Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot Discussion2 In Beta
The primary reason for discussion2 was to get beyond the pain in the ass that is navigating large discussion threads on Slashdot. You know the problem: once threads get deep, you have to click repeatedly, waiting for tabs to load. Or even when you encounter a long comment, you have to wait to get the full comment text.
Cool Things D2 Does Now- Allows you to change your threshold, open and close threads, and expand long comments in place, without ever loading a new page.
- Allows you to moderate a comment without clicking a save-button that loses your place in a thread.
- A new, more intuitive user interface that more clearly displays the nature of comment thresholds.
- Vastly Improved threaded view that allows you to see more of the discussion in less space, without clutter.
- Make it Progressive - Right now D2 simply gets all the comments in a discussion. This sucks. We need to write a task to retrieve only appropriate comments. So if you are at Score:4 threshold, we don't bother retrieving the full text of all comments at Score:-1. And even better, if someone moderates or posts a comment, we need to update the page you are reading to reflect those changes. Again, the goal here is that once you load a page, you don't need to close it until you are done with the discussion. This actually has MANY subtle problems, like how do you notify a user when a thread 10 pages up has been replied to.
- Make it Fast Actually I think solving #1 will mostly solve #2 at the same time. Since right now we get the full discussion, we are getting WAY to much data. We need to get say 50 comments at a time, not all 1000. This will give your browser time to catch up and make the whole thing "Feel" faster. Right now, on my machine a 200-300 comment page is very usable, but to much larger and it starts slowing down. This is all machine dependent. I'm sure there are good javascript tricks that would help improve performance.
- In-Place Posting You should be able to post a comment without reloading a page. Right now you can just open a tab, but then you are looking at a stale discussion. This isn't that hard either- especially once we finish #1. Just need to open the reply page in a div, and when you save, make sure that the new comment is properly retrieved and inserted into the thread. But there's some subtle stuff here like how to handle previews. We need to change some of our error handling- the current system uses previews as an opportunity to warn readers about things that are "Wrong" about their comment. We need to figure out how to do that without launching new pages. It's not hard, but it'll take some time.
- Compatibility ok so Opera's broken Javascript implementation won't work unless they fix their browser, but we'd like to make at least IE work for the trivial percentage of Slashdot readers forced to use IE by their corporate overloads. But since 2/3rds of you use Firefox, fixing IE is just not at the top of my priority list... I'd rather make it work better for the majority. And as every web developer knows, cross browser platform compatibility can be a real bitch. But before we are out of beta, it probably would be nice to get IE functional, if only for other websites using our source code that actually have IE as the dominant population.
- Smooth out the UI there are a lot of parts to this problem. Right now the threshold change is buttons but it should actually be draggable, I'd like the widget to toggle from the top to the side, but need to build a horizontal version of the widget. The expansion/contraction of comments and threads have weird functionality that could be improved- for example there is a difference between expanding a comment and expanding a thread. And there's new concepts like expanding a child vs expanding an entire thread vs expanding "Siblings" vs expanding hidden children vs visible children. These are very interesting user interface questions that we'll start working out soon.
- Rethink What Old Functionality By this I primarily mean discussion filters and ordering. By default D2 uses a thread ordered, chronological display. The old system had many other sort modes, but I'm not how sure how effective these are once threaded. So I may simply leave the old system in place for users who want to see a flat discussion ignorant of threads ordered by date or score. Since this is only a tiny percentage of users, I figure it can wait.
A lot of the stuff you see in D2 is just javascript you can easily play with yourself. We haven't mangled it or anything so you js haxx0rz are welcome to submit patches for interesting ideas. We don't have a backend for progressive rendering, but there are a LOT of features that we want to implement that wouldn't even require you to touch the perl. Of course if you're willing to hack perl, it's all up on the website not that anyone ever actually bothers to contribute anything more than ideas and complaints, but it sure never hurts to ask!
Already around 13,000 of you are using Discussion2. We're a ways off from flipping a switch to make it the default for everyone, but it's already substantially better for users with fast computers and Firefox. Hopefully in a few more weeks it will be good enough for everyone. Thanks for the help along the way. We hope you like the new system... I sure do. And mad props to Nate & Pudge for their work on this...
Stupid beta software...
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
...We get IE functionality soon. Its pretty hypocritical not to considering the majority of slashdot users are against people developing IE only sites. Its also quite a stretch for me to get FF on my work computer. I'm sure the case is the same with many slashdotters.
As a follower of firefox since day 1, reading that in a place as big as slashdot really made a tear drop.
I'm testing this thing out.
not that anyone ever actually bothers to contribute anything more than ideas and complaints, but it sure never hurts to ask!
Who do you get to be an expert to tell you something's not obvious? The least insightful person you can find? -J Roberts
can the beta handle a french subject?
as butter.. with some salt.
ok, the little control box either needs to be movable, or on the right hand side where it'll be less likely to cover text. It makes a big part of the screen useless as it is now.
It's not "hypocritical" to shoot for standards-compliant markup, and neglect quirky pieces of software that ignore the standards.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
Please for the love of , apply the moderation to a comment as soon as the moderation value has selected from the drop down box. I constantly forget to press the "Moderate" button which is hidden somewhere down the bottom, and therefore comments that I wanted to moderate don't.
Apart from that, it's a vast improvement. Especially being able to selectively browse comments that are below the threshold value, without loosing track of the conversation.
My spoon is too big.
I'm lowly member with a normal account, and I've been able to view the new comment system for like 2 months. Just a minor clarification...
I'll form my OWN solar system! With blackjack! And hookers!
do {print "Mini-Geek Rules!\n";}
until ($TheEndOfTheWorld);
Normally when I read Slashdot, I read the comments page in nested mode from the top to the bottom. With the new system I have to constantly click to open up the threads which got old real quick. Given that you're loading the whole page anyway, it seems pointless to force me to click expand most of the comment sections.
