Slashdot Mirror
Digg Backs Down On DiggBar
Barence writes "Social news website Digg.com has made key changes to its recently introduced DiggBar. The browser add-on had been much criticised for its use of frames to 'host' third-party websites within the digg.com domain using an obfuscating short URL, thereby boosting its own traffic figures to the detriment of those third parties. After many major sites ran negative articles on the DiggBar, and even changed their code to block it, Digg has relented and announced two changes to ease concerns."
Curious, does anyone know if Slashdot is/was planning a similar feature? if so maybe now is the time we, the users, state our requirements...
Remember: music starting automatically when you open a website, animated pictures, and of course, frames. What's the next, the unreadable background pattern
molmod.com - computing tips from a molecular modeling
They do the same thing, I'm wondering why there isn't similar backlash. I hate them both, framing is such a 90's thing.
-- these are only opinions and they might not be mine.
I'm really just getting sick of Browser Bars and add ins to "help your browser". I think it is very ironic that Google Chrome's excellent interface is just one souped up text box that you type stuff into, with a smattering of buttons for favorites. Browser bars are just stupid.... unless someone pays me to write one.
This is my sig.
fubar
... why is nobody screaming at Facebook about this, since they do the exact same thing that Digg was doing?
Seriously -- use the "Share" feature in Facebook to share a URL with your friends. Then click the link to read the shared story. The link will be framed with an obnoxious Facebook bar under a Facebook URL, just like stories shared via Digg were defaced, and with all the negative consequences that were associated with the DiggBar.
And yet while bloggers and SEO experts were up in arms over the DiggBar, I have yet to see a single story calling Facebook to account for this.
So if it's not OK for Digg to do this stuff, why is it ok for Facebook? Why the double standard?
Read my blog.
This, the Facebook TOS, and I am sure there are several other examples of how new technology, (ironically) such as Twitter and Facebook, have allowed people and companies to voice their concerns with a product and produce results. I am willing to bet that 10 years ago if some company wanted to screw you over (even if they sent a letter to all customers) there would not have been a way to get that info out to the world in a quick and efficient manner as to get said company to change it's policy.
There were no marches, no organized rallies; just a bunch of people complaining in a way that is heard by millions, including those they are complaining about and other users/customers of that company. This is the power of information.
No comprende? Let me type that a little slower for you...
Frames are the anti-christ of HTML.
The only practical use I have found is embedding certain types of complex content, like PDFs. Those should be hosted on the same site.
'nuff said
"No matter where you go, there you are." -- Buckaroo Banzai
Didn't about.com or somebody like them try this stunt back in the .com days? Remember having to add that "break out of some assholes frame" javascript on every page? I guess nobody does that anymore, but back then it used to be standard issue. Course, back in those days people used frames, so it was probably easy to break out. Looks like digg is using an iframe to host the content. This begs a couple questions:
1) What does something like AdSense think about pages served in iframes? Will it throw off their targeting?
2) What does this mean in terms of SEO? Will google get pissy about you being in some jerk's iframe?
3) How the hell do you break out of an iframe in a cross-browser way?
I gotta say one thing though--how they have the comments "fold down" from the "Diggbar" is pretty neat. Course, the posters on Digg are all 12 year olds who find poo-poo, pee-pee jokes funny thus negating everything.
Digg is a weird place, it is like some kind of flash-crowd groupthink that is enabled by the unlimited ability to vote anything down. Slashdot's moderation system may have its faults, but it is the best damn system I've seen for a website with lots of traffic. Here, you can make a post that goes against the general "view" of the site and still get "+5 insightful" provided you are eloquent. On Digg, you could write the most insightful damn thing in the world but if it goes even a tiny bit against the bias of the article you will be buried into the floor with zero chance of getting read.
This is the ongoing joke
Todos mis movimientos están friamente calculados
fubar
with their image search. Where is the outrage there, like Facebook others have mentioned?
Don't get me wrong, I hated the diggbar, and havent been to digg since they implemented it.
