annoy you-- it's part of the grand slashdot conspiracy to try to convince you to switch to Konqueror :)

Re:A cookie per page

[ameoba]

You'd stop reading slashdot 'cuz you're paranoid about cookies, but you're willing to include your exact location in your sig.

I guess it's true what they say 'bout crazies... You can't talk to a psycho like a normal human being

Re:A cookie per page

[gilgongo]

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Still lacking a feature..

[geojaz]

Thanks to Yazz, Kurt, Toad and Trish. And also props go out to Uriah on the West Si-eed for helping with some raid bios problems that messed with our database stuff and really though us for a loop.
Slashdot 2.2. News for Nerds. Spell/grammar-check free since 1997.

subject s

[Anonymous Coward]

Does AC posting work now? it didn't a bit ago... And what about this? foo

A bit of irony

[HongPong]

The changes are numerous, but non-obvious unless ....

It just so happened that when I loaded the site all the black and green parts suddenly washed out. I knew it was a glitch, but still, it seemed funny.

Does anyone else find it odd that CT has only posted 57 times in the life of the site, according to his homenode? This lends buckets of credence to the idea of /. bigshots using secondary accounts.

Arrrghhh

[Anonymous Coward]

That bracketed domain name thingie after href tags is pretty darned annoying and ugly looking.
I never login while checking in from work so I
hope there is an option to turn it off.

Or maybe it's an insidious plot to reduce the number of anonymous cowards browsing by subjecting them to such torturous things ;)

Some things never change

[Anonymous Coward]

Like that broken date format, will that ever get fixed? It's a minor quibble, but you've had how long to do it? Surely you're just using a tiny fragment of code to turn it into a string, so fix the formatting of it already!

Like: Saturday, August 18 @ 02:56AM

"Older stuff" slashbox

[Craig Davison]

Displays stuff currently on my front page. Or was it always like that?

My guess at the reason for '2165243' comment ids

[Anonymous Coward]

It makes deleting comments easier. In old times, if there had been a story without a #1 comment, or even #2 or #3, it would have been obvious something was deleted. With the new system, it will be much easier for people like michael do delete what they don't like without anybody noticing.

Now we need Meta Meta Moderation!

[RedSynapse]

Sure Meta Moderation helps prevent abuses in moderation, but now we need a mechanism to prevent abuses in Meta Moderation: Meta Meta Moderation!

Of course then that only opens up new potential abuses in Meta Meta Moderation, which will require Meta Meta Meta Moderation, and so on. What we need is some kind of neutral unbiased arbiter, unfortunately the supreme court no longer meets the criteria for such, so I vote for the development of some kind of super-intelligent ape.

-----
Lisa: Dad, don't you see you're abusing your power like all vigilantes? I mean, if you're the police, who will police the police?

Homer: I dunno. Coast Guard?

Beer + 2.2 == Good

[CMiYC]

Fuck, I just made my first journal entry and all is good. I got so fuckd up my ride home is puking and I am not. I don't understand that shit, but I don't care. Good job Taco, I miss talking to you on IRC and shit. Oh well. Peace everyone. I like the Journal if I didn't mention it already.

why 2.2?

[murat]

why did not slashdot gods did never use Slashcode2.0?

Needs a bit more work..

[sakusha]

The speed improvements are great.. WHEN they work. When I click on a story, it only works about a third of the time, usually nothing happens. And occasionally I get a page with no content. I'd report these as bugs but it doesn't seem to have any consistency so there's nothing to report but random errors, and I suspect you guys are already working on these problems..

BTW, I just hit submit and nothing happened. Add that to the bug list.

turquoise 'look'

[sewagemaster]

how about the turquoise look? are we really trying to keep it this way... it isnt exactly the retro type of grooviness ;)

Re:A bit of irony (BUG!)

[isaac_akira]

That happened to me a few times too. I thought it was browser bug from low memory or something (IE on Mac gets that way after a day of heavy browsing) but maybe it's a real bug...

(heh, and it happened just now when I previewed this comment!)

Ah! This:

<BODY BGCOLOR="" TEXT="" LINK="" VLINK="">

Looks like the culprit...

Submitted to bug tracker

[isaac_akira]

submitted the above bug...

Re:ooh, look

[Anonymous Pancake]

wow.. how did you make it appear to be goat.cx linked when it wasn't?

Searches broken?

[fuzza]

Is it just me (although I can't fathom why) or are searches completely broken? As in, no pages are listed for any topic, even no topic (simply browsing in order).

Hopefully all the pre-Banjo stories haven't gone walkabout... noooo!!!

Having said that it'll probably fix itself as soon as I post ;)

Looks good...

[E-Rock-23]

Kudos to you guys. So far, so good here. Looks relatively nice. One suggestion, though, would be flavoring. Let users change gfx from the standard green to an array of colors. Just an idea...

I'll second that one

[E-Rock-23]

I just got back from Karaoke myself. Beer, Music, Blondes and Banjo! Great combination! Caps off a killer night. Kudos to Taco and Crew for a job well done and worth a beer ^.^

The New Slashdot 2.2, with whiter brighter whites!

[Talkischeap]

Man, your new site is sooooo bright I need to wear my shades! With the NEW IMPROVED, Whiter Brighter White background, I can read all the troll's postings so much easier now.

The Old Dirty, Dingy, Slashdot pales in comparison.

Must be all the optical brighteners you added to the code, huh?

And how did you guys get all the fonts soooo smoooth? No more Ragged Jagged Edges for Slashdot, those NEW IMPROVED fonts just JUMP off the page at you! (Ouch!) Must be that new "state-of-the-art" di-fribfontulator algorhythm (4/4) you used, eh?

But wait, the Vibrant Colors in the headers... Wow! I only heard rumours about a beta version of the experi[mental] pixel bleaching algorithm. Boy, those colors are BRIGHT! You go, guys!

And to top it off, the new site seems to load about 60% faster, way out here on the Left Coast.

You pulled no [pun]ches with this new code did you? No more Dingy, Dirty, Slashdot, it's a Web Day Miracle!

Bring back fake email!

[Guido del Confuso]

I liked having fake email addresses! I want all my account info sent to my private, real email address and having people send email (and spam) to another fake address. Makes things much easier.

