Slashdot Subscribers Now See The Future

We're pleased to announce the newest reason for you to subscribe to Slashdot. Besides the ability to suppress banner ads, limit journal postings to friends, and a few plums, Subscribers now see stories posted on Slashdot from The Mysterious Future! These stories are recognizable by the red title bar, and the lack of a time stamp. Subscribers will be able to beat the rush and read the links before everyone else. You can hit the link below and I'll explain exactly what this means. If this appeals to you, you could read the subscriber FAQ or just go subscribe. First off, this feature doesn't change anything for non-subscribers. All Slashdot stories are put into the story queue before you see them. The time stamps on these stories vary tremendously. Sometimes the story is posted days in advance (like, say, a Book Review or an Ask Slashdot where time isn't critical and we post a set number a week) Other stories are "Breaking News" and are posted just seconds before they go live. But most stories are posted 20-30 minutes before they go live. This time window gives other authors a chance to take a look at them. To fix spelling, to check for dupes (HAH!) or even to reject the story outright!

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.

Comments

Hah! First!

[sulli]

Is that a Subscriber Benefit too?

But...

[Rudy Rodarte]

doesnt /. want to be free??
;)

Re:But...

[bellings]

doesnt /. want to be free??

No. Only information wants to be free. Slashdot has managed to avoid that for a looong time.

Re:But...

[gallen1234]

Information may want to be free but bandwidth is another story.

Re:But...

[Soko]

Tell that to the recipents of the /. effect, why don't you.

Soko

Re:But...

[Kallahar]

Actually, during an interview last year they said that the major costs were not bandwidth, but personnel. It takes a lot of money to employ people full time to administer the site.

But yeah, bandwidth ain't free :)

Travis

Re:But...

[nomadic]

Yep, that army of proofreaders and fact checkers that they've hired must be expensive.

Re:But...

[H.G. Pennypacker]

Publicity also tends to be expensive... the slashdot effect certainly generates a lot of that, too.

The funny part is that traditionally people pay to reach their audience, but on the internet, you pay when your audience reaches you. I guess this is one case where the Soviet Russia type inversion actually produces the correct answer. Maybe the internet *is* just like Soviet Russia?

/. effect?

[Lothar 0]

Will this now result in a pre-/. effect? Maybe the subscribers will be nice enough to mirror /.-ed sites on their own sites before the rush, but I'm not holding my breath.

Re:/. effect?

[cgenman]

This might be a good thing (tm) for system administrators. Getting a sudden, solid surge of slashdot referrals might trigger a webserver to htmlify dynamic content and / or switch to a text-only site in anticipation of the real flood, which might shut down any such system.

Of course, if you can't hang with the ping flood, you're screwed. But for those who aren't Dossed but merely hosed, this could be a great thing.

Re:/. effect?

[SweetAndSourJesus]

But maybe /. subscribers will be jerks enough to post the good stories in their journals, thus defeating the system entirely.

Re:/. effect?

[Ed Avis]

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.

...if they reload Slashdot every quarter of an hour or so. Who does that all day long?

Re:/. effect?

[CmdrTaco]

According to our logs... 10s of thousands of readers ;)

Re:/. effect?

[terraformer]

Maybe, but one thing is for sure, Karma whores will need a subscription to be the first to post mirror sites.

Re:/. effect?

[CmdrTaco]

If we enabled posting for subscribers during TMF window, we definitely would not allow AC posting.

Re:/. effect?

[CmdrTaco]

If we do allow posting during the window, there will be a way to assign filters to those posts, so you will be able to easily ignore them.

Re:/. effect?

[CmdrTaco]

Well, if you wanted to post AC, you could simply wait the N minutes until the Mysterious Future becomes the obvious present, and post anonymously to your hearts little content ;)

Re:/. effect?

[CmdrTaco]

The real variable here of course is what ratio of users post AC vs Not, what ratio post good vs bad, and then how many people actually subscribe.

Half our posts are AC. Of the logged in users, it'll be interesting to see what % of them both post & subscribe.

My point is that if there are only 1000 users who Login, Post Logged in, and Subscribe, then that 20 minute window could be awful quiet... not fun for anyone.

I don't know, it'll really depend on the % of active logged in posters who are also subscribers. That number is going to change dramatically over the next week since our subscriber numbers obviously spiked yesterday.

Re:/. effect?

[CmdrTaco]

Write an email.

Re:/. effect?

[CmdrTaco]

My thoughts are that if we allow posting, we must allow moderation during the same window.

WOW!

[gpinzone]

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!

Re:WOW!

[bsharitt]

I'd almost forgotten about the banner ads, I have't seen one in a while.

Future Messages?

[agrounds]

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!

Re:Future Messages?

[AlphaGeekOne]

Purple title bars! We want PURPLE title bars!

Is this going to be like K5?

[mhesseltine]

By that I mean, will readers be able to make suggestions, corrections, etc. to the stories? Or, once submitted, the story is "set in stone" and won't be updated?

Also, will someone begin "karma whoring" and mirroring pages and posting links to the mirrors?

Re:Is this going to be like K5?

[CmdrTaco]

Users can always make suggestions to stories by emailing the author. We do hope that subscribers will be likely to alert us to typos and stuff. No story on Slashdot is really ever set in stone. But I would consider a story from the mysterious future to be totally plastic- I will be editing and updating stories during that window without spelling out changes or putting in little "Update" comments. We've always used the last few minutes before a story goes live to make updates and corrections. This won't change, but users will be able to alert us to issues before it goes public.

Re:Is this going to be like K5?

[Mike McTernan]

That's great. As a non-subscriber I have the benefit of better filtered/corrected stories where the people that subscribe are doing the purification before it hits my eyes. Net result = I get better content - woohoo!

Re:Is this going to be like K5?

[CmdrTaco]

Thing is, if we had perfect spelling and never posted a duplicate story, someone wouuld find something else to complain about. I guess its just easier to not care and ignore the bitching and moaning.

I always find it funny when I post a story, come back 90 minutes later, and see a couple dozen complaints that the story was a duplicate, but nobody bothered to email me and let me know. After I post a story, I have to go read 50 emails, or delete 50 submissions, I don't usually have time to read the 300-400 comments in the story ;)

And just 'cuz we're alerted to typos doesn't mean we're gonna fix 'em either. If alerted, I often fix typos and grammar errors in stories. But I don't knock myself out about it unless its really a bad one.... We've got 10s of thousands of stories, it's hard to care that we missed an apostrophe ;)

Old news...

[ZenHarbinger]

I knew about this yesterday.

Re:Hah! First!

[gmuslera]

If you see the article hours before most of slashdot readers, I think that yes, this will be a subscriber benefit. For the others a lot of discussions will start half full just when the article is widely available.

Hmmmm

[ZaMoose]

Didn't TotalFark already go this route? What's next, Slashdot Photoshop contests? *grin*

Re:Hmmmm

[i.r.id10t]

No, but we will be able to rate b00bies at +5, Interesting.

Re:Hmmmm

[sweetooth]

Farks a touch differant in that a lot of the total fark news items never make it to the front page at all. So you are paying more to see the list of ALL of the submitted stories and not just what's being published before it goes live. Also with Total Fark you could get a head start on the photoshop contests.

Re:Hmmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

Fark does seem to be the pioneer. For those note familiar with their site, they link to several stories/sites/games/etc each day with a one line description, and a discussion thread for each item. Subscribers get to see all proposed links, including those that don't make to the main page, and of course including more time before the threads do make it to the main page. Their "photoshop contests," in which readers modify a picture and post it in the thread, provide added incentive to get early access to the links, as participants can prep their images and have them posted by the time the thread goes to the main page.

It works well for Fark, and I think Slashdot would benefit from copying it more fully. I.e., allow access to all *proposed* links, not just those about to be posted to public page, and allow discussion before posting to the public page.

I also think this would work well for traditional news sites. While you wouldn't want to unveil all communications within the organization, it would be fascinating to see unedited reports from New York Times field correspondents, and see the different revisions as it goes through the editing process. The legal liability (slander lawsuits etc.) would probably be cost-prohibitive, but if the service were offered, I'm sure it would garner a lot of subscribers.

Re:Hmmmm

[weave]

Think of the possibilities for a boobies topic icon, given that slashdot's topic icons are like 70x70 instead of the 70x27 on fark.

Think of it, http://boobies.slashdot.org/

Awesome

[RedWolves2]

But..
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.

I don't think that is a good idea. I think the fact that users can read ahead of time and then they can prepare their posts. This might make better prepared comments.

Re:Awesome

[k_187]

I don't think that is a good idea. I think the fact that users can read ahead of time and then they can prepare their posts. This might make better prepared comments.

Since when is this a bad thing? I don't know about you but most of the posts around here are pretty pointless or just plain wrong. I've personally got my prefs set at +3 just to weed out the silly stuff. I think anything that would contribute to the discussion would be a good thing (tm). Of course, the real downside to that would be the trolls subscribing so they would be guaranteed first post status, but then again the Mods would hopefully catch all that stuff.

Re:Awesome

[RackinFrackin]

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. :)

Re:Awesome

[Chasuk]

I'm going to be honest, I don't know what you don't think is a good idea: subscribers being able to post ahead of time, or the fact that those posts would be better prepared.

I like the idea of allowing subscribers to post early 'cuz we might eliminate a lot of those "frist post" losers (also flames and trolls). Perhaps impose a special levy so that these posts are still allowed, but the otherwise wasted bandwidth might actually makes /. money.

Considering the amount of diarrhea posted on /., this might generate substantial revenue.

Wait, before you implement this penalty levy, Taco, let me patent it...

It seems to me..

[jonnythan]

That this is kinda counterproductive.

Subscribers are probably the ones to load /. the most, right? Well, you get a subset of the most vigorous /. readers as subscribers... and that serves to null the good effect of beating the /. effect.

Also, the more subscribers you get, the smaller the benefit is for each subscriber. I would think that before long, the /. effect will just start when the red bar appears. Am I missing something?

Re:It seems to me..

[cascino]

Also, the more subscribers you get, the smaller the benefit is for each subscriber. I would think that before long, the /. effect will just start when the red bar appears. Am I missing something?
The only difference between the above hypothetical situation and the current situation is that in above, everybody's paying a /. subscription. That's the intended effect.

Hey we're all friends here

[ellem]

You need 40 bucks? Will that hold you until payday?

well golly

[JeanBaptiste]

Thats a pretty good idea. I would still think the /. effect would be better suppressed if slashdot would mirror stories, especially if its running off of somebody's mother's DSL connection.

