Slashdot Mirror
IRC Forum w/ CmdrTaco & Hemos Tonight at 8pm Eastern
Tonight on irc.slashnet.org in #Forum Hemos & I will be hanging out answering users' questions. This is your chance to ask about the moderation system, story selection, or the technology upon which Slashdot is built. (No Biz questions please ;) It's been a long time since we last did this, and we're hoping we can answer questions and get some feedback on some new ideas too. We'll see ya there.
I would like to see a log-file. Is this planned?
something tells me the trolls are rubbing their hands with glee.....
Acid House saves Souls
I wish I may, I wish I might. Get the very first post tonight. This should be a great opportunity to find out all sorts of interesting tidbits on /., I'm looking forward to it, though I doubt I will remember to log into irc.
OK, I'm a dummy. I'm vaguely aware of the acronym irc but how would one participate in this, specifically? I'm on a Linux box if that makes a difference.
Hey, what I have always wondered about Slashdot is some of the stats and demographics of the Slashdot crowd. Not from a business perspective (although I am sure some would kill for that info), but from a purely academic perspective. Additionally, I've wondered if there is any social science thesis work behind the growth and evolution of the friends/foes dynamic of the Slashdot crowd.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
You must not use irc much.
..what ever happened to JonKatz?
"I have not failed. I've simply found 10,000 ways that won't work." --Thomas Edison
You bring the chips and dip Taco...and I'll bring the salad.
And why no biz questions? Is this only to protect you from enbarasment, or what?
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
You have linux, so that has telnet included.
:<irc name>
/NAMES:
:<message>
:<notice message>
:<new topic>
You have to use ':' (colon), if Your text contains space(s).
First things first:
telnet irc-server 6667
Then log in: (<host> and <server> is irrelevant):
user <ident> <host> <server>
Choose a nick:
nick <nickname>
Since You have to answer the server;s PING manually, you'd better know it:
pong <irc server>
Join to a channel:
join <#channel>
Ask for
names <#channel>
Send something to the channel or to a nick:
privmsg <#channel/nick>
Leave if You are getting bored:
part <#channel>
You can send NOTICE this way:
notice <#channel/nick>
Let's change the topic:
topic <#channel>
Good luck!
It's valuable to hold a scheduled live event, but not everyone can attend. Could someone (official or not) please capture a log and post it for others to read (and flam... er, respond).
My own question would be why no technical aids have been implemented to avoid reposting articles ("has this URL been posted in the past X time?"), offer basic grammatical assistance (highlight the article via pipe through aspell or better), or assist Editors in other obvious ways. If I used slash for my own projects, I'd offer help, but I don't use slash. Someone ask. :)
And by "business questions," are you saying you won't talk about NYT &partner=SLASHDOT?
[
I recently reinstalled mIRC after a couple of years of not accessing IRC. I am about ready to uninstall as it is full of the terminately brain dead and so few people who actually type an English sentence of five words or more. Sooo, I am looking for this - it may elevate the norm.
So again, what time?????
...but what time zone are you guys in?
Thanx in adv!
I'm sure I'll end up sleeping through it (sleep schedual is a bit off currently), but I'd love to know why they never publicly announce when/what they change? Many users would love if there were a slash.slashdot.org or something to just post storys whenever slashdot.org syncs with the newest slashcode, whats changed, etc.
Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
Could you give the actual time, for the benefit of those of us who don't use fuzzy clocks?
... that this will be a huge troll/slashdot hater fest? The few voices who actually want to talk will probably be drowned out. But good luck anyway.
you take slashdot way too seriously.
sincerely,
everyone else
--
the strongest word is still the word "free"
How many users visit using IE or Windows? Good luck on getting that. Seems no one is willing to admit how many geeks are actually not using linux/bsd/beos/os/2.
will there be a duplicate session on IRC tomorrow night too?
Went to Afghanistan to sell a warehouse full of C64s, and got stuck there watching all the Baywatch repeats.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Use an IRC client with a spellchecker.
Pr0n... FREE! Click Here!
the almighty taco is going to some down from his ivory tower to grace us with his presence.
my question: when did you stop caring about the slashdot community and decide that making money was your highest priority?
Why is there a radio section that hasn't been updated in nearly two years! Just remove it already, no one will miss it, because if they did, they've gotten over it in the past two years.
I don't think anyone doubts slashcode's technical scaling merits; so for a high-traffic web site the main issues are scaling financially.
how long it will take to /. the irc server? :)
what happened to his gig at techtv? did leo get him shit-canned?
I want to know how you become a programmer or editor for Slashdot. As much time as I spend on here (and other message forums) it seems I should be getting paid in some way. ;)
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
It's right in the story title. That'd be EDT right now, or UTC-4.
This is your chance to ask about the moderation system, story selection, or the technology upon which Slashdot is built.
I've noticed that not all stories on Slashdot are duplicates. How do you choose which stories to duplicate (and triplicate, and possibly in some circumstances quadricate)?
Thanks!
---
When story submissions are rejected, are they deleted from the database immediately?
I ask because I'm curious if rejects could be redirected or resubmitted elsewhere with less effort than is currently required.