I don't want people to know my real address unless I explicitly give it to them, and I don't want to have things like my password get sent to an email address I don't check as often and could possibly forget the password to. I don't care so much about spamproofing my fake email address (Hotmail accounts start with 50 pieces of spam in them when you sign up, and it seems to breed somehow) as protecting my real email address from sickos and perverts. I wouldn't give out my phone number on Slashdot, and I treat my email address the same way.

Now that ultramode.txt is gone

[Skapare]

Now that ultramode.txt is gone, does anyone have a program that will parse the RDF or XML format and produce human readable and/or script parseable output?

Re:Now that ultramode.txt is gone

[brank]

Try http://slashdot.org/palm/. Lots of programs can parse such simple HTML.

goatse.cx defence

[ShootThemLater]

I see that /. now auto-inserts domains as plain text after URLs. Should stop those goatsex guys from making an impact until they get cleverer at hiding the target.

Haven't decided whether it looks irratating or not yet...

Re:goatse.cx defence

[ameoba]

I wonder what it does with Numeric IPs?

Re:goatse.cx defence

[ameoba]

Hey, here's a link that goes to goatse. Do we get reverse-DNS?

Re:goatse.cx defence

[ameoba]

It's worse than I thought... Numeric access to goatse takes you to hick.org...

In this case, it appears we've been saved by virtual hosting.

Re:goatse.cx defence

[Lazarus Short]

Actually, I tested a bunch of URL obfuscations during the beta. The code to display the hostname is pretty robust. And, since goatse.cx is (apparently) on a non-IP virtual interface, you can't link to it by IP address-- you just get the homepage of some other site. (Hick.org-- their hosting company, perhaps?)

Consequently, the goatse.cx posters are probably going to have to focus on finding alternate locations to host that pic. Beware of Geocities links!

Re:goatse.cx defence

[[amorphis]]

Consequently, the goatse.cx posters are probably going to have to focus on finding alternate locations to host that pic. Beware of Geocities links!

one I know of is tacoinspector.com
be warned

Re:goatse.cx defence

[suwain_2]

until they get cleverer at hiding the target.

What's to stop someone from throwing up a page anywhere they can - such as Geocities or FortuneCity - with an auto-forward? You'd click on a link to a legitimite site, only to be forwarded elsewhere... Just please don't *USE* this idea, anyone! :)

Haven't decided whether it looks irratating or not yet...

You can turn it off in your preferences section if it is annoying.

Nice changes to Yer Info, but. . .

[ahfoo]

It's nice to be able to see more than just the most recent four posts, but being able to page through ALL of them would be conveneient at some point. I know, you can just do a search for your user ID, but that's not exactly the same thing.
Also, how about getting rid of the text on the top of the "Your Info" page that questions why people should be interested in themselves. I've taken offence at that from the fist time I saw it. If you don't take interest in yourself, why should anybody else give a flying fuck? Assuming that people who are concerned with themselves and the responses to their own posts are somehow irregular seems bizarre and highly illogical.
If the goal of Slashdot is, in fact, an insightful discussion, we probably want people participating who are very conscious of and proud of their self image rather than the sad masses begging for attention because they feel so worthless and pathetic that they need to seek out attention by the lowest common denominator --acting like annoying children smearing shit on the walls and calling other people names etc.
How about this for the new text on the Your Info page:
This is your user info page. There are thousands more, but this one is yours. Here we have archived your eloquent contributions to our profound forum. This is your private sanctuary in which the text of your thoughts have been immortalized and conveniently organized by the caring Slashdot staff. We encourage you to re-read your own work and contemplate the greatness that is you. If you're looking to change your password or click pretty widgets to kill time, try clicking Preferences.

Local man?

[ajf]

Duh, The Onion writes about Area Man, not Local Man.

Re:My guess at the reason for '2165243' comment id

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll bet you're right. I'm surprised your comment has lasted as long as it has.

the obligatory...

[666johndoe666]

... imagine a beowulf of /. no site on the net would be safe!

--
feed the trolls, we are hungry too!

Re:Kikes

[JBowz15]

Should I submit a bug report on the 2.2 code because this guy is still around? I was really hoping thay'd have it fixed by now.

Same Here....

[minus23]

Totally agree... I get links to work only about a 1/3 of the time...

On top of that... the front page doesn't correctly display the number of comments... I've had a story showing no comments for over 5 hours now... That's a bug :)

Re:Same Here....

[NortonDC]

On top of that... the front page doesn't correctly display the number of comments... I've had a story showing no comments for over 5 hours now... That's a bug :)

I'm seeing that, too. That's an annoying one, and it'll cost the site page views as I typically wait for 10-20 3-rated comments to appear before I read comments, unless I'm moderating.

Hey

[Motor]

The amazing vanishing karma?

Pre-changeover: 30
Post-changeover: 14

Mailed malda to ask what gives, and karma now: 11

Re:Hey

[drnomad]

Seems that I'm too late again for an obvious karma-joke... ;-)

pesky numbering system

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, I liked the previous system whereby comments were numbered for each story instead of number 2,170,xxx zillion. This makes it way too hard to find anything!

Where's the meta-moderation link?

[Lumpish Scholar]

I use the "lite" look. Right under the Slashdot logo, I see links for faq, code, osdn, etc.; but no link for meta-moderation.

(Later:) I used the link in my history (http://slashdot.org/metamod.pl), and it appears to work. (I tried it again, and it offered again to let me MM; but when I hit refresh, it said "not eligible," as it should. IE 5, @Home; I don't remember needing to refresh around the cache like that before.)

how about no cookies at all?

[Anonymous Coward]

There really isn't any reason for cookies at all.

Re:how about no cookies at all?

[Bug-Man]

Then how else do you expect the site to remember who we are when we come back??

Log in again *EVERY* time?

Re:how about no cookies at all?

[RGRistroph]

Cookies can at least be made optional.

If you try to keep track of sessions by unique stuff in the URL, you make it hard for users to cut-and-paste links to send to each other.

But I thought that the single cookie at login method was the best compromise, and I don't like this continuous cookie updating. I don't really know all the options in session management though.

Could you do it with SSL, making an https connection ? (Ignore for the moment the fact that this would drive processing power requirements through the roof.)

Re:This is not a community

[Roofus]

In case you haven't been there in awhile, sCary's Shugashack no longer exists under that name. Steve wanted a more "presentable" name. It's now known as Shacknews. And he hasn't used the name sCary in like 2 years.