What I'd really like is an option to have them all expanded by default, but allow me to close the comment blocks on discussions that are obviously going nowhere.
I read the internet for the articles.
Make sure the old discussion is an option... it doesn't have to be default, but I'd like to be able to still use the old way, if I want.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
So I have to ask ... why is slashdot rolling its own Ajax library? Why not use Dojo or Mochikit or hell, even Prototype? Those do work on every major browser. You already have help from third parties, they wrote the library for you. All you have to do is accept it.
Man, I sound like a born-again or something...
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
I've been using Discussion2 for about 2 weeks now, and I, for one, offer my congradulations. As noted above, it has a few kinks, but overall, it is a vast improvement over the previous layout. I find myself reading much deeper into comments, and the "HUD" makes it easy to see how much time I waste here on /. ;)
Few annoyances I must note, however:
Overall, though, it's a vast improvement over the past system. Keep up the good work!
I'm not sure what is supposed to happen, but there's no way to adjust threshold and the floating window is just annoying.
I'm using the lastest weekly, 8573.
Opera are pretty good at fixing bugs promptly if you let them know. Use the form if you don't have other contacts:
https://bugs.opera.com/wizard/
Why is the size of the "Read more .. " presented in bytes?
To me this is a meaningless measurement that conveys no real information. Are we talking single or multi-byte characters? Does that include line terminators? Does it include HTML formating?
IMHO the number of words is a more beneficial stat. Or is the use of the number of bytes meant to be a throw-back to a "cutesy" geek secret club of "I know so I am 1334!!"
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
D'oh. Looks like they've added it already. Certainly wasn't there last time I had mod points.
My spoon is too big.
I was initially reluctant to try it out, but now I like it better than the other views.
I liked Nested view earlier.
I'd like a better way of replying that lets me see more of the discussion (similar to the PHPBB and other forums), and as some mentioned, a way to filter out Funny or by moderation.
There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.
I was using the new comments beta system until yesterday. I turned it off because it sucks ass. I see the potential, but it's annoying as shit right now. I know, that's not a very constructive criticism...but, damn. Speed is an issue, the stupid floating "full, hidden, blah blah blah" shit on the left pane, and whatnot.
Maybe after they work out some of the speed issues and the like, it'll be great. But for now, it can't touch "-1, Nested, Highest Scores First" comment browsing.
Nobody is being thrown away - IE users simply have a worse experience of the site but they can still read the articles and participate in the discussions.
Reality is defined by the maddest person in the room
The floating comments box on the left should have position: absolute before you scroll down to the comments and it gets position: fixed. Right now it always has to be continuously updated in position before you scroll down to the comments, which is slow.
The moderation-in-place has come in particularly handy. Many times I'd moderate something, then wait until I'd read down the rest of the page to hit "save", but forget to hit it.
The flip side of that is that I don't get to say, "Hey, here was a better way of saying the same thing." The mod point's gone. It's common for me to think, "This was a correct and useful answer, but impolite" and prefer to wait until I found a more polite way of phrasing the same information. If I don't find one, though, the correct answer is sometimes worth modding up if the question is important.
The box for setting viewing levels was kind of hard to get used to, but I think I finally understand it. "Down" doesn't mean "less of this"; it means "expand to take up some of the territory covered by the other box." If they change its behavior, I'd have to learn it all over again, and it makes sense once you've figured out what all of the arrows mean.
All in all I've been using D2 and sticking with it.
Is there no way to integrate that weird floating box (with comment numbers for full, abbreviated and hidden) properly with the page? It's distracting. At least it now stays dead after you close it... until you open a new article. Other than the weird floating box that doesn't integrate properly with the page, I rather like the new system.
Sure there are problems with the existing system, opening of low ranked replies in-page would be good, as would a better moderation system. However the current suggested replacement isn't really an improvement, the focus is on the wrong place and the approach should be scrapped.
When reading a comment, sometimes I want to read all its responses so I click on "X hidden comments". When done, I would like to collapse those comments I have just revealed. Is there a way to do this?
First, I'd like to know what exactly is wrong with Opera's Javascript implementation that D2 can't be made to work with it - especially Opera 9, I think somebody just couldn't be bothered.
Second, I tried D2 a while ago (I'm not a subscriber though, I guess some non-subscribers got the opportunity too), and I didn't like it much. Slow, slow, slow and did I mention slow.
NZ Electronics Enthusiasts: Check out my Trade Me Listings
I've been using D2 for a few weeks now, and although it's occasionally doing things that surprise me, I've grown to like it a lot.
I used to have to open hidden thread responses in a separate tab; now I can just display them inline. That change alone is worth any pain with the new system.
I noticed inline moderation yesterday too. That surprised me, and I'm not certain I like it - I used to go through an entire discussion and moderate, then check whether I'd tried to moderate more or less posts than I had mod points. If I'd gone over-budget I could then prioritise the use of the mod points. The inline moderation means that once I've selected a moderation, it's used. It's also less forgiving of accidental selection in the drop-down.
The other issue I've noticed is that for very large discussions (700+ posts) Firefox can report that processing the Javascript has taken too long. I get offered the choice of cancelling processing the script, or continuing. Once I'd realised what was causing this and just started hitting 'continue' it hasn't prevented the site working properly, just irritated me. But the performance modifications will probably resolve that.
Inline replies sound good - I'll welcome that.
Overall, given the choice, even with the existing implementation and its occasional flaws, I like it, and I'd prefer to keep it to the old discussion format.
They didn't say they wouldn't support it, they just said it was lower on the list of priorities, as 3/4 of their visitors use another browser. This isn't "elitist bullshit," this is allocating resources based on the priorities of the visitors of their site.
I don't care why you're posting AC
I appreciate the fact that we can finally have more comments on a page than 100. It's a rather annoying limit for some of the larger threads, especially when a discussion thread is interrupted in the middle by a page break.