If either A) Slashdot users could read their rejected story submissions at least for a little while after they're rejected, they could do things like easily submit them to my user-moderated open Slashdot queue or B) if there was some hook so they could dual-submit to your queue and someone elses journal (like mine), we could see whether or not moderation would also work for sorting through and highlighting story rejects. (I'm presuming you wouldn't mind helping users experiment with such concepts.)
Thanks for all your hard work. I enjoy Slashdot.
--LP
8pm eastern. it says it in the subject.
wow
" ..what ever happened to JonKatz?"
Here's a shovel. Go around the back of server rack, number three.
1. Download it. Here's a link:
http://www.xchat.org/
2. Install it
3. Go here for further instructions:
http://www.irchelp.org/
4. Don't blame us.
-MB
Wake up - the future is arriving faster than you think.
This is SO gonna suck if the Slashdot Effect takes down our IRC server...
503 Sig Unavailable
The Signature could not be accessed. Please try again later or contact the administrator
It wasn't a joke at all you might say.
Are you going to dupe this again in a couple of days same as you do with most of the posts you make Taco?
And WTF does "tonight" mean? are you some kind of omnipresent being that is in all time zones at once???
We aren't all in the Q continuum you know.
Disregarg that. It's obvious Slashdot has been hacked, and the story is bogus.
How do I know? Read it. Proper grammar, good ortography, even a well-place apostrophe after the word "users". There's no way in hell Taco wrote this.
look at the title.
I really hope that irc.slashnet.org has a big enough pipe that they can hande the minions of slashdot. It is an intresting thought though, that slashdot itself could become a DDOS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack. If of cource, you can post something interesting about a site... But back to what i was saying before, the server better be top notch, and how are they going to regulate who says what and when? Wont CmdrTaco get a little confused? I'm assuming this is where the operators come in, but from my experence on that network they dont do a whole lot of operating, they're there to kick the occasional spammer.
OMG OMG OMG WTF OMG WTF BBQ STFU RTFM, OMFG OMG OMG OMG ROFL LMAO OMG WTF STFU ROFLMAO
1.) Why do any negative slashdot comments automatically get nailed with a moderation of -1 redundant or overrated?
2.) If you want a moderation system that is open to the public why the hell do you let editors have unlimited mod points?
3.) Why can't we edit comments after posting (and have it posted in the subject (chg'd) or something like that)?
4.) Is there a plan to have "staff meetings" or something of that nature to try and prevent dupes and maybe having some articles with more content.
5.) Besides book reviews and the Late Jon Katz it seems the "read more" link is pretty much useless, is slashdot ever going to have some type of "meat" to their content?
6.) Google has no legal recourse for caching, why don't you do it?
7.) Ever thought about contacting link'd site administrators before killing their servers by a front page story and then getting charged for bandwidth?
8.) Most websites go through a "layout" change every couple of years, the "slashdot style" has been pretty much worn out, especially with not being w3c compliant, any changes in the future?
9.) Ever thought about publishing all stories in a public bin where the users decide what makes the front page? Like when an article gets 100 "post points" it is then sent to the front page where it's live and ready for commenting on?
10.) Have any of you ever thought about maybe bringing on some "professional" journalism type people? Someone who knows how to write the news and doesn't abuse the editor function as a place to put comments (michael comes to mind).
11.) You all ever think maybe this is getting a little old and it's time to get out?
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
As this is a global site, UTC is more appropriate when quoting time.
None of that daylight savings bullshit for me!
Use ISO 8601 dates [YYYY-MM-DD]
Why don't you have a section for the stories that don't get posted?
It can't be because you're worried about anyone questioning your editorial skills. And we know it's not personal.
So why not have a section for all those stories that get denied?
Hmmmmmmm?
http://tinyurl.com/3t236
Can I have some free stuff?
Liberate your mind in two clicks or less.
...
A Music Section!
...
As I have mentioned before -
With 250,000+ /.ers out there, I think we benefit the artists who have decided that the RIAA is NOT for them, and also make our voice heard.
If it was made available to subscribers only, that might be enough to make me go for a subscription (of course, since I thought of this great idea - I should get a free pass, or edit the damn thing.)
Rock Me, I'madumbass! I'madumbass! I'madumbass! ... I'madumbass! ... I'madumbass!
OhOh, I'madumbass!
I'madumbass! I'madumbass!
It's in the article title!
^_^
" something tells me the trolls are rubbing their hands with glee....."
That's not hands, I'm afraid.
If nothing else, I'm looking forward to the opportunity to see Taco spell on the fly. :)
Maybe it's just me, but why is the script index.pl broken (or is it just me?) for quite a few days. The link included should point to articles from June 5th, but shows me articles from June 6th and 7th. :-(
So is it 8pm EST? or 8pm EDT?
Great Linux Site
You know that Slashdot is going to edit out things they don't like. I want to know if any trolls wind up getting any juicy action going. Will someone goatse the chat, etc... Inquiring minds want to know.
