On the Matter of Slashdot Story Selection

Conspiracy theories again run rampant as users accuse Slashdot Editors of being in cahoots with scam artists. Sounds like just a normal day at the office for me. Except that I've decided to say a few words on Slashdot article selection process and users who try to abuse it. Read on for my rant.

Let's talk about Beatles Beatles. For the uninitiated he's just some dude who submits a lot of stories. He actually happens to get a lot of them accepted. We have a number of users like this. Looking at the hall of fame shows you a number of the most successful ones. Now the motivation for getting a Slashdot story accepted (besides fame, glory and sexy women who start IMing you naked pictures of themselves mere seconds after a story goes live)is a return link to the website of your choosing. Your creds. Your 'Reward' for sharing a cool URL with a half a million Slashdot readers.

It's not hard to figure out what sorts of stories Slashdot likes. We have a format, and a subject matter. A persistent user can simply start spamming the bin with a submission about everything he finds that comes even close. If he does it enough, he'll get a few through. Especially if he manages to get something reasonable in at 11pm when there's little else to choose from.

Now there is no conspiracy. There is some Roland guy who's last name i can't spell who submits stuff all the time and people thought for awhile he was Timothy. Lately there is a Beatles Beatles user who conspiracy theorists now think is Scuttlemonkey. We don't know these people. They are not aliases for us. They aren't paying us. 3 months from now it will be somebody else.

Now these submitters each have their problems. In Roland's case, he likes to link to his personal blog where he writes mediocre summaries of stories that add nothing to the original. In BBs case, he just cuts and pastes paragraphs from linked pages. Both use their return link to link a web page which is, in my opinion, pretty worthless.

Now technically speaking, we could add a nofollow to their URLs. Or strip them entirely. But that puts me into the position of editing not just the submission, but the submittor, and i really don't think that this is "Right".

Part of the Slashdot Editor's job is to make a submission "Presentable". Usually this means moving a few URLs around. I'd guess a good half of story submissions use the word 'here' or 'article' or something equally stupid as their anchor text. I prefer relevant words to be linked. There are other minor things tho, like taking off extra intros like "Hi guys I read Slashdot every day and thought you would like this". We want the Slashdot story to be mostly distilled down to the essentials. Just the key 3-4 sentences.

Should part of this process be checking the URL of the submitter to make sure that it is legitimate? Does that really matter? Should we add a nofollow tag to those URLs?

My opinion is no. Those URLs are what you get for submitting a story to Slashdot. We selected it. The submission braved the Gauntlet. A hundred submissions died, and this one made the cut. I don't think it's fair that we strip creds from someone just because they choose to squander that URL on something stupid. Who am I to judge that after all?

Now the real problem with this is what it does to the discussion. Last night a nice story was posted. It came from one of our "Problem" users. And dozens of comments were posted about this user. The conspiracy theories. The hostility. Now a lot of this is normal Slashdot Forum Faire. Thats fine. But the problem is that often when this occurs, it swamps out the real discussion. The messenger becomes the story.

I think this sucks.

The story is not about Roland or Beatles Beatles or whatever other random user is submitting a lot of stuff this week. I encourage moderators to use their points to mod these discussions down when they see them. As a moderator, your job ought to be to steer the discussion on-topic. The submitter is almost never the topic!

The catch-22 kills me. I might have a URL in the bin worth sharing. Something a half a million of you might enjoy. But because a user with a "Reputation" submitted it, I know that posting it will spawn a giant forum cesspool. I could strip attribution and take away incentive for a user to submit. Or just throw away the article and forget it. Or I could post the story and watch as half of the discussion is simply about the submitter and not the URL that i wanted to share in the first place.

Damned if I do, damned if I don't, right? I'm seriously looking for feedback here. What should I do with a good submission from a reader with a reputation?

And moderators, use those offtopic mods to steer the discussion towards the subject of the article, not the flavor of the month conspiracy theory about story selection.

As a side note, I'm really going to try to write more articles addressing Slashdot matters on to Slashdot. But please understand that doing so is tremendously time consuming- this article will generate hundreds of pieces of mail and forum posts that I want to read and reply to. But there are only so many hours in the day. I would like to request that the forum try to stay on-topic here. Let's talk specifically about the issues i addressed above. We can talk about digg or moderation or whatever issues are of most interest next week.

Update a dozen or so users have made the same point: Simply wait for the same story to come from another user. If that was possible, I would do so. I'm really talking here about stories that are submitted just by one person. Part of why these users are successful is that they submit enough stories that they get a handful that only THEY submitted. I can't simply wait for someone else. That will never come!

update Allright it's been about 300 hours. I've read every comment posted so far, and replied to many. Even managed to whore myself a couple dozen upmods ;) I think we will add a nofollow to the submittor link. Several users raised good points and they ultimately convinced me that since the focus of the story is the submission, not the submittor, any link that detracts from the focus is less relevant. This will probably reduce some kinds of abuse in the future, but of course not all.

There's a lot of really good discussion in there. Some really good feedback. I haven't touched my inbox yet, but I see a lot of messages in there as well that I'll try to get to. I'll try to post again in another week or 2 on some other subject matter. If you have ideas on what that should be, you're welcome to email and suggest topics. We'll try to make it, if not regular, a frequent thing on Slashdot.

Comments

A simple suggestion:

[TripMaster Monkey]

Institute a cap on the total number of stories a given submitter can get accepted (per day, week, month...whatever). A cap doesn't hurt legitimate submitters, while limiting the payoff for linkwhores.

Re:A simple suggestion:

[morcego]

Why not have a moderation system for the stories ? Let the users rate the story posted, and that information stick to the submitter profile. Then, users can filter the stories on their preferences, just like we can filter comments.
That way, you can publish the stories, and let the users decide what they want to see. We already have that for editors. Why not have it for the stories (step 1) or maybe even for submiters (step 2).

Re:A simple suggestion:

[timster]

We had that schism already. The problem is that Slashdot is popular because of the balance of content it offers, and that balance is carefully designed by the editors. If you turn that over to the most active and vocal users, the site would be less likely to attract the (essentially more profitable) casual readers.