Still, this offering may finally make me a subscriber. And I do like the idea of a subscriber getting to post first. The types of people that would subscribe are probably not the same ones that post the goatse.cx links and such. I'd even go so far as to maybe allow a subscriber another +1 bonus to karma, or maybe allow a subscriber a higher karma cap, or even let a subscribers post get modded to +6... but what do I know...

Re:well golly

[leviramsey]

Thats a pretty good idea. I would still think the /. effect would be better suppressed if slashdot would mirror stories, especially if its running off of somebody's mother's DSL connection.

Maybe make the Slashdot mirror only for subscribers?

Re:well golly

[sabaco]

Thats a pretty good idea. I would still think the /. effect would be better suppressed if slashdot would mirror stories, especially if its running off of somebody's mother's DSL connection.

What?! Now you want people to be responsible when they could use their own irresponsibility to generate money for them?? What is the would coming to... That's just downright unamerican.

Re:well golly

[MojoRilla]

I'd even go so far as to maybe allow a subscriber another +1 bonus to karma, or maybe allow a subscriber a higher karma cap, or even let a subscribers post get modded to +6... but what do I know...

Features like letting people see stories early or giving them extra karma for money will cheapen and ultimately ruin the site.

Having money doesn't mean you are more intelligent, or have more important things to say. By giving people time to prepare their posts, or giving them higher karma for paying, we are saying that what they say is more important than other people.

Following these trends, ultimately the quality of slashdot posts will decrease, which is the whole reason for the moderation / karma system in the first place.

Re:well golly

[siskbc]

Thats a pretty good idea. I would still think the /. effect would be better suppressed if slashdot would mirror stories, especially if its running off of somebody's mother's DSL connection.

Nah. How often is the site slashdotted before some karmawhore has pre-emptively de-slashdotted the site sometime in the first 5 posts? Pretty much always? So the /. effect doesn't really affect us that much - only the poor non-/. bastards trying to reach a site.

And this new deal is lame. Other than beating the /. effect, (which I obviously believe to be minimal), what do you get? You get to self-edit the site? Yeah, that's great - you can see firsthand just how half-assed half these editors are by which stories make it through and which don't. You can see *just how* outdated the site is from lag. And let me guess - they'll now make absolutely NO effort to post stories in a timely fashion, in an effort to drum up more "subscriptions." Sounds like a mob protection racket.

I'd even go so far as to maybe allow a subscriber another +1 bonus to karma, or maybe allow a subscriber a higher karma cap, or even let a subscribers post get modded to +6

Yep. Just in case the moderation system didn't quite suck enough already with people modding by opinion. Send Taco $10, get a permanant +2 - now *that* is the ultimate in karmawhoring! Yay!

All in all, I would have had more respect for a plea of, "I have no bandwidth, this site is about to /. ITSELF." That would have gotten me to cough up some ca$h. But don't give me this "pay money to get avoid having the version of the site that goes to shit" stuff. And how long until "subscriber-only" stories Taco?

Re:well golly

[dr_eaerth]

Maybe make the Slashdot mirror only for subscribers?

That would miss the point. The point of Slashdot mirroring content is not a service to the Slashdot readers, but to the poor sites that get linked. Limiting the Slashdot mirror to a small number of people wouldn't help at all.

Re:well golly

[jtheory]

Well, if you allow subscribers to post against the story while it's still "plastic", you're going to get a lot of silly comments about errors in the story that are fixed by the time is hits the "present" and everyone else sees it.

But if you do let them post, at least make sure they can't post anonymously, please! That will at least keep the quality up (and punish the silly comment generators described above...).

paying for what ???

[mirko]

1. So subscribers will pay to let you batch your weekly job ?
   
2. they will only be able to warn you about dupes before the slashdot crowd

ergo: they pay you to help you doing your job ?

(just a question : not a flamebait)

But...

[fuchsiawonder]

I already see all of Slashdots news in the future!

...Wait...never mind. My system clock is running slow.

So compelling!!!

[ThinWhiteDuke]

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!

Comments on Subscriptions

[malachid69]

After reading the article, I was prepared to just close the link since I have no interest in paying to visit ANY site. Hell, at least I registered with /., I still won't do that for the NYTimes articles that keep getting posted -- I just ignore every single one.

And pay to PARTIALLY disable banners? Very lame. I never see them anyways, since I have gotten so accustomed to ignoring them... It's amazing at how trained you can get at ignoring pretty much all graphics on all sites.

But, to top it off, I read ALL of the comments to this article so far. Not a single good one -- doesn't that hint at something?

Malachi

Re:Hah! First!

[idiotnot]

Actually, it would be, and AC's (unless they're logged in, posting anonymously) would be 30 minutes and 100 comments behind.....

I could start reading at zero again.

FWIW, I did subscribe. It wasn't much. I just wanted to get the ads out of the story pages. Banner ads don't bother me. I went back and checked before I posted, and I've still got like 400 out of the 1000 pages left. It's been worth it, I think, and this will just convince me to renew when the time comes.

Maybe allow subscribers to moderate stories?

[hackstraw]

I've noticed that the shere volume of stories in the past few months has increased, yet the quality of them is kinda variable. ask slashdot hovers around unbearable, but is sometimes good.

Why can't subscribers get a chance to mod stories during this "preview" time, and possibly even keep silly stories and dups from getting posted to the "real" slashdot.

Allowing posting would be bad!

[DavidpFitz]

Another possible feature addition that we're discussing is to allow subscribers to post during this window.

But this would mean 2 things:

(1) If a story gets pulled, lots of comments could already be posted. This would be pretty annoying if you had spent some time posting.
(2) Moderation is biased torwards early posters, and as such it would provide a disincentive for non-subscribers to post, thereby reducing the amount of discussion. This could be a good thing, since subscribers (hopefully!) provide more worthwhile reading.

Re:Allowing posting would be bad!

[CmdrTaco]

(1) This is a big issue and one that we would need to consider. I guess what it would probably mean is that you post to future-dated stories at your own risk. You're seeing Slashdot behind the scenes, you should expect some dust.

(2)Moderation is already based towards early posters. But since subscribers will likely only represent a small percentage of all posting, I can't imagine more than a few dozen comments making it inside this window. And right now, the first couple dozen posts are almost always disposable anyway.

We already know pretty reliable that subscribers are statistically better moderators. (we've done a bunch of internal reports, and basically according to M2 results, they are several percent more "Fair" then the population as a whole. I don't think we've ever done any reporting to see if subscribers are better posters. I'm guessing they would be less likely to crapflood, but beyond that, I really would only be speculating.

Re:Allowing posting would be bad!

[GigsVT]

For these statistics, are you including people who once paid and have run out of pages, or only people with actual pages in the pagebank?

Re:Allowing posting would be bad!

[CmdrTaco]

I don't honestly remember. I believe what we did was graphed the number of dollars a person had paid us, against their M2 fairness score. The end result was a quite linear chart- the more you paid, the more "Fair" you were. Not totally surprising I guess.

It clearly is not a coincidence, but doing anything with that information would have to be thought through very carefully- just because a user is statistically more likely to moderate fair, that doesn't mean that they aren't going to. Every now and then you see someone who uses all 5 mod points to mod up 1st posts. They get killed in M2, but it does happen. We have to keep that sort of thing in mind when we make any changes in moderation.

Re:Allowing posting would be bad!

[CmdrTaco]

We've considered such a ranking system, but we're scared that we'd create another video game out of Slashdot. We learned a lot from Karma. Users started abusing it. It's purpose was misunderstood and turned into a game. It was never really intended to be that- it was intended to be a useful indicator for moderation eligibility and a few extra features on the site.

So any ranking system we designed would have to be very carefully thought through. Frankly I don't really care to see "The top 100 Slashdot Users" on a web page... but I would like to see "The Top 100 Recent Good Journals" or something. Personally I'm not interested in "Is Joe Good or Bad" I'm interested in "Is this journal a good journal and worth my time to read". Hence the threshold based moderation system. Someday perhaps we'll apply that to journals somehow.

Re:Allowing posting would be bad!

[CmdrTaco]

Very likely. And also there is probably a pretty clear relationship between karma and subscribing. Thats why we've never really pushed forward on doing something substantial with this information. It's currently in the "That sure is Interesting" bin, and maybe someday we'll do something with it.

Re:Allowing posting would be bad!

[CmdrTaco]

1. Yes
2. 10 is the default value for the setting
3. Ads Disabled on Index is also the default setting. Index==Homepage.

Your second 3 points are exactly correct.

As for a form to alert admins, it'd be better if you just emailed the story poster. Thats true of dupes, typos, broken URLs, or flat out mistakes. Maybe someday we'll do a form or something, but we don't wanna make it TOO easy ;)

Re:Allowing posting would be bad!

[CmdrTaco]

We definitely would not allow AC during that window.

Re:Allowing posting would be bad!

[CmdrTaco]

1. All of that is possible. Seems a little confusing to me tho. if a story was rejected, I'd be more likely to just throw the baby out with the bathwater tho. Screw it. Thats the risk of posting to early stories. Besides, the number of stories deleted during that window would number very few. Probably just a few a week at most
2. Not a bad idea for the comments stuff. I worry a bit about scrapers tho. Also its worth noting that the users.pl page does list mod type on each comment. A user with 5 comments listed at Score:-1, Troll is a good tipoff).

Re:Allowing posting would be bad!

[CmdrTaco]

I guess what it comes down to is that of course moderation isn't going to be infallible. But what you're describing is beyond the scope of what I intend moderation to be. I want moderation to allow users to make a decision about how many comments they read, and have a reasonable shot at reading the N best comments in a story. I think moderation accomplishes that pretty well. Certainly not 100% of the time. But I think most of the comments moderated to 3-5 are better then the comments moderated down once or twice. Which is all I ever wanted the system to do.

Re:Allowing posting would be bad!

[CmdrTaco]

Right. I think that this is the biggest argument for allowing posts during TMF. But posts during that window will need disclaimers during posting telling posters that the story could be rejected at any time... and users will be able to assign scoring bonus/penalties to early comments.

Re:Allowing posting would be bad!

[CmdrTaco]

I only mind when the gaming aspect overrides the posting of quality insightful interesting informative content. Unfortunately a large part of trolling comes from the days of karma whoring. So the "Game" actually causes poor content to be intentionally posted to lure moderation away from "Real" content.

That is the problem that I avoid like the plague.

Re:Allowing posting would be bad!

[CmdrTaco]

I just don't think your fears would actually play out as you do. Maybe I'm just more trusting. Maybe I just understand the moderation system better and the limits imposed on people.

