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

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 ...

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).

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.

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.