Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot Code Update
You will likely notice a variety of changes in the comments system if you
are logged in.
Most of these changes surround the new 'Zoo' system which implements (among
other things) a sort of killfile function, and much more. Logged in
users have the ability to flag each other as Friends or Foes, and
assign bonuses and penalties appropriately. So if a user annoys you,
you can easily not read their comments any more. If you notice any
bugs, feel free to submit them or let krow or me know.
Want to know someone's friends or foes? Do the following:
1) Make them your friend
2) Click on the words 'friends' across from them
One can easily browse who's friend is whose.
Hosting for Creators: http://rpg-works.net
You've done an outstanding job of making it difficult, if not impossible for the people who are running slashdot "light" to mark a person a friend or foe. Could we have a bit more description of these features please? :)
I do believe that the actual intention for this is that you will tend to like certain people's comments more than others'. This way if you like something that you read, you can mark it good. And next time they have a comment in a thread you are reading, you will notice it and read it (meaning you will also spend more time here...hehe, as if you don't do that already). Also, this will help you ignore all those goat posts, grin. It basically will show everything, I assume, with a +1, -1 (or more if you can vote someone friend more than once?).
I like the idea, but I don't really understand how this is not kept private. Because me making all the "FP'ers" foe's will come back to haunt me? My opinion is made public when I make a comment, not when I read another's. I don't understand why that is so just yet, but I'm sure there is some reason for it.
"Time is long and life is short, so begin to live while you still can." -EV
Is this the same code that runs Slashdot?
Yes. Slashdot and Slashcode are usually running the latest development code from CVS, within a week or so.
If this is business as usual then we can expect to see a new release file announced at slashcode within a week or so. So the obvious question is, "Is this business as usual?"
Seastead this.
after playing with the reason modifer for a couple minutes, I noticed this bug (yes I already sent out an email):
I altered the "reason modifier" in my user preferences such that Funny comments got rated -1. The modifer is being applied correctly to "Funny" comments, but the comments are not being sorted correctly. That is, a +4 Funny shows up above a +5 Interesting. It seems to me the comments are being sorted and *then* the modifier is being applied, but I would think it should be done the other way around.
My comment viewing settings are:
Threshold = 2, nested, and highest score first.
Forget this web-board with limited filtering business, I want a Slashdot-to-Usenet gateway. Just think, all you'd have to do is point your favourite news reader (i.e. tin) at nntp.slashdot.org and post away. The bandwidth savings over this heavyweight html+graphics crap would alone be worth it, while the ability to choose your own client program with its own interface and filtering rules would be even better.
The scary thing is that this could probably be done in a reasonable way. Articles could map to newsgroups on the server (with new ones appearing daily and old ones disappearing). Since comments are threaded anyways, this should transfer across directly. And as long as the slashdot username and password are required for accessing the NNTP server, there shouldn't be any real problems with unauthorized usage by spammers and such.
Oh well. Too bad most of the crowd here is too young to remember what usenet even is...
It's only software!
that you can use the slashdot effect against a single user by posting one of those enemification links.
After all, there are enough users here that a dozen or two will end up making enemies after ignoring the slashcode warnings. I don't know about you, but having a single enemy could hurt my reputation and karma.
"Wireless : LAN
People without a login will come here and see his MSFUD comments at '0', with no opposing comments, and assume that they might therefore have some validity? god help us..!
455fe10422ca29c4933f95052b792ab2
Most of us here on
I find it downright ludicrous that to date, Slashdot has NO SECURE LOGIN.
[if you have one, then it's too well-hidden].
Make no mistake - I do not want my login password sent as cleartext.
It makes life too miserable.
For those with no HTTPS support, an unsecured login option should be provided,
but the secure one should be the default [or prominently displayed].
Much of Slashdot's pages teems with TABLE tags and other assorted formatting crap.
This drastically increases download and rendering times, and our ISP is only too happy
to charge us for it [money saved == more pr0n!].
Most users' browsers do not need this backward-compatibility kludge anymore,
as they use IE [what fools these mortals be!], Mozilla, Konqueror, Opera or NS6.x.
Use browser sniffing, then send pure, strict XHTML + CSS for formatting,
thus encouraging the luddites to switch to Mozilla!
[Good part is, the pages will still render well on text browsers like Lynx, Links etc.
Or they could be served the TABLE'd pages that NS 4.x & < should be served.]
That's all for now, folks. Any more suggestions? Feel free to tack them on.
set thread_growable TRUE
Use ISO 8601 dates [YYYY-MM-DD]
If this feature takes off, I'd like to see a "distributed affinity" system implemented, similar to Google's PageRank system. If I call a particular poster a friend, then anyone whom they call a friend gets an X% boost in my ranking, anyone they call a friend gets an X/100 boost, and so on.