If someone posts early, they will be seen by more people. So if they troll, they will be moderated down. Repeated down mods lowers your starting score, and your chance to mod.

Certainly it could be done. But its a lot harder then you're making it seem. Sure, the $5 for a Slashdot subscription is negligible, but crafting a troll that would escape moderation, especially when placed under increased visibility that posting during this window would cause, well lets just say its not going to work any better than it already does.

I guess my point is that if this could happen, it is already. Changing post times won't really matter much. In fact, I think it could seriously improve posting.

Doubt it

[Salden]

There's only like 10 subscribers abd they are all CmdrTaco's family.

Wait a second!

[Demon-Xanth]

You have to PAY to get "First Post" now?! What is this place coming to? SELLOUT!

(as promised)

Re:unfair

[adamruck]

well.. 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.

Also what are the implications for karma whoring... how long before we have subscribers getting all of the karma(mirroring and other methods), and the non-subscribers all being modded redundant.

Ummm...

[Tal Cohen]

Isn't red/green the most common form of color blindness?

Re:Ummm...

[Xaoswolf]

Tell me about it.

My only tech problem used to be trying to crimp patch cables, now I have to worry about reading slashdot right.

Re:Ummm...

[Whatsthiswhatsthis]

I am red/green colorblind. This doesn't mean that I cannot distinguish red from green. I can tell that everything on Slashdot's main page is in a green motif. It's harder to distinguish when the colors are close together or very light/dark.

This colorblindness test illustrates the problems I have recognizing the difference between these colors. In plate 2 I read the number "3" and in plate 3 I see "70." Try it for yourself.

If people who are red/green colorblind could really not distinguish any difference between the two, traffic lights at night would be really confusing.

No Anonymous early posts

[binaryDigit]

I'm a bit ambivilent about the early posting idea, since having an early post is directly related to the number of people likely to see your post, that "privilege" suddenly becomes a paid one. So people who might actually have something worthwhile to contribute suddenly have to become paying members.

But anyway, that is not the point of this post. I just wanted to say that if they do allow early posters, that they should NOT allow these early posts to be anonymous. This should help keep the quality of the early posts up. Maybe even have another modifier that increases any negative moderation by 1, again to try make the privilage of early posting a true privilage and keep abuse down.

Re:No Anonymous early posts

[binaryDigit]

How lame is that. If you had something interesting to say, it would be modded up no matter when you posted.

Not true. If you're post is the 748th on an article, the odds of any appreciable number of moderators seeing it are very slim. Esp. since by then, you'd be buried in amongst a lot of other non-moderated posts. You can see this effect all the time. This is esp. true for things like redundancy.

One problem I see with this...

[Champaign]

Is the fact that if subscribers post first, their postings will always be read first. If their postings are read first (or potentially the only comments read as I often get bored when reading tons of comments and stop half-way through), they will be moderated first. Assuming positive moderation, they will get the mod points and higher karma.

In a round-about way this is a bit like selling karma (something I think you've avoided).

Good show! Could I purchase 1.25 kg of enlightment please?

Re:Hah! First!

[staplin]

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...

Beating the slashdot effect?

[FearUncertaintyDoubt]

Gee, I'm sure all the web sites that are suddenly and violently knocked off the web will be happy to know that slashdot is doing this for their subscribers. This seems a little like saying, well, my movie theater is quite flammable, so if you pay me $5 more, I'll make sure to seat you by an exit so you can get out before everyone else dies. It doesn't change the core problem, i.e., that slashdot is posting stories where they know from the outset that the effect is going to be a massive web server smackdown, and providing neither a mirror or a warning to anyone that this is about to happen.

Perhaps now there will be a little bit of warning. When you start seeing the first referrals from slashdot on your web server, those are the subscribers -- the advance guard before the real assault.

Rich people can afford things shocker!

[PhilHibbs]

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!

Re:Rich people can afford things shocker!

[vrai]

Hey, I resemble that comment!

Don't be so hard on yourself, I'm sure you look nothing like a line of text.

Beta version

[carlos_benj]

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....

One more benefit.

[gokulpod]

...could be to let suscribers vote on stories, suggest spelling mistakes, notice dupes etc. Not only will it attract more suscribers, it will also help raise the quality of slashdot postings.

(yes, i do read k5)

Slashdot Liability Prevoked

[Anonymous Coward]

Congratulations Slashdot. You have just become financially liable for the Slashdot Effect.

By having a system with a financial incentive with a major goal being the avoidance of the Slashdot Effect you have now acknowledged it; and are financially reaping rewards for it.

Congrats.

a microcosm lesson for everyone

[circletimessquare]

if you pay more, you get more

unfortunate, but true

for healthcare, for the legal system, for media/ information

equality is an illusion

true in life, true in not-real-life internet communities

sad but true

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:/. effect? (Market opportunity)

[kriegsman]

Here's a great marketing opportunity for someone entrepeneurially-minded:

1. Subscribe to the Mysterious Future via ./
2. Contact Web site owners and warn them politely of impending future slashdotting
3. Offer to sell them (short-term?) service on a Content Delivery Network
4. ... Profit!

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.

-Mark, founder of Clearway Technologies (now owned by Mirror-Image Internet)

A sneak preview at Denial Of Service attacks.

[fmaxwell]

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!

Re:Bad

[leviramsey]

Try Kuro5hin. Reader supported (even the bulk of the ads are by readers).

Why the griping?

[Quill_28]

I don't understand why folks are saying that SlashDot is selling out.

While you may not like the editors, they have t o be paid somwhow. Banner ads aren't what they used to be.

And how much does the computer equipment cost? The bandwidth?

And you gripe about those who pay get benefits and gripe about banner ads. I don't understand.

It costs a good bit of money to run a site like slashdot why should it be completely free?

Sweet Idea, Ugly Fallout

[limekiller4]

I have to think that this will lead to an ironic situation where someone has an account, writes a script that updates some blog, somewhere, and Slash (well, their parent co) goes after them with lawyers. How Microsoftian.

That aside, I think this is a pretty cool incentive to subscribe. I'm not against subscription models or for paying for things I use, so long as they're not absurdly priced. And yes, my attitude is that if I wasn't going to buy it anyway, nobody lost anything. No blood no foul.

Are subscriptions helping the bottom line?

[bear_phillips]

How well are subscriptions doing for slashdot? Does anyone know if this feature was added because subscriptions are doing well or because subscriptions are doing bad and they need more incentives to subscribe?

At $5, slashdot is getting $0.005 per ad-free page view. What does slashdot get paid per page view with an ad?

Pre-posting is a bad idea

[techmuse]

"Another possible feature addition that we're discussing is to allow subscribers to post during this window."

This is a bad idea, because earlier posts tend to be moderated higher than later posts, simply because more people see earlier posts. This will give subscribers a much louder voice in the forums, while potentially degrading the quality of the discussion.

Reasons for not subscribing.

[thatguywhoiam]

I like Slashdot a lot. I come here every day. Despite the common flames (and downright freaky displays of human frailty around -1), I think the group consensus here is fantastic. It's often very funny, and I like knowing what all the really smart mf'ers think about certain issues and topics. I feel smarter for reading Slashdot.

Having said that, my lack of subscription is for a very simple reason: it's not professional.

I won't subscribe until I never see a dupe or typo. Really, for all of our vaunted technology, if Slashdot cannot surmount these two very simple obstacles, it doesn't deserve any real monetary support. It just doesn't. And again, I say this as a real fan.

Fix that, Taco, and you've got my money. And maybe even a little more credibility.

Re:Reasons for not subscribing.

[CmdrTaco]

If you want "Professional", read CNN. Slashdot is the trenches. Its down and dirty. It has typos and dupe stories and flamewars. We do our best to avoid mistakes, but we're mistake prone humans, trying to get news out in real time. So, sometimes things will go wrong.

Personally, I think that this is half the fun ;)

Re:Reasons for not subscribing.

[EllF]

Taco, man, you're confused. Rusty handles news from the trenches -- you're supposed to be giving us stuff that matters! ;)

Re:Reasons for not subscribing.

[CmdrTaco]

My point is that some people take Slashdot far to seriously. We're not CNN. We're just some guys trying to post a fun mix of the serious, the important, and the entertaining. Lighten up!

Re:Reasons for not subscribing.

[dasmegabyte]

Allow me to rebutt this.

I don't care about dupes and I don't care about typos. I've seen much worse than this on so-called professional news sites...in fact, I'd have to say that when compared to our local fox affilitate, Slashdot looks like the goddamn BBC.

I don't visit slashdot for the regurgitated, puree'd content. I visit slashdot for the clout. I visit for the semi-high profile interviews and the "insider" info.

And most importantly, I visit for the posts. If slashdot were just Drudge for technolosers, I wouldn't come back. But we have millions of intelligent people with degrees and experience chomping at the bit to respond to everything that gets posted. At the same time, we have a bunch of assholes waiting to post the funniest eye-opening responses they can. And we've trolls willing to play devil's advocate and to hell with karma, they're going to counterargue just to get us talking.

Slashdot is like a giant block party for subversive loner technology geniuses. It's hip, it's grooving, and if they want $15, they'll get it from me.

This BS about dupe checking, typos? Come on. It's not that important, and it adds to the "news of the second" quality that makes /. so appealing.

Re:Reasons for not subscribing.

[dze]

Its down and dirty. It has typos...

Never a truer word was written...

Re:Reasons for not subscribing.

[RobotRunAmok]

My point is that some people take Slashdot far to seriously. We're not CNN. We're just some guys trying to post a fun mix of the serious, the important, and the entertaining. Lighten up!

(pssssst! Taco! You're asking people to pony up more money! Ixnay on the efensivenessday!)

Re:Reasons for not subscribing.

[CmdrTaco]

Fortunately, I can disagree with you about the definition of "Professional". Do you believe South Park should have higher animation quality? Slashdot was designed to be an informal place. Should I change that just because there is a subscription system? I think not. Slashdot is what it is, and I think that the informal tone is part of its appeal. Part of that means you actively see mistakes happen. You may not like it, but I think that its just part of Slashdot. I work very hard to keep Slashdot consistent with my original purpose for the site.

As for a magazien or DVD, I'd love to see it happen. I just don't have the time and expertise and budget for it. If everyone clicks on banners and subscribes, then I bet such a thing would be quite possible.

Re:Reasons for not subscribing.

[Anonymous Coward]

If it's not serious, how can you charge money for it? Anyone could do the "editors" job at slashdot in about 5 minutes from home. No need to bother reading old stories, just look at what ends up in your email box and post 3-4 random items. Your charging for this??? Right.

