Slashdot Index Code Update

For years now Slashdot has posted what we call "Sectional Content". That is to say, stories that we think are good, but since we try to keep the Slashdot Main Page to around 15 stories per day, some stuff just gets put into the sections. This content is mostly lost to readers who simply don't know it exists. Today we're deploying new code to help you find that content (and alternatively, to disable it).

One of the most common questions I get is simply "What does the '2 More' mean in the left side menu?" To me it's obvious: it means there are 2 more stories on say, apple.slashdot.org than you have seen on slashdot.org. This is because Slashdot probably already had 15 stories today, and this particular story is only of interest to users who explicitly chose to view Apple stories.

Those little 'N More' snippets clutter up the left hand menu, and confuse people. Our power users know that they can suck all the sectional content into the main page, but very few users actually bother with that kind of customization. And just as important, we have a lot of content that is simply lost because most of you never knew it was there in the first place.

What you'll see now is the interleaving of sectional content with main page content. These articles are displayed in a very abbreviated format, amidst the other stories. This is content we've been posting on Slashdot for years, but most users never knew. I'm pleased with the design of the whole thing. I think it looks really nice and doesn't clutter up the page.

Of course some users will always disagree with me, and for them there are now a plethora of user configurable options. Essentially, each section has a range of options ranging from "All" (Meaning, every story is displayed in full text) to "None" (Meaning I really really really never want to see anything about Apple really no seriously I'm not kidding!)

These options are available on the left hand menu by simply clicking the 'Sections' menu entry. A fancy little window will open with various tools for you do play with allowing you to choose what content on Slashdot you want to read... and perhaps more importantly, to disable the content you don't. The default view of Slashdot has slightly changed today, but you can set your preferences back to make the site look like it did before too.

We are keen on making sure that this works for as many browser platforms as we can. We've tested it on the platforms used by around 96% of you. (that is to say, Internet Explorer, Safari, Firefox, under Windows, Mac, and Linux) and it works on those platforms. However if your platform doesn't work, you can still change the settings from the user preference page (click the word 'Preferences' on the left hand menu if you are logged in. If your browser doesn't support javascript, clicking the 'Sections' menu item on the left hand menu should take you there.).

We fully expect there to be some bugs with this, so please feel free to contact us... preferably by submitting a bug report to our sourceforge project tracker. We hope to have any major kinks worked out of the system in the next few days, so just hang in there.

All in all I am very pleased with this. This solves a number of long standing problems on Slashdot: That is to say sectional content getting "Lost" in the shuffle, the left hand menu being confusing, and the user preferences to twiddle these settings being buried so deep in the UI that nobody would bother changing them.

Best of all, if any of this bugs you, it takes just seconds to disable this stuff. In fact, it would probably take less time to fix it then to post a comment complaining... not that that will stop some of you ;)

update many people have commented on the design of the abbreviated story. Many make great points about how they visually could be interpreted as being "Footnotes" or "Related" somehow to the content above them. Just a reminder, the site is all nicely CSSified now... modifiy the CSS send it our way. If someone creates a design that works better, we'll use it! We're not married to what we have. Personally I wanted the grey curve on the bottom right side, but we thought we'd need an extra DIV to get it right, so this was the compromise.

updated again the reason we don't update the index 'on the fly' is because it is possible for you to get content that we don't actually have yet. We don't have a full ajax engine yet- so if you made an abbreviated article be a full text article, we'd have missing fields. When we have a real dynamic engine for loading the content, doing it on the fly will be trivial. Today I think it would just look crappy.

Comments

Very nice - but has some rough edges currently

[DeadSea]

Great idea. I have used the front page customization to turn off the politics section bring extra stories from sections into my front page. This gives me even more control, so I like it.

There needs to be a bit more work to get the rough edges that I see out:

1. My personal RSS feed no longer matches my home page. I see "Officer's Group Calls for Ban On 25 To Life" even though it is hidden on my home page
2. RSS feeds should have no description for the stubby version of the story. Currently I'm seeing a full description even for those stories that have only a title on my home page.
3. Stub stories in the mysterious future on my home page have a annoying green top 3 or so pixels.

Re:Very nice - but has some rough edges currently

[ari_j]

I don't like the way they display. It makes them look like they are part of the story listed above them. Maybe a line with "In other news..." and a rounded upper-left corner would help. Or just the rounded upper-left corner. But right now, they look like footnotes to the story above them.

Re:Very nice - but has some rough edges currently

[mspohr]

I agree that they look like they should be part of the story above. They seem to be just randomly placed on the page... it's confusing.