Re:A simple suggestion:

[TripMaster Monkey]

Very well...then you can simply change my suggestion to: institute a cap on the total number of stories a given submitter can get attribution for (per day, week, month...whatever). If a linkwhore wants to spam the queue with stories, fine, but they may not try so hard if they find that their attribution gets stripped out after x amount of stories accepted in Y amount of time.

And yes, you may argue that this will stop the linkwhore from sharing all these interesting stories with us, but the fact here is that the linkwhore isn't making anything here...he's just pointing out something that already exists, and that other readers, readers without agendas, can just as easily find and submit. Sure, the linkwhore might not try so hard to submit interesting stories, but the upside is that everyone else will try harder, because the odds of them geting something accepted just went up. I'm pretty confident that the balance of Slashdot's readership can take up the slack if the linkwhores are put out of business.

Re:A simple suggestion:

[Daniel Dvorkin]

I've juried story submissions, in a rather different context, and I can tell you what any editor, of any type, can tell you: 90+% of submissions are crap. (Yet another example of Sturgeon's Law in action.) They're either subliterate and unreadable, wacko rantings, or just plain boring, often some combination of all three. Crap. The number of people who make submissions that are even worth considering for the first cut is very, very small, and it's not surprising that people who make a lot of successful submissions are (almost tautologically) those who have figured out how to write submissions worth reading.

Re:A simple suggestion:

[jamie]

Two thoughts.

The Beatles-Beatles user has sent us 4.8 submissions per day on average, since September or so. Would it really solve the problem if we forced him/her to send us only the 3.0 best submissions each day?

And, there's nothing stopping this person from creating as many user accounts as they want.

Re:A simple suggestion:

[Oculus Habent]

I'm torn between a system where you look at everything the same and one where you track some sort of benefit for good submitters.

If you could mark rejections with "partial credit" - i.e. 'already submitted' or 'good link, bad summary' - which would display on the story submissions listing, would that provide any benefit to you? You could say, "Gee, so-and-so, has a lot of "partial credit" but very few accepts... I've got a fairly rare story from him...

I don't have a grasp on the process, so I'm not sure what direction to go, here.

Re:A simple suggestion:

[CmdrTaco]

I always favor the submission that comes in first. If I have 5 stories that are the same subject matter, I open all 5 in tabs, and start at the first tab. If it's really bad i'll check #2 or #3. But if it's even close to workable, i'll choose it.

I prefer to reward speed over quality. But that is a flexible rule too.

As for the rest of your comments, I disagree with Slashdot going downhill. I disagree with editors trying or not. But I will say that what we post is largely reflected by what is submitted by our readers. IF you don't like the stories we select, post more technical ones. As it stands, I can't post what isn't in my bin.

Re:A simple suggestion:

[Golias]

Well said. The fact is that link whores add almost no value whatsoever to slashdot. We don't need them.

A lot of regulars here don't bother to submit stories very often, because the odds of the submission actually being used are not very high.

Why bother to submit a story about some new geek-friendly story when you know that the version of the same story written up by a link whore who is currently popular with one of the editors is going to be the one that gets used?

Re:A simple suggestion:

[AgentGibbled]

Perhaps you should give out "submit points", sorta like mod points. Thus a user would have to make some contribution to the community (meta moderating, etc.) before they could submit stories. This has the combined benefit of putting a limit on the number of stories a particular user could post in a given period of time, and it also means they can't just turn around and make a new user and submit immediately (they'd need to build up the "submit points"). If the system for giving out points is done just right, it would probably also cut down on the total volume of submissions that the editors need to wade through.

Basically it rewards users who are active in the community with the privilege of submitting stories, and not users who are just trying to get their page full of ads in front of as many eyeballs as possible. It's not a perfect system... just figured I'd throw the idea out there in the hopes that it could be refined.

Re:A simple suggestion:

[winwar]

"I believe my first priority is to the readers here."

Then why is the editing done so poorly? Heck, I see very little evidence that there are any editors here. I have worked as an editor before and this level of quality would result in unemployment. I am genuinely curious.

Mix It Up!!!

[ferrellcat]

Are you seriously trying to say that Beatles_Beatles was the only guy so submitted all of those stories? I would be VERY surprised if this were the case. If you get one story from 50 submitters, what's the point of going to the same submitter time and time again? Give the rest of us a chance.

Re:Mix It Up!!!

[hattig]

As a matter of interest, how many submissions do you get in a day?

Do you have a submission management system that works like, e.g,. Bugzilla. Submission 15167 is a duplicate of 14599. That sounds like a useful thing to add to Slashcode, to prevent the almost-legendary Slashdot dupe.

At least the submitter will get (Rejected, Duplicate) instead of (Rejected, you'll never know why! hahahaha! HAHAHA!)

Then when it comes to forming a story from the submission you can use editorial skills to form a story from the best few submissions, ignoring the submissions from people who have had clearlytoomuchcaffienetodaydidimentionilikecoffeea ndcoke...

digg yourself

[0110011001110101]

create a /. staging area, where us, the real users, can rate stories, and let us decide what makes it to the front page... The the RPs and BBs of the world will only show up when their linkback page is actually relevent and useful...

Re:digg yourself

[maino82]

This is a good idea, but maybe you could also take it one step further. Make all user posts anonymous until they get selected for the front page, and only THEN reveal who submitted it. That way it's not about who submitted it at all, but rather whether the story is good enough to make the final cut. Then we have noone to blame but ourselves if the same people happen to submit front page stories again and again.

Link to the original article

[dannytaggart]

Why not simply link to the original article, instead of these cut-and-paste pages?

I'm sure there's a legitimate reason, but I'll ask

[Vicsun]

Why is it that only Timothy posts Roland stories and only Scuttlemonkey posts Beatles stories?

Submissions

[couch_warrior]

I have half-heartedly submitted a dozen or so articles to /. - none of which have been accepted. My favorite topic, of course, is the danger of X-rays emitted by spark plugs. (See how I snuck that in) Any chance of there ever being a "Guide to writing acceptable articles for slashdot" that gives detailed advice on DOs and DONTs??? Just thought I'd ask.