Re:Reasons for not subscribing.

[CmdrTaco]

Am I being defensive? Heh. Maybe. It's just that I've been running Slashdot for five and a half years now, and trying to keep it as an Informal news source. It was built on that very premise, and I think that this is core to its appeal. But there's always a group of people who think that this is a flaw. I just don't get it! I'm not trying to be defensive, I just feel like people who make these arguments want to fundamentally change the very nature of what Slashdot is!

Re:Reasons for not subscribing.

[CmdrTaco]

We have exactly this in the code, and I assure you that much more than 20 minutes went into it. You're welcome to improve the code and submit patches... perhaps then you will understand exactly how complex of a problem you are truly describing ;)

Re:Reasons for not subscribing.

[CmdrTaco]

I guess we're just going to have to disagree ;)

Re:Reasons for not subscribing.

[pjrc]

Informal news source ... is core to its appeal.

Yes, that's a big part of the appeal. But, spell_check != formal_news. You need to do so much more to be a formal news site. You're so far away from being a formal news site that the tiny incremenatal change of spell checking really is a tiny drop in the ocean of change needed to become "formal". But it would make reading slashdot less irritating (and there's spell checking software that make this easy, unlike avoiding dups...)

I just feel like people who make these arguments want to fundamentally change the very nature of what Slashdot is!

You're saying that integrating a spell checking into the story posting process would fundamentally change the very nature of slashdot.

Now if you were to investigate all stories, use a formal writing style, write your own copy instead of primarily using the submission text, and dozens of other things... then you'd be talking about changing the nature of slashdot. Integrating a spell checking into the story posting, and even into comment posting and posting to the story submission just isn't going to change the fundamental nature of slashdot.

Good Idea!

[jconley]

I think this is a good idea- At least it is a unique approach to funding an on-line news source. I would much rather have the choice to subscribe and get this than have even more ads...

J

Corrupting the time line

[dfn5]

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.

BSD section?

[leviramsey]

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!"

Re:Hah! First!

[JPriest]

Now all we need is some photoshop contests and Slashdot could be fark for techies or Linux advocates.

Re:Disable ads on the Index?

[CmdrTaco]

Well frankly "OSDN" doesn't really have much to do with this thought process. It's pretty much Me and the rest of the Slashdot folk making decisions.

YES we want you to use up your pages. However we set it up so that you need Max Pages of 10... which means that you will still have 100 days of subscription for $5. I always targetted our subscriptions to be comparable to the cost of a magazine subscription... $20 a year. This is still true. The ads were just an obvious counter.

As for liking the ads, well I guess we'll address that in the future- its not a bad idea. ALthough, depending on your reading habits, you could enable ads on the Homepage, but see them on articles & comments, which would probably allow you to still see a few ads every day. Course if you don't read comments, then that doesn't help. And most of our users don't read comments.

slashdot subscription system is too complicated

[truffle]

I just read over the subscription FAQ. I know we're geeks, but does slashdot need such a complicated subscription system?

The system seems to revolve around you buying add-free pages, and then spending a certain number of pages a day.

Get a grip Taco! Just make it ten bucks for a year's subscription with no ads and unlimited usage! Simple simple simple.

And if you think $10 isn't enough, think again!

suggestion

[sigxcpu]

Maybe Slashdot will locally cache the sites they are about to slashdot.
I think people would be willing to subscribe to such a service.

Pretty Shrewd, If You Ask Me

[istartedi]

Slashdot has figured out what it's two most valuable commodities are, and found a way to sell them: "First Post!" and a way around the "Slashdot effect".

Of course I don't care much about First Post, and if something really interests me I either grep for a mirror or wait a few days, but if this brings in some dough to keep /. running, I say more power to 'em.

Re:/. effect? (Market opportunity)

[vano2001]

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

sounds like the coke machine fiasco

[cheesyfru]

Good marketing, Slashdot! It reminds me of the Coke machine fiasco a few years ago. They tested machines that had temperature controls -- when the temperature got hot, it would automatically raise the price of the bottles. The media caught wind of this and had a field day. If Coca Cola had only beaten them to the punch and billed it as a "machine that discounts soda in cold weather", they'd have been heros.

"Slashdot subscribers - you get news quicker!" Sounds a lot better than "Cheapskates: you get delayed news!", doesn't it?

Re:But I don't see any ads now ...

[CmdrTaco]

Suppressing ads from servers is a fairly common practice. Probably 2-3% of our users do it. And that number will likely grow as browsers make it very easy to do so. Thats why we're adding plums unrelated to advertising on Slashdot. We knew that the Ad Suppression filter was really more of an Honor System kind of thing since using Junkbuster or even Mozilla's built in blocking is trivial for even the most competant of users.

However we hope that enough of our users will think beyond that and try to support us. Programmers, Editors, OC3s and Racks of web servers cost money.

Re:Hah! First!

[JPriest]

ISP's figured out a long time ago that people would rather pay for one month of unlimited access than a bucket load of hours that would probably take them over a month to use. People, like information want to be (feel) free.

idea for subscription in general

[ChristTrekker]

I'd like a cookie that would allow me to use my "ad-free" views in one location (home on my slow dialup) but not in another (work on the fat pipe). I don't mind seeing \. ads, and have actually found a couple interesting things I never would have discovered otherwise. But skipping those bandwidth-hogging ads at home would be useful, and might prompt me to subscribe.

As far as early posting for subscribers, I'd vote against it. The cardinal rule on \. is "post early" or you get drowned out, regardless of how insightful|informative|interesting|funny you are. Non-subscribers logging into a discussion with 100 posts and a couple dozen 4's and 5's already will likely not contribute as much. That would be a shame, and would reduce the quality of the forum for everyone, IMHO.

Re:idea for subscription in general

[CmdrTaco]

Thats an interesting idea. Not sure exactly how to implement it tho. Submit a feature request or patch to our SourceForge project page. All this is open source after all. (What, the Curtains?)

Re:idea for subscription in general

[CmdrTaco]

Currently we have no plans to give subscribers more mod points. All we've noted is that there is a corrolation between moderation fairness and subscriptions. What we do with that information is totally up in the air. Frankly I don't see us doing much of anything with it any time soon.

Re:idea for subscription in general

[CmdrTaco]

No way, we're money grubbing whores. Karma for Kash! I can see the bumper stickers already.... I'd totally do it if we had the time. If only to prove to people that karma is not important! Next time I guess I'll have to remember to amplify the sarcasm too.

Re:idea for subscription in general

[CmdrTaco]

There are technical issues with changing the range from -1..10. The biggest problem I see is that creates a confusing divide between "New" and "Old" stories. A user sets his threshold to 7, suddenly sees 0 comments on old stories!

No, I think the real solution is to change the meaning of scores from -1..5. I've written a few journal entries on the subject, and don't really feel like repeating myself now tho. Lets save that for another day.

no kidding

[Pave Low]

My take on these new "plums": big whoop. These things do not really change the way I feel about slashdot, that it's an amateurishly written site, and run by a group of dictatorial editors. I like to come and see what other people write, but it's almost never because of the "news" content, or the uninsightful commentary from the editors.

Here's some easier ways of actually getting more subscribers without writing a single line of code.
Spell check.
Correct grammar.
News that is actually timely and relevant.
Lose the inane commentary from paranoid jerks like michael, who add nothing new to the discussion and only serve to trollbait the users.
Listen to the readers, instead of waiving all the criticisms as trolls.
Lose the moderation system. It doesn't work, and never has.

That's a good start to people paying. Run it professionally.

Re:no kidding

[rela]

Lose the moderation system. It doesn't work, and never has.

And obfuscating it doesn't make it work.
A post is not "50%" funny or "10%" off-topic.
Nor is Karma "Positive" or "Excellent".

Re:no kidding

[Wraithlyn]

I agree with most of what you said, except this:

"Lose the moderation system. It doesn't work, and never has."

If you don't like it, ignore the mod scores. You can just read at -1 unsorted if you want.

And IMHO, if you think reading at -1 unsorted is the same as reading at +2, highest first (which is exactly what you're saying by stating "It doesn't work"), you're on glue.

Allow Early Posting!

[strook]

If you don't let people post in the first 20-minute window, then the subscribers who see the post in that window probably aren't going to come back later to post. But these people are probably more likely to make quality posts overall. We wouldn't want the quality of posting to go down even further... And I'm not a subscriber so don't go thinking I'm personally biased here.

Re:Mozilla block ads

[CmdrTaco]

I doubt we'll ever offer direct DB access. Besides security issues, the potential for huge queries makes it a messy proposition at best. We have a nice stats system in place that we could potentially make more public. Maybe someday we'll have the time to do so.

As for better ways to rate comments and friends, I'm always open to suggestions and/or patches. The code is all available from the SourceForge project page. Unfortunately, writing code to work on 2.2 million pages a day, a third of a million users, and our hugely limited hardware resources is a lot harder than it sounds ;)

Re:unfair

[RobotRunAmok]

Reality Check: /. is NOT a news oganization. I do not mean any disrespect by that (although I *will* admit to doing a spit-take with my coffee when I read it). /. serves as a community site where topics culled from different news sources are discussed. If you're looking for the latest news, presented in an objective manner, you should not be looking to /., and the editors here will be the first to tell you that.

Open Source code is, by definition, free. But Information is not, nor need it be, nor should it. Whatever made you think that?!

As for karma-whoring, etc., sure, the subscribers have a leg up. They'll be the first to post the mirrors, spew the obvious (but funny) jokes, and generally have an advantage in racking up k-points over the non-subscriber. What's the problem? Taco and posse *invented* k-points, and are responsible for their continued and prevalent (albeit bizarre) value in the "Geek Community." I'm glad to see somebody finally figuring out a way to make an extra buck from that (eerie) invention.

If /. Karma is (strangely) important to you, than you owe it the inventors to kick some dough their way. But nothing stops you from enjoying the site without contributing.

Personally, I'd pay quadruple the subscription rate for a site without AC's which also allowed me to filter by a subscriber's age. It's all just a little "too free" for my tastes. Here's hoping that, after I subscribe today, the pre-general release climate is a little less noisey.

I'll let you know!

Re:/. effect? (Market opportunity)

[silvaran]

Wouldn't that be blackmail?

"Hey, I'm calling about your impending doom... I have a way out. Deny my offer, and suffer..."

