Slackware Forums Alive Again!

HappySlacker writes "Looks like the forums from slackware.com that Patrick Volkerding (Slackware's daddy) had to take down because of massive trolling are fully active again after 2 years of hibernation as read-only at userlocal.com." Update: 01/21 19:23 GMT by T : Jeremy from LinuxQuestions.org points out the forums on that site, which is recommended on Slackware's links page.

Comments

Why don't they use slashdots karma system

[Billly Gates]

Old timers might remember what slashdot was like 2-3 years ago when trolls represented something like %50 the posts here. I almost stopped comming here and many members of my l.u.g. quit comming altogether because of it. First cmd Taco put in bans on individuals with certian nicknames from posting after so many flamebait posts.

Then I remember seeing the same posts over and over again with nicks like "asfdd3456-troll". I guess the trolls liked what the spammers were doing so they actually wrote scripts to generate tens of thousands of "..hot gritz down my pants..and Natalie Portman petrified.." posts with a different name each! Unbelievable.

This became unbearable then cmd Taco put in IP address bans. This was a lifesaver and cut down on the amount of trolls. Of course trolls can still just go to a library and post or spoof an address but it cut down trolling dramatically. Cut it down to half of what it was.

Last trolls began to experiment with page widening with lots of "."'s so an annoying horizontal scroll would be needed to read all the posts. Very very annoying indeed. A few lines of code to slashcode made that problem go away.

Anyway Patrick should use slashcode for his forum or write scripts that are similiar to slashdot's to get rid of the obnoxious trolls and use a karma system. This is the only way to ban them.

Re:Why don't they use slashdots karma system

[jmulvey]

[Insert the man with censored lips icon here]

So where does it stop, and who draws the line? Transparency is also the key here, as many longtime slashdot readers will also agree.

Here's a key discovery of mine from Slashdot: The ability to moderate a comment is more powerful than the ability to submit a comment.

How did I learn this nugget of knowledge? Look at my history, and you'll find that although I often post the alternative (i.e. "commercial") viewpoint, I'm not a "troll" in the traditional sense.

Yet I appear to have been banned from ever moderating. It has been at least 6-9 months, and I read slashdot several times a day. Every day.

My semi-alternative viewpoint in this forum has resulted in my sanction to the fringes of read-only activism.

Ultimately, "trolldom" is just another grey area of battleground where some will go overboard, and some will not do enough. Slashdot is naturally in the middle of this difficult new area of content management.

I understand the difficulties involved and risks. I don't blame Slashdot. In fact, I've learned a nugget of knowledge from the experience.

I just wish my relatively nonradical ideas didn't result is such obvious squelching of my voice here.

Signed,
a horrible, horrible "Troll"

Re:Why don't they use slashdots karma system

[IamTheRealMike]

Yet I appear to have been banned from ever moderating. It has been at least 6-9 months, and I read slashdot several times a day. Every day.

You're paranoid. I've been reading Slashdot for I think a couple of years now, and I read it quite a bit because, well, despite its flaws it's often one of the most entertaining and interesting reads around. I've had mod access once, which I blew because I didn't understand that thread == story. Never had them since, and I get modded up frequently.

You need to put your conspiracy theories away. Slashdot is mostly automated, do you really think Taco reads the comments and says, "Ah ha! User 233344 dares to go against the groupthink, I know, I'll make sure he NEVER has mod points". Er, no, he doesn't. Just running the site takes up all his time.

I just wish my relatively nonradical ideas didn't result is such obvious squelching of my voice here.

I've often posted unpopular viewpoints (usually posts pointing out Apple is not whatever hyperbolic adjectives have been applied today) but I still get modded up. If you aren't getting highly rated then either you need to post more interesting comments, or you need to change the way you write them. It has nothing to do with censorship or "squelching", just that there are hundreds of people posting but we all only have time to read a handful of the best ones.

Re:Why don't they use slashdots karma system

[JimDabell]

Old timers might remember what slashdot was like 2-3 years ago when trolls represented something like %50 the posts here.

They still do, don't they? I've adjusted my settings to only browse at 2+, so I don't see a lot of it any more. Perhaps you have done the same.

Then I remember seeing the same posts over and over again with nicks like "asfdd3456-troll". I guess the trolls liked what the spammers were doing so they actually wrote scripts to generate tens of thousands of "..hot gritz down my pants..and Natalie Portman petrified.." posts with a different name each! Unbelievable.

Simple to solve, use a turing test to prevent automated registrations.

This became unbearable then cmd Taco put in IP address bans.

Yeah, I remember that. I (and presumably every other user of my isp) was banned for months after I went to the trouble of emailing them the details of my isp's proxy servers (to avoid the "you can't post" page).

