Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot: Podcasts, IM, Improved Discussions
Recently we added the ability to receive AIM instant messages to notify you when stories are posted, when someone posts a comment to your journal, or when one of your friends post a journal. You can turn it on from the messaging preference page. You might need to set up slashdotomatic as a friend or buddy or whatever in your IM client to make it work, but this is a good way to get fast notification of Slashdot stuffs. We hopefully will add other popular instant messaging clients in the future but for now AIM is the top dog so we started there. The code is of course all in CVS if you want to add new platforms... there's room to easily add Jabber, MSN, Yahoo or anything else really. We've talked about SMS as well, so if there's a demand for it we'll work on it.
Everyone who knows me knows what I think about the vast majority of podcasts on the internet. The Slashdot podcast currently isn't at all like that. We call it the the Slashdot Robot Overlord. All it does is use Cepstral Voices to read you Slashdot stories aloud. So if you want to listen to Slashdot stories in your car or on your phone or something, here's an easy way to do it.
Subscribers have a new option in their journals: they can restrict the discussions to logged in users. This is a nice way to minimize trolling and general crappy behavior in your journal. Of course, there's nothing to stop the ambitious jerk from creating a user account, but this will at least slow them down for a few seconds. It's worth noting that when you post a journal, you are given the option to submit your journal to Slashdot... if your journal is selected, you sacrifice that option.
Speaking of comment posting, we've added a new <quote> tag useful in comments. If you choose to encapsulate a quote in said tag, that quote is expandable and contractible via user preferences. Properly quoting comments will allow your fellow readers to have better control over their display than simply blocking a huge chunk of words in italics.
A little bit more information about the Discussion2 system before we wrap up: It's currently tested mostly under Firefox (as is all of our javascript). It also works fine under Safari (2 and 3). We have some UI improvements coming soon as well, but it already is a vast improvement over the old system. One of the next steps is to make D2 degrade cleanly to a non-javascript browser so we can maintain one code base for development. When we get to that point, we can switch over the default/anonymous view to the new system.
We have a bunch of other stuff coming after the holiday. But in the mean time, please test this stuff out and let me know if you see any glaring bugs. The address is the same as always.
I asked this in IRC, but lately it doesn't seem anyone from the Slashdot SF.Inc's team is on there - if a user sets their msg prefs to IM, but they are not online at the time of the action, so the instant message cannot be sent at that time, what happens to it? Is it re-queued? For how long? Is there a fallback method such as email or web message if the IM can't be sent after X period of time? The last time I looked at the im_messages task code, I didn't see anything like that. But that was weeks ago, and I quickly skimmed it. So I might've missed quite a bit.
http://slashdot.org/~tf23/journal
You say that like it's a bad thing.
These are all excellent ideas. I'd also like to suggest maybe some sort of karma system for stories in general. It seems there are a few regular posters that people always complain about for either blatantly plugging their blogs, or for posting psuedo-science with a terrible summary that makes it sound like an actual scientific breakthrough but after RTFA is just garbage. As it is now, the tagging system has been partially corrupted for this purpose which is unfortunate and shows that there are needs that the current system is not addressing.
Curiosity was framed, Ignorance killed the cat.
You guys were podcasting back in the day with Geeks in Space. Those recordings viewed from now, almost a decade later, would be an awesome peek back into a different kind of internet, but I can't find the mp3's archived anywhere - I used to have 'em on a ZiP disk (heh) but even if I knew where it was, I'd have no way to read it.
Anyone have a copy of 'em lying around that they'd like to make available for research's/nostalgia's sake?
-Triv
You may want to get those issues cleared up before you consider Discussion2 complete. If you had access to Slashdot's web stats, you would fall from chair no less.
Hint: Top browser could not be Firefox. There is no such guarantee.
It happens because of people checking Slashdot at work or plainly choosing IE 7 (which is not a crime).
Since you have a very low ID, you get this question:
What constitutes a troll?
I regularly post expressing my disagreement with american foreign policy and get modded as a troll. I know I hold alot of views that many US citizens disagree with, but does that make me a troll? What was the origin of the expression?
I dont read
Still, as far as I can see, no indication that the parent post is below my threshold - meaning much confusion when trying to follow threads.
Anything but a direct reply to the article is indented and has a light grey "L" shape to the left (a tree link) indicating a link to the parent - but if the parent is below my threshold, it looks as if the child is linked to the comment above the parent. This leads to silliness like
Insightful post here
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+- Re: Goatse
How about it, guys?
A simple icon change would make it clear that there's no relation between these two posts - perhaps a cross to show that there's no link:
Insightful post here
X
+- Re: Goatse