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.
In English : "Better is Good's foe".
:
See that grey pearl besides your comment's details ?
click on it
Slashdot Friend/Foe System
So how do you perceive Cmdr Taco ?
So how do you perceive cyborg_monkey ?
So how do you perceive Klerck ?
So how do you perceive Jon Katz ?
...
Friend
Neutral
Foe
Note: Who you like and dislike is not private; it can and will be used against you.
Do you mean I may get sacked if I happen to feel some sympathy for some of the trolls ?
I believe this is a little dangerous unless we have the guarantee that you are trustworthy enough to use this.
Until then, well... Everybody is my friend.
Trolling using another account since 2005.
+2 comment bonus. Karma: 25
Capping out the system. Karma: 50
Jon Katz, Foe, -5. Priceless
And that's the first bug with this system, I think. People will be able to make links to Slashdot that appear visually to be links to other stories or something innocent, but instead these links might actually mass-blacklist a victim if a lot of Slashdotters are fooled into clicking the links. I think these links should be flagged or not allowed in the body of messages.
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
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? :)
Maybe it's just me, but this really seems to go against the basic idea of a forum like /.
To me this sort of environment is supposed to be a sea of conflicting viewpoints and brash arguments. Trolls tend to already be taken care of to an extent by the current moderation abilities, and to an extent flamewars tend to fall below filter level.
But with the ability to assign "Friend or Foe" you essentially gain the ability to make the No-Mans-Land of the comments into an area that only reflects your own views and opinions. Granted it might take a while, and will very likely never completely kill dissenting opinion, but a pretty self-supporting environment can still be made.
The closest analogy I can think of would be a hardcore conservative listening to 24 hours of Rush Limbaugh (Not sure who would be a good example for a Liberal stance, so I won't list them. ). Sure they can do it, but in doing so they cut themselves off from the other viewpoints and opinions that might provoke some thought in what they believe in.
'Life is like a spoonful of Drain-O, it feels good on the way down but leaves you feeling hollow inside'
Slashdot editors announced today the addition of new, ground-breaking features to their SlashCode system, which is the heart of their article and comment system.
Among the changes are new features such as:
You've always been able to exclude story authors, its been in the preferences for a long time. Making timothy your foe won't do much since it seems to be an unwritten rule that Slashdot editors post comments on the site no more often than once every six months or something...
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
http://slashdot.org/~cmdrtaco/friends
http://slashdot.org/~cmdrtaco/foes
http://slashdot.org/~cmdrtaco/fans
I set all my friends to neutral, and /. told me:
You are alone in the world.
I thought I was amoungst my own here!
I thought I was accepted!
Loved even!
Will no one be my friend?
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!
...and you STILL can't say "show me only messages I haven't already read".
YEssirree, kids, we're still DECADES behind Usenet.
--
I noticed
It's getting about time to leave everywhere
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".
I don't want editing as such, revisionism is a bad thing.. and would definitely be abused by many of the trolls and lamers that crawl out of the woodwork on /. like forums.
But an ability to annotate your -own- posts (i.e. an ability to add timestamped, limited length comments to the text of the post so they are visible to everyone viewing the post) would be very cool. Allowing for apologies/corrections/additional info to be placed in the comment by it's author, without despoiling the original comment..
"Oops, I always forget the purpose of competition is to divide people into winners and losers." - Hobbes
which makes each /. article appear as a newsgroup, with the comments being the messages in the group.
/. changes format.
Unfortunately, one has to run the CVS version of Gnus for this to work, since it does it by parsing the html, and need to be updated each time
There's so many features in /. that need check boxes.
or maybe not...
-Russ
(I'm just joking... jeez.)
Me