Slashdot Mirror
Help Shape the Future of Slashdot
Long-time readers will know that we try not to clutter the front page of Slashdot with much stuff about the site itself; this is a rare exception, but we hope you'll like the reason: we want your opinions. You should see above a link to take a survey about Slashdot, and (just to be heavy handed) here's the direct link. The questions there are simple, but we're going to read the answers carefully. The reminder bar up there will remain active for some time, but this story will scroll down the page like all Slashdot stories. Comments are welcome below; surveys have their limitations, after all, but please don't comment without also giving the survey a visit — if it makes sense, feel free to cut-and-paste any answers from there as comments, too. The engineers who build this site (and the editors, too!) are counting on your honest opinions and hoping for some great ideas; ideas outnumber the hours we have to do things, so we hope you'll make a case for the ways that Slashdot should change (and the ways it shouldn't!).
The moderation system seriously needs thinking and redone. It's constantly abused on Slashdot, up to the point where it really has started to annoy people. All the stories are filled with slashdot groupthink comments and it's always clear what kind of comments will be modded up and which down. This especially comes up within certain subjects - anything anti-piracy will get modded to -1, as does anything that says good things about Microsoft.
This really ruins the comment system as one is supposed to only have certain mindset and he is supposed to do all the same comments over and over again. Then there is the other mod abuse what happens when someone sees a comment he really doesn't like, so he goes on personal war against the poster and downmods all his comments from his comment profile, causing him bad karma and inability to post. Moderation system needs some serious work.
I always liked triangles. Slashdot needs more triangles.
Funny may not give karma, but +5 Informative never made anyone snort coffee out their nose.
where 2^14 people step forward and say "I am 'anonymous coward' on slahdot"?
n/t
Make it so I can see all the posts without logging in or Javascript. My usage of the site has gone down dramatically because it's a pain in the ass with the (relatively) new system. I have been reading the site since 1998 and this fucking sucks.
Stop hitting the web server on my NAT box for ok.txt every time I post.
Don't assume that any cookies you set will ever be sent back.
Don't use referer fields at all, just send straight HTML.
Don't use all this horrible crashy javascript.
Fire timothy, fix moderation, fix the damn slider for browsing comments, shorten the time to repost after posting one comment as AC. I have to sit here forever it seems waiting to post the next comment.
Some really terrible articles get through sometimes. Articles from some no-name person's blog that contain no or very few external links to anything to back up the crap put forth on their site.
Better quality editing.
Sounds mean but it has to be said. Some of the stories over the last year or two have had blatant errors in the summary (one was even in the title, about some incident at a nuclear plant), I remember at least a few troll stories that got through, it's shameful. It seems like the posters are often putting more effort into the posts than the editors are putting into the articles.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Back to how it was about a year ago, when it worked fairly well with or without Javascript. As it is now, it doesn't seem to work right either way...
Great Intellect...
All I want is at least one professional editor. Somebody to do basic things like check for dupes, make sure stories aren't wholesale ripped off, basic fact checking, that kind of thing. This is done by almost every other professional news media site out there, can Slashdot please make this /one/ change?
How about you read your own bug tracker and actually fix, or at least respond in some way, to the bugs in it?
Comment of the year
Bad stories. Useless stories. Stories that are identifiable after reading the first couple comments that they are in fact non-stories, trolling, or something like that. Stories should be demote-able, so less of Slashdot need waste their time with them.
I'm not sure there is much to improve. For years, the ever-changing (and oft confusing ways) to show/hide comments drove me nuts. But the current iteration of the slider bar works well.
Often, I type a comment just to find I'm not signed in (/. seems to like signing one out rather quickly). The old way I could have signed on at my post without losing my post. If I click log on at the top, I often lose my post. I have to remember to right click->new tab it. I greatly preferred the old way. I often lose posts and really don't bother retyping them.
I would also like to see /. get more story volume like Reddit but w/o losing IQ. I still come here because the posts are still more intelligent than most of the net, many social media sites included. Plus, unlike reddit, I like how the moderation often tells me why something was upvoted (I sometimes don't get humor of everything because I don't keep up with the latest trends/games/books/series/etc).
Bring back Jon Katz!!!!
That is all.
Give the money back to the share holders!
Articles shouldn't start like this: "Mr Submitter, with his first accepted submission, writes: [summary]". No one gives a fuck.
Half the time I try to post and use the capcha thing it thinks I'm a bot and kicks me out. Fix it.
I filled out the survey, but I will share my major concerns here as well. I use IE 7. My company mandates its use and locks things down fairly well. I am a lawyer interested in science and tech policy, but with no actual computer skills (i.e., I programmed a few lines of HTML in my youth, but that's about it).
Over the past few years, my user experience has gone into the gutter, with very few corresponding benefits. Boxes often overlap, and the whole site freezes on a regular basis. Most other sites are fine.
As a result, I show up less. Sure, I could read it on my home computer, but eh. What's the point if you can't sit on a conference call while reading?
Too bad I posted already in this thread or I'd mod you up.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I am uncomfortable with the number of CowboyNeal references in the survey!
PS: I don't reply to ACs.
More poines.
Oh, and more selection on the moderation. -1 Insane and +1 Really Insane and -1 Fanbois and +1 Well Played, Sir
Survey submitted.
Uh, Linux geek since 1999.
/. is a technical blog which gets its name from the "slash" punctuation symbol and the "dot" symbol as they are used in computing.
"Slash Dot" is a fantasy blog you wish existed about slash involving male body parts smaller than the punctuation at the end of this sentence.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Good. Then you should be happy right now.
No flash, No flash, No flash, No flash.
Less scrolling too would be nice.
The search function completely sucks. If I'm looking for a comment that I *KNOW* was posted in an story, but can't remember the story, good freaking luck finding it.
I usually wind up with better results by using google ("search text" +site:slashdot.org).
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
RSS needs html tags too. Story abstracts show up as plain text, though comments are well implemented. We can even post directly from the feed but can't RTFA. Even if we don't care to RTFA, context is lost without the blue underlining.
I would also encourage the editors to read /.'s feed to reduce the frequency of dupes.
In 2011 we shouldn't have to wait 10 seconds after hitting preview for our less than 1kb of text to be checked and displayed back.
The firehose submissions and peer review and all that stuff isn't working out too great. Analogy would be HP, where they test the wind, do consumer opion surveys, commitee meetings, just to decide what to do.
What slashdot really needs to do is get Steve Jobs (or an equivalent) with a clear vision and just do one thing, and do it with excellence. Be Apple, not HP.
The comment threshold slider is completely broken on multi-touch devices. You can't "click and drag" in any modern multi-touch browser (iPhone, Android, Touchpad, Playbook, etc.) If you try, it just pans the page. "Touch and drag" is the universal pan / scroll gesture.
In addition to the moderation / meta-moderation issues noted (confirmation bias anyone?) Changes over the past year have made reading /. on a mobile device (e.g. iPhone) almost impossible. Page loads take forever and it must be trying to calculate pi to 1 billion places for each page load. Plus, clicking a collapsed story to show it will scroll to the top. That's stupid. The "More" links are lame, too. You can keep clicking "more" to get more stories (since it only displays like 5), but when you go into a story to read comments and then come out, all your extra stories are gone. A simple "next page" feature would be far more useful. AJAX is all fine, but /. abuses it to the point where it detracts from site functionality.
Oh, and more stories about ponies.
I don't know, but it works for me.
I thought the title of this article said "Help shape the funeral of slashdot,"
I gasped until I read it right.
Being able to edit/delete your posts would be favorite. Yeah I know there's the preview button but often mistakes can slip through a quick proof-read. For a further example, look at how many actual submission titles/commentaries are riddled with spelling and grammatical errors... Now imagine the comments.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Everybody's a critic, including myself. So you're about to have to read some strong responses. But please keep in that, IMHO, there's still no place on the Web like Slashdot. So thank you for keeping it together, warts and all.
The randomly generated quotes at the bottom are rarely funny. Why not stick to lists of quotes from real people?
and quit trying to sneak your obvious political slant into posted stories by putting them into the wrong categories. So do your best to remove the slant from the site. You could also drop stories about whack jobs like Phleps clan going after Steve Jobs because it had no place here, it might work at Digg but we know where their bias got them.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
I want an option to automatically load all the comments on an article. not 250 at a time, everything. Every time. Automatically.
One of the big advantages of Slashdot is that we have a community with experts from a wide variety of fields. As a way to improve the overall signal to noise ratio, I think it would be neat to be able to moderate commenters' expertise on different subjects. For example, a physicist posting inside information on a physics story would get modded +1 for physics. At certain thresholds, they would get progressively larger moderation boosts for comments posted under physics stories and be marked as an expert. This would fit into the normal moderation system, so everyone else's comments would still be visible. Basically, the goal is to reward people for talking about things they understand rather than BSing based on one pop science book they read ten years ago.