Sorry can't be there so I'll just ask here. When will slashdot be reachable from ipv6? ipv6.slashdot.org works but it points to a ipv4 adresse. Couldn't find any AAAA records with dig :(
Answer: Who the fuck cares? The only reason they didn't announce his departure is that they probably would have been overloaded with "YAAAAY!" comments.
Seriously, did you notice that every single "article" he wrote had a slew of comments ripping apart his entire premise? Usually there'd also be one -highly moderated(up)- comment saying something along the lines of "Katz is a fucking moron smoking crack, why is he still allowed to post stories"?.
The guy was almost universally hated(mostly because the only thing more annoying than a philosopher is an incompetent philosopher.)
Probably the only thing he has to be proud of is that he was the biggest reason people bothered to register(to block his articles.)
Please help metamoderate.
Slashdot IRC Logs are always wonderful sources of wonderful information and history...
- Question/Answer Session
- Mirror of Signal_11 Discussion
- Another IRC log
Let's consider the number of typos that make their way into Slashdot stories. Now think about the fact that the editor(s) had a chance to review those few sentences per story for quite some time before publishing them. Can you imagine the number of typos one would find in a live IRC conversation with these same editors?
I don't think I've ever seen an irc client with a spellchecker.
It's generally understood that spelling isn't very important in IRC channels.
--
the strongest word is still the word "free"
Sounds like somebody's got a case of the Mondays!
--
For those in the UK, it should be on at 1am tonight.
Cmd_taco and Hemos will be talking about their relationship............as lovers
Face it, some editors (michael) constantly put up wild, hysterical headlines with their own two cents in the story that concludes the world is coming the an end. Isn't that the definition of flamebait? You guys are essentially baiting users to read and respond, in a very Enquirer/NY Post way.
Why is trolling from the editors less worse than trolling by the users?
And it seems to have gotten worse lately. Just look at the Red Hat story today.
In short, don't you think you guys should follow some set of standards or professionalism?
SIG:Slashdot: indymedia for nerds.
would that be GMT, PCT, ECT
Beef3k I have no beef with you.
"Then he went down to the corner and beefed." - MST3K
what time is "eastern" in berlin?
really i dont know. thanx. and yes, after first answer moderate me to -5 please.
A/S/L?
Oh, and what are you wearing?
screw JonKatz...I want my slashdot radio!!!!
/* oops I accidentally made a comment, sorry */
Most of the links on Slashdot point to places on the site Google is forbidden from crawling by robots.txt. As a result, only the few items Google catches on the main pages, plus pages linked elsewhere, end up in Google. Try searching for some of your old stuff. I bet you don't find a lot of it. Google should also allow journals to be indexed.
This is going to be an ask slashdot, where we actually ask slashdot.
It wasn't my original reason for registering, but it ended up being a great perk that I could block his stories.
(See subj)
Can we get the ability to have different settings depending upon whether we have mod points or not? For example, I normally read at +2, highest scores first, but when I have mod points I read at +1, newest first. It's annoying to have to change those all the time.
This space intentionally left blank.
I agree that a lot of posts that are merely disagreement, sometimes with cogent argument behind them, get moderated as flamebait, etc., and this is not corrected nearly often enough in metamod.
I have never dared submit anything conneted to stuff my geekfriends work with here in Boston, because i don't want to see them slashdotted. Fix that, get more off-beat interesting stuff.
I won't be able to attend, so i redundantly request PUHLEEEEZE post the discussion the next day....?
"I'd say 'Have a good time,' but arson is still illegal.
If you think Slashdot sucks in all those ways, grab the Slashcode and make your own site to fill up with trolls. It's like people are getting paid to be disruptive. Oh wait, that's the topic. Sorry, my bad.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
How do I log into this IRC thing via the AOL InterWeb? My screen name is l337h4x0rzzzz@AOL.COM thanks
Trolling is a art,
- There would be no confusion as to what time this event will occur.
This confusion is exactly what internet time is designed to stop.For all you people asking about the time, please note that the article name clearly states "8 PM eastern". Isn't this obvious?
-Dae
"Alle reden vom wetter. Wir nicht." - SDS Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund.
j00 4r3 3n73r1ng l337 w0r1d.
I'm one of the folks that got $rtbl'ed for modding up the forbidden post awhile back. As a result I have never gotten moderation rights and metamoderation went away. About two months ago or so, metamoderation came back, but I still have never gotten moderation rights, so I assume I'm still $rtbl'ed.
Was some code changed that $rtbl'ed users can now metamoderate, or is this a bug ? How are $rtbl'ed users worthy of metamoderation rights but not moderation ?
Tired of being "punished" by the Slashdot $rtbl since 2002. I'm now over at http://soylentnews.org/ .
Your are supposed to be bitching and moaning about mod points, karma, story selection, slashcode or poor response times.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
How's the Missus? I heard that his mother did not find out about the proposal till she read about it in the local news paper. Is this true?
I wonder.... what if the server gets slashdotted? Poor Taco, trying to handle 23745732 users concurrently speaking....