Why not put them together in a separate section at the top or bottom of the page and organize them better?

Re:Very nice - but has some rough edges currently

[networkBoy]

Curve the upper left corner as well as the lower left. That makes them look all their own. Takes care of the looks like a footnote problem nicely.

Personally, I love the interleaving lesser stories with the main page.
1.75 thumbs up (reserving the .25 for the rounded top corners).
-nB

Re:Very nice - but has some rough edges currently

[takeya]

This is NOT going to degrade into a digg argument.

We can peacefully coexist. 2 types of news for two crowds.

Awesome feature

[metlin]

This is a really, really neat feature.

I've always felt that having to browse separate sections of Slashdot was a little painful, and a way to know if new articles were posted in certain sections of interest would be neat.

This is a really cool feature and a much needed one. Props, folks!

Form, function, blah blah blah

[heinousjay]

The whole upward sweeping curve gives the impression that it has something to do with the story above it, which of course isn't true. Not really good design from a user perspective. This is what happens when you focus on 'pretty' and forget to deal with 'works.'

Re:Form, function, blah blah blah

[thermopile]

I have to agree with the parent post. The little "mini headlines" should be their own, distinct oval or some other such shape ... having the 'upward sweeping curve' really does seem to attach it to the previous story.

Otherwise, nice feature. I'm not 'fanboi'-level acceptance yet, but I imagine it'll grow on me over the next few days.

Re:Form, function, blah blah blah

[ahecht]

You can try to explain to people that the two pixel green bar means it's separate, but if everyone who looks at it immediatly thinks that that they are footnotes to the previous story, your UI is bad.

Go ahead and spring for whatever extra code you need to make it look intuitive.

Re:Form, function, blah blah blah

[CrazyWingman]

I have to say I agree the with the grandparent. The quarter circle upward curve on the bottom left does associate the "brief articles" with the article above. I have a simple suggestion to fix it, though.

Just change the curve to a half circle. Then you'd get something like a little bubble for each brief article.

Seems like it would be easy, and I think the curve on top would help dissociate it with the story above it.

I spent quite a while this morning before this article came up wondering what relevence any of the brief articles had to the rest of the articles. It seems I'm not the only one.

Huh? Problem? Wow.

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

This content is mostly lost to readers who simply don't know it exists.

Because they are unable to follow the "Yesterday's News" links? Unable to see the "Sections" links? Us the "Search" function? Thes must also be the people that have never been to a web portal or blog before. I would have never guessed it was a "problem".

n more

[Cutriss]

It looks good the way it is now. I like it. Now I have to commit fewer clicks to see stories. I don't have to memorize the number on the sidebar and then just compare when I load Slashdot.

About this...

One of the most common questions I get is simply "What does the '2 More' mean in the left side menu?" To me it's obvious: it means there are 2 more stories on say, apple.slashdot.org than you have seen on slashdot.org.

I imagine that much *is* obvious, but what isn't obvious is how that number is determined. If there are "5 more" stories on Apple, and I click on Apple, why do I see more than 5 stores? How is the number "5" factoring in at all? At first I figured it might have been cookied to only show unread stories within a certain timeframe, but that quickly proved to be false. So, the usefulness of the link is apparent, but the descriptor is byzantine.

Like it

[RealProgrammer]

I figured it out when the storyless stories started moving down the page. It's nice, but I have a suggestion.

The verbosity of a story on the main page should be a function of its activity, moderation, and timeliness. In other words, stories appear as a single line, then gradually get more page space as people reply, and less as they fade away, until finally you have a bunch of one-liners at the end. Sort of like the way threaded postings work with but with 'newest first'.

Done right, the code would be simpler.

Or maybe not. As I said, I like the new feature/design.

Re:Like it

[CmdrTaco]

That is a really fantastic idea. Here's the problem:

Say a story gets posted, and then it gets 100 comments, say that is the threshold for making it appear in full text mode. At this point it might be the 5th story down. Do I push the article to the top of the page (hearing 50 readers post DUPE as they cry in their soup!) or expand it and let it continue to slide down off the page... knowing that some users will miss it because they only read until they get to where they left off?

Really good idea. I'd like to figure out a way to use it somehow.

Small aesthetic issue

[AutopsyReport]

The first thing that caught my attention was the grey background (behind the new links) that seemed off. The grey background should be reserved for the right column; it is not present in the left and center column. I find it very distracting and out of place. Perhaps keep the same design, but lose such a dark background in the middle column.