The downside is that this requires a revamp of the topic system -- maybe it could work with tagging? It would also benefit from a removal of the +5 moderation cap.
Visit the
Better quality editing.
Sounds mean but it has to be said. Some of the stories over the last year or two have had blatant errors in the summary (one was even in the title, about some incident at a nuclear plant), I remember at least a few troll stories that got through, it's shameful. It seems like the posters are often putting more effort into the posts than the editors are putting into the articles.
Let users moderate article summaries. Heck, you could use a 3:1 moderation point penalty for summaries, but some summaries are so egregiously bad. We need some way to call the submitters and editors out.
2nd'ing the motion to let us moderate articles.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
Let's plot of graph of global warming against the number of penises in the world.
Disable comments. I'd be more interested in reading editorial comments than long, rarely-interesting threads.
Add value to the news you are reporting, don't dilute them. Be bold and transform the site.
If you want to know what is wrong with Slashdot, look at this article:
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/11/08/30/1233214/New-USB-30-Flash-Drive-Has-2-TB-of-Storage
The article is called "New USB 3.0 Flash Drive has 2TB of Storage".
To paraphrase what one commenter said, "It isn't USB 3.0, it doesn't have 2TB of storage, and you can't buy it."
Stop sensationalizing headlines. Consider not taking story submissions from users if it means the summaries will be less sensational. Try to read the article or watch the video before you post it. I mean, come on. The article's title was 100% wrong.
Seriously. The combination of heavy-handed bias of many editors, the sensationalistic "wind people up for ad impressions" approach to stories and the total lack of professionalism (eg even basic spellcheck) makes slashdot a complete and total joke to the rest of the internet.
Recommend slashdot to anyone -are you fucking kidding me? Slashdot has become such a joke I'm more likely to deny that I read slashdot rather than recommend it!
I bet moderators mod you down. Which is sad and is an abuse of the moderation system. Keep reminding people... -1 != disagree... if you disagree post!
Anyhow, here is my post... Even with the moderator abuse, I don't think changing the system is the right plan. A more complex moderation system isnt really the answer. I like the system here because it is simple and fairly fair.
Perhaps a more complex meta-moderation system would help, though it isn't immune from the bias problems.
Anyhow, to sum up my post... I disagree, but Mod Parent Up(tm).
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
Let us change our User ID.
I type - I hit preview - I wait - I wait - I wait - I wait - preview finally appears and then I can finally post it
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
Actually I have a somewhat tongue-in-cheek way to help the bias problem.
Add an actual moderation option "-1 disagree". Have this only lower the post for the moderator himself, and secretly subtract karma from the moderator. Eventually disagreers will no longer be able to moderate. Problem solved.
And to elaborate... bias isn't a problem with the moderation system, it is a problem with human nature. A way to filter that out would be helpful, but I am not sure how.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
There will be ten firehose entries for the same article. They will sit unposted for days, and then when it finally hits the frontpage it is from the same five people who always get articles posted, the worst link, the worst summary, and often through a spammy blog instead of the source.
I was happy when the firehose opened up. I thought it would help out a lot. Instead it is just like a cruel joke seeing what could have been posted instead of what did get posted.
The sad thing is you could move slashdot to a sub-reddit on reddit.com, possibly one of the worst sites on the internet, and it would be an improvement. For something masquerading as a technology site, the current setup is just embarrassing.
Make sure Slashdot actually displays properly on all the major web browsers. I'm forced to use IE8 at work and the survey page doesn't display properly. When the new redesign came up it took WEEKS to get fairly serious bugs worked out. I know IE is notorious for doing it's own thing but seriously. I will fill out the survey when I get home (and onto Opera!)
I personally believe that the mod system isn't really broken, that there are as many insightful comments as before, and trolls are not everywhere. My only real requests would be that funny helps Karma in some way - even if it's only worth half or a quarter of insightful - and that meta moderation does something that we understand. When meta-moding comments from years ago, I fail to understand the goal of it.
I call it 'The Aristocrats'
The moderation system seriously needs thinking and redone.
My main critique is that there is no way to moderate something explicitly as inaccurate or misleading. Much stuff that is posted is just plain wrong but isn't flamebait or a troll or even overrated.
All the stories are filled with slashdot groupthink comments...
I'm not sure there is a decent solution for that. If you have any ideas on how to improve it I'd be interested.
That's it!
Stricter moderation would be nice... the only thing that ruins my slashdot experience is bile in the comments... this need not be a complete democracy.
I usually just skip the comments because the quality and information content is so mixed.
Otherwise I'd have to mod you down simply because.
Real irony: If this post gets modded up.
Stop hitting the web server on my NAT box for ok.txt every time I post.
Seriously? That's what passes for Insightful? You are part of something like 0.001% of the population who could possibly care about something like that.
Don't assume that any cookies you set will ever be sent back.
What do you have to hide from a Slashdot cookie?
Don't use referer fields at all, just send straight HTML.
Bah, the web was clearly better in 1995 when men were men and the html blink element ruled.
Don't use all this horrible crashy javascript.
Why don't you just send wget requests and read Slashdot in your favorite text editor (vi)?
I guess slashdot got slashdotted?
Maybe for a fee, but a pluggable implementation of slashcode would be worth a lot to folks, as the moderation system is very good for signal/noise ratio.
As long as you make the comments searchable by commenters and site admins alike, and provide tools to increase signal and block noise for all interested parties, it would be a great service which many might pay for.
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
You can't read certain comments when reading Slashdot on the iPad. Also we need better IE support for Slashdotters forced to use it at work.
I wish you would fix your surway system, so it don't crash giving me an :
Error 503 Service Unavailable
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(Oh And 2 more things which need to be fixed: When increasing font-size with "Text only zoom" The bar to the left overlaps the text of the stories, making them impossible to read.
And I really miss a "Newest commets first, No threads" view mode for when I am comming back to an old story, to see if there are any new comments.
Moderation is really used for two different things:
1) removing troolish comments, spam, and annoying offtopic comments
2) acknowledging comments we think are insightful, funny, or informative
these two functions wold be better separated.
You could have a button to flag a comment to be hidden, and then if 10 (or whatever) people click a button to agree with the flag, the comment is hidden.
then there would be a separate drop-down where you can say "I think this post is: insightful/funny/informative" and it would simply keep a tally of how many people rated the post a certain way.
"Error 503 Service Unavailable
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Looks like we slashdotted the Slashdot survey...
Awesome!
Loads of crap stories make it to the front page, lots of blogspam and very few "news for nerds stuff that matters". Also the front page design sucks. Please bring back this one
Oh, and more selection on the moderation. -1 Insane and +1 Really Insane and -1 Fanbois and +1 Well Played, Sir
+1 Well Played, Sir.
I'd add: -1 Inaccurate, -1 Misleading, -1 Citation Needed, +1 Citation Provided, -1 Whoosh!
I was going to mod you down as overrated as I've already moderated in this thread, but this post is so bad I decided to just lose the mod points and post a correction to your woefully naive and innacurate analysis. It would slow down by a factor of 9, asshole. Way to overstate your case.
If I can just reach out with my words and touch a butthole, just one, it will all be worth it.
Give us SSL and IPv6 support.
Add support for OpenSearch.
lots more. even gizmodo has a nsfw section..
Here are my responses as the survey submission system isn't playing nice:
1) 5+ years
2) Multiple Visits Daily
3) The community comment moderating system, being able to track my comments and those who respond to my comments, the intelligent population (when browsing at 2+), the people who take the time to track a conversation- and more so the people who respond with questions as opposed to angry assertions.
4) The site is very sluggish. When not signed in, the comment system is barely manageable and signing in doesn't take me back to the page from which I decided to sign in... it takes me to the home page!
5) Extremely likely
6) Slashdot is a news aggregator which values intelligence and intellectual curiosity. While I am a complete geek for many subjects I see articles worth reading every day that are often unrelated to my normal preferences and comments clarifying or contradicting those articles. Anyone who I think has a genuine curiosity about the world, I direct to Slashdot.
7) Yes, Yes
8) I'll give info if requested...
(http://slashdot.org/survey.pl)
Error 503 Service Unavailable
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Varnish cache server
Slashdot is awful on any mobile device I've ever tried it with. Give us http://m.slashdot.org/ in a form factor that makes sense, and you will be doing something great for your readers.
I currently use Alterslash, the brain child of someone else on this site, and it's fantastic. And OSNews has one of the best mobile versions I know of (and has had it for ages).
If this were Usenet, I'd killfile the lot of you.
