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.
Any ideas on how much de-advertising will cost?
...it's just the implementation of some of them that everyone hates. I personally don't mind ads at all as long as they are embedded into the page and not pop-ups or pop-behinds. You really want to make them effective? Figure out a way to target them a little better. Perhaps a preferences page or something. I have no interest in the latest rack mount system, so if you could figure out a way to hide that when I log in and show a tasty ThinkGeek caffeine ad instead, then your sponsor's ad dollars will be much better spent.
This looks like a good argument, and in theory I agree, but if you take the time to look at every AC comment, I'd guess 90% are crap/ flames/ pointless. I realize there are some legitimate posts, but they are vastly outweighed by the static. Anyway, if you're privacy is such a concern that you'll post as AC, why not create an account just for this purpose? I don't remeber the exact procedure, but becoming a member here only took a couple of minutes max. Not to big a time investment.
No sig for you.
This feature could be a problem. If there was a +4 Informative post, I could mod it to +5 Funny and it disappears for everyone who has the -2 Funny feature enabled.
A better solution: find the average of the ratings: If there are 4 Informative's and 1 Funny, Informative is how the post is rated.
Chris
Give me some nice, tasty preferences in that misc section to tell you what type of ads I'd like to see.
Much like slashboxes, in that none selected will show you the default selection, and some selected will show only those type. Also show the default selection if none of the selected types are showing at that given moment.
I would be very receptive to setting those preferences. I think most other folk around here would too.
Video meliora proboque deteriora sequor - Ovidius
Taco, you gotta get off the crack man. Do you really expect that people are gonna pay for this? News for Nerds my ass! If anything, you might have a few people paying, a few people just tolerating the ads, and a VAST majority just filtering them so what good does it do you anyway? I personally don't mind the standard-size ads on the top of the page, Hell, i even click on them quite a bit because they're interesting. Those big ads in the middle of the page like some news sources are just downright annoying. Thats the kind of thing that drives me away from them, Especially when they advertise windows XP or the annoying shits like X10 that have a "pop-under" ad that just appears "under" your main browser windows so it catches you while you're closin it. Royal Pain. I Realize i'm rambling on and on, but whats next? popups? click-the-banners to enter like on warez sites? INQUIRING MINDS WANT TO KNOW.
unzip; strip; touch; grep; mount; fsck; yes; more; fsck; umount; make clean; sleep
Rob, I was wondering why there was no mention of the new ipid IP logging "feature" in Slashcode. I understand that this code was added to Slashcode to help stop lamers and crapflooders, but I, for one, am concerned about possible privacy issues that come into play when you start associating UIDs with IP addresses. Since Slashdot has historically been a major advocate of privacy and on-line rights, don't you think your readers deserve some sort of justification as to why you are tracking them by their IP address and banning IPs of users whom you have deemed to be "trolls". More info can be found here..
-atrowe: Card-carrying Mensa member. I have no toleranse for stupidity.
A few random questions:
How much does it cost per month to operate Slashdot? How much for the hosting, and how much in salaries? Just Slashdot, not the rest of OSDN.
How much revenue is generated from the current banner ads? What are the rates charged, and what does that total up to per month?
How much revenue is expected to be generated by the new obnoxious banners? What rates will be charged, and what's the projection for monthly revenues?
How many ads does the average Slashdot reader see, and what does that translate to dollar-wise? What would be a fair amount to pay, to compensate for the loss of banner revenue?
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
But, rather than feeding this trend and turning to more-obnoxious ads to cover the increased bandwidth, why not turn to conservation-based approaches? In short, reduce the bandwidth consumed for each page.
For example, a quick glance at the typical story's HTML reveals a lot of bloat, most of which could be removed by taking look-and-feel instructions out of the HTML and placing them into stylesheets. More than 10 percent savings seems realistic. And, unlike banner ads that have harmful side effects (such as annoyed readers), reducing HTML bloat has positive side effects like reduced download times and increased accessibility.
So before turning to increasingly evil ads, why not try conservation?
Easy, automatic testing for Perl.
There's no contradiction whatsoever -- you have every right to post an an AC, and taco has repeatedly stated that people will always be able to post as AC.
/. is somehow making ACs "unacceptable" is simply incorrect. they're letting the individual readers decide whether or not they (as an individual) want to read the Ac or not. He also made pretty clear that he's taking it beyond AC into the realm of other attributes, like modding as "funny". This seems like just another way to let the readers decide what they come to /. for.
/. since nearly the beginning I think those will do more to drive off the readership than AC postings ever did.
That said, anyone reading will immediately consider anonymous information to be less valid than that which is attributed. In some cases, the inherent value of the information itself will overcome that initial doubtfulness.
But to suggest that
there are days when i browse at -1 to laugh at the asinine AC stuff, there are days when i browse at +2 because I don't have much time to spend. There are days where I'm annoyed that the three top rated posts are all "funny" rather than informative or directly on-topic. there are days when I'm not bothered by it at all.
I personally think that Taco is doing as well as could be expected at trying to make everyone happy, which of course he can't. But he can give us more and more options so we can make OURSELVES happy.
