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

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.

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: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: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....