Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot Updates
The formkey bug that was wreaking havoc all weekend was fixed. It was a mistake in seeding rand that was causing a small percentage of users to have problems posting. It wasn't a conspiracy designed to thwart anyone, just you. Man it was a pain in the ass. But it was squashed on Sunday (thank god).
Anonymous Coward filtering is now in place. It's not exactly finished, but it'll do for now. Essentially there is now a user preference that sets all AC posts to -1. This has been a very common user request for some time, so turn it on if you like. It's currently off by default. It's only a baby step: eventually there will be more fine-tuned controls for anonymous posts, as well as comment types. For Example: I'd personally like to assign a -2 penalty on any comment rated 'funny' because most of them frankly just aren't funny at all. But humor is far too subjective to say that the moderation is unfair. Anyway, now everyone can decide for themselves. That should happen in the next few weeks.
Last up, I'm gonna talk a little about advertisements and subscriptions. Slashdot continues to grow: our traffic has increased by like 10% in the last few months, and simply selling the banner ads you see on top of each page isn't going to be enough to keep us afloat if we keep growing. And selling banner ads in 2001 is an awful lot harder then it was in 1999.
The change will be a different ad size on the article page. Currently we have the standard banner size on top of all pages, but soon the article pages will instead have those huge square things that you see on CNet or ZD. I know this will be unpopular with many people, myself included, but when we make the switch, we will also have some sort of subscription system where you can pay a fee to disable them honestly. (No I don't know how much yet!)
Just to shut down the conspiracy theorists, nobody is forcing us to make these changes: The navbar. The new ad formats. The subscription system. I could just say 'No' to changes like these. But Slashdot is now four years old ... and I want it to still be here four years from now. I hope you can understand the expensive reality associated with making this site happen every day for a quarter of a million readers.
Now flame me if you feel it necessary. Get it out of your system.
formkey bugs have been pissing me off for longer than just the weekend. It happens at like 1 out of 3 posts for me. It is actually pretty annoying to be told you cannot post b/c you already did. Nevermind the fact that sometimes it tells me that I don't have enough in the post (I think that a 12 word sentence is plenty).
Advertisements.. Eat me. "Slashdot is 4 years old and I want it here in 4 years." If the fucking traffic has increased 10% then that is just that much more money that you are making. Don't feed me this bullshit that I have to pay to get rid of them. The god damn subscription fee best be $1/yr or else you are full of shit.
-- enough of my annoying crap --
Funny posts -2? You said half the time they aren't funny (yes subjective..) yet more than 3/4 of the time they are funny. Assigning them -2 isn't much good, just remove them all together if you don't like them -2 is just going to make a 5 post a 3 and most people are still going to see it.
As far as blocking AC's... I say put in a AC asshole filter. Only blocking the god damn idiots that post (anything w/your specified words).
Thanks for keeping up the site for the most part you do a good job. I will pay $1/yr to remove the ads, otherwise you are making more money off me than you would if I just had the damn ads.
Har Har, very funny.
/. and it didn't wanna log me back in again.
Clicking the X on the OSDN NavBar just logged me off
Using Mozilla 0.9.4 on RH7.1
Democrat delenda est
Oh I noticed, because I was in the middle of posting a comment and instead I wasted my time because I got a "this form doesn't accept the POST method" and my comment was lost. This happens far too often for my likings, then I saw this navbar at the top, and /. was apparently screwed because I couldn't do anything except for view the static homepage...
/. can't seem to keep their site up for more than a week at a time without some sort of system failure.
For a site that preaches the values of open source, it sure is funny that
If God gave us curiosity
You she bitch of a goat's gizzard!
You distasteful snout of an eel's bladder!
Cat
Dammit Malda, there has got to be a better way. I can just imagine 50% of the user base firing up junkbuster just about now, but calling it dishonest. WTF??
Last time I checked, this isn't ZDNet. Don't join the crowd!!!
The subscription thing, that just might be a good idea.
One future, two choices. Oppose them or let them destroy us.
Without my daily humor of slashdot posts about beowulf clusters, and comander taco jokes, I'd rather just read ZDNet. lol
/. into a portal? Team up with someone to provide services so you dont have to recreate the wheel.
But on the side note, If Slashdot wants to make money, how about more news? I mean, 6+ articles a day? And some not very interesting. How about more tech news, Also how about having 3 bars, 1 on each side. How about adding a stock ticker?
Why not make
BTW, if your currious what I think a portal is, stocks/news/weather/tv listing/cartoons. Maybe not in that order.
That's Taco's problem -- not mine.
/. can't support itself, let it go subscription. And then, because I have no desire to pay for a smaller community of posters who aren't compensated for the only good content around here, I'll take my business elsewhere.
I absolutely _loathe_ advertising. Cannot stand it in the least, and I go through a bit of effort to avoid it. I eagerly await the development of some sort of computerized glasses, so that I can filter it out irl. (kind of the reverse of those ads they have at baseball games now)
Frankly, I've not even got any obligation to look at ads... filters are only slightly more complicated than closing my eyes when they're onscreen, and I don't see you advocating doing away with that.
TV has faced the same thing for decades. They can put on ads, but they can't make people watch 'em.
If
Slashdot's best interests are the furthest thing from my mind, in much the same way that I shed no tears as dot-coms melted down.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Huh? Hundreds of servers? Do you have any idea what you're talking about?
#1 congrats on dancing to the beat of the K5 drum. What's next, voting on all submitted articles? Stories that are more than 30 words?
#2 I know of several ISPs that will host a site like this for about $50/month with a 3 gig transfer limit per month. There's CJ "original poetry" sites that make about that, and amazon affiliates that have hymns and guitar tab for hymns that make almost double that! Granted, that doesn't get you a rack full of NFS and mysql servers and a SAN, but you wouldn't need it if you correct point 3:
#3 This "software" sucks. If half the people spent half the time they've spent on this perl mess devoting their effort to Nuke and PHP, Nuke would be incredible. Nuke is about 50 times better than Slash now, it could be much, much better with lille effort.
#4 Taco and friends need to get more honest with themselves. VA is dead, the bubble has burst, internet advertisers have figured out that ads on sites like this never were worth what you all were asking. This is business karma, folks, the market is modding your CPM down to (-1 Overrated).
Don't worry, you guys can still get honest jobs when VA goes belly-up, I hear there's still a couple shops out there who have perl programmers on the payroll. Or, you could go back to school. Take an English class or two if you're thinking about a foray into anything resembling journalism again.
AC's cheerfully ignored