That said, the suggested large ads are a PITA, and after being on
I suggest that they'd probably do better selling karma than ad space!
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
I feel like many of these sites are providing me with a cool service or interesting reading, and the least I can do is glance at what their advertisings are offering. Often, if I really like what a site has, I will click on the ad out of pity, and sometimes read what they have to offer.
This is how capitalism works. If you like the site, and you are even slightly interested in the ad, click on it. Both the site's owners and the advertiser deserve at least a shot.
One thing that absolutely pisses me off about the CNet and ZDNet ads is that they make the browser unusable and choppy untill you scroll them away. Don't put those there. Use simple images or light-weight animated GIFs.
Use PayPal. You have a solid, reliable reader base of what, half a million users? Create a yearly "pledge" drive similar to NPR stations. Get 1/10th of people to give you $5-50 bucks and you're all set. If you can't even get that, then the "community" doesn't deserve web sites like this.
Ads will kill readership, period. It's sad, but true. And because of the fact that you've given away the code, there are tons of options out there that will fill the void (for a while at least).
That way, the people who provide the content in the first place get rewarded for doing so (i.e. they don't get adverts, and whatever other value gets added). Those who don't, don't. After all, if nobody submitted interesting content, slashdot would die.
No, I don't want a free iPod
I think that users should be able to "pay" for their subscription fees with Karma points instead of cash (or some combination thereof). E.g. each Karma point could be worth 1/10 of the monthly fee.
:-)
Most of the value of slashdot is in the user comments, and I think it is only fair to give a "free ride" to those who contribute the most highly rated content.
Also, people who were bored with sitting at the +50 cap would have a way to reduce their Karma other than resorting to a week-long trolling spree.
People might be more willing to pay for Slashdot if they understand why it costs so much to run it.
/. is just a bunch of links to articles on other sites, you don't have to pay for writers. The code that runs the site works and is open-sourced, so you shouldn't need to pay anyone to maintain that anymore. Hopefully your servers are maintained by whoever provides your bandwith. So I can see the need for maybe one full-time employee, a couple people to help out at night or something, plus whatever it costs for all the bandwidth and the server hosting.
(Not me, but I'll happily look at big-ass ads as long as there's no popups or Flash ads.)
Since
So what's the actual cost breakdown?
Funny how things change. About a year or two ago, people would have been up in arms about any changes to Slashdot that would commercialize it to such an extent. The OSDN 'brand building' bar, the upcoming large ads, the mere thought of a paid subscription model, etc.
/. they either have to get the rabid fanboys to subscribe (big fat chance), or accept the new banners. As the fanboys will still read Slashdot (blah blah webwasher blah modified hosts blah), the more business-focused clients will possibly refocus on Newsforge over which OSDN has a lot more control.
Sure, information wants to be free. But it's NOT free as in beer.
As an aside, anyone notice how hard VA is trying to move people towards Newsforge? The banners exclaiming that Newsforge has twice as many news stories per day as Slashdot and LinuxToday combined? Now the brand building banner, etc? To me, this smacks of at least partial desperation; trying to create something that people will recognize and flock back to, even if the parent company should go bankrupt.
Sure, Slashdot is popular. Lots of people read it. But it is also becoming more and more stigmatized as the battlefield of business-ignorant fanatics. People who are worthless to any business, thus advertising to them is less productive than, say, advertising on a big, serious-looking site, with a more professional-looking design. With less hysterical stories about losing our rights to privacy and pirating music, and more stories about, for instance, "Caldera target[ting] developers with latest workstation", which is an actual Newsforge headline.
One of these two sites is somewhat appealing to business, and thus to advertisers. One of them is easier to sell as serious newsmedia. One of them has a heavy editorial hand, columns, and no negative image of being filles with Linux fanboys and other unwashed freaks.
The other one is Slashdot.
Somehow, I feel that OSDN is trying to direct as much traffic towards its more 'serious' site as possible, leaving Slashdot as a more 'hobbyist' site than anything else. Obviously they can't do anything directly about it, or those aforementioned fanboys (yeah, I'm one of them) would screaming bloody murder. But it can 'integrate' Slashdot into its OSDN thingee, adding bars, and big adverts, and subscription programs, and watering it down from its original incarnation.
Sure, it's necessary to survive economically, to some extent. But ultimately, Slashdot doesn't pay. It takes quite a lot of hardware, and SIGNIFICANT bandwidth. How much do you think VA makes on those Thinkgeek banners? To make up for the black hole of cash that is
But then maybe it's just a mad conspiracy theory.
And let me repeat: information may want to be free, but that's NOT free as in beer.
Has anyone thought about setting up some donation system? I'm sure a lot of people would choose to give more money to eliminate large annoying banners for everyone then they would just for themselfs. Or if there already is a donation system in place draw more attention to it (I don't know of one, and if people don't know of it they can't donate). Without of course being annoying about it, IMO sites begging for donations on every page is as annoying as ads. Then again, maybe I'm just overestimating peoples generosity.
