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 realize that this doesn't matter to a lot of the Slashdot crowd, but Discussion2 is still buggy in IE (IE7, specifically). There are JS errors on the page, the weird gray and white floating box that sits on the page which is apparently there to tell you how many posts there are in the discussion overruns the left-side navigation bar (and overall who's purpose seems a bit pointless to me in general), and its rendering is completely messed up in IE. Also, I have to use FF just to disable Discussion2 on my account, because it doesn't work in IE7.
You may want to get those issues cleared up before you consider Discussion2 complete.
A community-oriented lyrics site
Ive' noticed that Discussion2 tends to make Opera 9 chug on large comment pages (usally past 200
"I think an etch-a-sketch with an ethernet port would beat IE7 in web standards compliance."
well, they couldve kept the blockquote tag and just added css to it. this is what blockquote was meant for. div is meaningless, and shouldnt be used in place of blockquote.
Some better classification and filters on Slashdot, so we can reduce the noise levels. Give the articles:
:P
a "credibility rating" (from "improbable rumor" to "we guarantee it's correct with our life".. ok pick better named)
an "importance" rating (from "something to read if you're bored with life" to "breaking effin news!!!")
and "time effect" rating (from "it was announced to happen in somewhere the next 100 years" to "it just happened now!")
Because, damn. I'm sick of all the noise on Slashdot. And that's gold I'm giving you here. If you don't use it, I'll be so pissed off, I'll start my own news site just to see it happen
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
A feature that I really want: being able to see which comments were added since the last time I loaded the page.
Currently, there is not way to follow discussions you haven't participated. D2 doesn't even have the possibility to temporarily sort comments or threads from newest to oldest without doing it through the preferences page (which you need to access again if you want to change it back when you load a new story). For stories with a large number of comments this means that new comments will barely be read by anyone.
This is not a complaint by someone who is pissed of that no one will read his comments (see diggers and their new discussion system) but by someone who appreciates the overall quality of discussion on slashdot. Let's face it, these days there are better places to get the news, slashdot's quality is in the comments. This is where new features should go to.