It takes a little more thought than I'd like to put in to see how the thresholds are defined. 4 Full (score 5) / 51 Abbreviated (score 2) / 27 hidden (score -1) would be appreciated.
Being able to disable the abbreviated option altogether would be nice, actually. Then I could navigate threads at my leisure.
Also, a flexible threshold system would be good, but now we're going into divining magic. For example, if I click on a thread, I'm obviously interested in it; hide -1 scored comments, show comments scoring 0 or more.
-Rob
Biblical fiscal responsibility
If your prof in college docked 25% off your exam score because he didn't feel like grading that part, I think you'd be pretty darn ticked. Twenty-five percent is not a trivial number, folks.
I have the opposite problem. How do I get "the old "Flat" view" mode? I'm interested in maximizing the number of words on my screen, and minimizing the number of mouse clicks.
From TFA:
What makes Slashdot so great is that I can pop open a tab with 100 - or even 5 tabs of 100 posts each - and simply skim the entire discussion, without having to do any navigation more complicated than hitting PgDn every few seconds.
If I have to move a mouse and click on every one of 100 messages, or even 10 seperate subthreads, I'm not going to bother reading any of it.
The fact that I can expand a thread without a page load is cool -- but the fact that I have to expand threads without a page load isn't a feature -- it's a bug. Seriously -- if I can expand a comment/thread with a mouseclick but without a page load, then it means my browser has every word of the entire discussion sitting in RAM, and your UI is getting in the way of the user experience because it's preventing my browser from rendering it.
Terse.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I'll still use the site when the new version is available in IE. Ironically, because of personal preference (i.e. choice). I've tried the latest version's of FF, and Opera and I still think websites look best in IE. I don't knock those who like those browsers, but the way I see it, a standard does not need an independant group. That may sound lame to some, but I've invested a lot of time and money in building my MS developer skillset. In addition, seeing as my family, nor my friends, have ever had a major problem with MS software and tools, I don't see to the need to change course...yet.
That being said, I'll keep my copy of FF around and periodically look at Slashdot and other various sites, but to be perfectally honest, I think its font rendering systems and layout is ugly (too block'ish') for my taste.
Regards,
MBC1977,
(US Marine, College Student, and Good Guy!)
Regards,
MBC1977,
Why does it still say "Read More..." if there are 0 new bytes of blurb text? By definition, x+0 isn't "more" than x. "Read Comments" would be more accurate.
1. I don't see any 'click the checkbox at the head of every discussion'. Anybody else see it?
2. Is this the same thing as the University of Michigan Testing ? That system sucks-- it's wayyy to complex. Please don't make it the default. There are *20* different thresholds in the "Advanced Context Controls", and you force people to view the comments in the order they are posted. I have about 5 free minutes to view an article, so I like to read with "Highest Scores First" so I can get the best rated comments first, and avoid the trolls.
Given the # of people who are only allowed to use IE when they're at work, if /. stops working w/ IE, productivity should skyrocket.
[o]_O
seriously people. it's not rocket science to write cross-browser compliant code. i expect better from a champion of the open source community. (but of course, it is still in beta, so... ) m.
I read fast. I show all comments. When I enabled the new discussion system I had to tweak my preferences some to enable it to do what I had before.
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
Among other things, its way of giving you a "teaster" of a comment was worse than useless. Giving you five or ten words of a reply doesn't tell you anything worth knowing when the comment starts out with a quote from the Parent. Most of its other "gosh-wow, shiny!" features are things I find not only pointless, but useless, such as changing the threshold of replies based on the score of the Parent. What difference does that make? The reply stands on its own value, not on that of its parent or grandparent.
All in all, I found it something that badly detracted from my Slashdot experience, and I never want to be subjected to it again. Please, editors, let those of us who like it as it is continue to read /. the way we do now.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
Sometimes the number of hidden or abbreviated comments gets negative. Like "-5 Hidden". What the hell does that mean?
I've had problems using it under Opera as well... It tends to work just like the normal discussion (reloading the page with just the comment I click on and the comments under it) rather than the new fangled Web 2.0 stuff where it just expands the comment I want to see (and thus saves me time from having to wait for a full reload of tha page).
THANK YOU. I was thinking the same thing. Flat mode FTW. I was pissed when they started splitting things into pages and I couldn't load all the comments at once anymore on discussions with 100+ replies.
Someone please mod parent up.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
huh? as you can see above, i'm NOT a subscriber, however, i've been able to use the beta for a few months! i hated it and have been sticking with the old system... will the old system go away when this leaves beta?
Don't call me back. Give me a call back. Bye. So yeah. But bye our, well, but alright we are on a shirt this chill.
I would like specific markup and a decent CSS style (maybe user configurable) to quote messages.
Right now, there is blockquotes and italics. Italics don't look as good since the change to sans serif font, and blockquotes are a little more difficult to work with and to me the lighter grey blockquote font color makes the comment more silent in my head vs italics (kinda like parenthesized stuff is more quiet then non-parenthesized text). Bold is loud and/or important! AND CAPS ARE LOUDER!
It's not rocket science but it's extra work. Why do extra work to accommodate something (non-standard rendering) that hurts the web?
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
... is continuity and pagination that works. Any other feature is a complete waste of time if thread continuity and pagination continues to be ignored.
The threshold/moderation system renders most topics nearly unreadable without reloading the page at threshold -1. Replies to posts that are hidden by default make absolutely no sense at all where the post being replied to is not quoted. This would be all very well and good IF the pagination worked, however, currently if you reload a topic at threshold -1 its pretty much a crapshoot as to what you'll get on each page... will pages 1,2 and 3 all be identical? (often the case) will page four contain the last half of page 3? This is horribly frustrating when browsing on a dial-up connection.