Looks like we get to Slashdot Slashnet! :)
Eastern is not a timezone
I'm not going to be able to make it to this tonight (whenever "tonight" is for the editors, it's going to be really late in the night here), so could someone please bring up the following:
1. Congratulate the editors on finally cutting down on the number of dupes posted - it's been ages since I've seen one.
How has this been acheived: via technology or a more human factor?
2. Ask the editors when they plan to:
i) start checking story submissions for basic spelling and grammar errors;
ii) start checking that the actual stories aren't well-known hoaxes;
iii) start editing the story titles so that they are more easily found via searches (eg, a chess story should have some chess reference in the story title, rather than being called "Man Last Stand vs Machine" or whatever); and
iv) start offering bittorrents straight off the bat when it's relevant (eg, a story on a new movie trailer being made available for download, latest patch for a popular game, new distro launch).
3. Ask the editors to update polls more frequently.
Now that ChrisD's left, polls seem to linger well past their sell-by-dates. Chris said once that he posted new polls after x number of days or y number of votes, whichever came first. If I remember correctly, x was about 3-4 and y was roughly 25,000-30,000, so the recent poll about "Favorite fictitious drink" went on for far too long (7 days, nearly 60,000 votes). I'm sure some sort of automation could be used here.
That's it really.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
I hear they'll be announcing they'll be switching to scoop to avoid awful slanted stories. Of course there will only be awful non-slanted stories post conversion.
My question is: are all the elementary errors in English usage that appear in /. stories the result of (1) not editing submissions, (2) not knowing the difference between "its" and "it's', "who's" and "whose", etc., or (3) just not caring?
"Skill shows through where genius wears thin." -Wittgenstein || Religion: uniting aviation and architecture.
Emacs is always the answer.
It's really old.
I'll ask two questions.
1) what's with the dupes?
and
2) what's with the dupes?
I'll be there IIIIRCC (If I've Installed IRC correctly)
qaopm
Sounds like somebody's got a case of the Mondays!
That might have actually been funny if it wasn't Thursday.
I was wondering if you could change /. to meet the requests of all users and when a request of one user contradicts the request of another user you find a solution that will make both users happy. I think if you could do whatever users ask then salshdot would be so much better.
--I'm not talking about dance lessons. I'm talking about putting a brick through the other guy's windshield.-
And what do you do if you're leaving for a vacation this afternoon and you want to view the log when you come back?
-=- Many seek good nights and lose good days.
Don't give them easy questions like
If you do that then they have an excuse to not accept any other question about that mod. They'll use some stupid meaningless numbers about how often 'Overrated' is used. The question that needs to be asked is: Better yet, don't make 'Overrated' a mod option for posts at or below their starting score.Did anyone else find that the font size changed on slashdot about two weeks ago? I'm using Netscape 4.72 on Linux, and the new appearance looks terrible. I used the Internet Archive to compare with last year's pages and those still look fine, so I don't think it's anything I did.
Maybe you could have a page where you report on code changes, so users are given a clue about what might have happened when things break?
Just wanted to note you left out a couple of million readers, in europe/middle east this is something like the middle of the night.
Please consider making another chat with us folks,
Thanks
I really wish I could be there so I could find out why my favorite feature is often malfunctioning. As of 12:30 CDT the "Day of Week" link in the Older Stuff column (currently Wednesday) doesn't take you to yesterday's issue. Instead it just refreshes the main page.
This seems to happen often enough for me to notice it, and I'm just wondering what the difficulty of coding this link may be. It probably just gets prioritized below most daily activities.
I can't make it tonight, but I would really like someone to make a request for me.
I would like to see a controversy modifier. Similar to any of the other modifiers, add points to the score of comments that have been modded up and down repeatedly.
Some of the best comments that I have read are the type that many people will love, and many others will hate. As a result they never get modded above 2 or 3 (for long anyway) before someone decides it is overrated, or flamebate... I would like to be able to customize my view so I can see more of these comments as they are often very thought provoking.
"I'll have a Guinness, no wait, make that a Coors Light" -Grad student I work with, who shall remain anonymous...
Now is the perfect chance to comment on the submission/posting process that has resulted in so many duplicate front page posts over the last year or so.
Damn it! Why did you have to choose the exact time when i can't be there?!?!?! I have a final to take at that exact time, you insensitive clods!
sigh...
To somebody who will be able to attend, please ask for an option to get a reply message which includes mod's comments as to why they chose to reject a story that the user has submitted. Otherwise, everybody has to guess why their piece was rejected.
Did you know that "FTW" ("for the win") is a direct translation of "Sieg Heil"?
Speaking of searches, can we PLEASE stop 'or'ing everything together?
AND, OR, NOT, and () arn't hard tools. Impliment them, allow me to search story bodies, and I'll be happy.
IIRC, they don't want to prevent sites that generate revenue from ads and such to be suckered out of them. If they cached it, there would be problems with click throughs etc.
That is IIRC.
-- taking over the world, we are.
I hate to slam someone, but that was the main reason I stayed logged in. Just to skip his noise from the home page. I never even noticed he was gone.
Wearing pants should always be optional.
My question is that why does'nt slashdot have a section for rejected articles. I am of the opinion that alteast 20-40 % of the stories that people would like to read are rejected.