That way, after I've picked a certain number of people (100/X, actually) as friends, and they all like another poster I've never noticed before, he'll automagically have the same status with me that they all do.
Foe rankings would work the same way, but is the foe of my friend necessarily my foe, and is the foe of my foe necessarily my friend? Automatically assigning points based on those assumptions would probably not be useful.
What you should do now is to let people's friend/foe lists build up for a while; once they've gotten complex enough, make a digraph of the friend/foe relationships, and sell posters.
It probably would look cooler than those internet map posters I see Thinkgeek advertise from time to time - plus there would be the added fun of trying to find your node in the graph!
One can respect a foe, and look forward to reading his or her messages.
The people I want to score down are the Fools and the Trolls, whom I don't want to honor with the label "Foe".
Anyway, my point is that I'd like to moderate, and I don't understand why I can't.
/. lately, and you might, too.
Check out K5 if you haven't already. Their moderation system is much more democratic than Slashdot's, and (at least IMHO) much more effective. Unlike Slashdot's moderation system, theirs doesn't seem to have been designed to provoke confusion and deliberate abuse at every turn.
The quality of discussion at K5 is generally a little higher, since it's not such a playground for trolls. It's a different site with different purposes, but I've found myself spending a lot more time there than on
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
Well in the moderation system some things are to be improved:
-Seperate setting for doing moderations. I'd like my treshold lower when moderating to scan for AC gems. (or to search for trolls that are not trolls, but are meant funny)
-Some (don't know how) system to mod up late good posters. The problem with the current system is early on topic posters get modded up, but a 4 hour late gem has a very slim change to be modded up.
-Some filters for capitals in subject "RIGHT NOW" 8-)
Or better yet, a delete/edit function so you can go back and edit your own posts. Everyone has done it. You go and post a message and think of more to add or you just want to delete it entirely. Why not allow deleting/editing your own posts?
To me, this modification allows me the sort of freedom I've always wanted on a forum. If a post isn't insightful, interesting, or informative, I'm not really interested in reading it, at least not on Slashdot. I'll turn on BBC America if I want to be amused, I'll peruse alt.binaries.erotica.* if I want to be aroused - you get the idea.
I discovered long ago that the friend or foe concept works well in separating the shite from the non. I think the terminology is too confrontational, but the concept works.
On Amazon.com, for example, if reviewer X gives a film that I loathe 5 stars, I'll generally dislike all of the films that he might recommend. The converse is also true. The same concept also seems to apply to books, music, and ideas.
No, this isn't limiting. I see too much overlap in tastes and opinion for that to be a problem, and I know of many films I've enjoyed that I would never have watched had they not been recommended to me by a trusted critic/friend. Ditto books, music, interesting philosophies.
Neopets - the best free game on the Int
I came up with these a while back...
- Possible meta-moderation of rejected stories. Let a certain amount of users (controlled in the same fashion as moderators) decide if a certain story is worthy of a second look. If it gets accepted and rejected for a second time, it will not get meta-moderated again.
- Let those who end up getting their story rejected moved to their journal if they're a registered user. Make that an option in their preferences or in the submit story submission page.
- Allow users to ignore posts made by Anonymous Cowards. In some cases, these people are just idiotic trolls who just waste time posting their crap here, but there are the odd times that the Anon. Coward is actually posting something useful or something not moronic. If that coward gets moderated up, then that ignore feature can be defeated.
That is all I got to say.It would be good if you had a page where you could see who had put YOU on THEIR friends/foes list.
What good is a friend/foe if you dont know they are out there?
Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer, thats what I say.
"So there he is, risen from the dead. Like that fella, E. T." - Father Ted Crilly
And everyone will see things that agree with them and therefore they will KNOW even more certainly that they are the best and the brightest and the future of this planet dammit.
I think this is a bad idea. It is easy enough to skip past the moron posts, but what if I killfile someone who is just having a bad day, and who (I won't see it) comes up with a real gem tomorrow, some thing that could have made me think, see another point of view...
I'd like an option to post at any lower score. The option to decline my +1 bonus is useful, but occasionally being able to post at zero (without having to go Anonymous) or even -1 could be handy.
:)
Why? Five minutes ago I responded to an AC at score zero. I felt it required a rebuttal, but I didn't feel my response should waste the time of anyone who never saw the post I was responding to. I really didn't want to post anonymously, but it was the only way to get my score to zero. There is no way to post at -1 (if you want to respond to a -1 scored comment).
Choosing to post at a lower score is a form of courtesy to other readers.