Ask us again

[192939495969798999]

The most critical thing I can see is that these type of questions aren't asked that often. I would like to see a once per week, or at a minimum once per month, question from the editors like, "how are we doing, what changes, etc." It doesn't mean you have to implement them, but we'd like to know that you at least halfway care what the readers think. When you take out a story from someone with a rep, that can be considered censorship, so print that pig and watch the fur + mod points fly. That's what the internet is for. However, you can go out of your way to make sure that people starting to earn a bad rep get steered clear of that, by telling them early and often when things are going south. If they continue to be jerks, or post ad after ad, that's when it's time to step in. The New York Times doesn't run ads masquerading as articles. I'm not saying this is the NYT, but you can understand our frustration as readers to click a link and get an online store.

Thanks for discussing this

[Anonymous Coward]

Now the motivation for getting a Slashdot story accepted ... is a return link to the website of your choosing. Your creds. Your 'Reward' for sharing a cool URL with a half a million Slashdot readers.

How many article submitters consider this important? I can imagine the possibility that regular users submit an occasional story just because they think it's interesting and the kind of thing they'd want to read about on this site, without caring about a reward. The people who do care about getting return links are the people who will be "spamming the bin with a submission about everything" - that creates more work for the editors, and it annoys readers (because it's not 'stuff we (the community) think matters', it's 'stuff someone thinks the editors will accept'). I don't think we mind seeing a lot of submissions from one person, as long as they're not trying to unfairly manipulate the system for their own gain.

If that's the case, then adding nofollow to the submitter's link (for all submissions, since nothing else would be fair) will remove the spammers' incentive, while not deterring people who are submitting stories for their interest. (And don't include links in the summary which point to the submitter's personal site if they haven't added any value to the original news source.)

Of course, if most interesting stories are only submitted because of the return links, then that won't work at all. Does anybody know whether this is the case?

Re:Nofollow that fellow

[wrp103]

I wouldn't drop it, but I would hold onto it for a while. I would hope that if it is a good story, somebody else would submit it shortly.

I must admit I wondered about story submissions. At one point, I submitted a bunch of stories only to have them all rejected. In some cases, the story appeared eventually, but by somebody else. I just assumed that I wasn't fast enough, or that the editors tended to look at submissions from certain people first.

Thanks for the description of the process. More articles like this might help help reduce the off-topic rants.

There is an issue here you didn't address.

[brunes69]

If ScuttleMonkey does not know Beatles-Beatles, then why is he almost the only one who has ever posted his stories?

I have seen many, many, many submissions by Beatles-Beatles. I can't remember even one of them being posted by someone other than ScuttleMonkey. If it was simply a matter of Beatles-Beatles submitting a lot of stories, which you seem to infer, then they would be spread out among a number of editors, not all of which would be ScuttleMonkey.

This seems to poke a huge hole in your reply. There is something else going on here.

There are several ways you can combat this. WHy not change it so two edtiors need to approve a story instead of just one? Or, why not only have one external link / day for submitters? Then they wouldn't spam the queue so much.

As for your parent commect - the issue is not soley whether or not the user would enjoy the link. There is an issue of journailistic integrity here. Just because a story is facinating does not always mean a journalist should feel comfortable reporting on it. In the same way, just because a link is good does not mean you should be posting it.

If someone submitted a very interesting story, but their referrer link pointed at a child porn site, would you still post it?

Re:There is an issue here you didn't address.

[Xandu]

It's possible that **BeatlesBeatles free time (to spend submitting slashdot stories) and ScuttleMonkey's shift at manning the slashdot submission bin happen to line up. (I couldn't really check, as I don't know what **BeatlesBeatles uid/exact username is)

Re:Maybe I'm new around here...

[Bonker]

Slashdot could do with a fair bit of editorial rearrangement for new products or services.

Make a 'new products' category to stick all those 'This is cool, but it sounds like Logitech paid for the ad' stories. Similar for new services. If a company is cool or scary enough to rate its own story section on slashdot, then you can post under those categories... Like for google. Otherwise, let users filter them out.

Mod Article Down (-1 Troll) :)

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps you should start a feedback score for an article

E.g.

Dupe
Advert
Biased
Boring

People who submit too many times will have a lower score and a past history editors can look up.

Submitters don't need a link back

[Alioth]

Let's look at the supply and demand: apparently only 1 in 20 submissions ever makes it. Therefore, there is a massive oversupply, and it's quite clear that people don't need a link back to their website to be encouraged to submit stories to Slashdot.

Editors shouldn't just selectively remove link backs to a submitter's website - they should not put a link to the submitter at all, except maybe to the user's Slashdot user page (not journal). Perhaps I could understand the need to encourage people to submit stores if there were so few that the queue was almost empty, and every submission had to be posted - but this is clearly not the case.

Finally, I don't think people would have noticed * * Beatles-Beatles if his name wasn't so prominent, for example, if his username had been Johndoe or something else inconspicuous. Same goes for Roland Piquepaille who also has a prominent and eyecatching name that you'll remember the second time you see it - so some of the whole * * Beatles-Beatles controversy and Roland Piquepaille controversy is stirred up merely because their names stick in the mind.

Moderators are key

[teklob]

I don't think there is any be-all end-all solution to this problem other than dedicated moderators (and meta-moderators.) People need to be modded off topic if they are. Perhaps there could be some sort of penalty for bad moderation? ie. if 4 people mod a comment +1 Insightful, somebody mods it -1 flamebait, and then someone else mods it +1 insightful, the person who modded it 'against the grain' could be punnished by somehow being less likely to get mod points again. Maybe there could be some sort of 'smart' auto meta-moderation. just a few thoughts, too early in the morning bored at work...

Time zones?

[meringuoid]

It may be the case that at whatever time people in Roland's timezone are up and about, Timothy is on submissions duty, and when **BB's up and busy with his daily flood of submissions happens to be ScuttleMonkey's shift.

Anyone have statistics on the times of day at which R.P. and **BB stories turn up?

I've been wanting to ask this for a year

[wiredog]

But never got around to it. Why are some stories accepted, but never posted?

For example: "Global Trends in 2020 09:19 AM January 24th, 2005 Accepted"

Accepted, but never posted. Editor just forgot to post it? <TinfoilHat>Killed after $someone complained?</TinfoilHat> OTBE'd? A bug?

Limit...

[Shads]

... number of submissions. Shrug, if someone is sending 20 a day they need shot. Limit people to 1 submission a day so they're forced to submit only their best rather than taking the shotgun approach.