Would it be so much trouble? Disable comments on rejected articles(of course) and maybe just keep them for 30 days. No need to archive them(if space is a constraint). Avoid dupes in the rejected stories(and accepted ones too). Quite a few slashdotters would like that. Want public opinion on that? Put it in the next poll.
Another question- In the "Customize Slashdot's Display", why can we choose only 17 topics/authors to exclude? Do you plan to increase this in the future or keep it for subscribers?
Tips on how to scale Slashcode both technically and cost effectively would be apprecitated too.
<Mukluk> It's CmdrTaco. :P :(
<CmdrTaco> I've been getting flooded wtih E-mail about
Hamster Havoc. I'm fealing coooool.
<Mukluk> You know what? I had people send you all that mail out of pity... Sorry.
...
<CmdrTaco> I remember when ASCII art was as cool as it got.
Then ANSI. Then ANSI Music. The CGA. Now we have this
1152x864 true color shit. Life bites.
<TiMElaPSE> hld on
*** CmdrTaco was kicked by TiMElaPSE (Æ'HAZÆ' Watch Your Mouth!
Æ'MATÆ')
*** Joins: CmdrTaco (malda@198.110.97.36)
*** TiMElaPSE was kicked by CmdrTaco (CmdrTaco)
*** Joins: TiMElaPSE (Ask.Me@205.200.13.24)
<CmdrTaco> I feel better now.
Does this mean Geeks in Space is making a comeback?
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
Someone ask if they're ever going to protect the password changing page with the users password.
A surprising number of people leave public terminals logged in and lose their accounts that way.
Larry Ellison wants to buy
Would you mind telling
Maybe we all can subscribe and keep
Hi, I'm hosting a live web interface to the IRC chat on http://www.balaabodu.com.
I agree completely... and while they're at it, getting rid of all those stupid adds taking up space would be great.
I mean yeah... I could pay and support slashdot to get rid of all that wasted screen space, but it sure would be nice if there was a free and easy way to view the news without those petty annoyances.
no comment
iii) start editing the story titles so that they are more easily found via searches (eg, a chess story should have some chess reference in the story title, rather than being called "Man Last Stand vs Machine" or whatever)
I'd rather see some type of meta-tagging, rather than actual insertion of the topic into the headline, just so the headlines don't get too monotonous and hard to discern between.
I'm not quite sure where this would fit in (server, HTTP protocol, browser, ???) or if it already exists and just isn't widely used...
.. *cough*v4l*cough*) that have NO mention of date on them. I have read through howtos that refer to a 2.0 kernel patch... and I don't know if just the patch is irrelevant, or the whole piece of software (again, *cough*v4l*cough*).
But I am *really* tired of going to webpages (particularly linux HOWTO pages
Wouldn't it be nice if webservers would timestamp a page and say when it was last modified, and the browser would show that date?
no comment
okay, everyone is fulling up this list with suggestions. Here some of my own:
1. The "older articles" seems to be continuously busted. I click on the previous day and I get a page with all the current articles. Soemtimes the 'older articles' link disappears, sometimes it just behaves funny.
2. How about article rating and sorting? I'd like to be able to say all articles about X should be put at the top of the list and stay there for at least a day.
3. This one's not a suggestion, but a comment: I love the ability to mod down certain ratings. I've very happy to be able to add an automatic -1 to humor posts, many are actually funny, but they take up a lot of my bandwidth.
1. 2.
Hmm, well I might still show up.
Sounds like someone's got a case of the Thursdays!
I want to be able to browse by mod too, not just number. In other words, I may only want to read the posts modded Funny.
Sorry. What's 8 pm Eastern in a time format us in the rest of the world can comprehend?
Disgraceful. Next thing you know, we'll start measuring karma in inches and ounces.
Blearf. Blearf, I say.
I talk to taco at least on irc all the time... I dunno why you couldn't just fire off an email or something (or chill out on irc) when you wanted to ask him a question...
Who cares about spelling errors? i am more for content. Correct me if i am wrong but isnt the idea of /. to let each person have their opinion be seen the way the want it to be seen? if they choose to spell wrong. so be it.
-- botsex is {grep;touch;strip;unzip;head;mount}
Like anyone wants to talk to two prick editors for slashdot. Get over it...
Spelling error in posts are to be expected, and I wouldn't even think for a split second that worrying about them there is worthy of the editors time.
But spelling errors in the original story submissions? Well that's inexcusable. Slashdot editors have a duty, to the readers, the Andover shareholders and themselves, to make sure that the site is professionally run, and making sure that what they publish (ie, the stories themselves) is clearly written and makes sense is a part of that.
It doesn't take too much to run each submission through a spelling and grammar checker so why shouldn't they do it?
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
That dipshit michael often posts stories that are interesting, so I can't just exclude his sorry ass from the homepage like I did with JonKatz years ago. Isn't there a way I could just block his banal commentary? I would subscribe for that feature alone.
for those outside the U.S.
"Eastern Time" == "GMT -5"
There's a bug that affects me when I'm logged in, where the full number of comments that should display does not display, and the totals of how many comments are at each score level are wrong.