"Coming soon: HTML!"

[John Siracusa]

So...at what version will Slashdot start using HTML (instead of whatever custom angle-bracketed language I see when I view source right now)

And in other news

[JediTrainer]

Meta Moderation received an overall at the maniacal hands of Cliff.

User Info pages were handed a pair of old jeans with patches over the holes in the knees, and the 2-million-odd old articles were collectively given a large flowery muumuu.

Security gets a brand-new pair of underwear with an attached padlock.

[domain] feature would be good in meta-mod -nt

[DrSkwid]

[domain] feature would be good in meta-mod -nt

Lose yer cane?

[Snowfox]

I know I forgot to thank someone, and I apologize, but its past midnight and I've been going for 16 hours today.

Now holy shit, I'm gonna sleep.

Geezsh. Somebody's getting OLD!

I'll still be at my desk when you wake.

Re:RMS is a fucking commie idiot

[Hobbex]

(just testing, I'm sure the troll won't mind)

AC?

[jbarnett]

Check this out (don't login and look at user.pl):

Karma 1972 (mostly the sum of moderation done to users comments)

Anonymous Coward has posted 325291 comments. Below are the most recent 24 comments.

I first panic and though dammit I don't remember posting 325,291 comments last night in my drunken state. Then it hit me after the coffee started hitting my brain.

The thing that AMAZES me is that Anonymous Coward not only has POSTIVE karma, that account has ALOT of karma (1972)... I guess someone with a lot of mod points *cough*CmdrTaco*cough* really likes what AC has to say *cough*goatcx*cough*

Who would of thought?

Re:AC?

[kdgarris]

I guess that should start allowing AC posts to have the +1 Score bonus due to high karma. :-)

-Karl

Re:AC?

[mother_superius]

Well, an AC comment since it starts at 0, can only be moderated down by 1. On the other hand, it can be moderated up by 5.

Re:AC?

[sh4d3r]

the real url is
http://www.slashdot.org/~Anonymous%20Coward

Re:AC?

[etymxris]

Did you notice the user id is 666?

Re:AC?

[Anonymous Coward]

I found something interesting on AC's posting history...

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=20505&threshol d=0&commentsort=3&mode=nested&cid=0

Not quite sure what it is... but "JohnKatz" somehow appears as a goatse.cx link.

Re:AC?

[theancient1]

Another interesting thing about Anonymous users in 2.2 is that they don't seem to be completely anonymous. I remember reading in the FAQ once that clicking the "anonymous" box is as good as logging out. (I can't find that statement right now, though, and the article does mention that the FAQ needs to be updated.)

I submitted an comment anonymously in another topic. I was reading the article again a while later, and couldn't help but notice that the moderation options didn't show up for that one comment I wrote anonymously. I could moderate anything else in the article, but not that one comment.

It's possible that it's been this way for a long time. Or it could have been some other bug preventing the options from being displayed. It's just curious. Any insight?

Timeouts on Slashdot !

[kaltan]

Hey, do you guys also have these continuous time-outs ? I had to press the "Reply" button alone at least 5 times before i could post, and i know i'll have to press 'submit' 5 to 10 times again before this gets posted.

No one noticed ? 'Hope they fix this soon.

WAP/WML

[BlueDraco]

I don't know if slashdot is now using the wml/wap plugin for slashcode, however I'd really like to know if it is now, and the url to it.

http://slashcode.com/repository.pl?op=get&plugin _i d=7

..... and Thank You For Killing The Opera Browser

[Taco Cowboy]

Geeee... I wish I was the first to thank /. for doing such a good job to kill the Opera browser !

/. used to be browser friendly, that is, whatever type of browser you use, you can get on /. without problem.

Now, if you use Opera, especially the version which runs on Winblows, ye Opera will crash, and I can guarantee it (I have tried exactly 12 times, using exactly 12 machines, which runs various versions of Opera browsers, running on various incarnations of the Winblows OS.)

Thank you again, /., for killing the Opera browser so effectively !

re: cookies are evil

[aoeuid]

Mozilla & Konqueror have that option.

However, I use Communicator 4.75. Therefore, this feature is annoying the hell out of me as well. I do not have the resources to run one of those fancy new browsers. Netscape on a p166 other wise works just fine. Especially when I see no use for setting the cookie everytime. It worked fine before, the user cookie only needs to be set once when I log on.

Normally I block all cookies through Guidescope, and selectivly turn on cookies for sites which I need them for. However, in Netscape I still have the prompt for each cookie option turned on.

This is very much necessary. If you turn on this option and browse the web for a few days, you will see all the bullshit cookies companies set. Anything including the letters "UID" in the cookie name drives me absolutely insane. They have no bloody right to track my movement across websites. And yes, I know its a bit of an inconvience to selectively accept cookies, and I can live with that. But I don't need Slashdot, my favorite and by far most frequently visited site on the whole entire internet, blatently making things that much harder for me. And the nerve of you to tell me to get a new and modern browser. You sound like a typical enthusiastic Windows user. Damn you.

On another note, I registered a name shortly after Slashdot names were added as a feature. But I continued to post for a long time by just typing in my real name instead (when we could). My account magically disappeared. Now I am stuck with a very unimpressive UID. Damn whoever added that feature as well.

Link Domains?

[icqqm]

Gee, I wonder what caused this to be added to the features list?

Re:..... and Thank You For Killing The Opera Brows

[singularity]

For what it is worth, iCab, an alternative browser for the Mac, still works well on Slshdot/Banjo.

I just started up Opera 5.0b2 on the Mac, as well, and it seems to run well.

Shows you for running Windows, I suppose.

Cliff, I don't envy you.

[Colbey]

Thanks, /. team, for all the changes. But thanks especially to Cliff, who seems to have had one of the more thankless jobs I can think of. I can't stand a couple hours of busywork, and what you did probably took days. We salute you!--Colbey

Suggestion: Mark editorial moderations clearly

[Seth Finkelstein]

The link [hostname] indicator is a nice, clever idea. I have a suggestion along the same lines. Please consider doing the same with editorial moderations. Many people don't even know that Slashcode editors have unlimited moderation points

So, when an editor uses those unlimited moderation privileges, it should appear as e.g. -1 Troll [editor's name]. This would avoid the current problem that when comments critical of Slashdot, or a particular editor, are down-modded, there's no way to tell whether the mod is "honest", or an editor abusing his position. This leads to much suspicion, as dishonest editors can say "You can't prove it was me", while honest editors have a cloud over their integrity.