Thread continuity and working pagination should be top priority (assuming that you'll continue to insist on hiding the majority of posts by default). Pretty layouts and snazzy javascript (lord help us and save us) are a complete waste of time as long as continuity and pagination are ignored.
No javascript, please... pretty please... no useless and unreliable javascript, just give us a perl script that does what it says on the box and provides logical comprehensible threads with continuity and pagination that works. (which is horribly overdue, the site has been broken for far too long)
Please.
with a million users registered, 250 THOUSAND people do not matter..
chrissakes man, 25% of the customer base is not worth bothering over?
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Maybe it's just me and my naive attitude, but the above article does say that support for IE will eventually be available, but it's not the first priority. Logically speaking that makes sense. First work out the kinks in the code and cement its functlionality, then worry about making it all around compatible with other browsers. Personally, I think that everyone should have access to at least some form of comments (be it old or new) and be able to post their thoughts. To me, that's more important than the way it all looks.
"When did I realize I was God? Well, I was praying and I suddenly realized I was talking to myself." ~ Jack Gurney
D2 is completely useless on a PDA or phone.
Please, leave old system as an option for ever. Please.
But sometimes I manage to get the box over the menu. Doesn't happen always, though. Firefox 1.5.0.5.
IE will still work with the old version, so they could probably just change the default for Firefox (and other compatible browsers). So far, I don't even prefer the new version under Firefox, since I usually use threaded mode. I like the new version better now than the last time I tried it, so I may change my mind by the time it's out of beta.
a,e,i,o,u and sometimes w and y (at be if of up cwm by)
I loaded D2 in the latest Safari on my G4. It loaded fine. I clicked preferences, then went back to the discussion. It crashed while loading. I sent the bug report to Apple. D2 loaded fine after restarting Safari. I'm using it to post this.
Ok, so you're using a global variable called comments; a "hash" indexed by comment ID. Except it's just an object to JS, and you're telling it to create numeric elements in it... these elements are not just array indexes, they're also method names, and numeric method names.. well, they're a Bad Idea.
... } do comments = { 'c[cid]': ... }. Now instead of comments.1234567, you're asking for comments.c1234567. Now in comments.js, replace comments[cid] with comments['c'+cid]. Now changing the threshold works just fine.
With 2 search and replace operations, I have the basics of Discussion2 working in Opera 9.01 on a locally saved page:
First, instead of doing comments = { [cid]:
seriously people. it's not rocket science to write cross-browser compliant code.
It's also not rocket science, and is proper, to write code that complies to W3C standards. It's up to the user to obtain and use software that properly adheres to the standards that govern HTML. Would you buy a TV set that didn't adhere to the NTSC standard and then moan and gripe when your local TV station didn't broadcast a nonstandard signal, thus rendering your TV useless? No, you'd go out and buy a "real TV".
i am a soviet space shuttle
What does "D2" do that the Slashdotter extension doesn't do? I'm perfectly happy with that.
The most rabid believers in American Exceptionalism are the exact same people whose policies are destroying it.
There are a myriad of other features I would like. The ability to sort was a key feature for me in the classic display, and this new display could have vastly more power on things like that. (For example, sorting by probable association, so if there are multiple threads discussing the same thing, they are together.) You are limited on server-side processing, as it's time-critical - you're serving 100,000 users (the same circulation as a national newspaper), so powerful server-side features can be a real headache. With that kind of userbase, it's much better for the server to just update an index of probable keywords and deliver that to the client to do any further processing or sorting.
That, to me, is an important tool. Information is useless if it's so scattered that it takes more effort to collate it than to learn it from scratch. The ideal would be to be able to instruct the browser to recursively go through the related articles listed at the top and pull those indexes as well, so that users have the power to view the history and background of a discussion across multiple articles. (It won't prevent rehashing, which is inevitable, but it may encourage people to move further in their thoughts than is otherwise likely to happen.)
What has always made Slashdot exciting is that it has dared to challenge conventional wisdom on how news works - even the UK's Guardian newspaper cites Slashdot as the inspiration behind the blogs attached to articles, and the BBC's user moderation system is very likely a derivative of the system we all love and use. It's experimented with presentation, filtering, tagging, cross-referencing and windsurfing. The new front-end provides a thick-client interface, with all the possibilities that implies. All that power (Power! POWER! And it's even better than an IBM POWER! Bwahahahahahahaha!)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
The sumbmitter must be new here, huh?
Stupidity is an equal opportunity striker.
Fellow slashdotter Bill Dog
i wonder if enough slashdot users use konqueror. doesnt work for me in kde 3.4, havent tried 3.5.x though
You can use the weird little box on the side to get something approximating a flat mode, but it's still got lots of eye candy, but it takes multiple mouse clicks (and Javascript enabled) to get to it. The left margin of the text is still pretty ragged with various threading indentations.
I think the root cause of these UI bugs is that people who write web apps aren't the people who read textual content.
For instance, people who don't spend much time reading (books, web pages, whatever), you probably want to make sure "everything fits on a computer screen, browser maximized, no vertical scrolling"
If you are a chronic reader, that'll give you a headache within 30 seconds. There's a reason why dead-tree books, dead-tree newspapers, and even PDFs and e-books, are oriented portrait-style -- taller vertically than horizontally. And the text is presented in a flat view -- paragraph after paragraph of words, left margin static, right margin ragged.
If you're a web designer, that's unthinkably boring.
If you're a programmer, that's also pretty weird -- because there's a huge amount of information packed into every line of text, and the more you can show on the screen -- both by showing indentation and even highlighting syntax -- is a great idea.
Those models fail when applied to English. There's simply not enough information in the first 30-80 characters of a good post, for instance, to make the Abbreviated mode useful. There's a lot of noise in English. I could have made this point by saying something as short as "English has lots of syntactical sugar" -- but instead I phrased it three or four different ways, figuring that one of them would stick.