Re:Nofollow that fellow

[ergo98]

Toss it. The reason those submitters earn their reputation is because you haven't killed his or her stories before. You need some kind of editorial policy where all your editors share the same basic guidelines for what to approve and what not to, and this should include a corpus of "known troublemakers".

The reason those submitters earn their "reputation" is for one single reason: jealousy. Many of those people bitching and griping and complaining have been embittered by story rejection after story rejection (trying, unsuccessfully, to whore their own link), so now it pisses them off seeing someone having success at it.

No matter what way you cut it, that's a very unpleasant human trait, and it's really sad that it devolved to the point that these people now feel entitled to openly display it. Just get over it and submit better submissions in a more timely manner (as an aside - Slashdot should post the submitted time on stories. Most "Why not my submission?" complaints are likely the result of people getting beat out by someone earlier, but the posting delay gives them the illusion that someone after them was selected. I had a much better Sony Reader submission that was rejected...don't they like me?).

Of course there is the matter of actual submission quality - Roland's stories should have been rejected purely because his links sucked: It has nothing to do with the fact that it's Roland, or even if he had 100 stories in a row posted, but that he content ripped to his blog. Is it really that hard for the Slashdot crew to follow links and can the crummy submissions?

As for the link on the submitter - that is a marginal form of "payment". Indeed, before nofollow was added on discussions, I would say that PageRank was a pretty good motivation for a lot of users to engage in discussions, and to actually put the time in crafting karma-earning posts. I'm not talking about karma whoring, but rather it was a tiny motivation that overcame a lot of the hassles and annoyances of participating here. Personally I think Slashdot should take the "pagerank payment" concept further, posting a "best rank" per month, though of course they couldn't do that because it'd drive the jealous folks nuts.

Dear God, Rob! What _WERE_ you thinking?!

[Slartibartfast]

Sheesh. Here you dare to submit your own story, which asks legitimate questions, and even asks for feedback. The hubris!

You're lucky that the feedback has (as far as I read) thus far only accused you of

- Cronyism
- Faking user identities
- Taking kickbacks for posting stories
- General stupidity.

OKAY, FOLKS. TIME TO WAKE UP.

Let's take 'em, here:
Cronyism/faking poster names. IF ROB WANTED TO POST FAKE USERNAMES, DON'T YOU THINK HE MIGHT TRY TO COVER HIS TRACKS A LITTLE BETTER? Occam's razor kinda dictates that this Beatles Beatles guy is legit, 'cause Rob could cough up as many accounts as he wanted if here were attempting to run a propaganda site.

Kickbacks for stories. Ummmm... duh. Let's face it: we read Slashdot (or, at least, *I* read Slashdot -- and have for years; check my user number) because we enjoy the stories, and the commentary. If we EVER found ANY conclusive evidence that Rob was taking kickbacks from advertisers, I think it would be safe to say the site would be abandoned wholesale. Instead, just like UFO abduction stories, people love to discuss potential cabals and conspiracies, but offer no proof whatsoever. PUT UP OR SHUT UP.

General stupidity. Okay, maybe this one's valid, maybe it isn't. But, akin to Howard Stern's take on similar situations, IF YOU DON'T LIKE IT, STOP READING. I can think of no better vote. No, you DON'T own the site. Rob does. (Or the media conglomarate. Not sure. Doesn't matter.) But we, the users, in a very real sense do dictate the site's future. If we stopped reading, it would go away. So, if you're so pissed, STOP READING. If you think the stories that are posted are stupid, STOP READING. There are plenty of other sites that are spawned in Slashdot's image, that offer different editorial direction and/or mechanisms. Feel free to avail yourselves of them. And, while we're at it, if it's not to the point where you want to wholesale abandon the site, you can -- gasp -- get mod points to change the feel of a story's discussion. Use 'em.

In the meantime, I think Rob and the crew -- with the odd exception (see: magnetic longevity rings) -- try hard, and succeed most of the time. Certainly enough that Slasdhot's one of the sites I refresh the most. I, personally, will continue reading, as long as CmdrTaco and Hemos are associated with the site. They ain't perfect, but they do a damn good job, and have done it long enough and well enough to show it ain't a fluke.

Party on Way^H^H^H^H Rob.
Party on Hemos.

Comment Quality

[Godeke]

I have been around here for a while and over time I have had to boost the comment threshold quite a bit to drown out the whiners and trolls. However, reading at a high threshold gives a peaceful and interesting view of the comments. So much so, I was *unaware* of this "problem".

The moderation system is doing the job it was meant to do: whiners and trolls get left at the bottom and content actually rises to the higher levels where I see it. Some days I feel like I'm sponging off those who have mod points, but I mysteriously lost my mod abilities years ago, so there isn't much I can do about that.

I *literally* don't see the problem. Those who read at lower levels may, but I thought that was the point behind making that choice. I don't want to see whiners and trolls, they do. While you might think that meta stories are going to help get recommendations, the reality is you will get nothing but the same whines and trolls you were trying to avoid... promoted to "5". Oh, yay.

Pay attention to repeated suggestions

[C10H14N2]

Allow modding of both stories and submitters, not just content. Between the rotating mod points and meta-modding, most of these problems will quickly resolve themselves, including people bitching that it is the staff's fault. So, if a story is out for ten minutes and is quickly modded "-2 Slashverdisement" or "-5 Dupe," people who don't want to see that crap, well, won't. Most people who have made this suggestion have done so half-jokingly, but really, why the hell not?

Re:It's all about the PageRank

[inverselimit]

Consider the following:
1. Google employees read slashdot
2. Google has a serious search engine couterintelligence team staffed by non-idiots
and conclude that they have probably already implemented ignoring the link-to-posters-crap-website in slashdot posts. I seriously doubt it makes it into pagerank.

Ditch stories where its directly from site owner.

[Shivetya]

The number of times you have run hardware/pc-tech stories where the submitter is the owner of the site linked is what gets me.

Granted some will then submit anonymous but its far better than seeing @nnnnn.net being the same address as the story and then getting bombared with ads.

