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.
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".