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.
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
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.
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).
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.