/. a complicated process, as I have to log in to see all the stories I want, pop them in new windows, then log out to grab the full set of comments.
So, since I normally read only score-5 comments, it can say "12 of 500 comments", I click thru to the 12, and only 5 get listed.
So I have to erase my cookie, go to the story without being logged in, and I'll see that in fact there were 17 or 20 score-5'ed, and then it will list them all. (And I'm not lowering any scores in my preferences.)
This makes reading
I reported this into the bugtracking system quite some time ago, and CmdrTaco closed the ticket saying it was a known issue, part of a larger problem that was being worked on.
What's up with it?
o/~ Join us now and share the software
Searching for JonKatz in the Post-Columbine Neo-Hellmouth
Who cares? I know I couldn't be bothered.
[ -1 : 1025 comments | Nested | Oldest First ]
This will be almost like a new episode of Slashdot Radio!
Here - and yes, they meant EDT (GMT-0400).
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
They meant Eastern Daylight Time (GMT -0400), not Eastern Standard Time (GMT -0500). So, log on at midnight GMT (5:00pm Pacific Daylight Time, 1:00am British Summer Time, 2:00am in most of the rest of western Europe I think).
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
I think rotten.com got trolled. They got trolled to post an amusing email message that was written to get their attention, and probably wasn't sincere.
I don't know which situation is funnier... well, you know what I mean.
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
The funny thing is the original post is pretty stupid. Nothing insightful and nothing that actually suggests anything really all that surprising. How can anything the post says not be a possible consequence of normal mod system operation? Pretty crappy thing to rally around.... Either way, the official /. response to the entire things was totally immature and had an effect of throwing gas on a fire.
-Sean
Mediapartners-Google* is not regular Googlebot, it's their text-ad network.
[from Daemon News.]
So no, there's more than political correctness to it
Use ISO 8601 dates [YYYY-MM-DD]
I understand and agree that Slashdot is US-based. However, time conversion is not an issue of political correctness. Not every Slashdot reader is aware of the precise offsets of the various US time zones. Complicating this is the daylight savings variable, not specified in the subject.
Which is where a standard comes in handy. Specify one value, for everyone else in the world to apply their offset to. How easy is that?
Or even better, it could've been shown as 2000 EDT(GMT-0400). Satisfies just about everyone then.
As for your analogy with USD, that is flawed. Why? It stays constant regardless of where you live within the US.
I used to think the same way until I started thinking global. Then my perspective changed.
Don't worry about the flame, no offence taken. Best to sort out issues than let them simmer inside and turn into monsters.
Use ISO 8601 dates [YYYY-MM-DD]
While the Slashdot staff are free to do what they feel like, would this site be better off if it chased off its global audience? Would it be as diverse and interesting? What if they decided to exclude all articles and news not pertaining to the US? Is this a good thing?
I don't think so and I suspect I'm not alone here.
Use ISO 8601 dates [YYYY-MM-DD]
I've got a lot of questions for Rob Malda -- many, many, many. I've e-mailed him twice regarding the tip of the iceberg of topics I wanted to discuss with him, but got no replies. Rob, if you can hear me, please give a week in advance the next time you do the IRC thing, because I'm working tonight and I'll have to miss the chat because of work.
Christ, you were gone a while. Get working again, would you? More pen1s bird == teh better funnay
if you hate /. then make like a tree and go elsewhere
I can't access the chat. Someone please ask for moral justification of editor mod tampering.
I agree about the editors ability to distort things with their unlimited mod points. If the system is that broke then it should be changed.
I was a mod recently (bfd) and consequently started reading at -1.
I was appalled by the level of moderating I saw. Basically any post that expressed a divergent pinion was modded down, no matter how well argued. I used all 5 points in one thread reviving sensible, if anti-groupthink, comments.
Consequently I have left my reading level at -1. So yes, the mod system is stuffed.
Have fun...
Or we could simply have a system were each individual reader is responsible for their own moderation (filtering)[1]. Kind of like the way it's done in Usenet. If there's any moderation on the server side it's of a general nature.i.e. Trolls, FP, Goat guy, etc.
[1] This also removes any issues of it being done, not to the readers satisfaction. (Remember you can't please everyone.)
[1a] It also takes some of the load off the staff.
[1b] The same idea applies to anywere else a choice is required. Only like a particular type of story? Hate a particular moderator, or author?
If you were unable to attend or simply wish to review or archive the discussion, we have a text log and an HTML log available. By the end of the forum, over 600 observers were present. Thanks again to Rob and Jeff, everyone who submitted forum questions, and everyone in attendance!
I can solve your question with one response: Get over it!
Just ignore the stories you've already read. It isn't that hard, there's plenty of others on the page.
02:17 adpowers asks: Slashdot has a heavy slant toward open and free technologies. Why haven't you guys adopted PNGs or some other image format instead of sticking with GIFs?
02:18 Because PNG still doesn't work worth shit with most browsers.
02:18 We're idealists when possible, but practical when we have to be.