Now, let me say up-front, of course I have an interest here. The acrimony between one Slashot editor and myself is no secret. I don't deny my experiences inform this suggestion. Nonetheless, the idea should stand or fall on its own merits.

-- Seth Finkelstein

Re:Suggestion: Mark editorial moderations clearly

[uid8472]

The link [hostname] indicator is a nice, clever idea.

Yes, but you just know it was put there to appease all the l^Husers who don't check a link before they click on it and whine when it turns out to be goatse.cx...

Re:Suggestion: Mark editorial moderations clearly

[Nightpaw]

Yeah, what's up with that? Can't people just look in the status bar? I know that IE, Netscape, and Opera all have that feature.

I check it for almost every link I click on, unless it's pretty obvious from the context I'm just going to another page on that site.

Re:Suggestion: Mark editorial moderations clearly

[CaseyB]

Can't people just look in the status bar? I know that IE, Netscape, and Opera all have that feature.

In IE, at least, you could use an URL like:

http://www.linux.org...(lots of spaces)...@goatse.cx/

and it's indistinguishable on a mouseover from a valid url, because the status bar truncates the url when the spaces make it too long.

Re:Suggestion: Mark editorial moderations clearly

[Anonymous Coward]

Seems rather paranoid to me. I never checked links before following them. I don't know anyone else who has a habit of checking links before following them. There's no other website out there I need to check links on.

That said, on Slashdot I do check links occasionally, just because of that goat sex guy. But I still think it's paranoid.

Re:Suggestion: Mark editorial moderations clearly

[jdavidb]

This would avoid the current problem that when comments critical of Slashdot, or a particular editor, are down-modded, there's no way to tell whether the mod is "honest", or an editor abusing his position.

I've never seen such a comment. Where are you getting this? I read at cutoff 5 sorted by score.

Re:..... and Thank You For Killing The Opera Brows

[fyonn]

well, I don't suppose they did it deliberately. I'm sure they'll fix it as soon as they can. there's always teething troubles with a new system.

dave

look and feel

[uvc]

well... the old look'n feel is nice.

but it would be cool if there were other formats to choose from when viewing slashdot. call them skins or whatever... it doesn't have to be extremely complex.... but i'd be happy if i could change some of the viewing style on demand. or edit my own skin so i could enjoy seeing slashdot the way I want.

Kudos to Cliff!

[Anonymous Coward]

A huge new deal is the fact that all the old articles have been re-imported back into the database. 2 million of them. Old discussions will continue to be closed out as they age, but users will still be able to adjust order and threshold when they view them. This was a really nasty task for Cliff since he had to import nearly 4 years of HTML back into the database... including a dozen different comment formats that evolved over that time. A huge task, but one that he managed to pull off by the deadline. And I think any users who read older stories will appreciate it.

Woo! Major kudos and thanks to Cliff for this. Trying to find particular posts was a real pita before. This is much appreciated. Easy enough to use a browser find when looking for specific content, but when you want to browse articles over a certain threshhold it's not so easy. If only browsers supported regexps in the find....

What kernel does Slashdot use?

[pepermil]

I went browsing through the FAQ & looking through this article, but I can't find any reference to what version of the Linux kernel Slashdot uses. In looking through the FAQ I saw mention that the old slashdot servers were running Debian Frozen & RedHat 6.2...I'm just wondering if Slashdot is using the most up-to-date versions of the kernel (in the 2.2 series @ least) as most of the latest in the 2.2 series were released to deal with security issues.

If Slashdot does use up-to-date kernels to avoid security holes, how do they go about updating their servers...a new kernel would force them to have to reboot the servers...do they just do each server one at a time? Or do they rely upon their BSD filtering box & routers/switches to keep the site secure & not worry so much about updating the kernel on the web servers? And if so, what about keeping the BSD box up-to-date? It seems for a production site on the scale of Slashdot that finding the proper balance b/w keeping the machines secure with things like up-to-date kernels & packages & having to maintain the stability & uptime of the site must be an incredibly challenging task.

These thoughts are brought to you by my spending too much time using nmap -O recently. :-)

-pepermil

Re:More information about the Slashcode change.

[darth dickinson]

I wondered how long it would take...

Damn goatse.cx.

Link indications

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

The link [hostname] indicator is a nice, clever idea.

Personally, I find it irritating, as it disrupts my reading flow. However, I can see how others would like it. So, kudos to those behind it for letting us turn it off. (It's under your Comments preferences, in case anyone hasn't found it yet.)

If only everyone adding "clever" tricks to their software would let us turn them off, Office^H^H^H^H^H^Hthe world would be a nicer place. ;-)

Link Viewer

[jjeffries]

Ugh, the "feature" of printing out the destination domain of a link is really

(gee I hope that worked)

Re:Link Viewer

[Anonymous Coward]

Then turn it off.
Use the bottom-most set of radio buttons in your comment preferences.

Re:Link Viewer

[gorf]

I can see that people might start doing that just to get that particular of text to appear.

considering..

[Anonymous Coward]

..Oprea sucks more cock than Jon Katz, what's the big deal?

+1 Filter

[gss]

I wish there was a way in the preferences to ignore the +1 bonus. More often than not the comment that starts at 1 and gets modded up to 2 is far more interesting/informative than the ones at 2 with the bonus. Or a comment starting at 1 with +2 mods is better than a comment starting at 2 with +1 mod (hope that makes sense) There is no way to fiter this out though. I guess this is a key part of the moderation system and probably wont change but it's probably one of the things that bugs me most about slashdot.

Re:..... and Thank You For Killing The Opera Brows

[wheany]

Now, if you use Opera, especially the version which runs on Winblows, ye Opera will crash, and I can guarantee it (I have tried exactly 12 times, using exactly 12 machines, which runs various versions of Opera browsers, running on various incarnations of the Winblows OS.)

This reply was written on an Opera on Win98, no crashes here.