Slashdot has probably of the best comment systems on Earth.
Talk about damning with faint praise...
As it is down at the moment.
* Better editors: Fewer dupes, fewer lame articles.
* Better support for AC's. AC's make this site go, stop trying to coerce everyone to sign-in. Stop giving mod-point advantage to subscribers.
* No JavaScript. Yeah, it makes some things nice, but overall sucks. I say "me too" to all the previous gripes about JS.
* Better editors: Real science articles need to be edited by real scientists. Get a cadre of volunteers to vet the science articles so you don't have lame/wrong summaries.
* Better editors: summaries of articles should actually be SUMMARIES, and should be ACCURATE. They should not be rag-journalism taglines to trap unwary readers.
* Get off my LAWN!
tl;dnr: Anyways, couldn't load the survey; didn't take it..
... but I don't think properly. The page sections are all layered upon each each other, the survey is in the back, the menu's are in the front. Actually that happens quite a bit on Slashdot these days, and I'm using separate computers (work, home, parent's home, personal laptop, etc.) Is slashdot actively trying to make IE look like a bad browser, or does this happen to people not using IE? Site visited in IE 8.
The rest: First two times, got a 503 error. Now the page "loads"
instead of a "one shoe fits all" approach, do like what Google does and return a page that is tailored to the browser you are using. yes, it does this for cell phones but not for desktop browsers. for example, if I'm using lynx, it shouldn't be returning a page with JavaScript. render speed might also be another issue to consider. certain things like CSS dont render fast on some browsers but it's fantastic on the new chrome builds.
also, make the page pass the w3c validation test using strict without errors or warnings. some people want pages to render properly everywhere.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Create a mobile app or at least a mobile version of the site. It's really hard to read on the go, even on an iPhone.
Slashdot works very well. I don't see any problems requiring a major change. Is this a solution (e.g., an editors' ambitions to leave their mark) looking for a problem?
1 esp for those that have "classic"/D1 style selected DO NOT ADD TEST STUFF (D1 was selected for a reason)
2 have a -5 (oblivion) rating where you have to have N!^2 mod downs to reach it (you have to be down modded from 0 55 times to reach -5(oblivion)) then if you draw a posting with that rating 1 your ip is banned for 24 hours 2 after your ban you are limited to posting once a day (with an ip block check)
3 add a function to mod POSTERS/Editors (they get blocked for a week if they reach -1 moderation)
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
When I click "Get More Comments", I have to rescroll through all the page to find the additional comments that were loaded. Instead, full threads should be loaded all at once instead of loading parts of a thread incrementally every time "Get more comments" is clicked.
Reduce horizontal space wasted for indentation of comments nested in threads. On an iPhone, this causes a ridiculous amount of scrolling to read some comments.
Follow Facebook, Google, and a bunch of other sites that are offering HTTPS support to prevent session hijacking.
When I open up an article and then log in, I am redirected back to the main page. I would rather be logged in and left on the page I was on. Or worse, sometimes I'll read through the headlines and open the stories I want to read in new tabs, then I'll remember to log in. I have to close all the tabs and re-open them once I am logged in. The site should be able to recognize open tabs and show that I am logged in on each one.
Three days from now?? Thats tomorrow!! ~Peter Griffin
Whenever certain subjects come up, the commenting crowd rush over and surround the OP and begin tearing the posting down, sometimes getting pretty harsh in their self-righteous skewers. It makes reading /. a less than pleasant experience at times.
If you want to see what I mean about the harshness, go back and look at the responses to any posting that mentions creationism or Intelligent design,
that is, mentions it without immediately condemning it.
It makes me hesitant to post anything or comment on anything (on any subject) lest I be torn to shreds. The shredding of posters or commenters cannot be called debate, or free discussion of ideas, and it seems there is no room for any position or idea--other than the prevailing one among a group of frequent posters.
You asked, in sincerity I think, so I responded candidly, though baring my neck in the process.
OK, the rest of you, start your feeding frenzy--I've martyred myself already by using the word Intelligent Design without condemning it.
That doesn't return an Error 503.
I really don't care why someone thinks something I say in "interesting".
But I think that someone mod'ing "overrated" should be REQUIRED to explain why. And if their explanations are too similar for each of their mods (copy paste) or seem to have no bearing on the comment, then adjust their likelihood of receiving mod points in the future (or revoke their current moderation).
Evaluate this with the existing meta-moderation system.
I'd redo the moderating system to be tag oriented... so that a comment could be "funny" and "insightful" and "accurate" and "wise", etc... with each of the tags being given a weight by someone who casts a vote.. The tags would be just any old text, with the most common ones showing up in a list.
If we can then filter based on the tag weights, we could then filter out funny posts, or innacurate ones, or flamebait depending on our mood.
It can be MUCH better... but requires a shift in thinking away from the popularity contest.
Consider using part of the page for quick, 140-character comments.
I'd call them Tweets, but it's probably trademarked.
Dots? Sladots? Slots?
Error 503 Service Unavailable
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God Forbid, please do not use the Facebook comment system, like TechCrunch did.
I've never been back.
You might consider adding avatars / gravatars next to people's comments. And turning it into more of a social site. I wouldn't mind "following" the insightful people. (I know you have some social features of the site, but I don't think they are well integrated, or used very often.)
...after following a link - Why do I get the page that is several stories behind where I was? The page isn't cacheing properly. Not sure why this is, but it is aggravating to always have to reload the main page just to get back to where I was.
-- Don't call me "Sir," I increase entropy for a living!
Problem with metamod, in my head, is that you get a list that has some moderated comments and (usually) the majority of the comments weren't moderated in the first place. What is that supposed to do? It isn't in the FAQ.
Metamod should only get a list of comments that were moderated in the first place. IMHO.
As odd as it sounds I like the horrible javascript for submitting a comment and inability to edit posts. The less than friendly interface and number of steps makes me think and articulate before I post something. If it's too easy to post a comment then the probability of people spaming half formed thoughts increases.
4) The site is very sluggish. When not signed in, the comment system is barely manageable and signing in doesn't take me back to the page from which I decided to sign in... it takes me to the home page!
Hear, hear. That has kicked my butt many times.
Slashcode has been broken for months now, users who id starts with a special character are unable to log in. I've sent sent email to the appropriate accounts, filed a bug report, all to a complete vacuum. I'm tired of being anonymous.
Let me log in!
(startx)
I believe you want to visit reddit.
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
Please get rid of the Borg Gates as an icon for Microsoft stories.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
You'd think that w/ their experience w/ the number of geeks out there hitting the site they'd make sure the survey could handle the load...
Yep, see m.fark.com for a great mobile layout.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Yo dawg, I herd you like slashdotting, so I put a link in your slashdot so you can be slashdotted while you slashdot.
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I'd like the parent link to open the parent right above the post I clicked the link in, using something like css show/hide. It's annoying when the thread is long, and it jumps you up several pages. It can take a while to scroll down to pick up where you left off.
I just filled out the survey and tried to submit it. I got the following:
Error 503 Service Unavailable
Service Unavailable
Guru Meditation:
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Varnish cache server
Of course, it doesn't work. Lovely.
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What is this, Reddit?
I forgot to mention this in the survey itself, and it's been slashdotted now anyway (ha ha!), but I find it downright embarrassing that /. still doesn't allow unicode beyond the basic Latin set. Yeah, yeah, some pranksters can make the page's text run backwards by using some special character. Solution: Exclude that/those character(s). I've lost count of the times I've seen someone's touche with the proper accent mark get butchered into touch, or seen an attempted discussion of Chinese or Japanese language severely stifled by the inability to just fucking show people what you're talking about. And let's not even mention how much easier it could be to convey some mathematical concepts. This goes beyond /. being America-centric and into a whole new level of head-in-the-sand, and I don't understand how it's stayed this way so long.
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The user moderation is a great feature but it is abused by some. A system to detect the users abusing moderation would be nice. If a user is found to be consistently violating the guidelines for moderation, said user should be ineligible to receive mod points for a set period of time.
I do like the forced preview, though.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
One of the things that I find disappointing is that probably the single largest factor in terms of whether a comment is promoted or demoted is the time after the post hits the main page. It is extremely common to see average posts (i.e. limited informational or insightful quantity/quality) rated very highly (probably too highly) simply because they are submitted shortly (within 1-2 hours, often much less) after the parent post hits the main page. Conversely, insanely high quality posts (i.e. those with tons of useful information or insight) that are submitted after the magic window either do not get voted up or are only voted up to a minor degree.
