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.
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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? :)
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!
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".
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.
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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