A tribute to the greatness that was Slashdot

[duffbeer703]

A long, long time ago
I can still remember
How the trollers used to make me smile

And I knew if I had to boast
That I could try to get first post
And maybe I'd be happy for a while

But moderators made me shiver
With every minus they'd deliver

DoS scripts couldn't stop it
They scored them all "Offtopic"

I know that it's cheap crack they smoke
And meta-moderation's broke
At first I thought it was a joke
The day that trolltalk died

-- Chorus --
Bye, bye, MEEPTy, OOG, and Grits guy
Drove the Cruiser like some loser who starts posts with a *sigh*
Those Steve Woston posts that we all knew were a lie
Wonder what became of girls petrified?
What became of girls petrified?
--

Did you write a bunch of Perl?
And did it make you want to hurl
Feces at the Wall?

Can you believe these lame-ass polls?
Do you post big stretched-out assholes?
Can you make the goatse.cx link not show?

Well I know you think that Siggy sucked
Will the real Bruce Perens please stand up?

The bots don't have a clue.
Man, I dig those trolls from Shoe!

I was a rabid Free Speech advocate
With a Red Hat T-shirt and a Free Beer gut
Bought my Sony laptop working Pizza Hut
The day that trolltalk died

-- Chorus --

It's been two years since the IPO
And LNUX sinks to all-time lows
But that's not how it used to be

When Spiral showed how it was done
Trolling as Jon Erikson
Who worked for NPO Technologies

Oh and while they tried to filter posts
Somebody rooted Slashdot's host

"Crack Slashdot? That's absurd!"
Better go change your password

While JonKatz wrote a Hellmouth book
By using posts he simply took
And we flamed him till he was cooked
The day that trolltalk died

And we were singin....

-- Chorus --

10 grams. Inchfan. Didn't log out. Goddamn
The mods will find the sid real soon, man
You can't hide if you aren't AC

Your bud (George here) tried BSD
A dead Streetlawyer's tips were free
And WIPO helped letsriot turn Nazi

70 made his percents up
While 80md warned "liberals suck"

The moon does not exist
It's just a liberal myth

Oh and as Taco tried to take a nap
We forced him to invoke bitchslaps
Do you recall the flood of crap
The day that trolltalk died?

We started singin....

-- Chorus --

Oh and then we were wearing out "All your base"
And started posting monospace
The better for our penis birds

So come on, be a zealot, be a dick
You don't think Anne Marie's a chick?
Because lying's all we do about HURD

So go and push for BSD
And say GPL isn't free

Slow down, cowboy! The limit
Is one post every minute

Now tell the right wing facist slime
Infringing on Your Rights Online
That they can't censor all the time
The day that trolltalk died

-- Chorus --

I met a troll they called The Rev
And asked him if CD BREAK HEAD
He said, "That's old. Get over it."

And with all the courage I could muster
"Imagine what a Beowulf cluster...."
But it wasn't worth the trouble to submit

The karma caps are just plain jive
And everyone's moved to K5

The steelcage has grown rusted
And Geekizoid is busted

The three sites I don't see for weeks
Segfault, kernel, Comp-u-geek
Code is not art. This ain't Freshmeat
The day that trolltalk died

-- Chorus

Let's see if Extrans works yet...

[Dwonis]

BoldItalicUnderline
New Line.

New Line<p>Paragraph.

Re:..... and Thank You For Killing The Opera Brows

[zpengo]

/. works fine on Opera for me. Maybe you shouldn't be using a Pressario or whatever POS your computer is....

Naked Woman Seeks Sex at Airport

propz to my niggaz

[Anonymous Coward]

propz to my niggaz in da bricks
shout out to my bitch janiqua and all my bitchez in van nuys and my homey j lo, t bone, and that mutha fuckin NUT werd

Re:..... and Thank You For Killing The Opera Brows

[Fuzzumd]

I'm sitting here right now on Opera in windows 2000. Works fine for me, haven't had a problem yet.

Now start charging to make it sustainable

[Ars-Fartsica]

Seriously, most serious /. users would gladly pay $20 a year to use the site, if even more features were promised to "members". Also, charging would get rid of most of the annoying ACs.

Re:Now start charging to make it sustainable

[Anonymous Coward]

most serious /. users would gladly pay $20 a year to use the site.. "Most" meaning you and the mouse in yer pocket, I suppose.

Re:Now start charging to make it sustainable

[Anonymous Coward]

most serious users are contibutors too.

would you charge someone for access to their own work?

Re:Now start charging to make it sustainable

[duffbeer703]

Are you on crack?

Who the fuck would pay for this shit.

Nobody.

Perhaps it's Opera's problem

[Von Rex]

Gee, if I had a browser that crashed every time it read HTML that the mainstream browsers could handle without any problem, then maybe I'd conclude that it was the browser that was the piece of shit rather than the underlaying OS or the web site in question. Not that the OS isn't shitty too, but these things are relative.

I remember installing Opera once. Can't remember exactly what it was that caused me to uninstall it half an hour later.

I really wish you didn't upgrade YET.

[AtariDatacenter]

After reporting somewhere in the order of 10 bugs on the Slash 2.2 code, I really wish that you hadn't of gone live with this version. Mind you, a lot of bugs have been addressed, but there are quite a number still lurking out there. For example, I see that on the right some of the slash boxes don't have a grey background... they are white! And the journal area still looks a bit messed up.

Okay. As of this writing, it looks a bit better. But look at the icons in my journal entries. They are all broken. At least it is letting me post journal entries once again.

I also didn't expect that everything I did on Banjo would make it into production. I've got a lot of trash in my journal.

BTW, going to "Preferences" as AC was interesting. Talk about a Karma Whore. That UID has Karma through the roof.

But Commander, why didn't you all hold off a bit more before going live with the new version?

Re:..... and Thank You For Killing The Opera Brows

[Bradee-oh!]

Ummm... errr..... Opera on Win2k, no problems here

test

[libre lover]

test

Invalid tag error

[whereiswaldo]

Anyone else get an error when trying to post? I got "invalid tag error" the last time I tried to post... let's see if this one takes...

Re:..... and Thank You For Killing The Opera Brows

[Eloquence]

No problems on Opera (5.11) here, using Win NT 4.0.

Mod this up

[JPMH]

unless you know how to change this pref ?

F irst post!

[blair1q]

Did I get it?

--Blair

"I love a good meme joke."

Re:F irst post!

[blair1q]

Bugs bugs bugs.

The text of that joke is missing. It read:

>"Did I get it?
>
>--Blair
>"I love a good meme joke."