I understand why this occurs. A large influx of people are reading the comments shortly after the post and then there is an exponential decay afterwards. The result is that high quality and deserving posts do not get voted up since fewer and fewer people with mod points see them. It is completely understandable, however I think addressing this would have a significant positive impact. I know there have often been times that I would not post simply because I figured it was too late and practically no-one would read the comment so why bother. Unfortunately, I do not know how to solve this problem, just that it is real.
I do realize that the meta-moderation system does have some limited impact here, but I think it is too limited to be effective.
http://slashdot.org/survey.pl?op=take_all&svsid=111020429
Error 503 Service Unavailable
Service Unavailable
Guru Meditation:
XID: 332523110
Varnish cache server
Error 503 Service Unavailable
Service Unavailable
Guru Meditation:
XID: 332524142
Varnish cache server
Well, almost.
I was surprised that I opened this threat and that wasn't the asjldfjalsdjflasn dlfna ah, fuck it.
1) Get rid of this insane "show only 50 posts" system and the controls scattered throughout the page. It shows "50 of 357 comments loaded", the slider to the right makes you think that if you move it to 0 or -1 you get more posts, but no, it's still about the loaded ones, and if you want to read more, you have to know to go to the bottom of the page and click 7 times on "get more" to get 50 more at a time. This is silly and has to stop.
2) Get rid of the annoying hyperlinking of random words to the point where you have no idea which one is TFA. What is wrong with "In this recently released document so-and-so discusses some stuff. This is a prior article on stuff, and there are other developments mentioned on other site.
3) Daily slashdot email needs to lose the useless parts like title (it's already in the link), the "from the so-and-so department" and the prominent timestamp and instead have a proper summary of what the hell the post is about so I know without having to click on it.
4) Anon comments entered after the initial rush get lost forever because no one gets to read them. I am not sure if this is fixable but thought I should mention.
UNICODEEEE!!!
But really, is it really that hard to prevent any potential site exploits with what may be escape characters and whatnot?
Get with the times guys, please. Even UTF-8 is better than what you allow now.
...Slashdot's moderation system is utter shit...
Coming from MrHanky, wouldn't that be a complement?
To make /. usable, I disable Javascript, log in, use the Classic Discussion System and Opera's User Mode (to make comment lines wrap).
I want the above without log in and user mode.
Also, I agree with pretty much all top rated comments so far, especially about quality of editing and submissions.
The above problems are so annoying that this is my second attempt not to let my account slide into oblivion. I've been able to muster up a few months' active participation vs. many years low-intensity read-only.
All comments should be put through a spell and grammar check process. Comments that fail these result in a strike against the poster. Too many strikes and something slightly humiliating happens to your post (i.e. displayed in pink or something).
At least a check for commonly misspelled words that the Slashdot audience should know better should be implemented. Examples: lose vs. loose, make due vs. make do, stationery vs. stationary, etc.
It feels like there is little reason for me to actively participate in the discussions. Even though I have been reading for years, I don't feel any reason to comment unless I have something really important to say. It can take a lot of effort to put together a good post, only to have it ignored because it was not within the first group of comments or down-modded anyway. I don't want to spout of some mindless meme or bad joke (most of the time), and I don't have time to waste just to build up enough karma so people will pay attention.
Without a reason to post, I won't get mod points. Without any mod points, I won't really be able to be part of the discussion. So, until then, Slashdot won't have my contribution and will be worse off for it (imo).
What I would like to see is a way of better including the many readers who do not comment. How about randomly picking people who are reading an article (and haven't commented in a while), and ask what they think. The community will see more than just the usual voices. An automatic moderation added to one of the randomly picked representatives will get the voice of the average Slashdot reader included.
Being able to group by the moderation word.
That way we can see the top (20) voted Informative comments, the top 20 trolls etc... and be able to re-arrange that view so we can view the comments broadly and quickly.
PS - Didn't take poll, read one comment.
If there a filter for mod types? Sometimes I just want to see the Funny.
Any one who uses the phrase "you insensitive clod" should have all mod points confiscated, and then be burned on a stake. That alone would make Slashdot 10% better.
And why does preview take a minute to happen? (added after I tried to preview this comment) And why do I have to add html codes to get slashdot to recognize when I am spacing my comments with an enter key? Its inefficient and dumb to have the system be THAT backward.
People are too stingey with mod points. If you browse at -1 you realize the best comments are always 0 because people would rather reply to the +5, hoping to ride the karma train.
Some seriously compelling stuff is sitting at 0 that never gets read because it's all blocked by people that managed to get a +2. Or worse, blocked by a mere +1 because you registered.
Yes, i'm talking about Anonymous Cowards. We're people too, damnit.
Don't know if it's just something I goofed up myself or not, but I have some minor issues with what happens when I log in.
I tend to go right to slashdot.org/search.pl, as I'm generally not fond of the front page. At that point, I'll click on the Log In button, then depending on the phase of the moon, I'll either get a little dialog window that pops up, or I'm bumped to a new Log In page. Either way, I log in, then get dumped to the main page. This same basic thing happens if I go into an article/story and then log in. I still get dumped back to the main /. page.
Why can I not be dumped back to the search.pl or story pages? Better, I think at one time slashdot remembered who I was and logged in automatically for me. That would be nice to have again. Similarly, I bring my laptop back and forth to work, home, and where ever. It'd be nice to not have to re-log from each IP I connect from.
Slashdot publishes html. Html is indirect. I'd like to get raw data and format it and contribute to it as i see fit. The html view will be fine with most people, but why not also publish as xml or json. Make sure to indicate/annotate all the comments sensibly so that my client reader and commenter software can format it like I see fit. Also I'd like to be able to publish metadata about comments and share them and be able to get 3rd party comments on slashdot data.
Below you can paste pointers to existing systems that do that and which I simply do not know about.
I have mod points but you're already at 5. They should remove the cap on just this one comment so it can go to a million.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Every hurdle you put between me and inserting my comment reduces the chances that I'll bother. CAPTCHA and "Preview" severely demotivate me. not fond of the timer either.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
What happened to all the old stories and posts anyway? I tried looking up something from a few years back, was everything purged? Granted, I realize such old content is infrequently accessed, but it was a great resource to have.
Better story editing by the slashdot staff and a "Spam" moderation option so we can instantly filter out the automated bot posts trying to sell knock off electronics and other assorted crap.
Apart from that, I'm happy as Larry.
It amazes me that so many allegedly long time Slashdot users have fallen so quickly and so hard for a fraudulent fabrication of such laughable proportions. The very idea that a blathering balls of flesh happen to patrol our site, pestering us with obscure, offensive humor--with the same jokes repeated all the time--is ludicrous. Furthermore, it is an insult to common sense and a damnable affront to intellectual honesty and integrity. That people actually believe it is evidence that the liberals have wrested the last vestiges of control of our public school system from decent, Torvalds-fearing Slashdotters (as if any further evidence was needed! Torvalds Almighty!)
Documentaries such as Police State have accurately portrayed the elaborate, byzantine network of surveillance centers that the liberals have spliced into the Internet to spy on law-abiding Slashdotters. Equipped with technology developed by Think of the Children, Inc., these centers have the ability to detect trolling from hundreds of network hops away. That's right, neighbors... the next time you're out in the basement exercising your First Amendment rights, the liberals will see it! These centers are sensitive enough to tell if your mom is home by your surfing habits alone! And when they detect you surfing porn, their computers cross-reference the address to figure out your name, and then an enormous database housed at Berkeley is updated with information about you.
Of course, this all works fine during the day, but what about at night? Even the liberals can't stay up all night and prevent sleepiness from setting in. Thatâ(TM)s where the "trolls" comes in. Powered by Intel, the "trolls" are nothing more than scripted bots, emitting trillions of bits of mindless drivel. Coded by key members of the liberal community, the "trolls" are strategically deployed across the Internet, pointing out those who dare to make use of their Trovalds-given rights to wank at night!
Yes, I know this probably sounds paranoid and preposterous, but consider this. Despite what the revisionist historians tell you, there is no mention of the "Slashdot trolls" anywhere in literature or historical documents--anywhere--before 1997. That is when it was initially launched. When President Clinton, at the State of the Union address, proclaimed "We choose to go to troll Slashdot", he may as well have said "We choose to spawn bots." The subsequent faking of "trolls" posting on Slashdot was the first step in a long history of the erosion of our constitutional rights by leftists in this country. No longer can we hide from our government when the sun goes down.
Be relentless!
Well we can dream ...
Unfortunately I doubt that they'll have an epiphany and decide to stop the rot that's making the site less and less usable with each update.