Actually, google very clearly puts the original URL on the top frame, as well as on the main results search page. Did you miss the part where one of the major complaints is URL obfuscation? RTFS!
Moderators: Before moderating a comment Insightful/Informative, check to see if a child post has already refuted it.
Am I the only one who still sees the Diggbar when I'm not logged in? It hasn't disappeared for me at all. How is that "backing down"?
Yet another reason not to use Digg
Summation 2
Also Google's image frame serves the purpose of providing the image directly, so you don't have to search through an entire webpage to find it. It's great for random image browsing.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
I don't like the diggbar, but it also has the actual url in the bar as a clickable link
I quite looking at Digg when they wouldn't let the Pifts.exe story reach the front page. Norton had a possible back door into their software for big brother and it phoned home to a server in Africa. Pretty important story if you ask me. All accounts that questioned the Pifts.exe file on Norton's site were deleted. A back door can be exploited by all not just the one who puts it in their software!!
The summary is wrong. It's not a browser add-on. It's a frame, loaded via HTML, like any other frame. It loads when you click a link on Digg.
In that case, I amend my post to "frames really make me puke.", followed by, "web sites that use frames to hijack other web sites really, really make me puke." I thought framejacking went out with the early 90s?
This is my sig.
I see it when I use Opera-9.64 (the latest), which BTW cannot login to Digg.com nor can the 'close' X-button actually close the frame and send one to the REAL page, as it does with Firefox.
Opera claims to be the most standards-compliant browser in existence; what does this say about Digg?
I don't go to Digg much anymore, partly because of this but mainly to stay out of kindergartens in general.
I work behind a content filter, so the Digg bar was handy for reading sites that are filtered, so I didn't have to RDP onto a separate server to read blocked URLs. So this is kinda sad news for me, but c'est la vie, big picture and all that.
Let's stop dilly-dallying and just change "-1: Overrated" to "-1: Disagree" or "-1: Doesn't Subscribe to Groupthink".
http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/45795
I am pretty sure the only reason people are not opt-out in larger numbers is, because digg has not made it easy to do or advertised that you can turn it off at all. They need to turn it off for everyone and let them opt-in and then see what their numbers look like before spewing them like they show diggbar in a positive light.
It was useless to me until I removed "moderate safe search" in the preferences ;-)
The summary states that Digg was stealing traffic by "hosting" the targeted site's page in a frame. Unless Digg was mirroring that site and replacing the ads, they were doing no such thing.
Not that the diggbar didn't suck- I disabled it first thing.
"Upon attaching the waterblock to my penis, I began to notice that I know nothing about computers." -- JRockway
...but reading the consistently and utterly ridiculous comments on Digg or Reddit stories has given me a new appreciation for the commenters on Slashdot. The toolbar was just the icing on the cake.
It combined all the things I really liked about social networking into a simple format. Its existence was confirmation to me that you could keep a site's identity going beyond the site. Plus, it was a brilliant reaction to Twitter. What a shame they're scaling it back.
But then again, I apparently have an unhealthy mancrush on Kevin Rose, because I posted as much on my blog a couple weeks ago.
ShortFormBlog: Writing a little. Saying a lot.
Google's url eats up enough that most urls scroll out of the url box at my resolution. It's also an unparsable mess to my eye.
And the real problem in any event is the frame. If the focus defaulted to the page, it would be fine. Why would I want to scroll down in Google's frame.
Actually, that should be fairly easy to code out a firefox extension for.
But no, it's bad site design. There should be an option to not have the frames.
It has given me a new appreciation for slashdot moderation!
TechSutra
It is a amazing the sheer amount of politics that goes around pagerank and search engine listing. In an environment where your whole business can go tits up with a bad listing in Google, it is no wonder such politicking exists!
If you couple that with the fact that nobody knows what the fuck, exactly, makes Google like your page and you get quite a strange brew. Books and websites all passing around spells and potions with no scientific basis. People constantly thinking Google is somehow out to get them because their website dropped three positions for the keyword "smelly cat".