Oh yeah, and how bad would the server load be for a spellcheck option in the comment preview?
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Here's an idea..
How about moderation 'inheritance' for a author replying to their own posts..
So: You post a great comment, and it gets moderated up to (Score:5, Genius). Then you notice a mistake, or want to clarify something, so you post a reply which automatically gets a (Score:5 Inherited) since it is related to a post where you have already had good moderation. But after that it is on it's own, i.e. it can be modded down if it is a troll, or just plain stupid..
You would need some back-end logic, such as only inheriting on direct reply's (one level below the original post), and not allowing double-inheritance (i.e. moderation can only be inherited by -one- same author reply, this will prevent a troll/lamer hijacking an entire thread). And probably an automatic loss of this feature for people who's -inherited moderation- posts regularly get modded down to zero (they loose the privilige since they are probably abusing it).
"Oops, I always forget the purpose of competition is to divide people into winners and losers." - Hobbes
I'm just wondering... does the system disable itself when we get moderation points, so we can do our jobs looking at the entire available pool of posts, or does it continue to block out people we don't like?
My first thought, when seeing this new ability, was of course to add Anonymous Coward as a foe. But that's silly - just because some people troll is no reason to deny myself the ability to read some possibly insightful comments by others who can't or won't log in. If any named user is consistently trolling, he ought to simply be banned.
Now I'm thinking - okay, so marking people down is pointless, but marking them up can be quite useful, especially if we can start sorting article comments so high-rated friends go first... in essence, this is pretty much the exact same approach that I take when I moderate. I don't waste points downvoting, I use my votes to call attention to the good stuff. And so I shall do, with the friend system - if I like comments by people consistently, I want to be told when they have new stuff they've written.
Get off my launchpad!
Aaaah, the best new feature of Slashdot is not having to read opposing arguments, so I can live in my own little world, untouched by reality. Forget the truth, I only want to hear my own opinions, and believe that every one else has the exact same opinion as me. That's what being an American is about, especially in these TRYING TIMES.
Friends and Foes are NICE, but we can be just like Survivor if we try a bit harder, making alliances, breaking your enemies, backstabbing the other posters. We can make Slash into a real interactive game!
Couple of points. I want to be able to set my threshold at -1 or lower to read, I don't want to waste my time with anything 0 or greater. I come here to read the trolls, as do many others.
When posting, I want to flag my post as "for" or "against" the topic, so I can only read the arguments which support my own views. Yup, I wanna live in ignorance. Ignorance is bliss, and I want bliss.
I also wanna be able to mod others as "The Weakest Link", but there's probably some trademark stuff on the term, so "Flaming Goddam Moron" will do.
Thanks a bundle.
Your pal,
Adolf Hitler
maybe not automatically removed slash dotted links, that would everything. :) What about an auto link to a cached version on google...
Maybe a check box to include that in the item, from the submit page
Being able to flag users as "friend" or "foe" is a great intermediate step toward the kind of collaborative filtering-based moderation system that I imagine for Slashdot.
Imagine the following:
Slashdot 'notices' that a bunch of other users who share a lot of 'friends' with you have modded up a posting by someone who is not on your 'friends' list. Slashdot notifies you of the posting, you read it, submit a comment, and add the user to your 'friends' list. You have thus discovered a worthwhile posting that you may have missed had you been filtering out low-scoring comments.
If Slashdot created a true collaborative filtering-based moderation system, then moderation as we know it would cease to exist, and in its place hundreds of closely intertwined 'communities' of like-minded readers would emerge, and the quality of discussion on slashdot (as perceived by its readers) would grow enormously.
To satisfy new readers or those who had not taken the time to express their preferences, comments could be 'scored' according to aggregate moderation across communities. The key of CF would be that everyone would be a moderator all of the time, and everyone's moderations would effect whose comments they themselves saw in the future.
Amazing magic tricks
If I've listened to the same tired, lame arguement, I'd appreciate the opportunity to make him foe. However, if I haven't decided yet, then I'd like to mark him as a potential foe. This way, if he continues to abuse my patience and good will, I can choose to make him as foe.
On the other hand, if someone continually says something that I agree with, I'd also mark him as foe, not because I dislike him or agree with him. It would be because it's no use wasting my time reading something I already believe in. If you already believe in what the pastor preaches, do you really have to listen to it Sunday after Sunday? Aren't there so many other things in life to learn?
Sincerely, and with thanks,
Eugene T.S. Wong
testing out my trending skills
Also, in that vein: there should be one-button view preferences (-1, Nested, Newest First) for moderation. Too often the +3s get modded to +5 while the interesting, new AC comments are ignored.
sulli
RTFJ.