Re:Nofollow that fellow

[baadger]

I've been visiting Slashdot for about 3 years now and _I didn't know_ the submitter username linked to a page of their choosing until just now. I always assumed they were links to the submitters user profile and thus never clicked or even hovered my rodent over them.

I'm not sure if i'm making a point here, perhaps that submitter link just isn't very significant?

troublemaker remediation?

[MECC]

If you're going to classify someone as a 'troublemaker', and reject a submissions based on that, you really should provide a remediation process, and some kind of definition of what kinds of things get you labeled as trouble, so there's a clear picture of how to avoid landing in the don't-bother-to-contribute bin. Otherwise, the general openness of discussions on /. is taken down a step. BTW, that's not necessarily a bad thing, less openness. Its just your choice, as to whether or not to label someone trouble and reject submissions based on that, and open that can of worms. I guess its the lesser of two evils, really.

Re:Nofollow that fellow

[Golias]

Plus, if the editors didn't have to sift through hundreds of scattershot submissions from story spammers, maybe they would have a little more time to... I don't know, maybe run a spellcheck once in a while?

Taco's above message pretty much told would-be spammers exactly how to make money off slashdot: Comb Google News and the Drudge Report for stories, and submit every last one which is even marginally geek related. Sooner or later, they'll take some of them, or even start relying on you. Then watch the page hits roll in.

The fact that such submitters are not sent directly to /dev/null looks to me more like apathy about this problem than really, really wanting to run a particular story.

This story is about me.

[zerocool^]

Specifically, the comment that I posted here.

I just wanted everyone to read the email that I just sent rob:

----begin email----

To: Rob's email
Subject: I'm Zerocool^, I pissed you off, and I owe you an apology.

Body:

Rob:

First, I want to say that I've always been a fan of you and slashdot and Jeff. I remember listening to Geeks In Space and thinking that it's kind of a little window on the brains behind the machine - I remember in particular you blasting Amazon for 1-click shopping, saing "Someone give me 5 minutes and a secure socket layer credit card processor, and I can write that for you". It made me, an infant slashdotter at the time, feel connected. Which is all just me saying there is no personal vendetta against you, jeff, or slashdot in general.

The **B-B post (http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=173486&cid=14 433380) was pretty much done because I can count on my Karma and my zoo.pl fans to keep it above the din of the GNAA trolls - whereas most people who bitch about ScuttleMonkey and Beatles-Beatles either can barely speak english, have an average karma of somewhere around -6, or both. It was something that needed to be said, visibly, and I am as good a guy to say it as any.

I want to say now that the posted story on slashdot (http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/01/10/14402 40&tid=124) is *Exactly* the response I'd hoped for. I'm not asking for sweeping reforms, all I'm asking is for the Admins to acknowledge that there is a concern from readers. Bitchslapping threads -1/Offtopic only fuels conspiracy theories, and telling readership "you're imagining things" (when, for example, submitted/greenlit stories on BB's profile now say "An anonymous reader writes to tell us..." - there's no imagining that kind of revisioning after the fact) is insulting. Creating a top-level greenlit post about this issue is precisely what needed to be done - because for starters, now no posts are Offtopic.

My point about journalistic integrity boils down to this: sometimes it's appropriate to avoid even the appearance of impropriety in order to make sure your readers are satisfied with the quality of your work. If, for instance, there is nothing between ScuttleMonkey and B-B, why then is every greenlit by B-B posted by ScuttleMonkey? Surely even if B-B spams the submissions bin with 10 stories a day, logically, timothy, Pater, or whoever else would post one or two of them. That is the appearance of impropriety, *even if nothing is actually going on*. The solution is simple: Tell SM to not post B-B links. If the links are good, then other editors will post them. If I saw one B-B post greenlit by someone other than ScuttleMonkey, it would go a LOOOONG way towards killing the rumors.

That's all. Feel free to write me back at XXXX@cs.vt.edu. In fact, if you want to talk to me over the phone, you can hit me up at XXX-XXX-XXXX. I promise to keep an open mind towards any reply you may have. Also, I plan on posting this email in the above mentioned thread. And I apologize for hijacking that story on the wobbly Milky Way; but let's be honest - it was pretty boring.

Thanks for reading.

~Will Dunn

And that's what I believe - I'm thrilled that this story has been posted - It's exactly the response that I've wanted for a while now. It's not Jamie chiming in with "Nuh-uh!!!1", and it's not a bitchslap of comments off-topic (which does fuel conspiracy theories). It's fantastic.

If rob allows, or if the contents aren't private, I'll post any reply email I get from him; but, I will respect his privacy in communication if he does write me back and asks me to do so.

~Will

My 2p : ignore the moaners

[DrSkwid]

/.'s job is to pick stories that provoke discussion

it's raw material is : submissions & comments

if you can find a away to moneterize your /. postings, you go for it.

nofollow in comments is fair enough way to reduce spam

I'm sure once your submission queue is a more hassle you'll add nofollow to them too

good luck

Re:Nofollow that fellow

[CastrTroy]

Maybe we could moderate entire articles. Maybe it would take two mod points to mod an article, or once in a while, less often then you got post moderating points you could get article moderating points. There's always going to be articles that slip through. Dupes are another thing. Maybe if enough article moderators call something a dupe, it should just be marked as such, so that we don't even have to bother seeing them. Same goes for stories that we find not interesting, or funny. Maybe I feel only like reading funny articles today, and so, people should be able to mod the entire story as such. I think moderating stories would go a long way to help people weed out the stuff they don't want to see. And make the job a little easy on the editors, who always get blamed for everything that gets posted that shouldn't be.

Re:It's all about the PageRank

[yakovlev]

I agree. The correct thing to do is not have slashdot used to increase pagerank, only to increase exposure. Tag those user site links as nofollow. If the target site is good, people will learn about it and link to it as a result of it being on slashdot. If the site is link farming, being on slashdot will not improve the pagerank. This makes story submission legitimate advertising for legitimate sites, but not for link farms.

Then again, there's something to be said for pagerank as a form of payment, but I'm not sure how I feel about that one.

Re:Nofollow that fellow

[Chosen Reject]

The issue is not that the submitter stands to get money. The issue is that when a submitter stands to get money, the community, regardless of the quality of the submission, only wants to talk about the submitter. Perhaps the problem is jealousy on the community's part. If the story is good so what if the submitter made a nickel from it. It didn't come out of your pocket so why are you whining. I say if a good story comes a long and no one else submits a better version of it, or one at all, then publish it regardless of the personal gain of the submitter.