I have to wonder though if it is because most of the people who are tasked with SEO stuff don't think like computer nerds. In fact, I'd say maybe I'm wrong and the the people you really want to hire for SEO are guys with PhD's in statistics. Maybe folk who were actuaries in a former life or something. In the end, the entire theory of Google Search is nothing more than a bunch of damn statistics.
Overall I find Reddit's comments are better and certainly more entertaining than Slashdot these days. The first 20 posts top level posts here are always a mixture of Off Topic, Troll, or +5 Funnies that aren't actually funny.
Your comment being voted as informative kind of defies the point your making. Comparing Slashdot to the social news sites Digg and reddit is a bad start with the difference in the type of articles on the frontpage as a major factor. Besides that, I don't mind reading comments that make no sense or are plain incorrect, I'll do the censoring myself thank you.
It has given me a new appreciation for slashdot moderation!
I acquired a new appreciation of /. moderation a couple days back when I replied to a very very helpful post and stated 'Mod parent informative'. I figured that having karma of excellent would make theirs (a 1 default) more visible and useful.
People did so and that post was boosted to a 5
Later in the day, someone saw my reply, and it got modded -2 redundant.
Reply to That ||
What the hell are you talking about? The top frame when you click on an image in the google search looks as follows:
See full size image
See full size image
800 x 1118 - 176k - jpg - allisonfarnum.files.wordpress.com/.../tomato.jpg
Image may be subject to copyright.
Below is the image at: allisonfarnum.wordpress.com/
See the URL?
Also, when I click on an image in the results and it takes me to the page with the frame at the top and the original at the bottom, it DOES put focus to the original. The last part of the google page is:
Is it possible you have noscript preventing it or some bad greasemonkey script? The problem isn't the design, it's in your browser setup.
Moderators: Before moderating a comment Insightful/Informative, check to see if a child post has already refuted it.
The first 20 posts top level posts here are always a mixture of Off Topic, Troll, or +5 Funnies that aren't actually funny
Never ceases to surprise me how a topic labeled Off Topic can generate so many "Interesting" and "Insightful" modded responses. Something inherently wrong there.
ITA cancer
Get off my slashdot.
It's not like the two concepts are mutually exclusive. Unfortunately, we don't have a "-1, Boring as hell" to counter the opposite end of the spectrum.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
Since it became so one sided politically, I switched to mixx.com
This is a common pattern. A comment arguing that its parent should be modded up will often achieve the desired effect, at the cost of whomever posted the "mod parent up" comment.
I had a similar thing happen when I posted a comment that initially got modded "redundant". I had then replied to my own comment, elaborating on what I meant, and claiming that the original post was making a valid point. This achieved two things:
A) the original post got upped to 5
B) the reply to the post got modded -1 offtopic
In its own funny way it works, but you need to keep in mind that the system has its quirks.
Entomologically speaking, the spider is not a bug, it's a feature.
This is why they get modded "offtopic" and "troll", so that most people won't have to see them. As a result the first 20 *visible* comments will usually be relevant to some degree.
I agree with the "funnies that aren't funny" though. It's something that we have to either live with, or filter off anything modded "funny" (and personally, I'm willing to read a couple of "pseudo-funny" posts in exchange for a really good one).
Entomologically speaking, the spider is not a bug, it's a feature.
When Im on the couch I may grab my netbook and when you only have 10" of screen the stupid dig bar takes up alot of valuable space. Also I do not like the fact they can be loading their own ads or content into the page you are viewing. Then what happens when all the other sites start putting on there own bars, you will have 3 or 4 toolbars stacked on each other.
I don't understand why anyone hasn't mentioned copyright issues. With Digg basically putting a header at the top of your page and showing a Digg URL instead of your page's URL, can't one claim they are pretending that the content is theirs?
With their weird login crap, just go to a page with a login! But noon, they have to use javascript rubbish to (try) and open a window, which may or may not work in your browser.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
For me, the Digg bar was very obtrusive. I'm forced to use IE6 at work, and when the Digg bar shows up on that browser on my work system (Win XP SP2), it causes unacceptable graphical tearing and glitches in the page it's wrapping. If I scroll down, I had better not scroll back up because I wanted to see something at the top of the page.