The syntactic sugar in English means that it's a language that's great for skimming -- but a skimmable pile of text is something more akin to a book than either an interactive web application, and it's definitely nothing like the code in your editor.
Hence, flat mode FTW. Make the browser look like a big book, use the PgUp/PgDn keys to replace forward/back, and if it's got 300 kilobytes of text, so be it!
My beef with D2 may be with the design -- but my meta-beef is about a design process that started based on an incorrect assumptions about what Slashdot is all about: It's as much a means for reading discussions as it is for having them. I'll even wager that people like us (who post to threads) are in the minority of the /. userbase.
I tried it a while ago, and my only dislike of it is the sidebar on the left-hand side is in the upperleft which is, unfortunately, where the static site links are. Move it to the bottom left or on the right somewhere (or even a way to get rid of it), and I'll be happy (especially because I like how comments which don't show up have their first part available, so I don't have to click on the comment to read it).
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master."
You need to be logged in to try it. /Khell
To some people if you are having layout headaches beyond just a navigation pane down the left side and content to the right, you must be engaging in trendy UI stuff.
What are you doing, btw?
I've been using the new system for a few months and have seen the iterations come and go and have the following suggestions:
Other than those things, I'm quite pleased.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
Also, if I look at a discussion once, and then go back to it later, the new stuff is all way at the bottom - it'd be nice to have the option of seeing it at the top.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
What I would love to see is a Slashdot Discussions to NNTP gateway so that I can browse discussions the way they are meant to, with a normal newsreader. It would have to be setup in a way that only editors can create threads, and everyone else is allowed to follow-up. Moderation could be done by news filtering (for browsing) and by keywords for giving mod points.
I'm sure this is not the most brilliant idea ever, but I think it would be pretty cool.
By default D2 uses a thread ordered, chronological display. The old system had many other sort modes, but I'm not how sure how effective these are once threaded. So I may simply leave the old system in place for users who want to see a flat discussion ignorant of threads ordered by date or score. Since this is only a tiny percentage of users, I figure it can wait.
/. Highest score first. I normally only what to read the best 10-20 comments. For mature discussions reading at score 5 is fine but for new or non-front-page stuff it would still be nice to have a way to get the best 10 comments only.
I would be a member of that tiny percentage that reads
I know somewhere there was a CmdrTaco Journal entry about just this phenomina but I cannot find it (also mentioned changing the moderation system).
JFMILLER
Strive to make your client happy, not necessarly give them what they ask for
IE doesn't work... but hey, only a quarter of you use it! Screw that attitude!
Look, it's an issue of resources. Developers cost money. They're only given so much of an allotment in the budget to hire quality codemonkeys. So you have them do as much as you can. And it's beta. It's not like they're saying "we're never going to support ie". Chill out.
http://slashdot.org/~tf23/journal
My point is that they haven't even contemplated the server side yet -- client-side compatibility can wait. Supporting IE is pointless if they are still evolving their client server model.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
You can't possibly be suggesting that the least buggy browser available is just fine, and slashdots sad and pathetic mozillascript is the problem? That's ridiculous, just look at the high quality of all the other code they have written. There's no way they could ever do anything wrong!
I've been using the new comment system for some weeks and I like it very much (i.e. reading more comments now). However I have one concern and that is regarding minimising comments. If I decide that i would like to expand a comment to read this particular comment I just click the subject and *pop* I can read the comment, BUT (here comes my concern) if I then minimises this comment after I read it the entire subtree of comments gets packed toghether in 'hidden comments'. I would like it to just minimizing thé particular comment I minimized.
I can however see situation where I would like to minimize an entire subtree, so it might not be possible to implement. I just find it counter intuitive to close the entire subtree when I have just popped open that particular I'm closing.
So how would you run Firefox.exe on a machine that executes only those programs that have been digitally signed by the computer's administrator?
I'd like to see a new/old flag, where "new" is any comments that have been added since my last visit to the article. Also a way to set the threshold to expand only the new comments.
I'll even wager that people like us (who post to threads) are in the minority of the /. userbase.
;)
I recall seeing older Taco JE's where he's said exactly that. I'd search and link directly to one, if I weren't so lazy
http://slashdot.org/~tf23/journal
If a tv station wants ad revenue, it broadcasts in the "format" that accomodates as much of the audience as possible.
Regardless of what the W3C says, the unspoken web standard is to cater to the customer... cater to the viewer... no matter what they show up with, you find a way to make sure they can use your site with a minimum of discomfort. (Within reason of course.) I wish the browsers agreed with the standard as much as anybody. But seriously, if slashdot is happy to lose 25% of it's users/ad revenue, then so be it. That attitude does nothing but alienate people and that's counter-productive. If we want open source to ever succeed, this attitude has to change.
i'm sorry for my unpopular attitude... i'm just trying to be honest.
m.
It also works perfectly in the KDE Javascript implementation (I've been happily using it since late July).
Or rather, worked. Since this morning the discussion floating sidebar thing no longer appears. Boo, hiss.
Pirate Party UK
Make a feature where one can select a sentence or some words when modding up a post. These words are then highlighted somewhat. You see, it is often hard for me to understand the Slashdot jokes. Maybe this will help...
Its pretty hypocritical
/. can immediately discount 25% of it's own users.
You're right, funny how *nix users who represent such a small market share, scream when it isn't supported by software, but
Works perfectly for me (Konqueror 3.5.4-0.4.fc5). The sidebar isn't perfect yet (it doesn't seem to appear when or where it should), but once it appears it works, as do all the other funky Javascripty features.
Pirate Party UK
It wouldn't surprise me to find that no browser is in the "majority" here. If IE has 25, I might figure Safari for 20 and Opera for 15. leaving 35 for the fox and 5 for Konq & friends.
As per my original post it's the standard that these other browsers have in common. Yes, there are some still-evolving pieces of the standard and only 2 of the browsers pass Acid2, etc.