Last trolls began to experiment with page widening with lots of "."'s so an annoying horizontal scroll would be needed to read all the posts. Very very annoying indeed. A few lines of code to slashcode made that problem go away.

And created a new problem in its place: the "phantom space" bug, that breaks urls. A better solution would be to only allow long text from registered users, and only once per day, or perhaps warning them before posting something that is broken. Or (heaven forbid) actually using css to lay out the page instead of that nasty table hack.

Anyway Patrick should use slashcode for his forum or write scripts that are similiar to slashdot's to get rid of the obnoxious trolls and use a karma system. This is the only way to ban them.

Slashdot's system for coping with trolls sucks. Deliberately annoying people is against the t&cs of most isps, when it started to be a problem, the admins should have started notifying the trollers' isps.

I agree

[cioxx]

Why is the parent modded as "Troll"? He has a valid argument.

Slackware forums don't have moderation to filter out crap like /. has. It's just asking for trouble. I'm pretty sure Slack users (such as myself) check the distro site on a weekly basis, and would eventually find out if the forum was up again.

Just my opinion.

Re:I agree

[zapfie]

Did YOU read the post? The forums USED to be read-only, but now are FULLY ACTIVE.

/. Math

[tiny69]

Last post before forums were shut down: 12-14-01 13:24

First post after forums became active again: 01-20-03 21:07

Means "2 years of hibernation" on /.

There's two sides to that...

[BrokenHalo]

then cmd Taco put in IP address bans. This was a lifesaver ...

I've never trolled in my life, but slashcode has blocked my entire netblock (an ISP with a strictly enforced AUP and who would have pulled the plug on any miscreant if asked) for several months now. So despite my karma being "excellent", I can now only post via an anonymous relay. It was a major piss-off that my objections were just ignored.

Re:Now maybe they can work on the store

[jericho4.0]

Ohhhhh. Poor thing. :-)
Just kidding, always glad to see another newbie. If you havn't tried Debian yet, you shoud,. Or any other dist that uses apt-get, debians package manager. Apt-get makes dependencies a thing of the past.

It will not help you with all the other linux details though. Sorry. Please keep in mind that making an industrial strength OS that is also easy for anyone to use is a tall order, and people are working on it as we speak.

Glad to see signs of life

[bindster]

Now that I can see that there are some lights on at Slackware, I'm going to help them polish their distro with some apps/scripts/customizations which would be Slack specific; I hope this development spurs more people to do the same, and also to create a dialogue for those who are seeking to help improve the distro. I know of a couple things that could use some work too... how about that rc.sysvinit which doesn't even work? Maybe replace it with an optional full SVR4 init system, or have the option for a kernel with an compiled boot logo. Perhaps even our own version of a package download tool (tgz-get?). Hopefully this will open the door to all that.

Re:Now maybe they can work on the store

[wass]

Sure Debian's got 10k packages, but it seems that everything I need isn't there, isn't complete, or is old, even in the unstable tree.

Well, apt-get.org has gone online recently, which contains pre-release .debs that haven't yet made it into unstable. You can go here to find alot of software packages.

I do know that mplayer is there, along with the w32 codecs, which I have running on my machine and works very nicely. I don't know about the other packages you were looking for.

BTW, do you really find it easier downloading several tarballs, unpacking, doing the ./configure, make, make_install, for each package? Or is this somehow automated in slackware? I find possibly editing sources.list, doing "apt-get update" and "apt-get install mplayer-686" to be incredibly simple.

Do you really find the manual install easier? I can totally see someone preferring it to keep very up-to-date and control all level of installation, but EASIER?

Just curious. I've run slackware before, but found it a PITA to admin over debian, so I switched back.

Re:Now maybe they can work on the store

[wass]

Okay, I agree with you there. I did setup slack once and it was a very nice installation. I just had trouble adding more packages to the system, and found that to be incredibly annoying. Which really makes me wonder about people that claim that they find slackware the easiest of the distros to update.

I have run into my share of troubles with apt-get, apt-get might be one of the hardest yet easiest things about debian. That is, when it's working fine, it works ever so wonderfully. But every now and then you might hit a snag which requires some advanced features of apt-get to fix some of the problems.

I've been slowly building up my apt-get understanding, and now I have a decent system that's doing what I want it to be doing. I've certainly had to RTFM a few times when things go wrong. But, like any sort of system, once you understand it and become 311t with it, it's a snap to operate.

But, definitely yes, there are a few rough edges that should be ironed out. And, dselect is the biggest piece of crap I've ever used, when I install debian now I totally bypass dselect and just apt-get everything. so much saner.