I suspect that they don't even realize that they've turned a perfectly usable discussion site into a modern disaster that barely works, and that most of the problems can be blamed squarely on excess use of Javascript. Perhaps the survey might draw their attention to the sad state of affairs, assuming that they do read them and try to understand the comments.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
While tech articles are frequently ok, I've noticed life-science and physics stories especially have this problem. Often they feature sensationalist pieces trying to fluff up absolute garbage. The editors and story-submitters seem to have just enough background in the field to recognize the buzzwords and take the bait; not enough to render good judgement or comment in the header insightfully (in other words, too incompetent to realize how incompetent they are).
Firehose /moderation doesn't help as much as one might think -- from the comments it's clear this site is full of sharp comp/tech folks, but doesn't quite have nearly enough experienced bio/physics people to balance the discussion.
>5 year history on the site. (Actually, >10 year.) Currently a daily visitor after a few years of inactivity.
best:
The moderation system lets high quality comments be identified by the community, and the viewing software lets the user choose between highly rated comments and a broader range of comments.
I understand the site's source code is free somewhere, but people are on their own to implement a clone. (As opposed to, say, StackOverflow actively sponsoring additional sites using the code base.)
worst:
The moderation system should extend to the selection of articles, as with Reddit. Too often, editors allow poorly written, confusing, unimportant, irrelevant or ranting screed packed articles to be featured. The community should be able to prioritize which stories are featured. I don't object to continuing to have a page that would show the choices of editors. If readers are not convinced that the editors add value by selecting the best stories, than the editors would ultimately fade away into irrelevancy.
Also, there needs to be basic housecleaning. For example, the home page sidebar features links to Cringely's PBS site which has been out of service for three years now, but not to Cringely's current blog which has ongoing updates. Why this utterly careless indifference towards obsolete links?
recommend:
No, I would not recommend the site. I occasionally forward individual articles. The combination of zealousness, arrogance and ignorance amongst the most obnoxious of the basement-dwelling or college-age Linux zealots is tremendously unappealing for anyone who has a life, or who even aspires to have a life. I would not want to suggest that anyone subject themselves to that on a regular basis. Quite frankly, there is plenty of "news for nerds" here but very little "stuff that matters."
contact info:
You really mean that you can't automatically look up who posted survey answers while logged in with their user account at the site? C'mon, that's the kind of thing that open source is supposed to make easy!
Create a proper mobile site for those of us who read Slashdot on our phones.
I created AvantSlash in 2001 because the Slashdot site sucked when you tried to read it on a Palm Vx with AvantGo, Nine years later and it still sucks reading it on a HTC Desire HD.
I would expect a site for geeks and run by geeks to have the best mobile version in the world. Obviously not.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
More Linux worship, more facebook bashing, and more Microsoft bashing. Sounds good.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
nobody will fucking read it or comment on it. "oh but they will" NO THEY WONT.
thats why sites like NPR.org have to beg for money, while sites like Huffington Post can rumor they are going to IPO. Yes, Huffpo is a giant pile of ass. but thats what 'the people' want. and thats all that matters in a capitalist system , what the customers are willing to pay for (or put their eyeballs on, so that advertisers can pay for).
Look at the past. Discovery, History Channel, Court TV, and Tech TV.
Now we have Discovery, History Channel, TruTV, and G4.
Discovery and History are now full of reality shows like 'I got bit by a gater" and "Fat dudes screaming at each other".
TruTV is now game shows.
G4 is porn and violence.
Those other people simply do not exist.
------
Wait, how can I say this? Because I write slashdot articles. And if they arent 'hip' enough, they dont go to the front page. They have to hit. they have to draw people in. You have to take some boring ass story, like some guy being charged for leaking documents, and find the nut, "ex NSA mathematician says the government is reading our email". its not a lie, its actually true, there actually is an ex-NSA mathematitican who says the government is reading our email. its right in there in the middle of the story. the long, 15 page story that discusses obscure legal theory, has long stretches of biographical information i can guarantee you 80% of geeks skip right over, etc. You just have to figure out how to 'translate' what many people view as a bureaucratic infighting story, and take it and make it 'real' for the geek audience , a large percentage of whom have ADHD.
people who dont get this have never tried to write for any audience other than, i dont know, their professor or something. you cant have a New England Journal of Medicine style product in the modern era. Even 2600 does this shit. Thats how the world works. If you dont like it, support Occupy Wall Street. . . because until someone takes every single hedge fund manager, private equity fund ivy league douchebag, and stuffs cannoli down their fat throats until they gag and choke and stop ass raping their employees for an extra 0.001% profit per quarter, then nothing will change.
its a figure of speech.
I want the CowboyNeal option back!!!!! :)
I now he's not running the polls anymore, but seriously, it's not like he owns a copyright on his nickname... does he?
It seems to me that some of the geek jokes and obscure references, which made you feel like you're part of a community, have been dissappearing lately.
Other folks seem to be covering the important stuff already so I only got two more things to add:
* I feel in the last few years we've seen an increase in stories but a drop of average quality. More rubbish then usual gets accepted. Personally I prefer fewer but higher quality stories. I feel sometimes so many stories get thrown up that people don't even have time to give insightful comments anymore
* The polls sucks. I don't know what happened but ~10 years ago they actually felt meaningful / relevant. And while not scientifically accurate they were a fun platform for discussion. Is the problem just that we've run out of ideas?
Overall I still like coming here! Thanks for the ride.
You could call it something like... meta moderation.
These strange days we witness too much change for change's sake. We geeks see many of our favourites ruined by the poisoned marketing idea that you have to put out something new every once in a while. A change is supposed to be about doing something better, not just different. Fixing what ain't broken is like the evolution: 1% for the better, 9% for no difference and 90% plain suffering.
What's up with that ajax crap? All the rage these days. Remember back in the beginning ajax made browsing FASTER. Now if your ajax takes longer to compute a change to the current page than it takes to fetch a whole new page, you are doing it wrong. If you want to update the looks/feel of the page, just replace the freakin css. No reason to go all 'lets rebuild from scratch using the latest tech fad'. Geeks are a conservative people, they don't like fads in things they depend on. Fads only belong to tech toys and expos and the like.
Slashdot already has everything about right. If something is broken, think, ask slashdot, fix it. Most important, be clear at what you aim for. If all is well and you still have some idle time or hands, get a hobby, treat your wife, plant a tree. Slashdot is not supposed to be the unstable branch of the internet. Let someone else piss of their users.
FCKGW 09F9 42
No actually, I haven't. I don't know how you're deciding who has taken it and who hasn't but it doesn't work.
(If might be my stupidity and not a /. issue someone explain it to me please)
I used to be able to bring up a list of all recent polls, in case I missed a week or two. Now I can't seem to figure out where to go. Clicking on "Slashdot Poll" above the current poll just reloads the homepage (why?). Searching just brings up articles on
Everything in general seems to load slowly. It's all text based, so if this is the shiny interface's fault I'll take an older version.
OK, fuck you. I just changed formatting and it lost the entire post. Why do you need to reload the page? Do this in Preview, it's a back end flag.
While I understand that /. itself does not write the news, there seems to be some really poor submissions in the last year. Stuff which is way beneath the technical level and focus of the site or content only tenuously related to "tech". I don't necessarily mean political or social submissions, just the obviously vapid stuff.
Sites like Ars are leaving /. behind, and I don't feel like I learn as much here as I used to. Part of the appeal of tech news for me is to actually learn new things which I might not have read otherwise.
Get rid of AC, and make shitheaded idiots like "apk" sign up for an account so his ignorant, aggressive, asperger ramblings can be banned.
One nice thing to consider would be implementing some kind of Slashdot-to-NNTP server, that way be very convenient to use KNode or any other news program to read stories, comments, and post stuff. It wouldn't be easy, but it would be extremely cool.
You have no barometer that tells you when information is relevant, or when more information is necessary. You're a complete failure at this job, you're ineptitude makes the reader have to do more work, so please do us a favor and quit, and if you don't quit, I hope your superiors read this post and understand that you should be fired.
I try to contribute by moderating and submitting stories from time to time. But it's come to the point where I'm looking at slashdot, when my dad will call me and tell me about something major that happened to Google,MS,Apple,etc. It's kind of embarassing. I've started going to arstechnica for my news. Honestly, we need more submitted stories that are quality, and the editors need to quickly and efficiently find the best stories and publish them.
That's one way you could improve the Slashdot for me. You think maybe 9 years is long enough for this petty bullshit you guys pulled?
Tired of being "punished" by the Slashdot $rtbl since 2002. I'm now over at http://soylentnews.org/ .
I've posted a lot here over the last decade, sometimes bordering on excessively. I'm the kind of person who thinks by writing. I generally know what I think when I begin writing a post, and it doesn't change much by the end, but something changes very profoundly in how deeply the idea integrates against other ideas sloshing around in my liquid bit bucket. This is a deep way of thinking, but it burns a lot of time, even composing at 90wpm in perfectly formed paragraphs.
