Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot Subscribers Now See The Future
So while subscribers won't see news posted at the last minute before everyone else, most of our stories will be available to them 10-20 minutes before everyone else. This means they can click through and beat the Slashdot Effect.
Another possible feature addition that we're discussing is to allow subscribers to post during this window. We haven't decided if that's a good idea or not. Since subscribers are still subject to all the same restrictions as anyone else in the forums, they could still be moderated into oblivion if they were jerks about it so it's probably not subject to all that much abuse, but this is still something we're only considering. Feel free to discuss it in this forum, or to contact me with opinions.
A couple of notes here:
- Subscribers have a variable on their subscriptions preference page that tells us how many banner ads they wish to "Spend" per day. This number must be at least 10 for you to be eligible to see the Mysterious Future plum. This means that your $5 subscription will last 100 days- or, $15-20 a year.
- You also need to hit the checkbox to disable ads on the Index. Once you hit your Max Pages for the day, you will see ads again, but you will also be eligible for the plum.
- These notes will be clarified on both the subscriptions page and in the FAQ very soon. Your feedback will help us decide how best to explain this since it's not exactly black & white here. Give us a couple weeks and it should all be blazingly obvious from the documentation how everything works.
In closing, this is a new feature and we appreciate all your feedback, both good and bad. We decided to implement this after tons of feedback from you, and we're really excited about it. This is a really great incentive for users to subscribe, but it also can give subscribers a chance to alert us in advance if stories have mistakes in them. We'll likely be expanding this sort of functionality in the future.
Now please go subscribe and help support Slashdot!
Update To clarify the timing. Right now the mysterious future is set to 20 minutes. That number is not a promise tho, since a story posted 11 minutes before "Air time" would be seen slighter later. A story posted 30 minutes in advance will be visible 20 minutes early.
Is that a Subscriber Benefit too?
sulli
RTFJ.
doesnt /. want to be free??
;)
What, me Tweet?
No only do you stop getting ads that even the most brain dead ad-blocker could have gotten rid of for free, you also get to be Taco's personal dupe checker! I can't wait to send my money in!
So, since I'm a subscriber, am I actually typing this in the future as well since the title bar is green? It's really red, but I am seeing it green, thus I must be operating in the future! Jeez, and I though Babylon 5 was confusing!
I knew about this yesterday.
This space intentionally left blank.
Ah, so does that mean we're not seeing dupes, we're seeing posts from parallel universes? We can't complain about them, otherwise our parallel selves won't be able to read /.!
sig:- (wit >= sarcasm)
You need 40 bucks? Will that hold you until payday?
This
So this means a site could be slashdotted before the future reaches us?
I already see all of Slashdots news in the future!
...Wait...never mind. My system clock is running slow.
OSDN outsources slashdot editing to its subscribers base. These happy few will have the privilege of beta testing dupes, broken links and poor spelling and grammar. They will also be the sole beneficiaries of the prestigious first post award as well as the (somewhat less prestigious) AYBABTU, ISR and Beowulf Cluster awards.
Must find my credit card, quick!
It would be nice to be sure of anything the way some people are of everything.
There's only like 10 subscribers abd they are all CmdrTaco's family.
You have to PAY to get "First Post" now?! What is this place coming to? SELLOUT!
(as promised)
If you think education is expensive, you should try ignorance -- Derek Bok, president of Harvard
Isn't red/green the most common form of color blindness?
- Tal Cohen
No, but we will be able to rate b00bies at +5, Interesting.
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
There'd just be 2 varieties of first posts...
FPP: First Paid Post!
and
FUP: First Unpaid Post!
All it takes is a few trolls with some available cash...
It was discovered today by our intrepid reporter adamruck that people that have lots of money can afford things that people that don't have lots of money can't! This, he reported, represented "some sort of ethical problem". We must be able to find a better social system than this, surely!
I must have stumbled onto the Beta version because I see stories all the time and then, wow! a couple days later I see the same story.
You don't know how relieved I am since I just thought something had changed in the Matrix and they were onto me, y'know....
--
As a matter of fact, I am a lawyer. But I play an actor on TV.
This means they can click through and beat the Slashdot Effect.
Something is wrong when a subscription incentive is to see a site before Slashdot launches a distributed denial of service attack against it: That's right, subscribers, click on the link now because we are about to DDoS the site!
it seems to me that for a news orginization that promotes open source, there would be some sort of mentality that information should be free, to everyone, at the same same time, in the same context, etc.