But all are far better than IE and still trying to improve. And all the strawmen and mudslinging in this thread doesn't change that.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
File a bug on bugzilla, and ask that the developers sign the executable, or other appropriate fix-its? Surely, it can be done.
i am a soviet space shuttle
I like it and since I have js disabled the new features in shiny, new big-bad 2.0 are wasted on me.
not that anyone ever actually bothers to contribute anything more than ideas and complaints
Perhaps if we heard from Taco about where the project's headed, what's needed, what's wanted. Explicitly point out how people can help (be blatently obvious here). Give people who are willing to develop more of a heads-up about what's around the bend. Maybe a monthly "this is the state of things". There's an entire slashcode-development listserv that is so very desperately underused.
Maybe if Taco started perusing, and posting to that list, it would garner more of the positive support we'd all like to see for the project.
And I mean information related to slashcode, not slashdot. Yes, they are obviously related, but they are not one in the same.
Anyway, that's my suggestion....
http://slashdot.org/~tf23/journal
In soviet Russia highlighting overlords welcome you!
I'll explain them to you. A beowolf cluster of Portman's grits running on linux. Any questions? good.
You must be new here?
The way it handles some javascript events, like onFocus(), is buggy and whacked. The way it handles a lot of events is buggy and whacked. To get around it, I have to put Firefox-specific fixes in the CSS and elsewhere. I'm not talking about the infamous AJAX code forking-- that's different, and to be expected by now. This is purely for Firefox.
I had to alter my version of the Google Maps API just for Firefox. When I went in, I was shocked to find it wasn't my code that was broken... it was Google's. Guess which line was breaking it? The line that was supposed to make it compatible with IE. I'm assuming it's been fixed in newer versions of the API, but it raised an eyebrow.
There are bugs all over the place that you never see until you try to write for it. If you want to brag about how stable, fast, reliable, etc Firefox is, then fix all that crap first. "Fast" definitely doesn't apply to my development time.
I like the way it handles some things, like page layout. The way it arranges things on screen makes more sense than IE, sometimes. And it does render pages faster. But that's balanced out by all the things that annoy me about it.
Not everyone thinks Firefox is god's gift to Geeks. Deal with it. Call me when it starts to live up to its hype.
My script don't crash! She crashes, you crashed her!
A signature from Mozilla Corp. != a signature from your employer's IT department. Why would Mozilla Corp. have your employer's private signing key?
That reminds me. What happened to all that "help" that he got when slashdot was doing the whole CSS redesign?
is the fact that I can 'moderate on the fly'. No needing to abandon my position on the screen to scroll down and click the moderate button. As soon as I select the score, it moderates. I think that there ought to be some control on that though, maybe putting the button 'Moderate' button next to the drop down list would be better in the event that I incorrectly moderate.
We're all hypocrites. We all have hidden parts, it's the contrast between them that make us more a hypocrite than others
Then send it to the administrators? Surely, there's someone who's responsible for that job. Ask them to do it.
And file the bugzilla bug anyway. It'll come in handy for a lot of people.
i am a soviet space shuttle
Indeed.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
Don't know about you, but personally I think the old way works a lot better – I'm probably in the minority here, I just read at -1, no bonuses, nested mode, but I tried the new system, and it just makes it too complicated in my opinion...
Creative misinterpretation is your friend.
Can someone point me to technical description of that Opera's brokenness? (I haven't found anything extraordinary on Slashcode's sf.net bug tracker)
I've got a gut feeling that's just yet another "It's not bug-compatible with $browser_i_love_so_much" kind of problem.
Make the little angle icons which represent the depth in the threads be an in-page link to the first comment where a thread branches. This is not the same as 'parent', but would most often be the comment where a new subject was created.
This would make it much snappier when you get into a thread and it turns into a very lengthy bit of trivial nitpicking, and you want to jump back to the original comment and collapse the entire thread.
eskwayrd = m^2c^4
What about Portable Firefox? No installation required.
The whole issue is that the IT department declines to sign Firefox.exe in the first place.
In the real world, not everything IS standards compliant. It's nice to offer at least a work-around for those who don't live a perfect life.
At the risk of sounding like a dinosaur, I miss many of the aspects of news when reading web forums, including Slashdot.
.newsrc, which may not be feasible.
Specifically, the notion of "read" status on messages, and the ability to hide (temporarily by collapsing, or semi-permanently by killing) whole subtrees of the discussion. If this read status was communicated back to slashdot.org, we'd have some stats on how many people read or ignored each comment (what nerd wouldn't love more stats?). You'd also be able to hide all the comments you'd already read when you came back to a story. This amounts to storing every slashdot reader's
How exactly to do this in the UI I don't know. Introduce a multi-pane mode like a news reader? Stick to the existing layout and add keyboard shortcuts to navigate to comments and mark them read? Just gate the whole discussion to NNTP for people who've already paid to skip the ads and let them pick their own client (clearly there are issues here at least with the moderation mechanism)?
I have not used the D2 version of moderation yet, but I don't think I will like the immediate reaction feature. I tend to dislike drop down lists that have a permanent effect as soon as you select something.
As others have said, I like to select a few things and think about it before committing the moderation.
Would it be possible to have another floating box which shows what you have selected to moderate, lets you jump to the selected comments and has a 'moderate' button that apply the selections? I think that would give a useful combination of reminder that you have selected something, and opportunity for reflection before making a final decision. (Yes, this is yet another idea without any code, but maybe if I had some spare time ...)
I'd like the widget to toggle from the top to the side, but need to build a horizontal version of the widget.
I'd like the widget to go away!
Please provide the option for that.
(maybe it does something in Firefox? in Seamonkey it is just hovering there, providing me useless statistics but no useful function)
Clever signature text goes here.
please i BEG OF YOU.. change the preferences so that you can at least TURN IT OFF While forced to run IE. I enabled it while running Firefox, and at work it killed IE. I could'nt even turn it OFF, which ment no Slashdot while at work. Please just make it easy to turn off in IE. Please.