Perhaps slashdot could convince OSDN to do a network wide subscription, such that newsforge, themes.org, slashdot, freshmeat, etc. would all let you see adless version of the pages (with extra features maybe) if you pay a monthly/annual fee. That would rock. I'd pay $20/yr for that. (But no more, I mean, I pay less for magazine subscriptions)
Black holes are where the Matrix raised SIGFPE
So here's an idea: mod the ads. Users may voluntarily mod the ads based on how much they think the ads provide any value-add to life.
Miko O'Sullivan
Why not use collaborative filtering in tandem with traditional moderation?
With collaborative filtering, each slashdotter would view posts that were moderated up by other slashdotters who had similar preferences in the past.
There was a great site called moviecritic.com (which unfortunately has since been shut down due to budget limitations) that used collaborative filtering to recommend movies. I found it incredibly useful, and discovered some great movies that I never would have watched otherwise.
With collaborative filtering, stories could also be 'recommended' without forcing the user to rule out entire categories of stories. The beauty of collaborative filtering is that it does not assume anything a priori other than the fact that if two individuals have shared common preferences in the past, they are likely to agree again in the future.
Traditional moderation could be accomplished simply by tallying the votes that each post received.
mmm
p.s. I'd be glad to help build this functionality into slashcode if there is sufficient interest.
Amazing magic tricks
You err in assuming that the alternative to anonymity is total loss of privacy. Most slashdotters are pseudonymous, like yourself. All I know about you is that you are a "Software consultant in the Boston area." (mongeese.org wouldn't resolve.) And you freely chose to reveal that information. Also, I can see a list of recent comments you've posted, how they were scored, and I can even click through to see what you wrote, if I'm so inclined.
;-)
The advantage of pseudonyms is that they protect privacy while still allowing a writer to build a reputation -- whether good or bad. And that allows readers to make informed decisions about whose words they want to read, and what biases those authors may have.
Even if a slashdotter wanted to make some comments and not have them associated with previous comments from the same nym (perhaps they had revealed in the past that they are employed writing video drivers for OmniMegaView video cards, and now they want to blow the whistle on OmniMegaViews treatment of its gay employees), an easy option is open to them. Simply create two (or more) user accounts.
Use one nym for posting work-related or technical material, another for comments that might be embarrassing in some way, and a third for flaming the trolls back to the stone age. Readers would have no way of knowing that the nyms all represented the same person in real life.
"On Slashdot, nobody knows you're really CowboyNeal."
I think, though, that it would be better to increase the penalty for AC's, rather than set them to -1. If one could, say, hit them with an extra -2 penalty, that would still let those rare AC comments that had been strongly modded up pass through. In any case, this would only be an option -- if you object to it so strongly, don't turn it on.
P.S. The plural of mongoose is polygoose.
Good mfences make good neighbors.
actually, with a bit of hand editing of the url, they can be turned off for any ammount of time. The argument controls how many days in the future the cookie expires. I personally went with one that expires in 3000 days.
I do not currently filter slashdot's ads (as i do for just about every other site's ads...where would i be without mozilla?) because they are at the top of the screen, are relatively unobtrusive, and are actually sometimes relevant to my interestes. I will not, however, stand for those disgutsting CNET/ZDNET-stle ads. They are just eyesores, and no amount of cool ThinkGeek merchandise can make them worth looking at. So, if you [slashdot management types] think you'll be making more money with bigger ads, think again. You will just be offending lots of customers and making people like myself (who don't mind your current advertisement scheme) start not looking at ads at all. That said, I hope other readers are stupid enough not to care.
I also like the idea of a subscription system for OSDN, so that I can avoid ads in all OSDN sites. Of course, the economics and technology consideration may outweigh this possibility.
As has been iterated before (but never enough), I really like
--Outta' Sync
I always get the shakes before a drop.
Slash had/has a great opportunity to take advantage of all the geeks consistently coming here.
With a captive audience, why didn't you guys write an auction service, like ebay, or a classifed ad section, for a fee. You have a community of people, you are well known, take advantage of it. You have scalability experience. Over the last 3 years you could have really built something. And ebay has proven this to be the best way to make $$ over the internet.
I doubt ads anymore will help you - good luck. you remind me of netscape. they had millions of people going to their home page daily, and only belatedly realized they could create a portal service like Yahoo. They blew it, and finally died. They would still be huge today if they had woken up.
alex
Oh, yeah, excellent idea. The higher your karma, the fewer/smaller your ads are.
It makes sense, too. In theory, better content means more readers will visit the site, thereby increasing the "effectiveness" of the ads on the site. (I abstain from the argument of whether ads are effective at all.)
Subscriptions that eliminate banner ads do not add much value for the purchaser especially in a technically savvy crowd like Slashdot where users that know how to install and configure JunkBuster to get rid of ads abound. For subscriptions to be valuable source of revenue then the people who subscribe must get a considerable amount more than the people who don't to make it worth it. Suggestions I can think of right of the bat
A lot of the ideas are probably unworkable but they are put there to give an idea as to the kind of things that people are more likely to pay for than not.
All of these may seem distasteful but considering that VA Linux probably doesn't have much longer to go I think the Slashdot folks need to take a long hard look at how they're going to keep financing the site if they still want it to exist in four or five years.