I always read the main link (if there is a main link, and it isn't the forth one; god that sucks). I usually skim about thirty comments from the top of the cream pool. Then I response to my general impression of sentiment of the discussion. I pretty much let my mood dictate the tone of my post. The range of my writing style is what makes it a useful thinking process. If I always posted from the same mood, I'd soon become just another fly-weight ideologue. I try not to embarrass myself outrageously more than one post out of three.
I don't really know how my posts are digested after the fact. My karma has never fluctuated so far as I've noticed, but I never return to engage in dialog. As if I hadn't burned enough energy posting on the topic the first time.
That would be me.
You crack me up. That would also be me; I'm not in it for the last word, though I suppose it appears cowardly to people who aren't aware of my pattern and agenda for being here in the first place.
One of the most destructive forces around here are the stories posted where an extra sentence is tacked on at the end full of weasel words of misleading sentiment. Sure it stimulates discussion. It also encourages the trolls to invite Borat for a bikini modeling party. Think of the children! Seriously.
I feel my time here is winding down. I've gained a far stronger grip over my opinion--and the modes available to express it--than I had ten years ago. Like Wikipedia, this place sometimes gives you the feeling that it gets to a certain level and then you hit the glass ceiling of circular regurgitation. Before slashdot came onto the scene, there was just as much circular regurgitation, but only half as much awareness on behalf of the recidivist pukers. Worse than having the memes is having the memes and not knowing it.
Yesterday I watched Your Brain at Work. I think a lot about cognitive styles. You can witness plenty of the less flattering eddies in any Slashdot thread. What we like to think of as intelligence is rooted in the lateral prefrontal cortex, which is an extraordinarily small box compared to the rest of cognition, as the video points out.
The LPC is easily down regulated by any small annoyance. A person with strong internal mindfulness can moderate the interplay between intuition/limbic sentiment and the thin threads of LPC rationality. Probably the posts most worth reading are the ones that integrate both, perhaps in a back and forth cycle. That's ultimately the high level cognitive skill here. Whizzing through the little Sudoku puzzle of linguistic inference and put-down rejoinders, not so much.
As much as I've said a harsh word from time to time, I try not to write my posts as if making other people feel bad is the only thing that motivates me to move my fingers. Provocation is not a bad thing if you anchor it back to meaningful discussion. I'm sure it is taken badly some of the time, but my karma survives.
My personal sentiment is that this site really needs to kill those trailing sentences on story submissions that incite vague limbic arousal if it wishes to maintain any vestige of cognitive separation from other discussion forums where the Borats roam
It's not working online. It's too slow; even on better machines we occasionally see the "It seems a script is making the page slow" [Continue] [Stop]
A download link could produce a pdf/odt/whatever file. Commenting could be made easier with a locate comment by #number (seen on the previously downloaded file).
I wonder if it's possible to make it work faster online? Also, since I find moderation totally useless, I consider it a hindrance.
From my POV, scores would be different, a +5 would be +1 and a 0 would be an amazing post, even worth a +7. See, voted scores are mostly an annoyance. That is not to say I want to see trash, but is it worth living inside a moderation bubble?
... a trusted users system. I know people on slashdot that are intelligent and have reasonable judgement we really need these people to float to the top and given more weight. Trying to test out new systems to have these people float to the top would be nice. Politics usually seems to be slashdots worse subject - you get all sorts of nonsense in posts that are mere repeats of mainstream media talking points that are often false and misleading.
"Don't assume that any cookies you set will ever be sent back."
Don't do a lot of online banking do you? Hello 1993 called and wants it's gopher back.
-Michael
I just want the ability to drill down. Sometimes I just want to see how people may have responded to a particular comment. Having a "simple" link in opposition to the existing "Parent" link would be incredibly useful. All it needs to do is load the current immediate children of the comment, if there are any. If I want to see descendents, I can drill down from there if I care.
Never link to a blog that links to the real story. I know I don't always RTFA but editors should at least glance at it.
cant post without javascript
We already have the option (kinda) in Firehose.
Sara
Designer, Gamer, Macgrrl in an XP World
I like to read all the stories that get posted (and i'd wager i'm far from the only one) and would like a way of knowing what stories i've missed when i take a holiday, or am too busy to visit. This could be solved with a timeline that shows a condensed view of which days & stories made it to onto your screen compared with those days for which there's no visit recorded.
This UID is 7651 digits too high to subjectively infer IQ from.
I instinctively use clicking on the mouse wheel on a link to open that link in a new tab. I do this because that's how it fucking works on every single browser!!!!!! Please stop using it to "show parent post, or whatever grandparent post isn't showing yet." This is annoying and I fucking hate it.
/. is really much better than most places, despite what we complain about and all the damn apple-fanbois.
Unlike most other people here (according to the complaints I've seen) I don't have that big of a problem with the javascript heavy new-type comment system. I kind of actually like it, except for this one annoying-as-shit thing.
Also, Thanks for everything,
No, that link you posted to a web comic we've all seen a hundred times is not "obligatory."
Make the width fluid so when I increase the size of the text I don't have to scroll left and right to read.
Christopher Walken: I gotta have more cowbell!
Well, I explicitly allow cookies from my bank (they have a browser plugin, they shouldn't need it), while I don't allow them from just anybody that asks.
I'm just a bit less paranoid than the GP, since I allow cookies from /. too. But this is slashdot, if you want an audience that isn't composed of geeks, go to Dig.
Rethinking email
Slashdot needs to learn from Facebook about Moderation. Facebook has technical types, non-technical types, racists, sexists, feminists, liberals, conservatives, and everything else. And if somebody really gets on somebody else's nerves, they click on "Block". So what you have is a system in which all kinds of incompatible people are on the same website and they only see people they wish to see. Slashdot, on the other hand, doesn't let you just hide people from yourselves. It lets you mod them away so nobody else can see them either. So Facebook ends up with all kinds of people co-existing happily while Slashdot ends up with just a small group of people who are the lowest common denominator of everything a person can get modded down for. You're basically reducing the Slashdot gene pool to a small homogenous group of like-minded individuals. And that leads to the same comments being posted day after day with nothing new ever showing up, because it can't. (Modding people away) should be replaced with (hiding people from the person who doesn't want to see them).
You'd be surprised how big this site could get if you didn't make it so hostile to Christians, Chinese, women, every race other than white, Windows users, and all of the other groups that are essentially shut out at the moment. If you must keep your current system, you should consider making it so highly moderated comments float to the top but low-moderated comments never actually disappear. If the comments are spam comments then just delete them manually. They'll be easy to find because they'll be at the bottom.
I don't know about iPhones but the site seems basically unusable on an Android phone. There should be a mobile version.
The site is almost unusable on a regular computer. It takes forever for "Preview" to work and then another forever for "Submit" to work. And I don't know if this happens to everybody but often I've seen an icon with the word "Working" stay at the bottom of the screen the entire time I was on the site.
The stories on the website homepage don't match the stories on the RSS feed.
I know you like to repeatedly bring up the subjects that get people talking, but the duplication is ridiculous. I think you could find a daily podcast or look at the Twitter trending topics or draw from numerous other sources to find something that matters each day.
After years of lurking I finally created an account and this article was the reason. This post might run long but hopefully it provides at least one insight undiscovered so far. This will be rambling...iTired First, I have read this site almost daily for years. So I have seen the pros and cons play out over time and understand most of the comments presented so far. Just keep it in mind that I am not a remotely new reader. My focus here is my demographic. If you are a cynic, it is true - I am motivated solely by self-interest with this post but I can not be alone in my demographic and feel a sort of obligation to provide my meager feedback. I rarely see myself represented in the community here and those in my demographic typically get -1 because they post stupid shit, so here's my attempt at redemption for those of us that are stupid. I am not a programmer and I have received little to no "higher" education (I do not possess a college degree). Obviously I do not understand every article posted. So let me tell you how I, the "I wish I was a nerd but I smoked too much weed in high school and now math is hard" guy views this site. Overall I read a lot of stuff that is posted, so try not to take away the opposite of that from this paragraph. I skip articles about LAMP servers and SQL implementations (for example), as I obviously have no idea what the hell any of that is. Contrarily I do find myself testing whether or not I CAN understand some of those kinds of articles. Then again, I really do enjoy science and technology so I find that /. sets the bar a bit higher for me in some ways. Some posts are a welcome challenge.
I never got beyond HS Physics yet I love all of the posts regarding CERN and OPERA. I will take posts about anything related to space exploration all day every day, so thanks for those as well. Patent wars and the developments in IP impact nerds and idiots alike. So again, thank you. I could go on and on, but suffice it to say that I really do appreciate this website even if I will never understand some of the content. There IS a lot available here for people like me and I want to make sure that it stays that way!