Re:Good and Bad vs. Positive and Negative

[CmdrTaco]

Pesky grammar. I probably should have just asked that people are polite. Thats really all I care about ;)

Re:Hah! First! [privoxy, transproxy, and regex]

[mrhuman]

Why pay to block ads? They are dead on the web! Simply run Privoxy. Combine it with Transproxy and you'll be able to block all ads on the web. Especially combined with the regex know how of Regular Expressions Tutorial.

New DDoS Alert Service Unveiled Today

[NFW]

FREMONT, CA - March 6 2003 - Slashdot, the world's largest nerd news network, announced a new distributed denial of service attack warning service for web site operators around the world. "For years now we've noticed that web sites tend to go down in flames after we direct our hordes or readers to them," said founder CmdrTaco. "And since we're having a difficult time pulling in revenue, it only seemed natural to charge for advance notice of our DDoS attacks."

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.

Re:Unfair practices for monetary gain.

[CmdrTaco]

As I explained in the story, we're not taking anything away. Stories will be posted exactly the same as they were before. Subscribers will just have a chance to see most of them a little early. I usually post my stories 20-30 minutes before they go live. Subscribers will get to see them then, everyone else will wait until the scheduled release day.

And we've owned the Slashdot.com domain name for years. We started being a commercial entity about 6 months after we started... when the bandwidth stopped being free!

Immediate "Contact the Author" form?

[dschuetz]

...to fix spelling, to check for dupes (HAH!) or even to reject the story outright!

How about putting a simple little form underneath the stories for these previews? Something like:

Story is:
[] dupe (enter orig. url: ______)
[] fake (rebuttal url: ______)
[] mis-filed (better section: {popup})
[] mirrored (enter mirror url: _____)
Misc. Comments: [__________________]
[submit comment to editor / author]

Something like this would make it trivial for people to immediately help with the editorial process -- as opposed to having to write up a full email, etc. Plus, by allowing previewers to voluntarily announce a mirror this way, a list of mirrors could be presented once the mirror goes live, right at the top of the article. (come to think of it, it might be good to keep a mirror link list / submission form for all users, even once it's posted...)

Re:Immediate "Contact the Author" form?

[zerocool^]

it might be good to keep a mirror link list / submission form for all users, even once it's posted

As slashdot has covered this NUMEROUS times (obviously, as it's in their FAQ).

They DON'T want to do mirrors - a couple of reasons.
Slashdot hosted mirrors: Bandwidth != free.
Slashdot supported user hosted mirrors: legal and/or statistical reasons (banner ad displays, click thru's, page views, etc.)

Mirrors probably aren't going to happen on an official level, folks. Just keep posting them in the stories, like ya do now.

You know what would make me subscribe?

[ChaoticCoyote]

I'll be more likely to subscribe when I see:

• Professional Journalism
• Proper use of English
• Less flippant editorializing by the staff
• More in-depth, investigative reporting

Being able to see articles "early" just doesn't motivate me to send money.

I just don't understand Slashdot ...

[pgrote]

I am a Total Fark susbcriber and the only reason I did it was to get access to EVERYTHING that was submitted.

The enjoyment in using Fark comes from the ability to see what other people think is unique and newsworthy.

Slashdot is a great clearinghouse not only for technical news, but of technical thought as well. How many times have articles been submitted that the editors don't think are relevent to their vision, but that I'll get value from?

Isn't that what Slashdot should be selling? Access to the stuff other people consider important?

When I read Taco's explanation about the early preview the only thing it does is:

1) Offer the community the ability to check dupes.
2) Offer a headstart on crushing a site.

If a site is going to get slashdotted what is the big deal if it's slashdotted by the first 100 or the last 100? It's still going to be slashdotted.

If anyone from the Slashdot editor team is listening ... why not open up the whole queue for people to read? No comments, but at least let us check out what other people think is important and relevent.

Right now your model is focused on avoiding ads. Why? Focus on the CONTENT and you'll do much much better.

Re:/. effect? (Market opportunity)

[Rick the Red]

if slashdot themselves offered this service, wouldn't it be coercion?

Yes, but the Supreme Court just ruled that coercion is legal.

Subscription glitch?

[nuwayser]

I was happy to subscribe the first time this idea came around. Got my 1000 page views no sweat and enjoyed it.

Then, after the initial 1000 ran out, I looked at ads again for a while. About three months ago I got sick of it and tried subscribing again. No soap.

Paypal showed my payment as unclaimed for days, and I was still looking at ads. No replies received from the relevant OSDN address after sending two emails... not even a vacation message. I eventually cancelled the payment and am back to looking at ads.

Attn: Taco and team: I want to support you, I really do. But blowing off paying subscribers is BAD. How do you expect to retain your paying customers when someone is asleep at the switch? Why should I subscribe now?

netsaint plugin

[farnsworth]

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?

Re:Disable ads on the Index?

[bmetzler]

As for liking the ads, well I guess we'll address that in the future- its not a bad idea. ALthough, depending on your reading habits, you could enable ads on the Homepage, but see them on articles & comments, which would probably allow you to still see a few ads every day.

I'd rather see all the ads, and just pay $20 a year. Perhaps you could offer 2 subscription methods. I just feel that if I turn of ads, I'll miss something someone wants to sell me that I like.

-Brent

So does this mean...

[manduwok]

...that Slashdot subscribers will be able to see repeat posts from The Mysterious Future as well?

Re:/. effect? (Market opportunity)

[Archfeld]

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 :)

Re:Hah! First!

[MCZapf]

Nope. You can't post a comment until the story goes "live." I checked.

The circular file

[agrounds]

A 'plum' I would seriously like to see is giving us subscribers access to the rejected stories 'bin'. There are a goodly number of quality posts that get killed due to not fitting into the 'schema' of the moment or for any of another various and sundry reasons. Perhaps we just get a link on the sidebar somewhere between 'preferences' and 'submit story', or a new slashbox.. Either way, I think this would be something that would be very easy to implement and I think would bring some additional value to the subscription with no real effort. How about it Taco?

Isn't this self-defeating?

[selan]

Sounds like the benefits of viewing stories before the /. effect kicks in only apply if there is a small number of subscribers. The more subscribers, the more slashdotting a link takes even before the story goes live. If the goal is to have everyone subscribe, then you just wind up with a pre-/. effect. So the more subscribers, the less incentive to subscribe. Or something like that.

Wait wait wait!!

[OrbNobz]

....I'm getting a "future message"....
t-h-i-s.....w-i-l-l....n-e-v-e-r.... w-o-r-k....

- OrbNobz
Yours legs are stupid. - Zim

Re:Bad

[schnell]

Ideally, slashdot sort of things should be paid for by taxpayers, grants from the government. Turning this into a business model does not appeal to me.

NO, "Slashdot sort of things" SHOULD NOT BE PAID FOX BY TAXPAYERS OR THE GOVERNMENT. Good God, does anyone here understand a free market economy?

Is your argument that Linux-centric websites should be paid for by the taxpayers? Or is it websites you like that should be paid for by the taxpayers? Or just websites in general should all be paid for by taxpayers? (I'm also assuming here you aren't a taxpayer, or at least not one paying significant amounts of tax, or you wouldn't be suggesting that.) Or - and I'm going out on a limb here - maybe you just want everything for free like so many other Slashdotters who will pay $400 for a video card but warez all their commercial software or music.

Honestly, I find the sense of entitlement that so many Slashdot readers have to be unbelievable. Whaaah, whaaah. "But the readers really do all the work here by posting comments, we shouldn't have to pay for it!" Boo hoo hoo. Evidently, Slashdot brings something to the mix here, or you wouldn't be visiting. And if something provides a valuable service to you - whether that is collating information, providing a place for people to comment on things, or just bandwidth - then it is providing value to you. Slashdot has plenty of problems, but the fact that it has been free forever doesn't mean you should take it for granted or not be prepared to pay for it if you choose to.

Slashdot is a business, or at least is part of a business! If "Turning this into a business model does not appeal to [you]," then go start your own free Slashdot somewhere else! Let me know how it goes.

ads huh?

[sewagemaster]

as a subscriber, do i get to filter out slashdot ads.... like this entire story? ;)

Instant Business

[Greyfox]

Every site admin on the planet now has a legitimate (!) reason to subscribe to and read Slashdot on an hourly basis. Then they will know in advance if their server load is going to go up by an order of magnitude when someone posts a link to them in an article. THAT, my friends, is a good Internet business model.

Re:Disable ads on the Index?

[CmdrTaco]

I could definitely see that sort of an option. It didn't make sense when we originally designed the system, but we always considered it. So maybe yeah, someday. More likely if someone submitted a patch.

Re:/. effect? (Market opportunity)

[pediddle]

It's a pretty fine line, because according to that, the only thing distinguishing coercion from extorsion is whether the coercer or extorter gains any financial or material benefit as a result. One could argue that since Slashdot's subscribers would be getting better access to the articles, Slashdot would benefit. Slashdot makes money by selling subscriptions and banner ads, and better access would increase the popularity of both.

Re:/. effect? (Market opportunity)

[evilviper]

I don't think it would REALLY be coercion... After-all, the webmaster COULD just remove the page... I don't think anyone will be going over their bandwidth cap if they are just serving up a "Click HERE to help pay for my bandwidth" page.

Re:/. effect? (Market opportunity)

[kriegsman]

(Hi Matt!) In the Clearway days before Mirror-Image, we went as far as starting to register "slashdotted.com" for just such a service. Got lost in the CW/MII shuffle, I believe.

The difference here is that the customers can be identified a few hours or days before the deluge of traffic hits. And by the time ./ subscribers start clicking on the site, the Webmaster will already be seeing a good-sized surge of traffic; it's much easier to sell traffic surge protection when the customer sees a surge actually starting, and they know that they have only a few days or a few hours (or minutes!) to make a decision.

The two biggest problems in the CDN business are (1) finding high quality new customer leads, and (2) convincing people that they'll actually need the service and that they'll see real benefit. This scheme addresses both, head-on. And the cost of this marketing program? Just a basic ./ subscription, and having a specialized sales rep make a couple of phone calls a day.

Of course, if MII doesn't want this business, I'm sure there are others who do. And besides, they always say if you want something done right, you have to do it yourself... *gr{i|oa}n*

-Mark

Re:On the subject of banner ads...

[CmdrTaco]

This is a sort of advertising holy grail. I'd love to see it happen, but you're not talking about a trivial change. You're talking about a fundamental shift in how advertising works on the internet. I'm not saying "No", but I am saying its a little beyond the scope of this story, and it stretches far beyond just Slashdot ;)

Circumvention?