Flame Away.
slashdot used to be a place where important and interesting topics were discussed and genuinely important and interesting people such as Alan Cox, John Carmack and Bruce Perens would post and discuss.
Today, slashdot is full of karma whoring bitches who post blindingly obvious comments to articles. The only people posting interesting comments to the articles are trolls such as egg troll, Trollman 5000, the sporks, cyborg_monkey et al. Their posts may be crude and unwelcome by most of you, but as a slashdot veteran being surrounded with linux wannabes posting blindingly obvious yet 'insightful' comments it is a breath of fresh air.
You only need to look at moderation in the slashdot article Ask Slashdot: Opposing Open Source? to see what i mean: the article was all about opposing points to open source software, yet we had blindingly obvious karma whoring posts about microsoft's well known postition on the subject and the not-very-insightful karma whoring posts by a bunch of linux wannabes giving their un-valuable opinions, and yet whenever something new was presented, even in jest, it was moderated troll or flamebait.
I want an option that allows me to browse only the -1 posts. These posts are the only insightful and interesting material being posted on this site.
Somehow this makes me really depressed. First DMCA, then 9/11, then SSSCA, now /. I know banner and subscriptions aren't all that evil, hell I would pay myself. But somehow it seems as if its one more step down the road toward that bright, happy Orwellian future. I know, no direct connections...and yet....
/. readers inline, fear of this VA battlestation.
/. was something that I have looked toward as the brightest and best point of rebellion against big government, greedy corporations, dumb profiteering politicians, and most of the other things wrong with the world. Somehow it feels as if it too, is now going over to the other side, succumbing to the inevitable financial realities.
If I may indulge in a quote:
The last remnants of the Old Republic have been swept away. Fear will keep the local
...
Do not be too proud of this financial terror you have constructed. It's ability to destroy the free internet is insignificant next to the power of Open Source!
I agree with your comments regarding how a "community content" site shouldn't run on subscriptions. What it SHOULD run on is donations.
/. important to the /. community?
/. every day, though this is the first time I've posted. I'll send in a donation a lot quicker than I'd buy a subscription.
/. I'm willing to pay to have it. /. should ask for donations. I bet you'll be surprised at how much $$$ comes in.
I had a hand in running a site that cost about US$700/month in bandwidth charges. All content was provided by the site's community, and the whole thing was paid for by that same community (no ads!). The site was IMPORTANT to that community, so important that the money was always there.
Is
It's important to me. I read
I don't need to know the costs, and I don't think I'll be buying 'accountability' (I know what a miserable job running a site like this can be).
I just need my
Learn to use less bandwidth. The easy trick here to reduce bandwidth is to reduce your pipeline to the Internet to a smaller, less expensive pipeline. Yes, it will lag during peak hours, however, people would rather wait for the content to show up than to see it disappear completely.
Another thing is to modify the comments list to work in a frame or subject basis by limiting to the first 100-200 words of a comment. Soem comments go on for miles on end and therefore are useless. Should a comment have a rating of 0, only post title, +1 = 50 words, +2 = 100 words, +3 = 200 words, +4 would be whole comment.
This would help reduce your bandwidth use, allow you to get a smaller pipe, and live longer in this hellish economy.
It is called content management... And if you can't learn to manage your content delivery system properly, then yes, you can not survive in the future.
*Headline News* censorship shuts down the Internet! More at 6PM!
..something similar to napster, where subscribers give a little of their bandwidth/diskspace in exchange for keeping /. relatively free of the capitalists? I would much rather give space on my box instead of money, it just "feels" better.
Cutting edge is sharp, avoid contact.
Bitching about bandwidth costs? Then please look into stylesheets; you could easily save 35% in bandwidth costs. As the above poster noted, stylesheets are the way to go.
I love Slashdot, and I'm willing to pay for it because I know it costs money to run a website and ads aren't cutting it these days. However, they're basically throwing away the bandwidth they would like us to pay for. The HTML produced by Slash is crap, frankly.
I used HTML Tidy to automatically convert the page to stylesheets as opposed to old-fasioned obsolete HTML formatting tags. The old version of the page was ~230K. The new version of the page, using stylesheets, was ~160K. That's a ~43% bandwith savings, right there, with little effort. If you include images, there's still a 35% reduction in bandwidth.
Also, have the Slash crew explored Apache's on-the-fly zip compression abilities (it's a separate module, I don't know the name)? It eats CPU power, obviously, but HTML can be compressed by 90% or more when zipped. The cost of more web boxen would be more than paid for by the bandwidth savings, I'd wager... especially if Slashdot is getting free hosting from it's parent company.
Bottom line: I'll pay for Slashdot's content, but not for lazy Slashdot coding. If you want us to pay for bandwidth, show us you're using it as efficiently as possible. Because you're not right now. You're like a guy begging for food with a sandwich sticking out of his pocket... I just DON'T wanna hear it. And yes, I know there's other costs associated with running the website besides bandwidth, and the ad market is shit right now.
OtakuBooty.com: Smart, funny, sexy nerds.
Good idea. Give Karma whores a reason to whore karma.
;)
Seriously I think it's an okay idea, but I don't think giving people the incentive to ruin discussion by whoring just so they can maintain their free subscription is a great idea.
And it'd be nice if there was a similarily free option for the thousands of lurkers who just like to read the comments and don't post much.
And I don't think Taco's ISP accepts karma points as payment.
Sorry, couldn't resist. I don't believe that even enact is properly used.
But hey, a spell check WOULD be useful, and would it really be that difficult to pipe it through something? OK, yeah, extra computing power and extra expense. But hey, that'd be one of these k3wl extras!
Seriously though, I have no problem with subscription, as long as it's done right. Being able to turn off ads if I pay for it sounds like a decent idea. Actually, if I could target ads to myself through the preferences, that may not be a bad plan either, and I'm sure the marketing folks would eat it up.
Where the wind blows, the tumbleweed goes.
rather than complaining that we don't want big annoying ads, we should be finding ways to make the Internet more profitable for businesses without them.
What?
I love text ads. I click on ads on Google more than any other website because they are targeted and easy on my eyes. Banners with cycling images make you wait to see what the ad is for.
I'm not sure what the costs of slashdot are that are increasing, but I'm sure that there are effective ways to reduce them. Is it the server load? If you use technologies that are more efficent or pass the processing onto the client ( like XML, XSLT, and CSS ) then it would be less cost to you. Also using text ads would decrease load.
On another note: I think that a better, more streamlined, ad free slashdot would be worth a few cents a day. I suggest if you move to a pay system (which I would love) then use a micropay system. Something like $0.03 per page load. It is the fairest way to go, and would encourage people to start reading slashdot because there wouldn't be a commitment.
I see absolutely no reason why someone can't post as a logged in user.
In my experience, posting anything negative about Linux will get you modded down. Posting positive things about Microsoft can also get you modded down, but not as often. The chances of getting modded down for this decreases for posts over about 2k and for posts that begin with "I know I'm going to get modded down for this...", but I've found that if you state an opinion that is contrary to Slashdot groupthink, you need to post anonymously.
This post here, for example, is one that probably should have been posted anonymously, but in my little utopian world, I think I should be able to have an opinion without cowering behind anononymity just because a few monderators think anyone who doesn't like Linux is automatically a troll.
I'd filter anonymous posts, but there are quite a decent ones out there. But most people on Slashdot seem to believe that if you're not being insighful and interesting, or if you post less than 5 lines of text, it's best to be anonymous.
How to solve the problem?
What we need is an "anonymous" checkbox, and then an "I'm an idiot" checkbox.
Or a new moderation, "-1 Asshole." That way, if you don't agree with the poster, you can still mark them as Troll, but if someone is linking goatse.cx, you can mark them as being just plain annoying.
In my experience, posting anything negative about Linux will get you modded down. Posting positive things about Microsoft can also get you modded down, but not as often.
I do exactly that all the time, and don't get modded down very frequently for it.
but I've found that if you state an opinion that is contrary to Slashdot groupthink, you need to post anonymously.
As long as you justify your position I have found that you can state whatever you wish to. As long as you don't post defamitory or just plain stupid comments I haven't had much of a problem expressing my opinion.
Or a new moderation, "-1 Asshole."
Does it really matter? The labels don't do anything anyways as everything is filtered on score instead.
This post here, for example, is one that probably should have been posted anonymously
Why? I see absolutely nothing wrong with what you're saying, you've stated a point and you're backing it up. I'd be surprised if you got negatively modded just because you were expressing your opinion, and indeed if you were for that reason then it would be incredibly hypocritical of the people doing the moderation, since we're all trying to fight for freedom of speech et al.
I browse at 2, and I find that works out great. That means that either you're an AC who said something important enough to get +2 on it, you're a regular user who said something important enough to get at least a +1 on it, or you have a history of saying good things and thus you've probably got something interesting to say.
Personally I find it pathetic that there are loosers out there who think that it's cool to get in the first post on a story or post stupid ascii art about goatse.cx, quite frankly I think they need to get a life, but unfortunately that's part of life here. I think that the current moderation system works, not perfectly for anything pro linux is bound to get modded up, and sometimes stupid/funny gets modded up as well, but usually the moderations are fair. If anything I'd suggest to remove the cap for moderation, allow it to go as high as you want, or at least maybe to +6 or +7, and possibly give the ability to filter/sort based on the description of the moderations since right now they mean really nothing. Especially since the last moderation sets the description, it's kinda pointless if you have +4, Interesting and then a -1, Overrated so your comment is now (+4, Overrated)...
Ah well, this is but a news forum, I think we have more important battles to fight =)
If God gave us curiosity
As one of those Linux wanabes and a fairly recent addition to the slashdot community (1 year or so) I'd like to concur and respectfully disagree. I concur insofar as the statement that there is a groupthink mentality growing on slashdot which is dangerous to the vitality of the readerbase and is slowly changing the character of the site for the worse.
:-)
/. has simply gotten to ideocentric to accecpt deviants anymore. Perhaps I'm just rambeling.