But it does show up when I hit "reply" (i.e., I couldn't read it in the normal threading, but I can cut and paste it here, although it's been misformatted because the preview added a lot of tags I didn't use...)

Stop modifying the cookie!

[Rev. Null]

Every time I load up a new slashdot page, Mozilla informs me that slashdot.org wants to modify an existing cookie. This is really annoying. The old slashdot didn't do that. Please revert back to the previous behaviour.

Re:..... and Thank You For Killing The Opera Brows

[No-op]

my god you weren't kidding about the dubbing. that's unbelievably awful! I know this is off topic but he's seriously right about it, it's gawd awful. anyone in doubt should watch http://www.tekniikka.turkuamk.fi/~jfinnber/agapio/ putous.avi

unreal.

Re:..... and Thank You For Killing The Opera Brows

[linuxbaby]

Yep - just checking - it works great in Opera 5.12 on Win98.

Opera rules...

Mega-dittos

[GlenRaphael]

Me three. Many times I've hit the filter when trying to post a snippet of relevant code or carefully quoting parts of the comment I'm replying to.

Usually I get past the filter by deleting useful content which makes my posting MORE lame, less relevant, and harder to put in context. Sometimes I just give up and don't post because the thing the lameness filter blocks is the core of the comment.

Re:comment number# allocation is illogical & b

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, but it makes "first post!"'s a thing of the past.

No it doesn't. Just go to the first comment in a story to see the first post. In fact, some guy called "Ralph Nader Jew Hater" or something has been posting anti-Semitic and racist first posts all over Slashdot 2.2.

I think this was done to make it possible for the Slashdot crew (especially Michael Sims) to delete posts without detection. The numbers are so hard to follow. Why would they delete posts? Because VA Linux is in dire financial straits and they want to advertise this site as being a place where intelligent, technical people hang out. They don't want any advertisers or investors seeing wildly dissident, troll, or crapflood posts at a time when they need money.

I'll just click "Preview" to make sure my comment looks right...

Internal Server Error
The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.
Please contact the server administrator, pater@slashdot.org and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.
More information about this error may be available in the server error log.
Apache/1.3.20 Server at banjo.slashdot.org Port 80

Man, aren't the investors and advertisers going to love that...

it's just you

[sulli]

Sure, /. looks geeky. That's the point! I find it pretty easy to work with, and I love the fact that it isn't cluttered with fonts, animation (except for one exception), and so on.

I say don't make any major changes to the appearance. Small improvements are always welcome, of course.

Low bandwidth slashboxes are different...

[ctkrohn]

And I liked the old way much better! They are easier to read.

Now, they are just like the standard boxes in the normal page.

Karma Door

[fm6]

I think it's a mistake to worry about minor shifts in karma. Face it, your precise karma just doesn't matter. If you can resist the urge to troll and flame, your karma will inevitably creep above the extra-point threshhold, never to return. After that, who cares what your karma is?

People get so childish on this subject. They rant about bad moderators, or little glitches that deprive them of a point or two. Those issues are real, but they're just not important.

When you post or submit a story, you need to remember that you're just one of thousands doing the same. Every one of these people has just as much right to be heard as you do. If you want to attract attention, say something interesting. Bitching and moaning is not interesting. You think your argument is important or incisive, but you're hardly objective, are you?

If it were up to me, your karma would go up and down randomly every day. Have to go to a real-number value, and make the random changes fractional. If you did good things karma would be much more likely to go up, and if you did bad things it would be much more likely to go down -- but neither would be a guarantee.

This wouldn't affect true slashdotters with a comfortable margin above the 25-point threshhold. But it would keep lamers and karma whores on their toes, and give newbies an occasional chance to be in the spotlight. It would also stop all this stupid obsessing, and eliminate some of the class resentment.

Re:Karma Door

[k8to]

If you can resist the urge to troll and flame, your karma will inevitably creep above the extra-point threshhold, never to return.

Yes, and if you can resist the urge to post except when you actually have something worthwhile to say, your karma will remain below that threshold. And really, that would be an even bigger boost to the great Signal to Noise Ratio in the sky.

can we get rid of the damned annoying header boxes

[Reziac]

I use Slashdot Extra-Light for legibility and because it doesn't crash my preferred browser. But now -- the extra table definition heading up every comment, aside from being visually annoying, has the potential to hook into a bug that's in every version of Netscape (manifesting to varying degrees, but always there) where too many tables with links inside them causes a resource leak.

Even without that, it bugs my eyes and actually made it HARDER to see the user info. I want the option to make my /. view look the old way.

What happened to the Slashdot box?

[LordNimon]

There used to be a slashbox for Slashdot itself. You might ask yourself what the point was, but it allowed me to see a list of Slashdot headings that my filters normally hid from me. Every now and then I'd see something that looked interesting about a topic that I usually don't care about.

Could you please put the Slashdot slashbox back? Thanks!

BTW, the lameness filters are truly broken. My first version of this post, with the subject "Slashdot slashbox" was rejected because "Your comment violated the postersubj compression filter", whatever that means. Even after I changed it to "What happened to the Slashdot slashboxes?" it was still rejected.

Message Base Size?

[Alien54]

Just out of curiousity:

I wonder how much disk space the 2 million plus messages take up.

Even at 1k per message, that 2 gig of data. I wonder if the broke down and got an IBM 100gig for the future.

I am glad to see the hall of fame, etc integrated to include everything since the dawn of time.

- - -
Radio Free Nation
is a news site based on Slash Code
"If You have a Story, We have a Soap Box"
- - -
Check out the Vinny the Vampire Comic Strip

Re:It's

[Defiler]

http://www.angryflower.com/bobsqu.gif

Marking new comments?

[Reid]

How about some way to mark new comments? The way Linux Today does it for articles is nice. I'll read the comments for a /. article, but it's unlikely I'll reload and read new ones because the same old ones are there cluttering things up. Using a different color in the header than grey for new ones would be a good way to do it.

Nice job

[mrdisco99]

Great job, you guys. I didn't even notice. :)

Perhaps you need a decent browser

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, I'm posting this with Netscape Navigator 3.04; I just switched back from 4.78 bloatware.

3.04 works great! Of course, the SSL security is deprecated, the Java is archaic, the Javascript is archaic, there's no PNG image support, and the browser's never heard of cascading style sheets.