I can see how you might think that, but it's not true. In point of fact, the average Slashdot user believes that only other people's information (or music, or movies, or software, or news stories) should be free.
I write in my journal
Think of it, http://boobies.slashdot.org/
If people can read articles from the future it will inevitably corrupt the time line and will spell certain doom for everyone. Resist the urge. Don't do it.
-- Thou hast strayed far from the path of the Avatar.
The BSD section is already red. How would stories from the future be posted to the BSD section?
I can see the replies already to this post: "*BSD is dying; it has no future!"
Now all we need is some photoshop contests and Slashdot could be fark for techies or Linux advocates.
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
I wonder if slashdot themselves offered this service, wouldn't it be coercion? As in "you will be slashdotted if we post our story - which we are going to post - so either pay up or adios!" ... hehe
I've personally got my prefs set at +3 just to weed out the silly stuff.
:)
That's a silly thing to say in a comment with a score less than 3. I guess it's working.
Web site operators worldwide are encouraged to sign up for advance notice of port-80 DDoS attacks. "If you see it coming," said co-founder Hemos, "at least you have a chance to take down your web site before your ISP prepares a gigantic bill for that web site you put up to show your friends what you've been doing with your Lego kits."
Slashdot is a subsidiary of OSDN is a subsidiary of VA Software Corporation.
Build stuff. Stuff that walks, stuff that rolls, whatever.
Taco, man, you're confused. Rusty handles news from the trenches -- you're supposed to be giving us stuff that matters! ;)
We who were living are now dying
With a little patience
According to our logs... 10s of thousands of readers ;)
Pants are still optional, but recommended for you.
So who's going to write the netsaint plugin that detects "future story" http referers and preemptively pages the fire department so they arrive just as your webserver/db bursts into flames?
There aint no pancake so thin it doesn't have two sides.
...that Slashdot subscribers will be able to see repeat posts from The Mysterious Future as well?
Just do like we do for the general user community ...Slashdot.org is blocked. After being mentioned and slashdotted, then our employees discovering the place it was the only thing we could besides fire them :) Luckily I manage firewalls and proxy servers :)
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
Never a truer word was written...
"Luck is the residue of design" -- Branch Rickey
....I'm getting a "future message"..... w-o-r-k....
t-h-i-s.....w-i-l-l....n-e-v-e-r...
- OrbNobz
Yours legs are stupid. - Zim
Hm...just wondering. I wonder want a UID of 1 would go for on EBay...
Your Karma has gone down 2 level(s) for the future posting of goatse.cx links
...what you ought to do is bring back Jon Katz -- but only for non-paid subscribers. And anon lusers.
"Hey, I'm calling about your impending doom... I have a way out. Deny my offer, and suffer..."
Oh wait... You're talking about a slashdotting... At first you sounded like a Microsoft rep warning me that Win2K won't be officially supported anymore and I'll have to migrate the entire IT department to XP.
Whew. (for now)
pi = 3.141592653589793helpimtrappedinauniversefactory7
Commercial sites would love this. Academic/government ones probably wouldn't care as much. You could sell them a contract with an existing CDN (Akamai, Mirror-Image, etc.) or build out your own special purpose service, just to handle slashdot-like effects.
I can imagine the phone conversation now:
Unsuspecting Web Host: Um, hello?
Commercial Web Mirror: Dude... you've got 30 minutes until 1 million angry Slashdotters pummel your server into a pile of slag... What do you do?
Unsuspecting Web Host: [click]
TotalFarkingSlashdotted
adj., describes the state of having your webserver grind to a halt four times in a day as the Total Farkers, then the Farkers, then the Total Slashdotters, then the Slashdotters, are thrown a link to one of your webpages.
How about an auto +2 moderation on all posts?
Doesn't this suspiciously sound like Micro$oft-speak? For example, when Gates says something ridiculous like "We're implementing DRM and palladium because that's what our customers want."
I guess if you can't beat 'em, join 'em, right Taco? :)
...to see duplicate articles before everyone else. :-D
I guess that's why the future is "mysterious".
--- I wish I could hear the soundtrack to my life. That way I'd know when to duck.
I see. So if the subscribers were allowed to post early then we'd start off with a higher quality of posts, instead of those from people who don't read the article. Except for you, of course.
You could but Slashdot might invoke the DMCA on you!
Slashdot: bringing you the news, before it happens.
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