[cybermace5]

So, can subscribers grab the story URL, hop into the latest public thread, and anonymously post the URL for everyone's viewing?

Re:Circumvention?

[Khalidz0r]

This shouldn't be the case,

It only takes a single conditional statement checking if the user is a subscriber and let them in, or tell them that this page isn't allowed.

I don't think Slashdot coders would miss this.

Khalid

Re:Circumvention?

[peterpi]

I'm sure such a post would get modded fairly (i.e. -1 Offtopic). I guess most subscribers are keen posters too, so they care about their karma.

Perhaps it would be a good idea to disallow A/C posting during the subscriber-only period?

Re:Circumvention?

[CaptainAx]

You could but Slashdot might invoke the DMCA on you!

Future Crime Department

[Paranoid Cheese Sand]

If subscribers will be able to see articles before anyone else, they should be able to pre-emptively mod down habitual trolls and "First Post!!!!!111111one"ers.

Your Karma has gone down 2 level(s) for the future posting of goatse.cx links

If /. Really Wants More Paid Subs...

[Anonymous Coward]

...what you ought to do is bring back Jon Katz -- but only for non-paid subscribers. And anon lusers.

Re:Mozilla block ads

[t]

Your analysis of the moderation system is interesting, but I think the premise that there is full knowledge of the current score is flawed. I think for there to be any significance to the actual levels -1 to 5, the moderators would need to moderate based on those levels. For example, instead of adding a point, a moderator should have a sliding bar and say, I think this post is a 3. Then the resultant score of the post would be an average of all moderations. This way if 10 moderators mod a post simultaneously, it doesn't soar instantly to +5.

Come to think of it, this shoulds suspiciously like a judging event or a grading session with multiple judges. They all grade independently, then you average the scores.

Uh-Oh

[tunabomber]

"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)

Re:Uh-Oh

[allism]

Oh, c'mon, this isn't funny at all! This is exactly what MS is doing to my company and its DOS software! Where is the '+1, Tragic' modifier?

Moderators

[jbohumil]

It might be nice if moderators also got the advance reading. That might increase the chances that the moderators have had a chance to read the topic before they moderate. Plus, moderators would get a peek at what the advance viewing system would be like, and it might encourage them to subscribe.

Re:Comment Ranks

[CmdrTaco]

I think that the solution to this problem is more complex then just widening the scoring range. Read my journal for occasional thoughts on this issue.

Other more interesting ideas...

[StevenMaurer]

I doubt that as presently constituted, this is going to be counted a success. Certainly Slashdot will get some low percentage just from the good will they've built up, but this will likely wither over time as subscribers realize there isn't that much benefit.

Nearly every change made to Slashdot over the last several years has made it harder to offer any real diferentiation in a premium service. People buy totalfark subscriptions to get more time to "win photoshop contests" - while slashdot has hidden it's equivalent karma system (and most regulars have topped out anyway). The delay from story acceptance to publication isn't all that long - it can't be: Slashdot is primarily a news site. The sophisticated readership could avoid ads if they really wanted to (I suspect most don't because it's part of the social contract). Finally, there are too many people who have run afoul of Malda's notoriously thin skin to have built up a "save salon" type of outpouring. (Setting special flags on people's accounts just because they dared mod up a critique? How juvenile -- but I digress).

Still, there are a number of ideas that haven't been tried that might be of interest, if done right:

Have a special premium queue for stories, plus the promise that one story will be picked a day. Suitable markings to differentiate stories drawn
from "preferred" queues ala google.

Allow premium users additional access to html. IMG tags anyone? Maybe combine this with small level of image storage.

The ability to "challenge" a mod down. Automatic if the mod is "overrated" which doesn't get metamodded; better yet, get rid of "overrated" it's an invitation to abuse.

The option of mirroring any content mentioned in slashdot (except ads) for any site owner who is a premium member. Most site owners love the attention slashdot brings them, it's just the slashdot effect that's so hard to deal with.

The ability to be modded to a value of "6". (The post still has to earn that value from the mods on it's own merits though.)

The ability to read from low karma to high. For fans of "alternative humor".

The ability to start at a +1 karma level (editable, of course, for those so unamerican as to believe money != speech). This would be especially attractive to people with "high uid" accounts.

A higher bandwidth channel to premium customers.

A java plug-in that downloads slashdot incrementally in the background, making those annoying page-load/drill-down delays go away.

Allowing edits of your own posted comment, so long as it hasn't been modded or responded to. If it has, you can still edit it, but a link is added to the original version.

I think this is a good start on you offering enough differentiation to make a "premium" view worth money without cutting into your site's popularity.

The bill for my business advice will arrive in the morning.

Slashdot Subscribers Now See The Future

[DrewCapu]

Is this one of those things with a backwards business model?

1. Prophet
2. ???
3. Bankrupt

Error every time

[kvandivo]

So,

I just got sucked on and subscribed.

For the last two 'red' posts, (Austin and China's CPU) every time I click on 'Read More' I got a hung browser with a title of 'Error'. Is this supposed to be working?

What if (max # ads to block == 0)?

[wowbagger]

I have my max number of banner ads set to 0 (block all banner ads and damned be the cost!)

Is the code written as

if count >= 10 || count == 0

or just as

if count >= 10

Logically, it should be the first, but I'll bet it is the second.

Re:What if (max # ads to block == 0)?

[jamie]

It's the first. To be precise, the code in Subscribe.pm is:

if ($user->{hits_bought_today_max}
&& $user->{hits_bought_today_max} < $today_max_def) {
return 0;
}

So, you're cool if you set it to 0. And thanks! :)

Sounds like a scene from a Keannu Reaves movie...

[artemis67]

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]

New meme

[blair1q]

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.

Re:Hah! First! [privoxy, transproxy, and regex]

[Bill Privatus]

Look, it's the spirit of the thing, y'know?

Go ahead and block slashdot ads if you want. I'd like to think slashdot isn't evil, like x10.com.

If you don't want to subscribe, don't. But I don't think it's virtuous to not subscribe, to kill ads, *and* to post saying "I'm bright - and you can be, too!".

Do the first two, and you're fine. The last makes you an anti-slashdot fanatic and you'll no doubt be visited by the proper authorities any time now (knock, knock...).

Just my $0.02. Very much tongue-in-cheek. CmdrTaco will be sending me the usual check for $0.02 at the end of this month...

There's an easier way of avoiding ads ...

[snowtigger]

Get a host file that associates ad servers names to 127.0.0.1 to get a connection failure. Works with most websites.

Here is an example.

Doesn't cost you anything and works on most platforms (windows, Unix ...)

If you run a webserver that binds to 127.0.0.1, just choose another non-occupied IP number.

Pay Rob Malda or we'll ddos the site before you

[t0qer]

can read it is basically what this plum means. I think it sucks personally. Why didn't you implement a cache system?

Re:Pay Rob Malda or we'll ddos the site before you

[shyster]

Sure, it's a great idea, but it has a lot of implications.

As do most great ideas...so, what's your point?

But what happens if I cache the site, and they update themselves?

The cache could easily check for updated content...or just put the original link there for people to check themselves if they're all that interested. The story got posted on what WAS there, so isn't it a safe assumption that thta's what we want to see?

I could try asking permission, but do you want to wait 6 hours for a cool breaking story while we wait for permission to link someone?

Like Slashdot's stories are all that breaking in the first place! How about the submitter could ask the site, and they would have until the time the story was posted to opt-in (if you're all that worried about permission).

It would make things a lot easier when servers go down, but it's a complicated issue that would need to be thought through in great detail before being implemented.

And exactly how much time will it take to think through this idea in great detail? I've been reading Slashdot for about 3 years now, and I'd say that's plenty of time to think through just about any idea short of the meaning to life.

The FAQ is woefully inadequate in explaining the reasoning behind the no cache directive. It's time it was updated with new reasons (or excuses) or just admit that it's not something you want to do because (a) it's too hard, (b) there's too many legal issues, (c) you think the /. effect is funny and adds to /.'s prestige, or (d) all/none of the above.

Additional Subscriber feature....

[MBraynard]

How about an auto +2 moderation on all posts?

Re:But I don't see any ads now ...

[josh crawley]

---Sometimes I turn the images back on for slashdot.org. But there's never any actual information there, so I turn them back off.

That's what I've determined. I prefer to read slashdot in "advant/LYNX" style where everythiong is just plain text (with exception of ads and friendship meter). I'm also passively ignoring images due to disabling the showing them.

If I'm porn/schematics/image surfing, images go on with filters. If not, Poof! they're not displayed.

If you look at kuro5hin's model, they use text messgaes. They also allow you to post stuff in the "ad space posting". Very cool. You even end up with word-to-word advertising (Which CmdrTaco, you should already know that's the best advertising bar none...).

I can tell you, I'd abaondon my account by putting my login/passwd on a high ranking post I make if you disable the use of "plain text site". Altavista did that for a while and I just didnt use them. I ended up using Dogshit for full metasearching until Google came around. I heard of Google from my friends/usenet community.

Uh oh..

[BlackjackGuy]

Taco: We decided to implement this after tons of feedback from you, and we're really excited about it.

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? :)

Re:Hah! First!

[Daetrin]

That's what was said above, they're considering it, they haven't implemented it yet.

"Besides the ability to suppress banner ads"

[rudy_wayne]

Mozilla: right click; select "block all images from this server".

No more ads.

+5 Informative.

Wow, $15-20 / year...

[TheConfusedOne]

...to see duplicate articles before everyone else. :-D

I guess that's why the future is "mysterious".

Re:Hah! First!

[Paradise Pete]

Nope. You can't post a comment until the story goes "live." I checked.

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.

Re:/. effect? (Market opportunity)

[allism]

/. doesn't automatically send users to the /.ed webpages, /. just says 'you might want to go here'. Each individual user chooses whether they want to click the link, and the pages actually get viewed by an interested (?) reader. And who the hell is gonna sue over free publicity? If they didn't want anyone looking at their pages, they shouldn'ta posted 'em.

Suggestion to lower dups...

[LinuxParanoid]

If you don't allow people to comment before a story is posted (which I agree may be wise), it'd be nice to allow users to somehow signal to you via a checkbox or something that a story is a dup.

--LP

do -NOT- allow early "normal" posting

[Splork]

if you allow paid subscribers to post comments in stories early you are asking for trouble. your moderation system does not work. whoever posts first always has the best chance of getting rated up no matter how stupid they are.

don't allow people to pay to sway the masses.

take a hint from kuro5hin, early posts into stories should only be -editorial- comments meant to make suggestions to the editors. they should disappear when the story goes live.