The most important part of /. (to me) is the community. It makes all of the difference. I delve into comments and thoroughly enjoy the level of debate and commentary provided by a majority of this community. Some of the posters here are absolutely top notch. I have always said that if I had a million dollars I would spend all of it surrounding myself with smart people and forcing them to tell me everything they know. /. is the closest I can get to that idea and it's free so I find myself satisfied at times. If some people think that reflects a depressing state of the internet, I don't really know what to say other than "where have YOU been and how can I get there?"
In all seriousness, when people take the time to type out paragraphs of well thought out articulate commentary I almost want to start masturbating. It is a welcome change to the world I normally inhabit. I don't care if someone is wrong in their analysis of a topic or an article. At this point? These days? I just appreciate that someone is actually THINKING about something and willing to put forward their individual view, right or wrong. I think this needs to be promoted a little bit more because... The best part about this process comes when I see people correct each other. To watch people actually converse in a civil manner and educate each other (and lurkers like myself) about a topic can be fascinating and even energizing. Sometimes slashdot makes me want to learn more, be better.
You make me want to be a better man.
I agree with a large number of the comments I have read so far regarding current moderation (both good and bad). While there are certainly injustices served by notching down posts that should survive, if not only for rebuttal, /. still has (by miles and miles) the best and most insightful community alive on the
Allow us to kick off useless editors: The ones who post links to a three-sentence ad-filled blog post when there's a long and meaningful BBC article linked to in the blog post that is the actual content. The ones who can't spell and don't have even a passing acquaintance with English grammar. The ones who think Bitcoin will create infinite ponies.
Let us, the readers, get rid of them - by vote or moderation or whatever - after they've been "in office" for a certain length of time. That gives new editors a chance to get their feet under them before we boot them, and also keeps the deadwood, useless editors from being with /. forever.
I figured from the other reply to this that this comment is about Slashcode, Slashdot's engine, not Slashdot per se. If not, I'd like to know where the Slashdot issue tracker issue. I'd certainly have feedback to give, but I'm not interested in giving it to a black box.
I know what I'm posting, damn it, if I fucked up, it's my fault. I can always reply to myself and look like a jackass. =p
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
This is the sort of foolishness that killed kuro5hin.org. If you put up roadblocks people won't join and the site will slowy die off.
I agree with you. There is much less groupthink than everyone presumes. I moderate up quality posts I disagree with to keep the discussion balanced.
There is much less groupthink here compared to digg in its heydey and Reddit.
Slashdot needs Geekcode | Can anyone recommend any good SCIFI? My tastes: Foundation, Startide Rising, CITY, Ringworld,
Please, finally enable Unicode in comments.
It's 2011 and Unicode is used everywhere and allowed even in URLs, but Slashdot is still firmly stuck in 8-bit dark ages.
As a state gets corrupt, its laws multiply; the most corrupt states have the most numerous laws. (Tacitus, Annales 3:27)
>Google does love Slashdot
And why shouldn't they? Amidst the thicket of our strife often a stem of truth is found.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Share slashdot profit with submitters/commentators
Slashdot = Sarcasm
I'd like a slashdot skin that looks like, say, eclipse, so I can read at work in way that isn't 100% obvious from the complete opposite side of the room (no privacy in this office).
=D
I've been proposing a new moderation system here whenever the topic comes up for some years now. I agree with other replies that Slashdot actually has the best moderation system on the net, but I think there is still room for improvement.
This proposal could also be used to improve the quality of stories on the main page and alleviate complains about "xyz subject is not suitable for slashdot, give us more zyx instead!", replace the fixed categories for that matter, and replace the karma system and the friend/foe system too while we're at it.
The idea is that not only can you rate posts +1 or -1 (like every site out there), and simultaneously tag them with a descriptive label to explain that rating (like Slashdot's "insightful", "informative", etc, but more similar to article tags, with multiple tags possible, and subject matters like "science" or "politics" too), but different users ratings interact with each other in interesting ways:
An "affinity" rating is calculated between every pair of users on the site; directionally, so my affinity to you and your affinity to me may differ. Rating up someone's post increases your affinity to them, and rating down their posts decreases your affinity.
Affinity is transitive: if you have affinity to someone else and they have affinity to a third party, some your affinity bleeds over, diminishing by degree. So if I like you and you like Bob, then the system things I will like Bob somewhat; if I like you and you hate Bob then the system will think I will not like Bob so much. Of course you have a first-degree affinity to that third party too which is weighted more strongly than you second-degree affinity to them.
Effective ratings on posts (what you see them rated as when reading them) are weighted by affinity. So, posts by people you've previously rated up will show at a higher score by default. Posts by people they like will likewise, and posts by people they dislike will show at a lower score by default. Of course your ongoing ratings on the new selection may well temper that if their first posts you rated were unusually better or worse than those people's usual fare. As you moderate more, the system will learn what you like and dislike and the effective ratings of posts displayed to you will adjust likewise.
Note that this not only filters posts by their quality but also by their subject. If you're really into computer hardware but never want to see a political debate again, and you uprate all the interesting hardware posts you see and downrate all the political commentary, then the people who post interesting hardware comments will become your "friends" and you will see comments from them and people they like more, increasing the odds of hardware articles showing up; and likewise the people who post all political commentary will becomes your "enemies" and you will see comments from them and the people they like less often.
(It occurs to me now that the system could perhaps track "interests" as well, and weight posts based on those. If you rate lots of things "-1 politics", it will learn that you dislike politics and show you fewer articles tagged "politics", even if the people who rated them did so because they like politics and so rated them "+1 politics". This could also tell the system that you only like Insightful posts and don't like Funny ones; or perhaps you're a troll connoisseur and rate things +1 Troll, in which case the system would learn that you have an interest in Trolls. If we were to allow multiple tags per post, you might rate something "+1 Funny Troll", or even "+1 Funny Politics Troll", and other things "-1 Politics Flamebait" and just "-1 Troll"; the system would then learn that you like political comments and trolls when they're funny and especially all three, but you dislike political flamebait and unfunny trolls).
This applied to articles (user-submitted, unfiltered and unedited) could completely replace the fixed "sections" of the site. You could also filter articles (and posts) based on their tags, e.g. 5
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
I'd like to see an official Android and iPhone app for Slashdot. Not just RSS, but supporting the comment and moderating facilities. I'd happily pay for the privilege.
RS
If someone can really contribute to an issue, and takes the time to write a thoughtful post, complete with sources. By the time they are finished, the "magic window" has often passed, and their post never gets up-voted... I rarely make substantive comments any more, for exacty this reason: I know that the investment of time required to make a real contribution to the discussion means precisely that the comment will not be seen by most people.
How to fix this? That's hard...
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
I love /. for the Informative and Funny comments. I have often laughed out very loud at the wit here, and on many occasions have had my eyes opened on issues that had escaped me before. Reading what intelligent people have to say about something is fascinating and educational.
But I always have to manually determine what threshold to specify, as I want somewhere around 15 comments if possible. 3 comments at level 5 isn't enough, and if dropping to level 4 brings in a total of 11 then it's worth doing.
I'd like a way to specify "Automatically reduce threshold if required so that I always get 10 to 20 comments if possible"
- i.e. if level 5 gives me 9 comments but reducing to 4 gives me less than 20, it's worth pulling in those extra ones. More then 20 is too much to care about, too much work.
Or you could automatically configure it (by option) such that if the next level down contains only 50% more comments (or less) then automatically bring them in.
Does anyone else agree?
Right, but what is the basis for the paranoia. I am highly skeptical (even of a geek community) of properly directing that paranoia to non tin-foil-hat conspiracies.
1) Theft follows the money and the naive (e.g. major banks, major places with credit cards, and people/groups susceptible to social engineering attacks)
2) net-Stalking generally is done by major govs/institutions that make wide-area attacks with non-targetted victims, or petty people with no servers from which to reliably cause a reasonably cautious netizen to worry.
3) Ad-tracking / Ad-metric-gathering allows vendors to.. Well, produce more targetted ads. I never understood the visceral hatred of double-click. Though I share the frustration with ad providers that steal my cursor with CSS popup DIVs or flash.
4) Porn sites presumably can detect repeat non-paying visitors and restrict content (big shocker there).
I understand the notion of a condom-mode web browsing (no cookies, no cache, no passwords), and I can see the frustration with the web essentially being broken in that mode; but honestly. Session cookies are much more elegant than embedded tokens in paths; as they are perma-linkable. And being a personal hater of 'apps' when a stateful website is just as functional (and almost by definition, more portable), I find it difficult to swallow a demand that HTTP remain stateless.