It sure is svelte compared to the porcine modern browsers and Netscape Mail is particularly responsive. I doubt if any of the plug-ins work with a 4-yr-old browser, but who cares? Plug-ins suck!

That's one of the problems with most sites

[Anonymous Coward]

Sites like Yahoo! are great because they *don't* change too much. Yahoo! looks very much similar to its inception (circa 1994) when it was being served up from http://akebono.stanford.edu. For a very long time AltaVista didn't much around with their look. Happily, it appears that the folks at Google understand this. Even Amazon.com appears to recognize this. If you go look at a book review, it pretty much looks the same as it did 3-4 years ago.

People Who Just Don't Get It(TM) build sites like cnn.com and espn.com and change the interface a couple of times a year, causing regular visitors to get lost. They also try to incorporate a lot of whiz-bang new and *unnecessary* geegaws that often don't work (Java, Javascript, templating). You can still visit Yahoo! with Netscape 3 and use the site effectively.

*Real* web surfers don't care about new looks. They care that A. ) they can efficiently find what is they're seeking, B.) the site retains a reasonable amount of reliability and performance (Yahoo! is pretty much king for availability, reliability, and performance), and C.) the content is relevant and fresh.

whatever happened to Signal_11?

[Anonymous Coward]

Whore he may be, but he is part of /. history :P

Re:whatever happened to Signal_11?

[Trepidity]

He had a semi-publicized "I'm leaving slashdot" episode, and now posts somewhat regularly at kuro5hin.org.

Generally speaking x.0 software sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

You really don't want to install the initial release of major version (e.g., 2.0, 3.0, 4.0) - it's usually late alpha/early beta quality.

x.1 releases are usually like release candidates and by the time x.2 releases hit the street, they are generally production quality.

Sorting Comments

[trommaster]

Well Finally!
The ability to sort archived comments is a good one.
Thanks to all of the team

-
whatdoyougetwhenyoumultiplysixbynine

Most of those "new features" seem not to work

[thejake316]

'Slashdot Journal System
Form Error!
There was an error in your submission; please get a new form and try again.' and some 'Key 4353h43ewadsf error' and formatting crap with /boxes.

"Welcome to Slashdot's new cluster" eh? Congratulations, I'm surprised it works at all. Thanks for using us peons for your alpha testing on a production server, we have nothing better to do. This is a shining example of the Peter Principle in action, not only have you folks risen to maximal incompetence editorially, but also code-wise. This is some shameful code, and shameful project management. You guys are selling advertising on this site, the least you could do is thoroughly test it first, and I don't mean "put it on a public server and hope our user peons find all the bugs in it." I think it was Linus who said something like "with enough eyes all bugs are shallow" but you'd need an infinate number of eyes to navigate the spaghetti of Perl that backs this thing. Larry Wall should modify the Artistic License specifically prohibiting whoever coded most of this from ever using Perl again. If this mess was deployed on a public website by any self-respecting company, basically everybody associated with the project would be fired in short order. Imagine Amazon pulling this sort of shit..."Please help us test our new server and beta storefront code, MoronHaven. Submit bugs to moron@moronhaven.tld" And then, the moronhaven project managers and coders saying shit like "But boss, we tested it. We had the beta server online for weeks, and nobody sent in any bug reports!" "But boss, ordering appliances is a new feature for Amazon, you shouldn't expect it to work at first!" "Thanks for trying to order something from Amazon! We realize this code is garbage and much of it doesn't work, but look at the feature list we wrote for it! Isn't it great! Click here to report a bug. Oops! You get an error when you click there, too, eh? Thank god we didn't code our email clients, those still work!"

Go ahead, mod this down, I never cared and never will. Assuming this even gets posted. I noticed if I hit 'preview' I tend to get an error when I try to post, so I won't hit preview. Rob&friends obviously never hit 'preview' or they would have noticed it in their exhaustive tests of this new "software." Of course, they only post comments when somebody points out they're taking heat (like the Anne What'shername troll) but obviously occasionally things hit close to home.

Re:Most of those "new features" seem not to work

[thejake316]

I think I can distill the rant down as follows:

"Worst upgrade ever."

Posts History

[Pat__]

Does anyone else feel naked and petrified that any user can view all the posts you ever submitted to slashdot?
Not that I have submitted that many :)

Also another offtopic question. Is the karma limit 12 if someone never posts to slasdhot? I'd been lurking for many years and one day I realized I had karma without ever posting! Just wondering if 12 was a coincidence or not.

Re:..... and Thank You For Killing The Opera Brows

[Anonymous Coward]

Opera 5.01 on Win98 no problems here.

--Joey

iCab? no

[Pope]

Actually, due a still-present bad HTML hack, Nested mode in iCab does NOT work.
each comment has this:
<UL>
<TABLE><!-- comment block -->
(yadda yadda yadda)
</TABLE>
</UL>

If you change all the <UL> to <DL><DD> and </UL> to </DL> everything works better. I have tested it on all the major graphical Mac browsers and it works fine. Anyone want to cut up a sample and look at it Lynx?

But OperaPPC has been working great since day one. Cool!
I had sent this to the guys at MacSlash when I figured out the problem, but forgot to send it into Slashcode. Doh!

invalid form key

[Anonymous Coward]

I was told, a few minutes ago, that I had an invalid form key.

I was so offended I didn't even check to see if the post had gone through. I expect this to improve, but I didn't copy the hex code, or the verbatim error message, for which I apologize and feel embarrased.

Overall, Slashdot has enriched my life in countless ways and I think all the OSDN people are way above their peers, and deserve great respect and admiration.

Except when they write cryptic error messages.

Re:invalid form key

[sulli]

This is a particularly annoying bug. Fix it!

Wow, great

[delmoi]

Nice to see all the old comments back in the DB. I have to say I was a little shocked when I went to check my own user info and saw "delmoi has posted 2945 comments" rather then the 50 that it usualy showes :P

I don't participate in /. as much as I used to anymore, but this is still cool.

Well, actually ...XML is out of date at the moment

[SNACKeR]

...I have a program I wrote recently that parses the Slashdot XML (http://slashdot.org/slashdot.xml) and displays the headers. I just noticed that the XML page is out of date compared to the home page. This didn't use to be the case...

They are currently separated by 8 hours, something tells me there is a cron job not running anymore.

Re:..... and Thank You For Killing The Opera Brows

[lostchicken]

Opera 5.12 works under Win2kSP2.

