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Slashdot Discussion System Updates
So D2 now remembers what you have read. This will mostly be useful to readers who use the key bindings to navigate -- we didn't really want to guess if you've read something, but if you use the WASD keys to navigate, moving on from a comment flags it as read. Read comments are slightly faded, and if you re-enter a discussion a few hours later, it should remember what you've read.
We've simplified comment retrieval as well. If you get to the 'End' of a discussion and try to get more comments (either by clicking one of the various 'More' links, or by pressing a keybinding like S or D that tells us to move on to the next comment) a dialog box will show up asking you if you would like to lower your threshold. So if you normally read at Score:4, and read to the end of the Score:4 comments, it will offer to lower your threshold to Score:3 either for all time, or just for this page. This means you don't need to constantly raise and lower your threshold to handle discussions of different sizes. This works really nicely.
Lastly is a user preference in the pref pane labeled 'Collapse Comments After Reading.' I'm actually considering making this one on by default but I'm open to feedback. It does what it says -- after you've navigated off a comment (using the keybindings again), it collapses the comment you just left. This makes it very easy to keep your place in a discussion as it grows. This is especially useful in discussions where you want to leave a tab open for several hours, or else come back later and figure out what's new.
There are undoubtedly bugs: feel free to email me or post them to the bug tracker. Thanks to pudge for hacking all this stuff too. Especially the bugs -- he wrote those first.
They'd have to throw the first few weeks' moderations away (admit it, you'd be tempted to go LOL I MOD ZONK DOWN EVERY TIME), but it could be useful later on.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
And what kind of bugs are you submitting?
Click the link, they're all listed. Mostly usability bugs, some extremely obvious visual bugs.
Keep in mind big projects get alot of bug sumissions.
Slashdot doesn't; maybe 5-8 on a busy day. Today it'll get a ton, but I've been watching their Sourceforge tracker for awhile.
Did you do the research and see if it's a dupe?
Yes. I used to work in QA, I do know what I'm doing.
Is it a security bug, they'll probably get looked @ first. Then they'll look if it's cosmetic or functioning.
My experience shows that they will not.
You're the one that attacked OSS
I'm not attacking OSS; I'm attacking projects that ask for contributions and then ignore the contributions. It just so happens these projects are usually open source projects.
Commercial products generally don't ask for contributions, and yet I've had much better luck getting bugs fixed in them. I've pointed out bugs to Apple, Blizzard, Microsoft, Adobe, MySQL (on one of their closed-source utilities) all with positive responses. Many of these bugs have been fixed, or will be fixed when the next product revision comes out.
Do you use a Mac? Do you play World of Warcraft? Do you use windowed mode? Did you notice about a year ago that windowed mode started remembering its position on the screen between runs? I submitted that bug, and it was fixed in the next Mac-specific client release. (Sadly, the Windows developers haven't yet implemented the same thing. I should pop off another email.) Blizzard doesn't ask for user contributions; in fact they make it pretty hard to even find what email address to use.
so I figured you're a MS fan boy.
Damn those shades of grey! I only see in black and white, and that's the way I like it, daggummit!
Most open source programs, except for big ones like DEs and distros or office programs, etc, most developers aren't getting paid to make and are writing them in their spare time.
Ok; that's fine. But if they don't have time to look at or fix bug submissions, they shouldn't ask people to submit them. They're just wasting our time and effort.
I don't know what your profession is or what bugs you actually submitted or to what projects, but when submitting a bug, evaluate how important it is, to everyone, not just you, and set your expectations.
I think it's a reasonable expectation that every bug, no matter how trivial, at the very least be assigned to somebody. Over 50% of the bugs I submitted were literally never read. Probably closer to 75%.
If you can code, then submit a patch.
I can code. But I don't have the free time to learn the coding style, build instructions, layout, possibly new programming language required to make the patch. Definitely not enough to make the patch when there's a good chance the patch will be rejected anyway.
The best use of my talent to the open source community is to use my extremely low tolerance of bugs and ability to notice tiny annoyances for QA purposes. Turns out most open source projects don't actually want that.
Comment of the year
Hell I'd even consider subscribing if the editors could keep their "witty" comments to themselves or give us an option for viewing submissions without editor comments
I've had half a dozen submissions posted (one last night, it was the first one this year) and sometimes submissions are straight from the submitter without even typos corrected, and sometimes they completely rewrite the submitter's summary (like the one I submitted yesterday afternoon so don't blame ME).
Contrary to popular opinion, slashdot editors do edit. They may of may not be good at editing, but they do edit. Or not, as they see fit, I've found.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
The best system for organizing a forum that I've ever seen is the left-hand pane on Google Groups (You have to enable Tree View to see it).
I'm baffled by the fact that no other comments system seems to use it. I bet Google would donate the code to Slashdot, too.
- Alaska Jack