Which browsers is he talking about? PNG8 works fine in 99.9% of browsers out there, there is no reason to continue using GIF. Which browsers is CmdrTaco talking about? Netscape 3? IE3? It's time for Slashdot to move to PNG and set an example.
How has this been acheived: via technology or a more human factor?
Apparently, subscribed users are mailing in dupe reports, so the dupes are quickly removed before the rest of us see them. In other words people who are paying to get a better slashdot experience than the rest of us are making our slashdot experience better than theirs. Which appeals to my sense of irony ;-)
If I seem short sighted, it is because I stand on the shoulders of midgets
Seth is that you ?
anyway looking at your friends list you seem to love trolls.
because then you change the content of what was submitted, and that takes away from the idea of free speech
-- botsex is {grep;touch;strip;unzip;head;mount}
If someone's spelling and/or grammar corrected how does that negatively affect the story that they are trying to bring to everyone's attention?
And whoever said that Slashdot was a forum for free speech? If that was the case then every story would submission would always be accepted and people (even the first posters and the trolls) wouldn't get automatically moderated into oblivion by scripts that the editors have available to them.
The number of times I've seen the name of a company, product or person misspelt alone justifies some basic checking.
Of course, you're assuming that story submitters that mistype words, spell poorly and/or have bad command of grammar wouldn't want their mistakes to be corrected. If it was you, would you rather suffer the embarrassment of everyone knowing that you can't differentiate between "there" and "their" or be offended that your submission was tidied up without anyone else ever knowing about it?
Regardless of all these arguments, each of which has enough merit on its own, there's one overriding reason that stories should be checked for spelling and grammar: because Slashdot is supposed to be a professional (for-profit) website, and picking up basic mistakes is what editors of professional websites do.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
Why slashdot doesn't, for subscribers only (key concept guys: revenue generation!):
:)
1) Put karma back to a numeric rating
2) Place NO limit on karma
3) Generate a top 10/100/1000 list of subscriber karmic users (perhaps viewable to non-subs as well for promotion).
Frankly i dont care about seeing/notseeing ads. Im used to them. But I'd pay to be able to compete against others in karma.
Janie took my gun...
if it means so much to you run a proxy server which spell checks pages before you see them. you are one user. write up documentation or even make a public proxy for serving up /. with spell checking and come up with some hard core numbers like %51 or more of active /. posters using your system and then talk to the developers about posibly implementing your idea. but to sit here and whine isnt going to get you anywhere.
i dont care about spelling, and personaly is there was a spell checker built in i wouldnt use it, nor an option to spell check the site before i see it.
and perhaps you could just follow the the faq
-- botsex is {grep;touch;strip;unzip;head;mount}
You might not care about spelling (hey, way to go spelling "personally" incorrectly just to prove your point) but others do. It's particularly frustrating searching through the archive for an article on, say, a Philips flat panel monitor only to find that the story was posted with the misspelling "Phillips". This might not bother you, but it does me and countless others.
Slashdot isn't some pet project anymore, it's a full-blown professional website, with a readership in the hundreds of thousands if not millions. It even charges for premium content and features, so it isn't too much to ask that the site be professionally managed.
In the publishing industry (which is where Slashdot finds itself), the odd typo can be forgiven, but there's a world of difference between never checking spelling and the occasional one-that-got-away.
It's not my intention to "sit here and whine". It's my intention to give the editors some feedback so that they may further improve their site, just as I provide feedback to webmasters that run sites that try to set illegal cookies or are otherwise poorly coded.
Looking through the very FAQ that you brought up, I find the following extract:
Why is your grammar/spelling so bad?
We're more interested in getting the stories out quickly than we are in making sure every post passes the white glove test. These days we have a copy editor who catches most of the spelling and grammar mistakes, but things do sometimes slip through.
If you see a mistake in a story, email the author. We'll get it fixed pronto.
Answered by: CmdrTaco
Last Modified: 6/8/00
So, just over three years ago, Taco and his fellow editors recognised the need to correct spelling and error mistakes. It's a pity that they've either forgotten about it or are just flat out doing a bad job spotting what are often pretty major mistakes.
Oh, and why do I expect the editors to do something about it rather than dealing with it myself? Well, without wanting to state the obvious, it's their website and their job, not mine.
In summary, it's not a free speech issue. It's not a "people don't care" issue either (or else it wouldn't be in the FAQ would it?). It's simply a "we just don't do a good enough job" issue.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
I have to miss this chat because I will be watching the season premiere of Stargate SG-1, but can someone tell CmdrTaco he sucks hairy balls for me? How many fucking stories about SCO do we need? Or stories about .LA (that came out two years ago, for fuck's sake!)? Who are these editors anyway? Monkeys in a cage with keyboards?
deal with it, or move on. no one is going to listen to you especialy with that attitude.
-- botsex is {grep;touch;strip;unzip;head;mount}
deal with it, or move on. no one is going to listen to you especialy with that attitude.
Nobody's listening, huh? I beg to differ - this isn't the first time the subject of professionalism on the part of the Slashdot editors has come up and it probably won't be the last. And if nobody's listening, then who's modding me up when I raise the subject? And why's there a mention of the issue in the FAQ?