Corollary

[cybermace5]

Also, could a paid subscriber get linked stories and post them to some other geek/nerd news site (not to mention free), thus getting the jump on Slashdot and causing more people to go there instead?

Preslash.com is available.

Re:But I don't see any ads now ...

[zerocool^]

Programmers, Editors, OC3s and Racks of web servers cost money.


Don't lie. You don't have racks of webservers!

As I'm referencing the FAQ, I see:
5 load balanced Web servers dedicated to pages
3 load balanced Web servers dedicated to images
1 SQL server
1 NFS Server

The 8 webservers are described as:
PIII/600 MHz 512K cache
1 GB RAM
9.1GB LVD SCSI with hot swap backplane
Intel EtherExpress Pro (built-in on moboard)
Intel EtherExpress 100 adapter

Now, I know all of those could be 1U very easily (only one hard drive and one PCI card), but let's say they're 2U's.

The NFS server is described as:
Dual PIII/600 MHz
2 GB RAM
(2) 9.1GB LVD SCSI with hot swap backplane
Intel EtherExpress Pro (built-in on motherboard)
Intel EtherExpress 100 adapter

Again, this could be a 1U, but let's say, since it's a Dual system, it's a 2U. I know for a fact, this could all fit with acres to spare in a 2U (we have 3 of them on our network with dual PIII-1.4's, 4GB ram, and 6x73GB SCSI drives).
In fact, just for the sake of arguement, let's call this a 4U.

Now, the SQL monster server:
Quad Xeon 550 MHz, 1MB cache
2 GB RAM
6 LVD disks, 10000 RPM (1 system disk, 5 disks for RAID5)
Mylex Extreme RAID controller 16 MB cache
Intel EtherExpress Pro (built-in on motherboard)
Intel EtherExpress 100 adapter

In this one, you've not only got Quad procs, but you have 2 full size PCI cards you have to deal with, as well as you have to find somewhere to put 6 hard drives. We'll call this one a huge, massive monster at 8U's.

After all that, we have to add the Cisco equipment:
[quote] All boxes are networked together through a Cisco 6509 with 2 MSFCs and a Cisco 3500 so we can rearrange our internal network topology just by reconfiguring the switch. Internet connectivity to/from the outside world all flows through an Arrowpoint CS-800 switch which acts as both a firewall load balancer for the front end Web servers. [/quote]
I don't know how big these cisco's are, but let's say these 2 cisco pieces and the arrowpoint are 10U's (say, mabey 4 for each cisco and 2 for the arrowpoint). I see this as very reasonable.

And now the tally!

16U for 8 webservers
04U for 1 NFS server
08U for 1 SQL server
10U for equipment
--------------
38U total.

Most racks are 42 U's. With this, you even have space for a 3U APC battery backup and a 1U power octopus. So, unless you're just keeping your single proc, single hard drive systems in 8U servers, and putting your leftover pizza in there to keep it warm for lunch, you're wasting space!

You slashdot editors: you're always braggin!

~Will

Re:Hah! First!

[SoftwareTechie]

Funniest comment for ages. Thanks :-)

Re:Mozilla block ads

[Chacham]

I doubt we'll ever offer direct DB access. Besides security issues, the potential for huge queries makes it a messy proposition at best.

True. But I wonder how many queries are actually different. I'd guess most queries would actually be in the DB cache, but it would be interesting. If anything, maybe we could submit queries to be run and maybe someone would get around to running them? A weekly or monthly run of a few queries with an associated JE/Story ought to be interesting. Hmm... I'll have to think more about this one.

We have a nice stats system in place that we could potentially make more public. Maybe someday we'll have the time to do so.

That would be cool.

As for better ways to rate comments and friends, I'm always open to suggestions and/or patches.

Well, basically, I don't like the current system. What are friend's and foes for? To moderate their comments and journal related items. But, the problem is, I can only rate people as a group, either all friends or all foes. I want to rate up some people's comments, even though I care little for their journals. And the opposite is very true as well.

Take for example, the case where I find someone's journals offensive, but not their comments. In that case I unfriend them. This way their journals don't show up, but their comments are not hit by my foe modifier. Well, the issue is that I don't remember that I unfriended them, and I sometimes end up re-friending them. I guess a history would answer that, but it just seems to point a flaw in the system itself.

Hmm.. a good question would be to find out how many people use the system, and what they use it for. Then maybe something that directly does that would be good.

The code is all available from the SourceForge project page.

Very true. You've got me on that one. :-)

Unfortunately, writing code to work on 2.2 million pages a day, a third of a million users, and our hugely limited hardware resources is a lot harder than it sounds ;)

Now, that could only come by working with it. How could I even know?

Re:Hah! First! [privoxy, transproxy, and regex]

[Anonymous Coward]

I user AdMuncher to block all ads *except* Slashdot. Many companies don't deserve my ad revenue, but /. does. So I support them. What's it cost me? very little. And sometimes I see links to cool stuff on ThinkGeek. So, yay.

Uh huh..

[Forkenhoppen]

No offence, but with this, I think slashdot's finally jumped the shark.

Plums??

[BollocksToThis]

From the 'plums' link:

• You get a "More Comments" link on your user page and on other users' pages. Going through comment history might be a bit DB-intensive but we trust subscribers not to abuse the privilege.
  
• You can add up to 400 friends and foes, instead of being limited to 200.

So, one plum is a next to useless feature, that will probably cripple slashdot if you use it, and the other is increasing a maximum on something that's a goddamn waste of time in the first place?

Although, I have to admit, in the face of non-subscriber features like "duplicate stories", "biased editor comments", "april-fool stories any time of the year", and "complete inability to learn fucking english", these plums come up a little sour.

Re:Hah! First!

[lateral]

For the others a lot of discussions will start half full just when the article is widely available.

...which is much the best place to join them anyway. It's enough time for the (frequently tangential) themes and discussions to emerge and for the moderation system to subdue some of the early noise.

L.

Re:Hah! First!

[Jucius Maximus]

A benefit of this SHOULD be that paid subscribers should be able to mark a story as a dupe before it goes live, giving the editors time to take it down.

New /. motto

[Compact Dick]

Slashdot: bringing you the news, before it happens.

Re:But I don't see any ads now ...

[CmdrTaco]

I don't think calling our advertisers "Morons" is really in our best interests... but our ad folks do try to keep alt tags right.

Re:AC posting should have it's own window

[CmdrTaco]

Forcing a delay for ACs is something we've considered in the past, but we've always rejected it. The logic is that ACs have a lower score *already*. How much more "Punishment" do they need? Set your threshold to 1, and they're gone.

I would like to tie scores into some sort of delta since posting to sort of normalize scores over time. 1 mod point used on a comment posted 12 hours after the story goes live probably means as much as 2 mod points used 1 hour after the story posted, simply because of the number of eyeballs involved.

As for more stories, we've definitely stepped up teh story posting in the last year, but I don't know how much more we really want to stretch it. When we have good stories we always post them... at some point tho, more stories means a quality hit.

Re:But I don't see any ads now ...

[CmdrTaco]

Well in all fairness, that FAQ is way out of date. We've got 3-4 databases now, and a dozen webheads, plus numerous machines relating to development not in there. If weeks were longer, the FAQ would be more up to date ;)

Re:Mozilla block ads

[CmdrTaco]

My point is that writing code for Slashdot is much harder then saying "I don't like zoo and I think it should do this and that".

We love patches. But especially for anything relating to the homepage display time generation, and moderation, we need to really be careful. Besides our hardware limitations, you have to think of security, and the potential for gaming of the system.

It's very tricky and we screw up a lot. But I gotta admit, I find it frusterating when people say they don't like something and propose something that clearly would be better... but there's no way we could computationally do it given our hardware limitations.

Fortunately hardware keeps getting cheaper. If Slashdot keeps surviving, we'll need to constatnly upgrade the databases... and that means more cycles for features!

Re:But I don't see any ads now ...

[CmdrTaco]

Ways you can help Slashdot:

1. Subscribe
2. Meta Moderate
3. Post Good Comments
4. Submit Good Stories
5. Moderate and use all 5 points up when you get 'em
6. Post intelligent journals

Re:Idea to make it better

[CmdrTaco]

Why not just email the author when there is a problem? Why does everything have to be a webform? Email is much faster for us.

I'm not opposed to a peer review of the homepage stories, but why add some clumsy oversimplified webform when its just better to send a message!

Re:Why no AC posting?

[CmdrTaco]

Because AC posting allows a user to circumvent moderation to a certain extent.

The Karma Bonus is a good example- using it increases the chance that you will be moderated down. This creates a balance: Use it properly, or you will get moderated down. If this happens enough, you loose the bonus.

If we force users to be logged in to post during the TMF Window, they are accountable for their words. They'll perhaps think twice. And the end result will hopefully be a better discussion.

Re:Another suggestion

[CmdrTaco]

We intentionally suppressed the time stamps to discourage trolling or crapflooding.

Re:But I don't see any ads now ...

[CmdrTaco]

We just disagree about what means "Quality" for Slashdot I guess ;)

Re:But I don't see any ads now ...

[CmdrTaco]

wrt to meta moderation, there is a link to see context. And yeah, you can M2 twice a day now. Or don't. But we really need people to M2 for moderation to work. We break even on M2 most of the time, but some days we run short... that means less accurate M2, which means bad moderation can be missed. On the whole, M2 works pretty well tho.

We plan to expand journals at some point, but its a lot of work to do a good job of it. This is definitely an area where a user could come in and design a system that we could consider: code to rate hot journals somehow in real time to make a journals.slashdot.org that was really useful.

Re:Mozilla block ads

[CmdrTaco]

It depends on the patch. If someone pulled an item out of the SourceForge TODO list and submitted a patch, and we really wanted the feature, we'd definitely work with them. However we're pretty hard about UI and Performance. We don't necessarily give paragraphs of feedback for a 12 line patch, but if someone went and implemented a feature we really wanted, we'd work with them. We don't get very many patches after all.

There's also a mailing list and a website to follow, although those tend to be more of tech support for people who can't figure something out for themselves and less of 'Heres a great new feature I coded'

Re:But I don't see any ads now ...

[CmdrTaco]

Context Yeah, its hard to miss that link that says 'See Context' immediately adjacent to the radio buttons for Fair & Unfair ;)

M2 Feedback Yeah I guess I hadn't really thought so much about that. Someone should submit a feature request asking for more M2 feedback. I bet we could provide some nice charts or something in response to M2 so users could see where we were at at some point in time. Those charts wouldn't be real time or anything, but it would at least let people know where we're at.