For example, if some company comes up with a really cool new gadget that everyone here would be interested but nobody else knows about it, would you get upset if they submitted a story about it? If AMD was the submitter for the release of their FX-60 CPU and linked to their site in addition to extremetech's benchmarks, would that be unacceptable? I would hope not. At least not if someone else didn't submit at least as good a submission.

Re:No more popular submitters please

[Risen888]

Okay, that's pretty good stuff. Now, how does that system (which I like, don't get me wrong) guard against one person with twenty usernames?

Re:Nofollow that fellow

[John Harrison]

I suggested months ago to Taco that he keep a database of abusive submitters and auto reject them. It would save them time and keep the occasional nutjob post from getting through. Taco told me it was not possible. At least he was kind enough to respond.

I also think that anything that links back to your own site should raise some red flags of abuse. Maybe limit such submitters to one story per month to stem the torrent. It is only the last few months that people are gaming the system this way, which indicates to me that the system wasn't built for this and that it needs an update.

Re: Benefit is part of a community

[Blink Tag]

Altruism sounds nice, but is difficult to sustain. We spend those few hours daily (monthly?) away from our computer screens in honest-to-goodness real-life communities.

Do you work entirely for the public good? Or if in the off chance you do collect a salary to pay for little things like rent or a mortgage, do you give all of the remainder back? Few do, but our communities are successfull nevertheless.

A good community is able to provide balanced rewards for productive involvement--and that's what this discussion is about.

Re:Do what Groklaw does

[CmdrTaco]

This is specifically one of the things that we want the new mod system to deal with. Essentially this is a matter of self-tagging your comment. "I know i am offtopic. I'll say so". It would go a long ways towards keeping articles on topic.

Re:Nofollow that fellow

[sootman]

>If you become a popular submitter it is because you submit relevant stories.

Not entirely true. It could be because you submit tons and tons of stories. Countless times in these threads we see posts saying "I submitted this story and it was rejected, here's a link to my writeup which has more/better/clearer/less biased info" and the alternate writeup is indeed better, and usually sooner. Getting a story onto slashdot requires exactly one thing: appearing interesting, yes, but the key is it has to appear interesting to the editor who happens to see it in the queue. Submitting tons of stories increases these chances.

Submitting stories to Slashdot is a numbers game. It is *not* the case that the first or best submission gets accepted, even when it's staggeringly on-topic. The 'Editorial' page of this site's FAQ lists Taco's favorite subjects: "Linux, Legos, Penguins, Sci (both real and fiction)." I submitted a story about a guy who created Star Wars scenes with Lego. Can't get much more on-topic than that. It was rejected. Later that week, someone else's submission of the same site was accepted. The stories that get onto Slashdot depend on exactly one thing: the editor who reads the submission. So: on topic or not, good or bad, if you submit zillions of stories to Slashdot--even if they have mediocre writeups--you'll become a popular submitter. (And sites like Reddit and Digg make finding interesting stories even easier. You could proabably set up a bot to scrape those sites, submit them as stories, and have a high amount of success.) And of course, posting lots of stories probably means you will have mediocre writeups. Great: just what slashdot needs: a system that rewards mediocrity.

If I didn't have two jobs I'd start submitting stories like mad and document how many got posted just to prove this but I don't have the time. But any longtime slashdotter (or the site admins themselves) can tell you the same.

And Taco: I love the site, I think you've done a great thing here, but it turns my stomach to hear you talk about the serious editorial duties you perform when you won't even do 2 quick google searches on each story: one to make sure it isn't a dupe and one to see if the article is totally bogus--a scam, a hoax, factually incorrect, etc. (There was a hoax here a week or two ago, which was already known to be a hoax by the time slashdot picked it up. The hoaxness was mentioned in comments and in a slashback a few days later, but still--it should have never made it onto the front page.)

Also: "Both use their return link to link a web page which is, in my opinion, pretty worthless." Um, hello? You've not heard of Google, page rank, and the uncountable fortunes that await someone with a high google score? Please. You *know* this is a hugely popular site. You *know* the power of it, and google's. Leaving the combined power of these two sites in the hands of anyone with scads of free time is silly.

Here's my take: I don't like 'nofollow' in blogs as a general rule. Lots of good stuff does show up in google because blogs mention it or it shows up in the comments. Slashdot comment spam stays out of google beacause google browses at +1, IIRC, and I think google also sees slashdot without .sig's. That gets rid of a lot of chaff and leaves us with a lot of wheat. So for the submitters: You can give them the gift of visits. You *dont'* have to give them the gift of abusing PageRank. But don't make it a special case, make it a rule--put 'nofollow' into ALL submitter's personal URLs.

Modding offtopic down, or ontopic up?

[artifex2004]

Taco, your suggestion that we mod offtopic comments down is troubling, in that it runs contrary to what I believe about the way Slashdot works, or should work:

Everything starts at the same level, subject to optional bonuses we can choose, but probably most of of us actually read at 2 or higher these days -- except when modding. I would think the best use of the limited modpoints we have is to mod the ontopic, useful comments up to the point where we all see them, rather than push the lame stuff further into oblivion. There's plenty of time to correct poor judgement calls in voting, once we get to the point of metamoderation. But that's sometimes days or even weeks away, when the discussion in question is cold, and no longer benefits from improperly downvoted posts recovering their standing. I'd rather see a few comments not of interest to me, than few comments of interest to me, which is what happens when we subtract from, rather than add to, the pool of visible comments.

As part of adding, sometimes we'll see points come up that are only mildly related, but worthy of note. But tangents are a major point of the spark of discussion created by the topic even being set before us, aren't they? Tangents are where we leave the space we all know and expect, and start to learn things, perhaps unexpectedly. Mindful of this, people are certainly less afraid to bring tangential information to the table if they think they might be rewarded for it, rather than punished.

I think we have a broader, more comprehensive discussion when interesting points are pulled up, rather than when the crap is pushed further down. As an editor, you have unlimited points to get rid of the worst offenses anyway. Let us concentrate on digging for the gems, please.