Browser Stats!

[MMC Monster]

More importantly, can we have a page dedicated to the browser stats for /. ? Maybe something that shows trends over the past year or two?

(Yes, I realise people here are stuck to browse with what's at work, but it's still a extra blip of information)

BTW, Kudos on the /. re-org, and, more importantly, on the open dialog that you are giving us now.

Design Issue

[Dom2]

I have one minor point to do with the design of the "compressed" stories. The left hand curve makes it look like a footer of the full-text story above it. Of course, if you get two or more "compressed" stories, it rapidly becomes obvious, but with only one, they start to feel like they're part of the story above, instead of separate entities in their own right.

Good idea, though. Thanks!

-Dom

Very good, but...

[Billosaur]

Excellent idea. Nice to see content instead of having to hunt for it and this will force submitters to get creative with their headlines!

I have only one complaint and that's having the stub stories "grafted" onto the bottom of full stories. While I like the curve and it makes for an interesting visual package, I think the stub stories should be in their own individual little capsules, color-coded to the sections they belong in. This will make it easier to see them for one and also indicate that they are not "attached" in any way to the full story above them.

Not the only change, it seems

[maxwell demon]

Obviously now the trick of changing the color on subsection stories by just changing the initial part of the URL doesn't work any more ...

That is what AJAX is for

[DeadSea]

Don't load the story into the original page itself. When somebody clicks on the [+] to open up the full description, use AJAX to load it into the page dynamically.

The best of both worlds: small initial page size, dynamic content.

This will make Slashdot worse

[elliotj]

I've always liked the fact that sectional content was largely missed by the wider readership: this fact acted as a filter of sorts. The problem with Slashdot is that the signal to noise ratio of comments has been getting worse and worse. I like the fact that only a few power users had figured out how to comingle all the content on the main page, or that only people interested in a topic would routinely read the sectional stuff. This meant that those non-frontpage stories generally had better comment quality. I think this will suffer under the new system.

Re:This will make Slashdot worse

[el americano]

Unfortunately, OSTG values quantity over quality. Like yourself, I see no more refuge for real experts on Slashdot, and I hope they don't go away entirely. Maybe I'll stick to reading stories that are unappealing to non-technical people.

At least this story answers that ancient question, "What does the '2 More' mean?" Although I read sectional content, I didn't make the connection. I couldn't find it in the FAQ either, but it's nice to know that it really was a frequently asked question.

Re:This will make Slashdot worse

[vrmlguy]

"The problem with Slashdot is that the signal to noise ratio of comments has been getting worse and worse." Not as bad as over at digg. For a while, I found myself spending more and more time at digg, and correspondingly less time here. Over the past couple of weeks, though, the front page stories at digg have become less and less interesting to me, so I'm spending more time at slashdot again. I fear that any sort of automatic promotion system will eventually suffer a similar fate. I guess editorial control really is useful, after all.

Re:This will make Slashdot worse

[Dirtside]

The problem with Slashdot is that the signal to noise ratio of comments has been getting worse and worse.

That's preposterous. Go back and look at stories from a year, two years, five years ago; there was just as much gibberish and nonsense back then as there is now.

Graphic design is confusing.

[reed]

I don't get the graphic design. Putting the headlines in a rounded grey box make them look like part of the preceding story summary (whose title is in rounded green box going the other direcection). The grey boxes actually look nice-- perhaps they could be used for the "Read More" part of a story summary.

But I would display the "extra" headlines In a different way. Maybe just as a bulleted list? Or round the grey box the full 180 degrees rather than halfway.

Design modification idea

[0110011001110101]

Taco: Wouldn't it make more sense to keep the new gray sections with the same curvature that the green sections have? This way, they look exactly like a main page story, except missing the body (header only).

The current solution really does make it look like a footer, but if flipped over to mimic the green headers, it would look like yet another story, but a different color and smaller... which intuitively would make more sense. I spent about 2 hours this morning looking at this trying to figure out how you guys were relating the "child" stories to the "main" stories.

Good idea.

[raygundan]

I was thinking much along the same lines. Because the "little stories" have bars that curve the opposite direction from the "big stories," they all look like they're grouped together. I was thinking the new stuff was some sort of broken "related articles" system before I saw this article. Change the bar so it's a gray version of the main story bar, or do what the previous poster suggested. Anything to end the unintentional appearance of "grouping related topics" that is there now.

Re:How about a "Dupes Only" Option

[damiam]

Counterpoint: if something gets duped, it means the editor didn't notice it the first time, so it can't be too important.