Opera 3.whatever for BeOS works too. If only Palm made BeOS. sob..

twb

Re: cookies are evil

[Trepidity]

So use Opera. It takes fewer system resources than any other browser I know of, and has the useful features spoken of above.

Lets see how the new Slashcode validates

[goingware]

You can use http://validator.w3.org to test whether a given web page contains valid HTML according to W3 Consortium standards.

The form uses the GET method so you can encode a validation request in a URL. Let's try validating:

• http://slashdot.org/
• this article

Nope, doesn't look like the HTML is any more valid than the last slashcode.

For more information see Use Validators and Load Generators to Test Your Web Applications.

SSL connections

[Anonymous Coward]

No, whether or not the connection is encrypted is moot. Basically, something on the client system needs to be flagged saying, "I'm logged in and here's the stamp on my hand".

Remember that with a multi-user OS (e.g., UNIX), several people can be simultaneously connecting to a server from the same IP address/same CPU ID/etc. Cookies are a widely accepted way to deal with this; it basically comes down to picking a technology that will get the largest number of visitors through your front door.

For many folks nowadays, the actual computer they use might not be terribly important. This is once of the big reasons why personal security certificates have failed miserably. I can get a free S/MIME certificate from Thawte, but I can't go to a generic browser on a tradeshow floor kiosk and sign my messages with it.

And by the way, using SSL connections does not "drive processing power requirements through the root." SSL connections are pretty much the way they were five years ago: low on CPU requirements, a little bit higher on network requirements. For the latter, a well-designed, svelte web site will reduce the amount of cr*p being sent over HTTPS. It's been that way for *years*.

Re:SSL connections

[RGRistroph]

SSL must be keeping track of a certain amount of session type data. If several users are using the same machine to visit SSL sites, their browser keys don't get confused.

Agreed.

[arcade]

I usually hate me toos -- but in this case, just to show the slashdot crew that more people agree with you.

YES. The 'lameness filters' suck horeshit. They get triggered if you type too fast. It has happened that I've responded to 2-3 comments in a row, and well -- since I'm a fast typer, every so often I get hit by the lameness filter. I think it used to be more than 20 seconds though.

Of course, we need to throttle the trolls, but that shouldn't take priority over regular postings.

No one noticed.

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't worry about it. It's nothing personal.

fix me

[[amorphis]]

Comment Submitted. There will be a delay before the comment becomes part of the static page.

This should be changed as there are no static pages now, no?

slashdot.xml

[Anonymous Coward]

http://slashdot.org/slashdot.xml doesn't get updated apparently. still shows only "Report Security Problems, Face The Consequences" (posted 2001-08-18 17:09:46) as of 2001-08-19 10:17.

Text browsers?

[ClarkEvans]

I was wondering if you had tested alot with text browsers like lynx and w3m? I've been unable to submit comments and have received numerous problems using these two user agents.

Re: cookies are evil

[aoeuid]

Coincidently I downloaded it last night, but it seems a little pricey. $39US is a little much for me, when I have Netscape Communicator, which otherwise works fine, for free. Plus it kind of sucked last time I used it, probably a good 2 years ago.

They write bad code too...

[duffbeer703]

The compression test thing actually gzips the comment and checks the size difference to see if it matches the expected compression for text. This more than anything says that the slashdot coders are idiots. This is the dumbest way I have ever heard of to do textual analysis. Maybe if Taco would bother to learn some information theory before flailing away in Perl, we might not have to deal with such stupidity.

Figured I'd post this again, since it is on-topic and true.

ARE YOU STILL HERE WIMP ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Gee ralphie boy, hows my fat little nazi wimp ass today

Im still around, still armed and still waiting for the place and time so we can meet and you can show this dirty jew what sort of a man you are

But then again your'e scared of that arent you my fat smelly four eyed little ass bandit.

IM NOT GOING TO LEAVE YOU ALONE UNTIL YOU LEAVE HERE DICKHEAD - FACE ME OR FUCK OFF

Sure looks better than Xafloc.com

[kr4jb]

Just thought I'd see what you were comparing /. to.
Error Occurred While Processing Request

Error Diagnostic Information

An error occurred while attempting to establish a connection to the server.

The most likely cause of this problem is that the server is not currently running. Verify that the server is running and restart it if necessary.

Unix error number 2 occurred: No such file or directory

Threaded

[pallex]

I set my prefs to `nested` but each stories comments appear in `threaded` mode. I can change them (on the page) and they work for that story, but if i change my prefs nothing happens! Bug?

On Kiro5hin this meant the trolls took over

[Per Abrahamsen]

Last time I checked kiro5hin, the "front page" looked like reading /. at -1.

hmm so why...

[sgups]

so why is it that the only story of mine which has been accepted but never posted doesnt show up in my user info after the updates? It was regarding NASA's genesis project

Mod totals

[sulli]

Bring 'em back! Stuff like:

Score: Flamebait=5, Troll=1, Funny=8, Informative=3, Offtopic=1, Total=17.

Those were always amusing, not just for the trolls but for real content too.

I am an idiot

[Anonymous Coward]

Okay, now I see them. Forget this one.

New feature request: self-down-moderation?

Ahhhhhh!!!! The colorblock indexes have changed!

[CKW]

You can dynamically change the color of a SlashDot page by using the ?colorblock= setting. Ages ago many of us went through hoops to figure out which indexed field matched which "things" on slashdot, and so we came up with our own colorblock settings.

For example, mine was like this (http://slashdot.org/index.pl?colorblock=white,med iumblue,black,white,darkblue,lightsteelblue,E0E8FF ,darkblue).

Unfortunately Slashdot 2.2 breaks the indexing, and now we have to totally re-discover which old index matches which new index!!!

Arrghhhhh! How hard would it have been to maintain backwards compatibility?

(Heyyyy, cool. I no longer have to manually put in the paragraph tags! Now that's progress!)

meta mod needs to be operational first

[Anonymous Coward]

QED

Compression filter is bad

[Sloppy]

I was posting about a couple of arcade games, and used the subject line:

Hard Drivin' and Race Drivin'

and was told

Your comment violated the postersubj compression filter. Comment aborted

This is a bad filter. I know there's a lot of shit that gets posted here, and the compression filter was a neat idea to try to counter it, but in the end, it is a Bad Thing. Get rid of it.