The thing is wight on top of all the text.
/. more then I like /.
/.
Yes I like my stile for
so if this is not an option then
will also not be an option. too bad.
If your site works in Lynx, then it is likely to work well in web browsers used by blind people. This can become very important for getting contracts with companies that are required by law not to discriminate against people with disabilities.
These are not stupid or uneducated people. They use Firefox at home. If they hit Slashdot from work, they're likely to be doing it via IE.
Come on people, it's a browser. We computer people tend to lose a great deal by getting stuck on minor issues like what browser people use. There are many very intelligent people who use internet explorer. It's a fact. And they are't even exceptions. The truth is, 90% of functionality is the same. The difference doesn't justify what we make of it.
I'm not hitting on your comment btw. It's just the habit of not seeing the forest because of the trees that i have a problem with.
Anyways, what I really wanted to say: a side effect of this comment system is that it'll favor a lot more comments with a score of 3 or lower. They are the comments usualy hidden by default, and most people who'd read them didn't bother reload. I predict from now on comments will have more meaningful subjects from now on, and a lot less "Re:". Even if a comment is low-rated, if it has an interesting subject it may incline people to click on it.
Okay, am I the only one completely unable to change the treshold? I'm not against using some javascript/css tricks with good judgement, but Discussion2's features are pretty much non-discoverable. If they're there, they're well hidden - I can't find out how to do the things I can easily do with the old system.
Additionally, what's up with mixing 'display options' (the popup window) in between "real links" - some of them are destructive (ie they take you away from your context, to your "Preferences" page or whatever), and others aren't (they pop up some extra features without reloading the page). If you're not yet familiar with the links, it's a lottery to see if you're going to load another page (context) or not.
So as it stands currently, and imho, it's a usability regression. Even after trying for a little while, I can't do what I could do previously. Hope it doesn't get adopted as it stands.
Man Taco, I still dont have any mod points! Obviously, this discussion 2 thingy is still broken! ;)
Its also quite a stretch for me to get FF on my work computer
I don't get it.
Here on /. we slam website developers all the time for making their website work only in IE and not testing it on Opera or Firefox. Our stance is that they should take the extra time to make their website compatible with the 10% of the community that is not using IE.
/. implements a new feature, that feature is only supported by Firefox (not IE or Opera) and therefore 25% of the community can't use it. The people behind the project even say that it's not worth their time to serve that extra 25%.
Yet when
Interesting.
-David
But there's some subtle stuff here like how to handle previews.
Previews? What's that?
Beware of geeks bearing formulas.
Ever since the last code change on Slashdot, I find it's interface so irritatingly bland that I usually avoid it.
The subject blandness started well before that and has gotten worse also.
Although I can see why D2 is handy and bandwidth-efficient for browsing selectively, please keep D1 around permanently at least as a login option. If you don't keep D1, I'll write and publish a perl script workaround that gives me and everyone else who also wants it "-1, Nested, Highest Scores First" even in D2, using up more or less the same bandwidth as if I were still browsing using D1.
Scroogle
Please just use blockquote. You can handle it. It's only 20 more letters to type while your rant about formatting was probably a couple hundred.
Though a quicktag JS button would be nice.
People who begin their comments with quotes, and leave a blank line at the head of the quote, have no information when their comment gets abbreviated. What we actually want is to see the text they wrote.
Exercise your right not to vote. thinkoutside.org
Ignore this comment. It's a test.
I don't like threads, i like flat mode, and just want to view +3 and up. With the new system i can't do this. What i would like is to keep the current layout but use ajax to moderate, change thread/flat mode, change starting score and reply, and keep the same UI.
And you know what? That could probably mean they could target IE and opera too.
Open Source Java Web Forum with LDAP authentication
This actually has MANY subtle problems, like how do you notify a user when a thread 10 pages up has been replied to. Perhaps flag the parent in some way that is recognizable. Or perhaps an inline system for indexing new posts in a single place, with the parent name indicated, as a drop down menu or sidebar.
Great new book on Evolution: The Greatest Show on Earth by Richard Dawkins
Definitely true, and in fact I abused that to make my point... But it doesn't lead to well-organized discussions.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
What ever happened to 'anonymous coward'. I am *the* anonymous coward. I like being anonymous. It keeps the sickos from kicking my door down in the middle of the night. I don't know if /. is a leak or not, but they don't have to target /. servers if my real name is posted right there for all the planet to see (I suspect my alias is vulnerable too). So for me its anon or none.
Sincerely,
Mr. Anonymous Coward, esq.
I think I would be awesome If I was able to move the Discussion2 box, like you are able to inside meebo, that would be awesome.
Just out of curiousity, I did a view source on the output within Firefox cut and pasted it into the W3C validator, and it horked out 310 errors claiming that this is not HTML 4.01 Strict.
Most of those were using <nobr> or <wbr>, not closing off tags, extra closing tags, etc.
Will this version of slashdot software pass teh acid 3 test???!
Sent from my desktop computer
To the Editors...
/.
This is a bit
off-topic but
it has been
quite a while
now and the
center-column
squishing bug
with the new
slashdot
style still
hasn't yet
been fixed.
How long
until some
work on that
one is going
to take
place? It's
extremely
annoying, as
you can see.
Slashdot is
hard to read
with the
style-sheet,
and it's
hard to read
without the
style-sheet.
I'm now
beginning to
agree with
the others
that said
should have
kept it's
old HTML
formatting,
for those
who need or
want to
view the
site
without CSS.
Any chance
of fixing
the current
problems,
before
introducing
new features
with their
own issues?