I disagree in the assumption that all new users and linux wanabes are responsible for this. I for example try to keep my posts restricted to my personal areas of expertese (spelling not being one of those areas) and pure speculation. I don't post on the future trends in the open source movement because I simply don't know shit about them. I'm intersted to see what others have to say though... and I think I've learned alot from Slashdot in my year or so here.
Now into that speculation. I've noted that Slashdot tends to be straying from what many consider its origional purpose to be. Most of the reader base sees this site as dedicated first and foremost to news about Linux, high tecnology, and science. Nonetheless, we've branched out. Articles on personal liberties (many of which really don't belong to "your rights online") and poltical developments grace these pages.
Perhaps, other niche groups need their own slashdot? I've seen a few uses of the slashcode in various poorly frequented news sights, but nothing of the scope that Slashdot has.
As a history buff myself, I'd be curious to see the reaction a site like, oh, say Pastdot would get
Point being, I think a lot of the AC posts and trolls we see here are a result of two things. 10 year olds with to much time on their hands, and people looking to discuss issues who really aren't part of this "community" or clique if you prefer. Perhaps
Killfile(TGK)
No trees were killed in the creation of this post. However, many electrons were inconvenienced.
Perhaps "features" could be created by taking the base story and any posts that add significant information and those features could be sold. Sort of a "Premium Slashback".
>Yeah, we all hate the ads, but can we give Slashdot a viable alternative?
How about forking a commercial version of Slashcode?
I'm dead serious; surely there are people who would be willing to register an enhanced or optimized version at a reasonable price. I've paid to license both WWWThreads and vBulletin, and those are just message boards. A full featured content management system like Slashcode ought to fetch a decent registration fee. Throw a professional installation into the package and I guarantee there will be buyers.
I love open source as much as the next guy, and I've written my share of giveaways. But "free as in beer" doesn't put food on the table. Beer either, for that matter. And it sure doesn't pay for the bandwidth and colo overhead incurred by a site with this much traffic. Being generous with your code is nice, and it gets your name out there in a positive light, but the Slashdot crew don't need the publicity anymore. They need to keep the bills paid.
Shaun
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
Whoever moderated this as a troll, I think, proves the point.
If you challenge to the status quo, you're a troll.
>We already "pay" for the site by submitting content!
Huh? Since when is content an acceptable form of payment?
You also seem to be missing the difference between Slashdot and Salon - paying a subscription to Slashdot will, based on everything I have ever heard CmdrTaco say about it, never change the *content* you are able to read, but rather things around the content.
The last I checked, running an ad off of Doubleclick was never considered "content." If you pay the subscription, you lose the ad - YOU DO NOT LOSE CONTENT.
So you are not paying for (user-provided) content.
You also mention the difference between in pre- and post-Andover takeover. You seem to trace differences back to this purchase without considering other possibilities. Is is not possible that Slashdot grew enormously during this time and, as a result, hosting costs went up as well?
>Let us know that we're being charged this because of need, and not because
>of the avarice of a few businessmen over at VA.
Let us not forget the other thing - based on everything I have read, there will never be a *need* to pay the subscription fee. It is a choice.
- (c) 2018 Hank Zimmerman
I understand as a website why ads are necessary especially for one the size of slashdot, I am happy to pay a fee to keep from seeing them and still supporting your great site.
I think the net has a anti-payment mentality which unfortunately breeds the kind of annoying business model which we all detest. A few bucks isn't going to kill anyone and still allow this site to be a nice place to read.
You guys are doing a great job and it is appreciated.
Thanks
Happy Person
I think that myself and many slashdotters are up on "a good cause" enough to be willing to pay for a subscription. Heck, I know that TheGIA once made a request for money, not even a subscription system, and got tons of money just from people who readi t and enjoy seeing the content.
If even the 1% of hardcore slashdotters payed for a subscription, it'd be more money than one could ever generate through ad banners.
If there's anything about the open source geek community, it's the adhesive-like properties it shows, especially for people who routinely give so much for so little. So I think if Slashdot did such a thing, its financial troubles would most likely be indefinately alleviated.
Go Slashdot, I support you wholly.
- WrexSoul
\/.
vvv
In response to all the bitching about ACs, how about setting up two things:
:)) .. slashdot would be a third party. Since they wouldn't have an email address displayed when posting anonymous, this would allow a user to send them a private message.
/. private message system (which is better than nothing, I'd guess.)
1) Make it so you can post anonymously, but must be logged in. Ie, (like on half-empty) your karma is still affected and there is still an internal link to your post with your account, but nobody knows who you are.
2) Make it so there's an interface in slashcode to contact anonymous individuals (perhaps anonymously as well?
This way ACs who are posting crap will eventually bottom out in karma and post at -1 and have the potential to be flamed on the
--
First, it is said:
"I don't like it any more then many of you, so if you log in, there is an option to disable it."
Then:
"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"
If you COULD have said no, and you HATED the changes, why did you say YES?
Lawrence Lessig is my personal hero.
If slashdot wants to stay alfoat in the dotbomb world it should understand why it is popular:
1. The only annoying advertising is a thin banner ad, no popups, and if you scroll down it doesn't stay there. i.e. CLEAN INTERFACE
2. Katz can be filtered through the user preferences.
3. CmdrTaco and friends do a decent job of highlighting a wide variety of tech/geek news sources, not just what the parent company shoves down their throat.