Drop Credentials, provide submission feedback

[MidKnight]

Now the motivation for getting a Slashdot story accepted ... is a return link to the website of your choosing. Your creds. Your 'Reward' for sharing a cool URL with a half a million Slashdot readers.

Here's my take: the 'creds' noted above are probably the motivation for the 'problem' user. One of the comments above mentions that BeatlesBeatles has submitted on average 4.5 stories a day since September. Apparently the return link is important to him/her, sure.

But for your average Slashdot reader who occassionally submits stories, I doubt that link is the real motivation at all. I've had stories accepted over the years, and typically my motivation is wanting to see what other people like me (i.e Slashdot readers) think about it. In other words, my motivation for story submission is the potential for generating an interesting discussion.

So part of my solution would be, yes, get rid of the credentials link. This has its own set of problems, but it would solve the initial one we're discussing. You might then lose some of the volume of links submitted, and get stuck with a bunch of 'virgin' story submitters who just don't know how to submit a good story.

If you're really ambitious, one possible solution to solve the 'virgin submitter' problem might be to provide better submission feedback. "This link is good, but please run a friggin' spellchecker." Or "We're not posting a link directly to your blog; please try again." Possibly putting a submission into a 'Draft' state, then waiting for the user to improve it.

Yeah, this would be potentially a lot more work for the editors, but hey TANSTAAFL. The best way to solve this problem is, in my opinion, to do all that you can to help the casual Slashdot reader to submit a good story.

--Mid

Nofollow everything

[m50d]

I mean it, everything. Every single link on the site. We don't owe google anything, we don't need to help them to get their results, and they lead to spammers messing up our site. So, not to put too fine a point on it, fuck them.

Re:Nofollow that fellow

[Atzanteol]

Hear hear. I actually haven't had a problem with *any* of the BeatlesBeatles stories. Most are interesting, and are very much on topic. The thing that *pisses me off* is the people who post large threads to that story about how they hate BeatlesBeatles.

What I would *love* is a way to colapse or skip entire threads. Or perhaps let an off-topic moderation 'trickle down' to replies to that post (how can they be anything *but* off topic if replying to an off-topic post?).

Re:Nofollow that fellow

[Overly Critical Guy]

Maybe we could moderate entire articles.

Yeah, it sure would be cool if there was a site that let you do that.

Editing problems.

[AntEater]

At least part of the problem, as I see it, is that the lack of editing on the part of the editors leads to the impression that these "problem" submitters just get their stories posted with little question and that other submissions are getting ignored. I'm not going to name any specific editors but there is a serious problem here. There are spelling and grammar errors in the article summaries that wouldn't pass 5th grade English and these occur with amazing consistency. On top of the lack of basic English, there is the problem that duplicates have become quite commonplace on the site. An editor is supposed to actually do something, not just copy/paste an article from a favored submitter and then add an additional poorly structured statement or question to enhance the posting controversey. These editing problems create the feeling that the actual article review and posting process is performed in a shoddy manner. This leaves a wide open opportunity for people to question the motives behind the posted stories.

Personally, I couldn't care less if Roland or whoever gets an article posted every day, as long as the quality of the site and stories remains high. You've had a great thing going here for several years now, I hope you continue the good work and improve the site where appropriate.

Anyways, that's just my opionion.

How about ...

[Rip!ey]

How about providing each /. user with the means to remove submitter information from the head of any subsequent stories from a given submitter. Replace it with Anonymous Coward, or Cowboy Neals Pet Goat, or something ... It might help prevent negative comments about such a submitter reaching the critical mass required to "swamp out the real discussion."

This just doesn't jive

[Chris Burke]

Again, that works in theory. But not always in reality.

the spammer is taking the time to submit many many stories to get a couple through. The casual user only submits the stories he thinks are the absolute best. If we pick a dozen stories, they can't all be the very very best. There will be a few stories that are not as great... and a few that simply are of interest to a different subset of readers. A spammer submits 10... if i order them in terms of how widely known they are, #1-5 are submitted 20-30 times... but number 8 and 9 maybe only once or twice.

Okay, so you're saying that when the only person to submit an interesting yet slightly obscure story is a queue spammer, that queue spammer is going to get their submission posted. This makes sense except...

The queue spammers are getting their submissions accepted on stories that are not obscure, when there are 20-30 submissions, and a casual perusal of the comments shows half a dozen irritated submitters who had at least comparable if not plainly superior submissions on the same story which were rejected. Yet the queue spammer not only wins, but wins several times in a row. Clearly there is more going on here, and your explanation sounds more like "theory" than "reality".

I'm not going to claim that the spammers are being deliberately picked or given preference due to some unknown deal. I am going to claim that, consciously or not, certain submitters are being accepted more readily than others irrespective of the relative merits of the submissions, and I don't think this claim lacks ample support. At the very least, the fact that a story that links to a blog is frequently picked over a similarly well-worded submission with links to primary sources shows that the system is not working even for those most popular stories.

I think part of the problem here (meaning this very story) is that the problem is not you, yet you have to come to defend the editorial process as you exercise it. Frankly, it was the moment /. editorial staff expanded beyond you and Hemos that /. started to noticeably dive in quality. I don't know what the answer is, I don't know what the relationship between editors is. You might try suggesting they stop going with the easy, safe submissions of known submitters versus others that include better links and equal if not better text.

I don't read comments

[Anonymous Coward]

Hiya CmdrTaco,

Thank you for hard work on Slashdot. You and your co-editors set the tone of Slashdot, and while it's a mixed bag, myself and many others find it enjoyable and often brilliant. But like many other users, I simply don't read comments. I've tried. When Ricochet's death was announced, I posted technical information on the free origins of its protocol, how to unlock it from the Ricochet (brand) network, and the command set of the device. That factual post was drowned out in a sea of opinions not just in volume but in moderation as well. That's okay. The fatal implication is that other factual replies by other people suffer the same fate. I'm now firmly of the opinion that any factual content worth while makes it as a headline and the comments section is skipped. This reply is an opinion. As such, it's devoid of substance. The short of it -- probably most of your readers are just like me and never noticed that "Beatles Beatles" submits a lot of stuff or has a pointless home page; we enjoy Slashdot even though the comments are run by hoardes of idiots; nits aside, the editors do good work.