Lameness filter-avoiding junk...
tnahse nhcraeolr uaentuhnt tnahenuta antehounta ntahent husntheu thsnutaeus ntaheun staheutna hutnahsut ntashe ustahustna ohusntaheuntah snathe unsatheusna theusnathu santheu hsantuhrcql rjcklqrckl vvouve owzuwounhqn rchqrkc vwmdhvwm dvwmdvmh dvwmnt nathe nuthas euhaseu haoeun tnahse nhcraeolr uaentuhnt tnahenuta antehounta ntahent husntheu thsnutaeus ntaheun staheutna hutnahsut ntashe ustahustna ohusntaheuntah snathe unsatheusna theusnathu santheu hsantuhrcql rjcklqrckl vvouve owzuwounhqn rchqrkc vwmdhvwm dvwmdvmh dvwmnt nathe nuthas euhaseu haoeun tnahse nhcraeolr uaentuhnt tnahenuta antehounta ntahent husntheu thsnutaeus ntaheun staheutna hutnahsut ntashe ustahustna ohusntaheuntah snathe unsatheusna theusnathu santheu hsantuhrcql rjcklqrckl vvouve owzuwounhqn rchqrkc vwmdhvwm dvwmdvmh dvwmnt nathe nuthas euhaseu haoeun
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
One thing that I'd like to see in the future is the possibility to expand and collapse articles in the home page, to show/hide the scoop. Then, if I see a headline w/o scoop that interests me, I could expand to show the scoop, and then decide whether I'd like to open the whole discussion or not.
wuteva, final post is all that matters
Make it Progressive - Right now D2 simply gets all the comments in a discussion. This sucks. We need to write a task to retrieve only appropriate comments. So if you are at Score:4 threshold, we don't bother retrieving the full text of all comments at Score:-1. And even better, if someone moderates or posts a comment, we need to update the page you are reading to reflect those changes. Again, the goal here is that once you load a page, you don't need to close it until you are done with the discussion. This actually has MANY subtle problems, like how do you notify a user when a thread 10 pages up has been replied to.
I like having all of the comments ready to be viewed if necessary. For example, I was just reading the Defense Lawyer Q&A and there were many sub discussions that I wanted to read. With D2, I just had to click. Honestly, the D2 stuff is rather liked tabbed browsing for me: At first, I was like "WTF?" but as I use it, i am finding it indispensible.
My only "complaint" is that as long as that silly "popup" or whatever it is called is visible, scrolling is quite painful. Thankfully though, there is a close button on it, so once I have the comments set the way I like them, I just close it and everything is speedy again.
Regardless, thank you for you efforts.
Dave
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
Excellent idea :) A few comments about how it currently works:
1. You have to constantly click to lower/incrase the threshold, I found this a lil clumsy as sometimes the threshold would not respond as expected: It would jump upwards if I hit the down arrow. I suggest making the interface draggable; like the audio volume.
2. I notice that when I clicked to reply, but wanted to return back to the thread page; my prefrences were reset and I had to adjust the treshold again. It would be nice if the interface remembered my prefrences
Thanks and keep up the excellent work
garbage in, garbage out...
I like D2, but there's a few UI details that I think could be improved.
[Science] is one of the very few things that raises human life a little above farce and gives it the grace of tragedy.
I've been using d2 for awhile, and I love it. The only real complaint I have so far is the 'instant' moderation. I like to set the popup to a moderation, then if I find something even more brilliant, and I've not enough points, I go back and rethink before hitting 'save'. This new 'instant' version takes away my ability to do that, and when some of these discussion threads are really long it is easy to lose a comment that I wanted to compare.
I think you missed the big fucking point in the article.
They were complaining that currently the client is pulling the whole page with all the comments (up to the spill threshold), and then dynamically hiding portions on the client.
They want to do the opposite, where it pulls a subset of comments, and then fetches comments piecemeal as updates occur (on the server side), or as the client changes display settings (on the client side).
That's going to require extensive remodeling of the comment.pl code. They're going to need some sort of comment cache, or they might have to rewrite the page view code (normal view) as a special case of generalized comment fetching from the cache system, with some additional assembly (adding headers, footers, ads). Then they expose the comment-at-a-time interface to the AJAX in the client side.
But yeah, that's a lot of work considering that slash is still a very traditional CGI system (GET request triggers the view code that does work behind the scenes at it outputs the page).
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
As a (recent) Slashdot subscriber, I've played with the new discussion system. I like a lot of it, but I find the arrows awkward to use, the thresholds confusing, and sometimes it was impossible to make that side box appear or disappear when you need it to. I did like the ability to see abbreviated comments, but it was hard to control.
But one critical problem forced me to turn it off. I make heavy use of tabbed browsing, and I often have 100+ tabs open across a number of browser windows. Generally, if I'm quickly scanning Slashdot's homepage, if I see an article that looks like it might be interesting, I open it in a new tab and move on. I usually don't have time to read most of them, and typically I'll end up bookmarking and closing the tabs eventually (in which case it's even less likely I'll ever read it).
It's not uncommon for me to have 50 or more tabs containing Slashdot stories that I'll never get around to reading. This is already bad enough when it comes to memory usage (and my machine has 1GB of RAM), but with the new discussion system, the Slashdot stories became unreadable because the navigation was taking too long. I'm not sure if this was because of paging enormous amounts of memory or because the dozens of background Slashdot tabs were somehow consuming CPU time. One way or the other, it was unbearable, and I stopped testing the new discussion system.
It would be nice if I could click a button on a story that would bookmark the story under my user page as one I want to return to later. Couple that with some tools to organize and manage that list, and I wouldn't have to open new tabs to keep track of the stories of interest...
Deven
"Simple things should be simple, and complex things should be possible." - Alan Kay
The base-10 numbers are costing you bandwidth.
Try base-32 with uppercase and lowercase letters.
That's an 8-to-5 reduction in the size of an ID.
Less data should also speed up the browser.
Thanks. The aforementioned bug has been fixed.