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!

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

[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

[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.

No 2.0?

[gad_zuki!]

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

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...

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

[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

[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

[bconway]

Thanks for your appropriate metamoderation.

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

[sharkey]

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

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?

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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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.

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.

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.

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?

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?!?!

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.)

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.

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?

[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?

[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: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.

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 #]

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

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

[Swordfish]

I agree 100%

Either the cookies go. Or slashdot goes!

Not happy!

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

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.

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...

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?

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

[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

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: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.

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.)

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.

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.

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

Link Domains?

[icqqm]

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

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

[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.

Link Viewer

[jjeffries]

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

(gee I hope that worked)

+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.

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

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Re:invalid form key

[sulli]

This is a particularly annoying bug. Fix it!

On Kiro5hin this meant the trolls took over

[Per Abrahamsen]

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

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.

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.