Hey, advertising revenues are down. Deal with it. You have a company that turns a profit. Don't get greedy and it will stay that way. If you need to shell out for more hardware and bandwidth for ISP support do so, but don't let that lead to bloat. Slashcode could be always be tweaked to save computing resources, but it is mature and doesn't need more bells and whistles.
bash-2.04$
bash-2.04$yes "Don't you hate dialup connections?"| write USERNAME
It would be interesting to see some stats about how many /.er's have the toolbar on after 'x' days -- in fact it would be interesting to have a compilation of stats in general:
If you are planning on using the exact same ads, that is a very stupid thing to do--most of those ads use flash/shockwave, which is EXTREMELY annoying, and can't be stopped. At least with Gif89a you could stop the f'ing thing! The worst ones have sound too.
Considering how many *nix geeks are on this board, along with how many run Lynx, etc., how effective will those ads be, really? Yes, I will pay to get the hell rid of them, but I think that plan might backfire.
I think that it is a shame that many useful posts get missed just because someone was either too lazy to log in, had forgotten their password, was on another machine, or (like me) lacked enough imagination to come up with a cool nickname.
ACs should post at 0. If a comment gets modded up or down it should be because of it's content, not because someone is anonymous.
(Actually, Slashdot was anoying there for a while because the defaults were ACs post at -1 but read at 0... I couldn't read my own posts.)
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
Seeing everything from modding ads to new payments schemes has been discussed today, I will add my tiny suggestion for improving slashdot.
When I am a moderator, I find the pull-down mod system terrible. I like modding, but I don't want to spend all day on it. What sux is this: I view a story, see a good post and change the pull-down to "interesting". However, I don't want to go aaaaall the way down to click "moderate", because it takes 2-3 seconds of my life for the page to reload - and then I can't find where I got in the text. So I keep reading, just in case I spot another mod worthy post. If I see a sub-thread which isn't expanded, I can't go in there, cuz then the uncached page would forget the post I wanted to mod when I go back. Too often I end up going on a mod rampage, and just mod down trolls, but I would really prefer just to immidiatly vote for a post I saw, without getting disrupted.
Any solutions? You bet! If you check out half-empty, the solution chosen there is simply a small button or link for every vote option. Click on any of them and a little window opens in the background, which handles the modding. It's beautifully simple and solves all the problems mentioned here. It even stimulates modding.
-Kraft
Live and let live
- AFAIK it's true that most sites with significant traffic have a hard time selling even 10% of their ad space
- it makes no sense to drown your users in banners that aren't even paid - just show an empty banner code so that they don't need to use WebWasher etc. on your site if they don't mind 5% or 10% of the pages having banners
- click-through rates can be 5% with Google's system - it's important to learn from this: low cost, cost-effective, very targeted - that's the future. Try to offer a system for your customers that can be effective with a very low initial cost (e.g. a simple system to buy ad space only on pages in the Apache section). Offer text-based ads the greedy, short-sighted users who want everything for free and no ads too can't remove easily.
- before you do it secretly, offer it as a service: "advertorials", paid news items for selected customers. Don't accept just anything, but new hardware etc. released by some companies can just as well be announced in a manner that earns slashdot a few dollars. It's not as if users didn't suspect the slashdot staff getting paid for some of the articles anyway.
- subscriptions are what everyone who operates a large web site wants
, but don't do it alone. Get a few other interesting sites for the same audience together and offer a "premium" package with some extra content first (web mail, notification service, no ads, whatever).
- don't laugh: advertisers still have an obscure obsession with paper, so if you can provide content that can be printed without looking too silly, do it. Slashdot could have a monthly issue printed with the submitted articles and a few links and sell it together with a CD containing all the comments for that month and a few goodies (the latest Mozilla, updated Debian packages, security announcements, whatever). It's not a big investment (keep it that way!).
And, do it at your own risk."I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
If you take the Salon analogy your on track, however, I think a better analogy is the coffee shop. ;-)
I don't go to the coffee shop to drink coffee, I go to have a natter with some pals. I find their company more valuable than the environs, but WITHOUT the environs we would be unable to meet up during the day as there would be nowhere to go.
In order to make use of the facility we buy coffee. Or beer in a Pub. We also choose the nicest available place to have coffee, and sometimes pay extra to sit there - but thats cool - thats a free market!
Now, maybe my analogy sucks - but thats how I see the web. ALL of my favoured sites operate on community originated content. But some sucker has to provide the coffee shop for us to meet in. Why shouldn't the Gunters of this world make a bean or two.
Personally, I don't mind if Taco etc make a good whack of cash, so long as they make sure this thing stays good. But then, if they don't we all bugger off and their back to being sad lonely spods!
AvantSlash allows you to read Slashdot on your Palm or WinCE device through AvantGo.
