Slashdot Mirror
How Voice Enhances Life Online
Carl Bialik from the WSJ writes "A Wall Street Journal article looks at the myriad ways, some surprising, that voice is being integrated into websites and other online tools. Usages range from the familiar--multiplayer gaming--to conducting business transactions and long-distance relationships. 'Ten years ago, the first Web sites were like company brochures, says Jeff Pulver, the VoIP pioneer. 'No one ever expected to have the ability to engage a community virtually. But now a lot of services are becoming a part of the Internet experience, including video, email and voice.'" Update: 08/27 00:12 GMT by Z : Corrected the attempt to 'enchant' and 'enhance' in the same word.
Slashdot trolling phenomena make up a large subset of the bizarre and complex subculture found on the popular technology website Slashdot. They are a mixture of juvenilia, sarcasm, deliberately bad jokes, tasteless nonsense and highly developed and artistic attempts to provoke outraged responses from other forum users, or amuse them. Slashdot trolling is a subset and a microcosm of Internet trolling in general. Some of these behaviours are usually considered to be more offensive or insightful than others. On Slashdot, many of these phenomena have become the object of parody.
Slashdot trolls can generally be divided into four categories: disruptive, offensive, deceptive, and idiosyncratic. Disruptive trolls are those which intend to disrupt the normal flow of things on Slashdot, either by decreasing the signal-to-noise ratio or by causing the pages to render incorrectly. Offensive trolls exist for the sole purpose of offending as many people as possible. The purpose of deceptive trolls is to trick people into either following a link or reading a comment which seems legitimate but is actually a troll. Idiosyncratic trolls are those which are specific to Slashdot and have elements of Slashdot culture and history in them creating, in effect, an inside joke.
Contents
* 1 Disruptive trolls
o 1.1 Crapflooding
o 1.2 Page widening/lengthening
* 2 Offensive trolls
o 2.1 Homosexuality and racism
o 2.2 Anti-semitism
o 2.3 Nationalistic insults
* 3 Deceptive trolls
o 3.1 Karma Whores
o 3.2 Comment Plagiarism
o 3.3 Article text alteration trolls
o 3.4 Web vendor referral trolls
o 3.5 Signature trolls
o 3.6 Movie spoiler
o 3.7 300 Dead in Sri Lanka Tsunami
* 4 Idiosyncratic trolls
o 4.1 First post
o 4.2 Netcraft confirms it
o 4.3 Stephen King is dead
o 4.4 First Obituary
o 4.5 Hot grits/Natalie Portman
o 4.6 Reigniting flamewars
* 5 Minor trolls
* 6 See also
Disruptive trolls
The purpose of disruptive trolls is to cause the pages of Slashdot to display in an undesirable way or to otherwise bring attention to themselves. The two major categories of disruptive trolls are crapflooding and page-widening.
Crapflooding
Crapflooding is the posting of many nonsensical or gratuitously offensive messages in order to disrupt the normal functioning of Slashdot and annoy its users and editors.
Later versions of the software behind the Slashdot website had an updated lameness filter to prevent posting of the same message more than once. However, crapflooders began avoiding this restriction by varying the content of the message after each post. Crapfloods can be performed manually with a dedicated user repeatedly clicking through the posting options each time, or automated by a piece of software. Automated crapfloods are -- not surprisingly -- larger, more effective and more frequent. The subject of crapflooded messages varies. Some examples include:
* Offtopic stories
* Pornographic/Homoerotic sex scenes with the names replaced with those of the slashdot editors or open source celebrities.
* Incoherent nonsense that contains the correct letter frequencies so the lameness filter recognises it as vaguely English.
* Offensive Base64 encoded images or text.
The original page widening posts were simple messages consisting of one long stream of characters with no spaces. This caused browsers to render a very wide page with horizontal scroll bars, making it nearly impossible to read the comments page. Slashdot began inserting spaces into any long run of characters to prevent this and so began the evolutionary battle between Slashcode and the page widening trolls. Newer and more inventive ways of causing page widening were dis
"Enchances"? Is that a word?
Trolling is a art,