Regards,
-scott

Re:Nofollow that fellow

[phookz]

If personal benefit is really the problem, then maybe all posts should be anonymous? Seriously, isn't getting credit for the post one of the big benefits?

If you disagree with my statement, but instead think that personal benefit is still the problem (as in the benefit of having a link to your own page), then your defining what personal benefit means to you. I submit that not everyone has the same goals.

This is my first post with a new account to /. - I've been lurking for a long time, and I find the articles and discussions (mostly) relevant and interesting. That being said, I don't usually RTFA, unless it is something very interesting. I find the information posted from the community to usually be of more benefit, and often it has better links to information about the topic of discussion.

I agree with other posters, and with CmdrTaco, that the problem is the OT discussion. If someone takes the time to post an article, and they want to get a link to their (worthless, off-topic, whatever) site, that is their benefit and kudos for posting an interesting link. Cencorship of the link because they are a 'problem' user is a big mistake, IMO. It's one thing to moderate posts based on the content; relevance, dupes, etc. It's another to not post it because you don't like the submitter, for whatever reason. That includes waiting for someone else to submit the same topic. That seems wholly unfair to me.

Re:Nofollow that fellow

[RemovableBait]

On the subject of Personal Benefit, I agree that this is largely the problem with the Slashdot submission system. Everything would function just fine IMO if all submitters had their right to put a return link in the article revoked. Surely, with the design of Slashdot, the "reward" for posting good stories is the positive karma and recognition as a 'good guy' right? I mean, thats what should be there to stop people raking Google News and posting anything and everything, as there'd be so many rejected stories.

Karma, the way I understand it, (and the ability to should louder than others that goes with good karma) is is the reward for being a good guy, an insightful poster, and a good submitter.

Take away the referral link for all submitters and suddenly the motivation for these spammers disappears (they don't get a link, therefore no ad revenue). We'll find the number of spammers drop, and the number of general good posters (and good submissions) will increase. The lifeblood of Slashdot is the users who want to share interesting information with others. Remove the motivation for spammers and /. becomes a hell of a lot more useful and readable to the rest of us.

RE: modding stories

[Jim Hall]

I second this idea. Let me build on that- assuming a moderator can assign points to story submissions similarly to how you assign points to comments, the points range for stories could be fairly limited: -1 to +1 (stories start at 0.) As the parent poster suggests, it could take more than 1 mod point to mod a story ... or maybe only subscribers could mod stories, and it takes a full 5 points to do it.

I know this would require big changes in slashcode, but I'd actually buy a subscription to Slashdot if I knew I could browse stories at +1.

Re:Don't repeat Kuro5hin's mistakes.

[irix]

Amen to this! Please, please - for those of you who weren't around to watch K5's slide from great to completely horrible, listen to Inoshiro. User moderated content isn't going to work, unless it is a combination of user moderation and and editor selection. I don't want content selected by the average of a cross-section of hundreds of thousands of people.

Re:Nofollow that fellow

[c4ffeine]

Isn't there greasemonkey script to allow you to collapse an entire thread? Too lazy to look for it, but I could have sworn it was one of the first out there.

Re:strip down the attribution process

[SolemnDragon]

That's valid. It's good that you are considering these things, even if nothing changes as a result.

The end result is probably a compromise between what you feel is slashdot, and what works when used by thousands, and it ought to trend more towards what you intend than what we ask for. After all, we did start visiting it exactly as it was, and continue visiting with it exactly as it is. Actions are vastly louder than words.

(For what it's worth, i like the green colour. It's the prettiest of all of the news aggregation sites that i'm addicted to.)

For me, the defining-element cluster is skewed more towards the journal circle, and the community, than the front page.

Don't get me wrong, i still read the front page- but it's the people who have kept me here. For all of the trolls and the jerks, there are a lot of people who post genuinely useful stuff. I don't come here to hear it first, i come here to hear it in depth. I come here when i've already read most of the news i'll read for the day. Sometimes that community conversation doesn't work as well, but sometimes it offers a lot more background and related information than a news site could. It depends on the day. When it does, it's worth the days that it doesn't.

THAT is a defining element of slashdot for me.

Re:Nofollow that fellow

[drinkypoo]

I haven't had a story stay in the queue for more than 8 hours. Ever. (only one has been accepted, and it ended up as part of slashback. what a ripoff.) Most of the submissions I'm talking about were submitted at least a day earlier, some of them several days.

Re:Nofollow that fellow

[sootman]

Comments.pl shows individual comments like this: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=173521&cid=144 38389 or lets you reply to them (like the one I'm typing in now) but articles, with comments, is what google sees when it visits article.pl.

The reason google browses at +1 is because it sees what any non-logged-in user would see. Telling it to ignore comments.pl keeps it from doing redundant work. Google will see this story with a few hundred comments at article.pl; it doesn't need to re-index each comment's ``comments.pl'' page. Also, google will follow links but it won't click form buttons--so, it can't reply, change its threshold, etc.

Re:Don't repeat Kuro5hin's mistakes.

[fiftyfly]

Oh you know i tried to read digg for a few days regulary. Let me tell you, 99% of the content here is already crap. You can tell that most digg users are 14 years old or something from what is posted and popular. And the comments... the comments are worse than what you would find if you could browse slashdot with only 0ed posts, maybe with less spam and f1rst psot, but even less interesting than that

The overwhelming percentage of the content posted @ /. consists of the comments - it's what /. is for. The comments @ digg are truly horrible but, and this is a fairly large but, most of the links that are popular @ digg and make the /. front page are visible @ digg much much earlier. If anything digg is a little like CNN (lotsa crap but it comes fast and if anything important happens it'll prob at least make the ticker even if the signal:noise ratio is low) and /. has become a bit more like a magazine.

I don't think the two compete. I'm pretty sure they shouldn't. I certainly follow digg via rss (and rarely bother with the comments at all) and browse /. @ +4

Re:Nofollow that fellow

[LWATCDR]

One thing that might help is to have a field for the submit URL. It would be pretty easy to have the code check for dups and to group the submissions by URL. If you have 8 submissions for one URL the editor could then pick the one that he thinks is best or combine them.