Journals Those are all reasonable suggestions but there's a lot of potential for problems. You hit on a few of the problems, for example a "Cool" journal gets promoted, so the posting restrictions would have to change. I wouldn't want that to happen to my nice private little journal, so that would have to be an option. Plus we'd have to make sure that users can moderate their own journal. We could use other factors as well (number of logged in users who visited the journal? number of posts? Number of up moderations?) but each of those can be gamed with a robot or something, so there's more to it then that.

As I said before, this is a complex problem that I would love to see solved, but don't really have the time to design the solution, and slahsteam doesn't have much time to code it...

Re:valuable rankings (was Re:Allowing posting...)

[CmdrTaco]

There is no way to see the Top N comments based on moderator points used on them currently.

In fact, I probably will eventually make such a stat totally worthless by capping moderation. I really think that the difference between a comment rated 4 and 5 is pretty much irrelevant. I'd prefer to "End" moderation after, say, 10 moderations. At some point, we're just nitpicking anyway... so lets force users to move on to more comments. The point of the mod system isn't to haggle over those last points... is a 5 overrated or a 4 underrated...

The 10 hot comments box is worthless. Its only here for legacy.

I think an indicator of an articles value would simply be the quantity of upmods given to it, and an indicator of a discussion quality would be some sort of ratio of up to down to total comments. I've never really thought through what exactly that would be. It certainly could be used to generate a Top Discussions list... or perhaps a top Journals list somehow. Certainly worth thinking about.

Re:valuable rankings (was Re:Allowing posting...)

[CmdrTaco]

I don't know offhand how many comments get more than 10 moderations, but thats not really my point. Even if we said the number was like 7, the point is that after a certain number of eyeballs, moderators should move on. We usually have 2x the comments as we do the moderations after all...

As for "Penalizing" users with the +1 Karma Bonus, I'm sure we could solve that somehow. Regardless, this is a hypothetical feature, and not one I see a huge need for by itself. I really think that this is a fundamental issue with our existing scoring system, and one that would be more easily solved by rewriting the scoring code. I have a plan for that (see my journal for various notes) where the +1 Karma Bonus wouldn't matter so much.

Yeah, there's no way to read -1's with upmods, but they also are a rarity. I'm hesitant to implement a feature like this simply because I don't really know how I could do it intelligently in the UI. One of the core design decisions of the moderation system is that moderation should happen as part of your normal reading... what you describe would perhaps be nice, but it would require a lot of extra effort on the moderators part. You might do it, but I really doubt very many people would bother.

Yes, we're concerned with the mod point inflation. We had a *huge* change in dynamic when we altered the index to include a note telling users when they had mod points. This caused hundreds (perhaps thousands) of additional moderation points to be used every day... hundreds of users didn't realize they had points (remember that 50% of our readers don't regularly read comments).

There are a few solutions to this problem. A simple one would be to make the leap from Score:4 to Score:5 to require 2 mod points. Essentially creating Score:4.5. Of course this gets messy really fast.

As for cutting the number of mod points in half, I simply disagree. If we had more meta moderation occuring, I'd rather *double* the mod points in the system, and rework the scoring system. I think we have enough data that we could rank every comment in a given story from best to worst, and then assign the score based on that. In that case, more mod points would mean (hopefully) a more accurate sort.

But that folks, is a lot of work, and is well beyond the scope of this discussion ;)

Re:But I don't see any ads now ...

[CmdrTaco]

M2 Feedback I just don't know what information would be helpful. Maybe some general stats.... like 14,000 comments pending M2? Thing is that M2 uses 5-7 'votes' on each M1, so "Done" takes awhile ;)

Journal Ratings the problem with "Higher Karma" voting higher is that Karma is highly gamable. The more you work with it, the more you learn to understand what it means. Bad karma means an untrustworthy user, but high karma doesn't necessarily mean that the user is good. Some of the most obnoxious trolls on Slashdot have good karma.

I'd rather make such an indicator more transparent. Perhaps a factor of reads, posts, moderation, and karma. We'd likely still have some thin level of editor approval for cool journals to be approved by authors, and also, accepted journals would also become uneditable by the author. We have to be careful to not allow someone to get their journal accepted, and then replace the text with COCK SHIT ASS FUCK BITCH ;)

As for what we're busy with, Krow is busy with slash functionality specific to other OSDN sites besides Slashdot. Pudge is working on anti robot measures, Cowboyneal has a few bugs to fix, Jamie is working on all sorts of subscriber related functions. You can usually get a good idea of what we're working on by checking out the SourceForge project page. Anything with a high priority assigned to someone is usually being worked on. We always have "Secret" stuff that you guys can't see (like stuff related to denial of service attacks, robots, trolling, security etc etc) but you can often see with a quick glance of the 'Bugs' page and the 'Features' page what stuff is on the TODO list.

Re:But I don't see any ads now ...

[CmdrTaco]

The problem with M2 feedback is that it would likely be depressing. I don't think users would necessarily be *encouraged* when they see that they just M2'd 10 times, and there are 10,000 remaining M2s in the system ;) And as for total M2s, we actually have that value internally, but I'm hesitant to post it because, like karma, it might be turned into a game.

I hadn't thought about 'Shadowing' a journal into a story for a journals section. Thats not a bad idea, except that I suspect that many journals will become "Good" only by reading the comments posted. So the shadow sorta penalizes the comment posters. Plus it means that a general user would essentially be seeing something different then the author who 'Approved' the story in the first place.

As for what I do, I delete submissions, read email, keep track of who's doing what, manage bugs in teh source forge project page, delete more submissions, read our anti robot reports, moderate, decide policy, and hopefully when all of that is done, try to design new functionality for the site, keep track of scheduling to make sure someone is always on the site. I'm a manager you see- a PHB. Truth be told there's very little time for that. I spent 2 full work days posting comments, and replying to email realted to the TMF plum. Thank god we don't do that every week.

Re:But I don't see any ads now ...

[CmdrTaco]

Geez man, you sure are chatty ;) I'm calling this good after this message.

The problem with M2 feedback is that there's really no way to get ahead. The system is designed to take as many M2s as we get, and use them. If M2 doubles, we'll get more accurate M2 because the numbers will slide up... 7 M2s per M1 or even 9. That just means more accurate and better M2... but the system will never be caught up. We're posting a thousand comments an hour during the posting peaks, so a user wanting feedback could come back and hour later, and see things *worse* then when they left it!

As for an M2 Game, I'm not sure. But I never really predicted karma whoring either. In hindsight is was obvious, but I didn't think about it before we made karma public. We probably could rank users or something based on the M2 that they do, but I'm still not sure if thats beneficial or not. Perhaps we could try it and see if it causes trouble. But that comes back to the time thing- its hard to justify time for experimental features.

I don't like the idea of simply forking an entire journal & discussion. It just gets messy. Plus users could get double benefits or punishments for their discussion. And I've seen many stupid journal entries that are actually useful because of a couple of intelligent comments. I don't have examples handy- I just don't care enough to bookmark them or anything ;)

Editors have infinite moderator points. We always have. This is addressed in the FAQ. Practically speaking, editors represent a couple percent of all moderation on Slashdot. Very small. According to Meta Moderation, our fairness is inline with the general population. Some users troll and freak out and rant about this, but they are idealists and I'm practical. If I see a shitty comment, I'm going to moderate it down. Thats my perogative ;)

I meant the policy decision as a somewhat vague thing, but I have to make a lot of decisions about what robots we allow, or decide what is a crapflooding robot. That sort of stuff. It's not really "Policy" but that was the closest word I could come up with. I see what a dozen robots do, and then try to make a generic rule. The robot stuff is taking a lot of my time lately since we've been having problems with robots beating the shit out of us.

WRT scheduling, there is a schedule. We have shifts. Someone is always in charge during normal biz hours: weekdays 8am to 11pm. These shifts are shared between the authors. Usually during the 9-5ish slot there are 2 or even 3 authors available, but ultimately only 1 person wearing the daddy pants. It is *their* job to make sure that stories are queued up and posted.

Yeah, I've posted a lot in the last 3 days, which is why I don't generally do it. I learned long ago that I have to budget my time. Getting deep into discussions means I don't have time to do other things that are usually more critical.

I believe everyone can see their accepted submissions on their users page. I could be wrong. Now that I look at it, I wonder if there was a problem with that, because i had a couple of other stories on that list (authors don't get their posts on the list unless the story is not based on any submission, so I rarely get any listed there)

Re:valuable rankings (was Re:Allowing posting...)

[CmdrTaco]

We're gonna have to disagree on this one sir. I think the capping of moderation far outweighs the value of the N hot comments slashbox. I don't think more moderations means a better comment. More controversial perhaps, but not better. In fact, it might mean the comment is *worse*. If the comment flew straight up to 5, and was never moderated down, that means no moderator contests its value! That comment could very likely be far better then a piece of crap comment moderated up to 5 until a smart moderator calls shenanigans on it as a troll, and then it bubbles around absorcing moderator points.

Plus, once a comment makes it to the Top 10, it could stay because now it is suddenly getting the attention of many new moderators seeing the "Hot" comment for the first time because it made a list. A feedback loop causes the Hot comment to remain hot... all the while *wasting* moderator points.

I think the difference between 4 and 5 is relatively negligible in our current moderation system. And most mod suckers just cause a comment to bobble around from 4 to 5 and back to 4.

Sleep on this again... shoot me off an email. I gotta rip the bandaid off this discussion or I'm gonna be pulling hairs off my arm all week.

Re:valuable rankings (was Re:Allowing posting...)

[CmdrTaco]

Actually I like that idea.

Right now the Hot 10 Comments box is simply the N comments the DB pulls out first, when ordered by score.

We could change it so that the 10 Hot Comments is actually the shortest time frame between the 1st and last moderation for all Score:5 comments. A comment with 15 moderations would have a long time frame between #1 and #5... but a comment that went zip straight up to 5 would have a relatively small gap. If a comment goes up really fast but is moderated down, then that time lap would increase... eventually falling off the list.

We would also need some sort of absolute limit on this... like only count comments posted in the last 24 hours. Alternately, I could see this as being a useful factor when we rework scoring. Certainly 2 mods in 3 minutes are worth "More" then 2 mods in 3 hours. Since we start "The Clock" at the first mod, Score:0/1/2 starting comments are relatively equal anyway... although Score:2 have the edge since they only need to get 3 mods... but a really good Score:0 comment could conceivably get up there fast if it was good.

If someone submitted patches, I'd probably take 'em.