Slash 2.2.0 Released

If you meander over to Slashcode, you will notice that Slash 2.2.0 has been released. This is of course the website engine that runs Slashdot. The release has the message system, improved journal functions, new comment filters, and countless bug fixes. And of course a variety of optimizations that continue to make it possible to serve a quantity of pages that no other open source package like this can even touch :) Plus it's way easier to install. Now that we've got the Fry tree out of the way, its off to work on Zoidberg (which will include subscriptions, killfiles, and a few surprises)

Comments

Changelog lacks any real value.

[Neutron_F1uX]

"More changes to stats report" Bug fix changes, or just changes? It'd be pretty nice if the changelog was a little more detailed. When there are a whopping 4 entries in it, you could give a little bit more detail.

Re:A nice surprice wuold be:

[Russ Steffen]

Another nice suprise would be to have posting at +1 cost a point a karma.

How about an NNTP gateway? I'll gladly subscribe.

[Dast]

Taco, I've posted this before, but I will post it again. I would be willing to pay for an ad-free, subscription based NNTP gateway to slashdot. I think something in the range of $5-10 US / month or maybe $50 US for a whole year would be reasonable, as long as there aren't any ads and it works with GNUS. (I know GNUS has a /. backend, but it sucks, sorry. I don't want to worry about parsing html to get the content into GNUS.)

Think about it, cause there isn't anything else you could offer me that I would pay for.

Improvement suggestions:

[Anonymous Coward]

* Lose the lameness filter. It is lame. Why? Because it
a) doesn't deter trolls but
b) does annoy legitimate posters.

* Separate karma moderation from comment moderation, eg. a plagiarizing post could be moderated interesting, yet the poster's karma could be modded down.

* Kill the CowboyNeal cop-out poll option. It hasn't been funny for, oh I dunno, about a year or so.

* Add year to (at least some of) the dates. Currently the only way to determine the year in which a given story or a post was made is to look at the URL, which is just plain dumb.

* Improve the search. Finer details of this left as an excersise.

* Add a link to stories that leads to the "daily issue" of Slashdot when the story appeared. Currently the only way to see the full Slashdot for a given day is, if I'm not mistaken, to keep clicking on the "yesterday's issue" link or hack the URL.

* Expand the hall of fame to cover more top stories, say 30 or so, ten is too little.

Other than that I'm pretty happy with Slashdot. :)

(I like the fact how users who aren't logged in don't see sigs anymore, the ability of the Slashdot crowd to generate good sigs AND UPDATE THEM has always been a bit, um, shitty.)

Re:Improvement suggestions:

[mosch]

Lose the gzip filter too. Testing how well a comment compresses is a fucking retarded way to check if it might contain valid content. On a number of occasions I've attempted to post code to do something useful, that was related to the story or a parent comment, and it got rejected because it compressed too well.

The fact of the matter is that most of the filters do not stop trolls, who are willing to attempt to post an obnoxious piece of ascii art multiple times, but do not stop legitimate posters who just want to share a contribution with the community. After all, who here has a job and a life, and time to refine their messages to make the slashdot retardo-filters pass their content along successfully.

I'm so glad to see that somebody else has realized that the slashdot auto-filters are useless, annoying, poorly written pieces of software that merely detract from the slashdot community.

Re:Improvement suggestions:

[Anonymous Coward]

how about the fact that the lameness filter is, by definition, censorware??

The editors all seem to be against it, but when they run it on their own site, it's just a way to stop trolls and ascii art.

The hypocrisy is stenching, from michael and his handling of censorware.org, to this "filter".

At least you guys should own up to it, and censorware is ok from some cases.

Plus the fact that editors mod comments is a travesty of this stupid moderation system.

Re:Improvement suggestions:

[Anonymous Coward]

I have been around just long enough that I am starting to get used to the 'stenching' hypocrisy. It is, after all, all around: Microsoft gets derided for having to release FixPacks (service packs?); Linux gets top billing every time a new kernel (which often is naught more than a fix pack) comes out. Copying MP3s and other media is fine because the underlying copyright laws are broken, but infringing copyright by violating the GPL is bad. Not to mention the hypocrisy of trying to jibe censorship here with the abuse that censorware takes when (say) libraries try to install porn filters. The editors here are self-serving hypocrites and chauvinists who are too blind to see the inherent contradictions between the viewpoints they espouse and the actions they undertake.

nntp

[stevens]

Now that we've got the Fry tree out of the way, its off to work on Zoidberg (which will include subscriptions, killfiles, and a few surprises)

Wow. In just a few short years they'll have implemented....usenet!

Just kidding, I know there are differences. Still, an nntp gateway would allow people to use their own clients, and those killfiles.

Security?

[Krieger]

Have the passwords for accounts been moved to a secure format yet? And along similar lines, what about password resets?

I remember that these were pending problems from a while ago.

Spell Checker?

[Christianfreak]

I mean there's been a perl mod for ispell for a long time now. How about incorporating it in? That would certainly help both users and administrators.

Re:Spell Checker?