Attitude? Asking questions and providing feedback is considered attitude? Wow. I must have missed the sign saying that suggestions were not wanted and that any criticism however big or small was treasonous.
Anyway, why does it irk you so much that I (and many others) would like to see Slashdot tidied up around the edges?
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
first off, your posting with a karma level of 2. secondly this is their site, they can run it how they see fit. the issue in the faq is related to things that significantly change the meaning of a story. what irks me is a bunch of kids screaming about the way this site is designed with out doing a single thing about it. start your own site or pre process it for spelling. even if there is a large group of whiners crying about spelling and grammar i dont beleive it will ever be taken to hart with /. editors when your argument is all I I I think it should be MY way. what a joke.
-- botsex is {grep;touch;strip;unzip;head;mount}
You know, this is getting boring. I'm not going to change your opinion and you're not going to change mine, so let's agree to disagree.
I could point out several things that you continue to ignore but I'll stick to just one: this isn't "their site", as you put it. Slashdot is a commercial property, and has been for some time now. It also charges people for premium content and services.
Asking for someone to spend the 60 seconds it would take to run each story through a spelling checker on what's now a charging commercial site isn't asking too much.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
this is petty. but i dont mind. i havent gotten a bill for seeing any of the content subscribers do. the site belongs to osdn, which also doesnt care about your petty complaints else wise they would have done something by now as well.
-- botsex is {grep;touch;strip;unzip;head;mount}
Here's the text of the /. IRC chat [also available as text and as HTML. /msg Questions /. users ever be able to change the "look and feel" of Slashdot? Such as the colors, and general layout? ;) :) :)
-----
[20:00:40] Welcome to tonight's SlashNET forum.
[20:00:46] Tonight our guests are Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda and Jeff "Hemos" Bates.
[20:00:52] They are two of the figures behind Slashdot.org, as you all know.
[20:00:58] Topics they'd like to talk about tonight include comment moderation, story selection, code plans, and technical stuff.
[20:01:06] If you have a question you'd like to ask, you can submit it to the queue by sending it in a private message to "Questions":
[20:01:11] Before we get started with queued questions, would either of you like to say anything? Possibly a brief intro as to who you are? CmdrTaco first?
[20:01:21] Uhh... we do slashdot.
[20:01:25] first question!
[20:01:41] rfoster asks: How has the Slashdot info structure changed over the last year are you still experiencing growth and what hardware are you running to accommodate these needs?
[20:02:14] Well, we can answer what hardware we are using now...
[20:02:14] The system continues to be refined. We add new hardware.
[20:02:20] and I can answer the hardware that's coming.
[20:02:21] The FAQ lists most of the hardware.
[20:02:34] A dozen web servers... a few mysql boxes.
[20:02:37] The major upgrade for hardware will be webservers/DB readers.
[20:03:24] Yeah, we're getting new hardware for the first time in years.
[20:03:28] Literally.
[20:03:33] Like, I think 30 months or so.
[20:03:35] We've added a few boxes, but really not much.
[20:03:44] I mean, yeah, we've added new boxes, but they have been 2 - 3 year old machines.
[20:03:55] w00t asks: Will
[20:04:04] Maybe a little, but not much.
[20:04:30] It's computationally expensive.
[20:04:32] The new machines will be 2x P3 1.4 Ghz, with 2 gigs of RAM.
[20:04:34] It's programatically tricky.
[20:04:43] And only a tiny tiny percentage of users care.
[20:04:58] Patches are always welcome tho
[20:05:00] Aridhol asks: What advice would you give to people trying to start up their own content site(games,news etc...) How did slashdot get so many viewers?
[20:05:13] Please don't msg me.
[20:05:25] Aridhol: Being there first.
[20:05:29] And not looking like ass.
[20:05:33] Do something other people aren't.
[20:05:55] reefer asks: Is there any system in place or a plan on developing some system to prevent duplicate posts?
[20:06:03] Whatever.
[20:06:04] Next.
[20:06:11] Reefer: There is one.
[20:06:12] jew asks: At LWCE 2000 NYC, you stated that you were considering developing alternate systems of accessing the site's content than HTTP/HTML. You mentioned NNTP. Have you considered or implemented any alternate means of accessing the site, such as RRS? If not, why?
[20:06:19] It's just that the media spreads stories around.
[20:06:29] And there's something like 30,000 stories, so dupes happen...
[20:06:37] Well Jew, Patches are always welcome
[20:06:39] Look at the bottom of CNN's top stories - usually that's all dupes.
[20:06:47] We don't have time to implement much in the way of other protocols.
[20:06:59] CmdrTaco: We did try the chat thing with whatever program that was.
[20:07:03] Er, not chat.
[20:07:09] Discussion thing.
[20:07:11] Yeah, we had an IRC bot.
[20:07:16] That gated stories & discussions.
[20:07:17] Salsa.
[20:07:18] That was fun.
[20:07:21] Worked really well.
[20:07:24] Nobody used it
[20:07:36] The deal is that other protocols are fun, but HTML/HTTP is bread & butter.
[20:07:43] Supporting other protocols is a lot of time,