D2 Updates, Text Message Notifcation

A few quick notes on some recent code updates. The smaller function is that we've added text messaging stuff for phones. If you visit the messages page (you must be logged in) you can define your cell phone's email address, and get notifications sent to it. The more interesting update is for Discussion2 users (turn it on on any article page). There is an option now to restrict page sizes and you will retrieve comments by score. This means you can configure your Slashdot to return smaller, more bandwidth friendly pages that you can expand without loading fresh pages. Anyone still running D1 is a sucker.

Comments

Texting in US is Ripoff

[DrunkenTerror]

The other day my wireless provider sent me a text message saying "It currently costs $0.10 to receive text messages. Would you like to upgrade?" I mean, damn guys, thanks for the message, ya know?

Re:Texting in US is Ripoff

[ZombieWomble]

This was something that intrigued me when I was talking with an American who was visitng - do you have some way to regulate how you receive texts/who you receive texts from? I can understand the rationale behind paying to receive a phone call (obviously, you can choose to reject the call if you don't want to pay the price). But over here at least, texts just arrive - doesn't this (theoretically) make it possible to bomb someone with vast amounts of texts and drive up their bills without them having a meaningful way to protect themselves?

I'm sure there's a simple solution to this somewhere which I'm overlooking, but having an aspect of a person's billing completely outside their control seems rather bizarre.

Re:"Sucker!"

[jrumney]

I just tried it again after finding it lacking a couple of months ago, and no, still no way to sort by score. So I guess I'll keep sucking the traditional interface for now.

Re:sucker?

[internewt]

The ability to colapse a whole thread appeared on this slashdot 2.0 ajax interface thing for a while. It didn't seem to be the best implementation (IIRC), but it kinda worked.

Did you used to be a usenetter by any chance? Thats where I picked up a desire to be able to kill a whole thread. Laugh all you like, but I used to like Netscape 4's news reader, and like a lot of usenet clients it could ignore threads. If a thread turned into a flame fest (that you've seen before), or just wasn't interesting, OT etc., you could just ignore the whole thread, and new messages in that thread would be marked as read.

The ability to ignore a whole thread, or from a point downwards would be nice on slashdot. Once you've been here for a while you start to notice that a lot of discussions are very similar: they follow the same patterns of posts and ideas that have been talked about a million times. If whole threads could be ignored more easily by /. users, it might mean that mod points get used more towards the end of discussions (which often have insightful gems of comments that get overlooked because either a mod has run out of points by the time they get to the end of the page, or they've moved on to a newer article).