Slashdot Mirror
Welcome to Slashdot 2.2
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.
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!
æeee!
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
-= Xafloc =-
alinuxbox.com
N
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.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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.
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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.
If Murphy's Law can go wrong, it will.
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!
If god had intended you to be naked, you would have been born that way.
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)?
The shareholder is always right.
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?
Feminism is the wild notion that women are human beings.
how about the turquoise look? are we really trying to keep it this way... it isnt exactly the retro type of grooviness ;)
my blog
Haven't decided whether it looks irratating or not yet...
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.
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
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?
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.