Furthermore, when I first noticed the Digg bar showing up on sites I visited via Digg, it was pretty easy to get rid of the bar -- one click to an obvious-looking close button widget and it was gone. A few days ago, I seemed to no longer have the ability to even get rid of the bar, which (combined with the aforementioned graphical problems) is what made it so annoying to me.
As a developer who slings a lot of web-based applications, I have been operating for years with the understanding that it's considered bad form to use frames and iframes, and especially bad form to wrap someone else's content in one of your frames. Most web sites (and the entities that operate them) don't like it when you include their site contents inside yours using frames -- there are legal concerns, concerns about obfuscating the URL so the end user is confused, concerns over the mis-appropriation of others' copyrighted material, concerns over the appearance vs. reality of content ownership (i.e., making someone else's work appear to be yours), and technical considerations, among other issues.
One such technical consideration is that most sites are authored assuming that they pretty much own the root of the DOM, and things like the Digg bar break that assumption. It's not an unreasonable assumption to make, especially since it simplifies your JavaScript and navigation logic. I recall testing out free WiFi at several airports, including Denver International. The Denver system would intercept your HTTP requests and decorate the page you were trying to load with their own ad-laden HTML, which would then wrap your desired site inside a frame. Their stuff mostly worked, but occasionally would bork my browser or cause multiple instances of ad bars and other detritus to be loaded around the page I wanted to see. In some cases, the web site I was viewing came up completely scrambled. (This was on a MacBook Pro running both Safari and Firefox 2.x. I did try both.)
...in TFA. The article says that for users who are not logged in (or who don't have any Digg account), the Digg bar should not appear at all:
I just tried surfing to a Digg-linked site, and the toolbar still appeared. I can confirm that I am not logged in to Digg, and I've tried this with IE6 and Firefox 3.x.
What I do see is a little disclosure widget appear when I mouse over the close box for the Digg bar. (Hey, at least the close widget is there -- a couple days ago, it mysteriously stopped appearing, making it impossible to remove the Digg bar.) Clicking on the disclosure widget reveals a link to "always hide" the toolbar.
So, it would appear that, unless Digg still needs to roll out their changes, they are not playing by the rules described in TFA. Requiring the end user to opt out when they're not even a Digg member is not exactly in the spirit of their supposed new rules (and apparent agreement with other site owners). It's also not obvious how this opt-out nonsense works unless you're one of those people who obsessively mouses over every square millimeter of screen real-estate. Even then, you need to know that the little chevron-ish icon that shows up is what you need to click.
Why complain when these lines prevent anyone from framing your pages?
<SCRIPT LANGUAGE="JavaScript">
if (top!=self.parent)
top.location=self.parent.location;
</script>
How many escape pods are there? "NONE,SIR!" You counted them? "TWICE, SIR!"
Browse at +3 or +4 and change your prefs to get rid of funny moderated comments. They are very rarely funny and it really makes for a much better reading experience. Filters out the trolls and funny comments that aren't funny, and any real cream usually rises to the top as long as it isn't posted too late.
It's easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
"but the signal to noise ratio has been fading fast lately."
At least every few months someone is kind enough to post how much worse things are than when they first started.
I think it's a cultural difference between the two sites. People here take moderation much more seriously than they do at reddit for some reason. If you like a comment there you can just mod it up yourself too.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
I acquired a new appreciation of /. moderation a couple days back when I replied to a very very helpful post and stated 'Mod parent informative'. I figured that having karma of excellent would make theirs (a 1 default) more visible and useful. People did so and that post was boosted to a 5. Later in the day, someone saw my reply, and it got modded -2 redundant.
That's why us professional karma whores say something like "if I had mod points, I'd mod you up" and then just throw in a filler statement. It's the exact same thing, but the different wording prevents it from being modded down.
I modded it up so it's back at zero. Posting anonymously since this post is too late in the thread to grant me delicious karma ;-).
Joy of Tech take on the DiggBar
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad