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

Re:Changelog lacks any real value.

[krez]

Any chance of there being a DEB package of Slashcode? Does anyone know? Anyone working on this?

So when is /. going to get a facelift?

[BenLutgens]

I mean really, we've been looking at the same interface for years. Not that there's anything wrong with the current appearance, it's just time for a change.

Question...

[EnglishTim]

I'd like to be able to put in an URL something like

http://slashdot.org/frontpage.pl?commentthresh=5 &s tyle=light

and have it give me slashdot in 'light' format, with comments in the stories as 5 & over only.

The reason for this is that I want to get Slashdot on Avantgo, but obviously I have different viewing requierments on my Palm than I have on my desktop.

Is there any way of doing this with Slash 2.2?
I know there wasn't in the old Slash 1.x ...

Add sub-categories to main page

[crow]

I want to be able to set my preferences to include stories that only appear in certain sub-categories (Science and Ask Slashdot) on the main page as if they were full-fledged main stories.

Karma Kap

[Anonymous Coward]

Here is something that sort of irks me. My karma is capped, not that it is important or anything... but get this...

I post a comment with a score of one. Four moderators come along and think that the comment ought to be at a five. Three more moderators come along and they think that it should be at a two. I just got screwed out of three points, when I really should have stayed at 50.

50 + 4 = 50 (karma cap)
50 - 3 = 47

I just lost three points when in reality I should have gained one. This sucks.

Re:Karma Kap

[Calle Ballz]

I agree with the overrated. Also the "Redundant" moderation needs to go. I have only seen this used correctly a few times. Most of the time I will see an informative post that's near the top modded as Reduntant... yet near the bottom, a similar post will be modded as Informative. I think whoever is moderating needs to learn to look at which they have on: Oldest First or Newest First.

Re:Karma Kap

[Pinball Wizard]

Actually its more like complaining about getting a 1590 on the SAT due to a glitch in the system when you should have gotten a 1600.

That would piss me off too.

Re:Changelog lacks any real value.

[devphil]

When I give my indoctrination spiel, uh, er, "training lecture" on CVS to coworkers and lackeys, I usually hand down a list of requirements for log/commit messages and a ChangeLog entry.

Most of the time it's a variation on http://www.gnu.org/software/guile/changelogs/guile -changelogs_toc.html, or sometimes the rules used for ChangeLogs in the GCC project, which I've found to be of immense value when tracking down changes.

Personally I can't stand changelogs that don't say a thing. It's just enough "open source" to look good, but not open enough to actually invite help.

My biggest wish

[Reality Master 101]

How about comment editing capability??? There's nothing worse than posting a comment, even using preview, and realize you screwed it up somehow.

It might even be interesting to add a "previous version" capability. Just stick the message in some other dump table and have a different screen to dump them out.

The journals have editing capability, so I don't see why normal messages can't do the same.

Re:My biggest wish

[baptiste]

So make comment editing painful so folks won;t do it. Just like you can't moderate a story you post to. If you edit a comment, the moderation gets reset to whatever it posted at (-1 to +2) plain and simple. Also to avoid lamers from editing comments to get out of -1 land (say they posted at +1), you make it so that your post has to be at its original moderation or higher to edit it (or for simplicity, +1) So 0 and -1 comments could NOT be edited.

OR even simpler. Any comment at -1 or 0 could be edited at its current moderation - who cares? Any comment at +1 or higher will automatically get set to +1 when edited to start over. Easy enough and hard to abuse.

So for the word problem challenged:

sub edit_submit { if current_moderation > 1 { moderation = 1 } }

Easy enough!

Four suggestions..

[update()]

First of all, the new code seems to be working well. Availability and response time has been much better than before. (Bender code was in place on September 11, right? I was amazed at how well the system held up.)

Four suggestions -- three of which should be easy and the fourth is harder:

• The hard one -- I'd love the ability to go back and revise posts for typos or even delete them if I realize I've said something false.
• Moderation by editors should be noted as such. This would reduce (or confirm) a lot of the conspiracy theories around here.
• I'll also agree that the +1 bonus should be off by default.
• How about a lameness filter against HTML posts where more than 30% of the displayed text is formatted? This would help out people who forget to close a tag and don't bother to preview, and reduce readability problems caused by people who want to use all bold. (In a related vein, does the Code option for post formatting do anything but generate unreadable posts? If people want to post code, let them use HTML.)

Re:Four suggestions..

[FortKnox]

The hard one -- I'd love the ability to go back and revise posts for typos or even delete them if I realize I've said something false.

The abuse for "modified" comments would be immense (ie - whore to +5 quickly to be on top of the comments, then change all your links to goatse). Deletion isn't, though. I like that idea (although what happens to mods and replied?).

Moderation by editors should be noted as such. This would reduce (or confirm) a lot of the conspiracy theories around here

Yeah, like michael would agree to that (I'm teasin michael... don't mod me down!) ;-)
I don't think editors should have mod points at all! Unlimited mod points *DESTROY* the moderation system by definition. They should trust in the system they designed!!

I'll also agree that the +1 bonus should be off by default.

I think majority will rule, and this one come in effect quickly.

How about a lameness filter against HTML posts where more than 30% of the displayed text is formatted? This would help out people who forget to close a tag and don't bother to preview, and reduce readability problems caused by people who want to use all bold. (In a related vein, does the Code option for post formatting do anything but generate unreadable posts? If people want to post code, let them use HTML.)

How about killing the lameness filter altogether?
We all hate it, and it doesn't stop the trolling. Plus, isn't it a form of *censoring* (gasp!)??
Honestly, my only suggestion (both for comments AND articles) is to have the terminator of every type of valid HTML tag forced at the end (already done on comments). This will prevent bleeding of comments (and no more "Close you italics flag!" comments).

Re:Improvement suggestions:

[rif42]

I agree that the UI should default to use year indication in its default date format - without it is a mess when searching old articles.

Preferable using a universal understandable date format, which do not leaves you wonder if month or date are written first.

yyyy/MM/dd hh:mm, e.g. 2001/11/07 19:25
or
dd month yyyy hh:mm, e.g. November 7 2001 19:25

Will I pay for Slashdot?

[Skyshadow]

I've been thinking about this off and on ever since I heard that Taco was going to institute subscriptions: Would I pay for Slashdot?

In favor: I've used and enjoyed Slashdot for a very long time. I'm not concerned about privacy issues involving my email address, so that's not a worry for me. I know that a lot of hard work has been done to keep this service running for me to enjoy, and I know that the upkeep costs a lot. I know that the reality of the web is different now than it was.

Convincing, but against: I, and all the other posters, experts, flamers, trolls and etc. are what make Slashdot even basically interesting. The stories alone I can get anywhere -- it's the posts that are semi-interesting. When I pay for a subscription to Salon, I'm paying to get content I enjoy. If I were to pay for Slashdot, even just to get ride of ads, I feel like I'd be paying for something I help make happen.

All that said: I'll pay for Slashdot. The reason is that, all philosophical problems aside, I know that economic realities are forcing this thing in. I'll miss the free Slashdot, but even a subscriber-friendly Slashdot is better than no Slashdot at all (what would I *do* with my days?).

In return, I'd really, really like to see a more intelligent basis for story selection. I *miss* that Slashdot from three years ago where the stories were mostly tech-oriented and not just another excuse to flame Katz or diss Microsoft. I want to see real efforts to improve the signal to noise ratio without stomping on unpopular views (like moderation tends to). Maybe it's not possible to go back to that, but I'd like to see some effort made to try.

Subscriptions?

[hutchy]

The moment it costs more than $0.00 for any content on /. I for one will no longer be a reader of Slashdot. The next we know it VA software will pull up the leash, and slashcode will become proprietary

Stylesheets

[NutscrapeSucks]

Nobody else has mentioned it, and it's my pet peeve, so I'll throw it in there -- I would love to have nice clean XHTML or XML that could be formatted with stylesheets (CSS or XSLT) on the client-side. Now that Mozilla is out there, this should be politically acceptable.

This could potentially reduce serverload quite a bit -- not only would you be spitting out far less bandwidth per page, but things like score filtering could be done on the clientside instead of requiring another roundtrip to the server.

You could even invent your own killfile, highlighting, light-mode, and score biasing schemes. Slashdot could use a default stylesheet, and then host user-submitted ones. Removing all the presentation goop would probably make NNTP/Gopher/whatever gateways easier to implement too. This would also have the positive aspect of pushing off most of the minor bitches back onto the userbase.

In short, no.

[_xeno_]

I could try and explain it, or I could simply point to AvantSlash and let Scott Tringali's plagerized comment from Kuro5hin explain.

Reproduced for the terminaly lazy:

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.

Additionally, 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 /. 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.

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.

In order to make that usable, I'd have to pump my link depth to something like 4 in order to read the stories. Plus, for the first time in months, slashdot.org has stopped serving 403's to sync.avantgo.com, which basically killed it's usefulnes... (It was one of the first sites I tried to sync to my iPaq via AvantGo, and until today, everytime I tried, I'd get access denied errors reading it when I tried to sync.)

Re:No open-source package can touch it, eh?

[Pinball Wizard]

Hmm. I haven't seen a PHP package that would do nearly as well as Slash under heavy load. Kuro5hin is a perfect example - while they have similar hardware their site is usually slow and often painfully slow. And that's with a fraction of the traffic.

Someone please enlighten me

[scorcherer]

I can't use w3m anymore for /. because the current code has these stupid links:

<a href="//slashdot.org/whatever.pl...">

So. w3m interprets this as http://slashdot.org/slashdot.org/whatever.pl. OK, it's probably valid html since it works correctly in Mozilla and friends. But still, I wonder why the fsck does such a convention exist in the first place. More importantly, what's the point of repeating the host name for local links?

Re:Improvement suggestions:

[denshi]

Jamie, I think you're the best editor on this site, but your response is the lamest I've seen you write yet.

"Actually the gzip filter is a really clever way..."

This line angers me b/c it is just a one-line unsupported dismissal of a widely held viewpoint. That may have been the design intention of the lameness filter. That may be what it looks like to you from up there. But down here in the posters' trenches, the consensus is that it sucks ass. Way too many people catch the lameness filter for a short subject, or trying to be lyrical, or just having too much whitespace. I have caught it several times, and after playing with the text for a while to evade the filter, I just give up. Most people I know do. Email it to you? Sure, right after pouring one's energies into writing someing insightful and on-topic, a tiny block of perl tells one to piss off, one should feel motivated to email bug reports to a group that has grown continually less responsive to user input?? Right, he said.

Why the continuing trend to offload debugging onto users who didn't ask for the 'improvement' in the first place? Why keep pushing code onto a hugely popular community site that only serves in Generalissimo Taco's war on trolls, dadaists, and the generally absurd? Why a gzip "filter"?? There are decades of research into fast algorithms for determining statistics on bodies of text -- any one of them, many public domain, would be an intelligent tool against crapflooders. But a 'compress and size check' line instead?? That's the worst kind of lax unfeeling code, that wields a brutal metric without regard for corollary damage. ("Rob code", I've heard it called, but "MS code" is more typifying of that style of program design.)

I generally don't rant. You are running a valuable site at no monetary cost to us. But /. continues to become a place where trenchant technical analysis is unwelcome, master geeks ignore the pablum, and Taco & the trolls continue their little war with the rest of us caught in the minefields that they lay. Every day I feel a greater desire for the /. of 1998. I say, bring back Chips and Dips.