[Calle Ballz]

One think I have learned about any technical conversation is that they kill spell checkers. I set my outlook (I don't choose my software) at work to automatically check for spelling errors before I send it out and initially I found myself adding TONS of new words for spellcheck to ignore. It's been a year, and it's still trying to correct various technical terms, acronyms, abbreviations & such. On slashdot I think it would mostly be a pain in the neck trying to post, unless you could choose to use it or whatever.

I can read past misspellings anyways, 99% of the time. I am not like the grammer trolls who feel it is their duty to give everyone a language lesson, I just say give it a break... no one is perfect and not everyone has a degree in literature.

My wish for meta-moderation

[Erik Hensema]

I'd like to see the score of an article at the time the moderation I'm metamoderating was done.

A slightly interesting post at +3 shouldn't be awarded yet another point, so in that case an 'interesting' moderation would be unfair.

Currently you only see the comment and think 'hey, interesting' and you'd M2 it as fair.

And please dump the over/underrated moderations. They're only used to dodge M2.

Re:My biggest wish

[sam@caveman.org]

excellent idea. i agree that being able to go back and edit your posts is a BAD idea. that is what preview is for. however there are dozens of 'oops, i meant to say' comments all over the place on nearly every story, and being able to append to the story (much like Ebay allows you to append info but not change what is already there) would be good.

-sam

That whole option should go

[Lac]

I believe that allowing posters to "opt out" of their +1 is moronic. The premise behind the bonus is that said poster generally posts good comments, so this one is probably good too. Now this either works or it doesn't. If it doesn't, remove the +1. If it does, grant the +1 and get over it.

Allowing an option to "opt out" of the +1 is like an option that would allow you to "opt out" of being moderated up. The feature is down-right silly. Judging the quality of a post is not the job of the poster. It is the job of the community system and the moderators.

Just remove that option. It makes no sense.

More useless suggestions

[yardbird]

Two quick suggestions:

Enable me to have separate comment viewing prefs for when I'm a moderator. Changing them back and forth is annoying. Plus then they could be set automatically to more socially responsible defaults.

If a comment below my threshold has a child which is above my threshold, I think that should be clearer; ideally, in between the visible grandparent and the visible child should be a link to the invisible parent.

Re:Four suggestions..

[athakur999]

The abuse for "modified" comments would be immense

Allowing deletion only if the post hasn't been replied to or moderated would be compromise. Since most of the "doh, I wish I could edit this" probably fall in the "oops, I misspelled something" or the "I forgot to preview" category, the author will catch these pretty quickly and be able to do something about it.

Re:My biggest wish

[tb3]

Now that makes sense. I post to a few other message boards running other code, and some of them let you edit your posts, and it does make for cleaner posts. None of them have a moderation system, however. Locking the post after child posts or moderation would make a lot of sense.

As long as we're on the subject of wishlists...

[DahGhostfacedFiddlah]

An anonymous post by a logged-in user should be treated exactly the same as a regular post. It should include any +1 bonuses and affect karma. If only unregistered ACs were rated at 0, I'd have less qualms about missing something browsing at +1.

Open to contributions?

[Pinball Wizard]

It seems as if there are two different versions of GPL/Open Source development. One is where the project is open to anyone capable enough to contribute to it. Mozilla and KDE are examples of this. The other is where the development, while open to suggestions, is tightly controlled.

Slashcode seems to fall into the second camp. There doesn't seem to be a wide variety of people who have contributed, rather the credit is purely to CmdrTaco and friends.

Instead of doing all the work yourselves, why not have a todo list and let others make contributions to the project, rather than just implementing suggestions?

Re:Kill funny messages

[ftobin]

I'm still waiting for the option to recalculate the point value for articles based on my own preferences. I want funny to count as +0.

I find it hilariously ironic that I and many others would have never seen this message if it hadn't been modded +5. By getting people going directly against the author's proposal he get more people to see it.

Slashcode may not be the most scalable open source

[Paul Bain]

Commander Taco wrote that Slashcode contains

a variety of optimizations that continue to make it possible to serve a quantity of pages that no other open source package like this can even touch :) [emphasis added]

I am not an expert on improving the scalability of web applications (especially those written in Perl, as is Slashcode), but, from what I read, I understand that Java generally scales much better, especially when it has been tweaked for that purpose. Recently, an open source discussion board (written in Java) appeared that its creators say is one of the most scalable on the planet: Jive. Even in Jive's old, version 1.24 form, it was so scalable that Sun Microsystems decided to use it as its main web discussion software, replacing discussion software that they had written themselves (in Java). Sun employee Eric Larson wrote (in article's last paragraph) that

Jive has proven itself at Sun by supporting 94 forums with more than 358,000 messages, and about 2 million users. And the current infrastructure is not even close to capacity. As more developers try the software and contribute to the project, Jive's success will only continue.

Jive's developers swear that it can serve a million page views per day without a problem. On the other hand, Jive doesn't support the posting of news items in a manner similar to Slashcode. Maybe that's what Taco meant when he wrote "like this" (above). Of course, the open source developers at Meinds may decide to alter the Jive source to permit the posting of news items. Then Slashcode might have been bested in terms of features as well as scalability.