You could point Avantgo directly at the slashdot website, but you'll find that due to the sheer mass of links, your limit will be reached pretty quickly. You could point Avantgo at the palm version of Slashdot at http://www.slashdot.org/palm but it has a number of problems. Here is what Scott Tringali had to say about it on kuro5hin:
First of all, this is a great example of how not to write a Palm version of the site, and here's why. Offline readers depend on "link-depth" to traverse a site. However, their Palm version breaks each story into a random number of small chunks. So, you can't just page-down to read a long story or a bunch of comments- you have to click on lots and lots of links. A real pain. Lots of small links makes sense on a slow online connection, but it's awful when you have more bandwidth available, as your desktop PC or an offline browser.
/. in "light" mode doesn't work either. There are too
many useless links on the front page. I don't care about the
advertising or the FAQ or all the other stuff: I want the stories and the
comments. Basically, the readers I use so far have no way to "prune"
sections of the tree you don't care about. This causes the site to be
gigantic and not fit into the paltry 8MB of your typical handheld, or, it
fits, but it so big as to detract from its usefulness.
If you're interesting in downloading avantslash or can provide a public URL for others to use, please check out http://www.custard.org/~richard/avantslashAdditionally, it's restricted to 10 comments, not a threshold. That's boring. I'm sitting here in Jiffy Lube picking my nose, I wanna read some funny trolls and flamewars!
Finally, using
Finally, someone did the right thing: AvantSlash takes the page, filters out all the crap you don't care about, and doesn't break it up into a thousand chunks so it's readable.
Thanks for listening.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
I work for a company who's primary business is more and more based on providing web content. We have a mixed free/subscription service (20%/80%). Our model is not the same as Slashdot in that we provide a lot of our own content and our target market is rich (i.e. Lawyers). No subscription gets you news and some basic information. Subscription payment gets you full customisation rights, protected content and even specialised linking to our material.
Business websites are VERY expensive to run - ask anyone who has been in the IT business for long enough - and slashdot is part of a company, like it or not, and there is no way on gods earth Slashdot makes any money.
If Slashdot needs larger ads, big deal - its still free so stop complaining. If you REALLY don't like it, then go and start your own Slashdot.
However if you want to start charging for a subscription, you have to then offer some kind of content which is UNIQUE to paying subscribers, and that means authoring your own content. Otherwise, whats the point of paying to see re-hashed material ?
I suggest if the hypocritcial /. staff start getting us to pay for slashdot, we do what they would advise us to do if it were software:
/. ip squats on it.
We fork it!
Someone register www.freeslashdot.org before someone at
graspee
I've submitted about a dozen stories/links over the last year, most have been [IMHO] good quality, and some have been 'Bang On Target', yet I've only had one accepted. e.g.
2000-10-24 09:13:06 UK Employers gain e-snoop powers today (articles,news) (accepted) .NET (developers,news) (rejected)
2001-01-24 11:09:08 Interactive Digital Television casestudy. (articles,tv) (rejected)
2001-02-28 15:22:44 nCube doubles size of worlds largest VOD System. (articles,news) (rejected)
2001-03-08 22:15:04 Amazon Security hole (articles,news) (rejected)
2001-04-09 13:17:24 PS2 & STB Convergence (articles,news) (rejected)
2001-04-09 13:22:41 Update: PS2/STB Convergence (articles,news) (rejected)
2001-05-04 13:02:10 'Tractor beam' technology advances (articles,news) (rejected)
2001-08-24 16:59:15 J2EE vs'
2001-10-11 12:38:02 Microsoft astro-turf EU investigation. (articles,news) (rejected)
In too many cases (all above) I've also seen a similar story posted within days. So it's not the stories themselves, so why are they being rejected? I think if we've gone to the effort of contributing we deserve at least a basic explaination.
The cost of hosting a fairly small web site is pretty cheap (approaching free, but not, of course).
The cost of hosting and running something like Slashdot.org is way more than a lot of people are willing to admit to. Banner advertising might work, but from personal experience, I can tell you it ain't always enough. Worse, it can lead to tempatations from what I've seen.
Let's just say that it's time we grew up. Those of us who grew up without the web remember getting two types of magazines -- Free ones (trade rags) and subscription ones (going the route of the dinosaur). The really expensive ones were sometimes the best. The trade rags -- do I need to remind people what kind of dross was found in them?!? Crappy reviews and huge payola were often the norm. A rare voice like Nicholas Petreley could be found from time to time.
Why do a lot of people fail to realize that some things are going to be worth paying for? We like to think that advertising will just do it, but the God's honest truth is that it's just not doing it. It might be different if web advertising were more intrusive (like TV advertising, for example) -- but it's _not_ -- it's one of the things that makes surfing the web a pleasurable experience. If we had to watch (even catchy) flash movies every time we tuned into a web site, we'd freak.
CmdrTaco, Hemos -- I applaud your bravery, and I'll consider the cost of your ad-removal. Oh, and thanks for Slashdot.Org and your hard work.
--Paul Ferris
But sales of advertisments are hurting. If it means having slashdot for longer, I wouldn't mind obtrusive ads, as long as I could pay a little bit a month to turn them off. They would probably make more from people paying to not have them, than they would from them clicking them.
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58.0% slashdot corrupt