-Michael
How about including a widget with the Top 5 most popular stories (most commented in the last x days) ?
What year is it?
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Why is slashdot insanely slow on small machines?
(E.G. 2.4GHz P4 with 4G of ram!)
Watch this Heartland Institute video
WTF? I just watched the above post go from score 4 to 0 with no follow up post. This is a discussion on fixing Slashdot. Don't you see, this is the problem. That a post can be modded up to 4 and then back down into oblivion is sad and an example as to why the quality of Slashdot has dropped over the years and readership numbers have declined. Well it looks as though Slashdot is well on it's way down the road to earning it's Darwin award.
Please mod me 1 or troll. It's where the truth is these days, even on Slashdot. Beware the power of moderators everywh
Lots of mod points are wasted on that crazy Chiro, Dr. Bob. Get rid of that account and your mod system will automatically improve.
For me it's a treat to reach the bottom of the page; to have read all the submissions, because you get to read the quote! ..." thinking it's the quote. And I don't 'get' it.
But sometimes I start reading "Trademarks property of their respective owners.
The quote might be overlooked (by me sometimes) because it does not stand out as much as the disclaimer. Can that be fixed?
"We'll reach that bridge when we find it" - Suzy Romer, prime minister Netherlands Antilles '98-'99
Why to not discuss about moderation?
- Moderation is the most difficult way for controlling the content.
Because appreciation of the content are infinites and depending
on the user. It is an spurious battle.
- It will be much better that each person own the right of what
to read. Having a personalized filtering tool, could help in this direction.
Sophisticated text analysis tools are already available, in order to implement
a better reading of large post list.
'Nuff said.
"-1 Citation Needed" seems like you're trying to turn the moderation into a measure of truth. It's not.
I disagree. Moderators already are evaluating the comments for veracity. They just don't say so explicitly. We've all had comments moderated down because someone disagreed with them or thought they were wrong. Furthermore, I would rather a factually wrong or unsupported comment get moderated down than have a half a dozen responses correcting it.
If you only get 6 mods, which would you choose?
I think 6 is too few but if I had to pick just 6:
+1 Interesting (I'd drop Insightful and Informative because they are used interchangeably)
+1 Funny
-1 Inaccurate
-1 Troll
-1 Off Topic
-1 Redundant
my next choices would be
-1 Groupthink
+1 Clever
+0 Meme (so it can be filtered)
Bring back that CmdrTaco guy?
slowly sinking into second place. my dilemma is that i don't know what is in first place
If your post deviates slightly from Slashdot's standard of "political correctness" you get modded into obscurity. I refrain from making opinion posts and keep to factual information for this reason.
Slashdot political correctness has a flavor of libertarianism and slightly liberal. And in general computer hackers can do no wrong.
Other bboards allow this. Sometimes I notice spelling or factual errors too late.
/. has stayed good, clear and simple all these years. Unlike Facebook or Firefox, that change every 5 minutes.
I don't block the ads on /. because they are not intrusive. and finally /. knows it's public.
Privacy is terrorism.
Triangles always looked three-sided to me...
I completely agree. The summaries have been terrible and too many awful stories are being posted without vetting.
Maybe /. needs a story-rating system so it can bury the crap and elevate the great ones.
Volume of comments is only a measure of popularity, not quality.
Quite simply, Slashdot should be accessible via IPv6. That is all.
Follow your Euro bills at EBT
I'm a reader of Slashdot from Russia, and so, I would love if Slashdot would welcome comments coming from people speaking in different languages, especially the Russian. It could be implemented as a bilingual pre-moderated thread, opened simultaneously at two websites -- namely, slashdot.org and some Russian resource. Readers of Slashdot would see the thread in English, readers of the Russian resource would see the same thread in Russian. The hard job of providing translations into the both languages would be done by a team of translators. Of course, it doesn't have to be the option supported all the time, but having one bilingual thread possibly each week or each month would be very fun for the both resources involved. As of your Russian counterpart in such a project, I suggest you to work with Inoforum.ru. You can contact administration of Inoforum using the contacts listed at the bottom of the page: http://inoforum.ru/proektu_nuzhny (Well, that page is in Russian, hope it won't be a problem.) If you like the idea, contact the Inoforum administration (Skype is preferable -- exchanging emails may take for too long). Remember that intentions come first -- technical issues are discussed and solved later. You will possibly wonder what connection I have with Inoforum -- well, I am one of Inoforum volunteers (known as "filatovev"), and I have stayed in contact with the Inoforum administration for at least the last year. So, this is not an official invitation -- but a friendly invitation indeed. I believe that you can find the common ground with the Inoforum administration. Best regards and have fun, Evgeny. p.s. Just to prove my identity: my contributions to Inoforum.ru as a volunteer scout/translator "filatovev" are listed below: http://inoforum.ru/user/?puser=85586/ http://inoforum.ru/user/?puser=39859/
I'm quite fond of the Anime series "Ghost in the Shell".
The series describes a plausible future and discusses (and illustrates) the moral implications.
Totally fascinating stuff.
The next time you want us to consider suggesting changes to Slash Dot, title the article: "Slashdot Dot Dot Dot?" ;-)
Other than that, my only suggestion would be to sponsor:
(1) An Android client that (a) doesn't get hung on IBM's dynamic ads, and (b) allows emailing of the link without going to the web page (and therefore requiring an
additional delay)
(2) Extensions for Chrome and Firefox that allows for easy Slashdot article submission from a web page NOT Slash Dot.
In other words: Nice Yob! Keep up the good work.
In tech debates? Figures, just judging by your little name-tossing tantrum here.
Narftrek confirms it! I AM kind of a big deal on the internet!
:)
Woohoo, I can't wait to tell my wife that my time spent ignoring her isn't wasted
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
+5 'modded up' posts by apk (8):
http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1901826&cid=34490450
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1872982&cid=34264190
http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=175774&cid=14610147
http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1806946&cid=33777976
http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1884922&cid=34350102
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1139485&cid=26975021
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=170545&cid=14210206
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=170545&cid=14211084
----
+4 'modded up' posts by apk (4):
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=161862&cid=13531817
http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=167071&cid=13931198
http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1290967&cid=28571315
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=158310&cid=13263898
----
+3 'modded up' posts by apk (7):
http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=155172&cid=13007974
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=166850&cid=13914137
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=175857&cid=14615222
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=273931&threshold=1&commentsort=0&mode=thread&cid=20291847
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1021873&cid=25681261
http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1754650&cid=33255474
HBGary POST in Fake Names On Social Networks, a Fake Problem -> http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2375110&cid=37056304
----
+2 'modded up' posts by apk (25):
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1139485&cid=26974507
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1361585&cid=29360367
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=245971&cid=19760473
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=174759&cid=14538593
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=233779&cid=19020329
http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=970939&cid=25093275
A late post here to link from my pool answer...
* Increase the friends/foes number limit. I've reach the maximum friends I can register, and I have queued more to come once the limit increased, in my journal. I use this to change mod points and skim the posts.
* Preview comment is very long to load, at least for the first preview. (Submit is quite slow also)
* Search a topic or comment doesn't work well. I found it strange not to find a topic I knew I've commented. See in this thread: people tell about the problem.
* Remove the scripts from other sites: facebook, twitter, doubleclick, ... I don't trust them (thank you NoScript!).
* Improve the "more" loading. Or at least show something to let us know it's loading, because sometimes the "more stories" / "Many more" button at the bottom seems unresponsive and it is often really slow.
* Let us fetch the stories by day: it was easier to do that before. When I miss a few days of reading I want to catch up easily. A calendar would be nice.
* Have an unread stories page, assuming loaded headlines allready have been checked by the user. Set a one or two month retention, enough to catch up after hollydays.
* I prefer the previous meta-moderation system, the new one confuses me.
* Have a quick bookmark system "Read this later" checkbox.
If there was some way to easily mark stories and comments here for reference later, it would increase Slashdot's value to me. I have run across some extremely interesting/insightful/useful posts and collections of posts under certain stories here and I don't really have a good system to keep track of them. This would be a very useful feature. In fact it's the most useful addition that I can think of for the site.
I also wanted to add my vote for the previous generation of the comments system. It was organized and easy to use, and the site allowed the side columns to be eliminated to make the meat of the site, the stories and comments, to use the whole browser window. Ever since the latest generation, I had to go back to the first classic view.
They suck. Let's have an option to hide them or demote them.
5 years is too long in Purdah. I've worked my way back from that, and it's a long slog. I want to help you. Help me help you and I'll dig you out of negative /. karma.
I've bookmarked this comment and your user page. If you post something - anything - I'll see it in time to moderate it positive. I have great /. karma and post +5 comments every week so I have 15 modpoints almost every day, but can moderate a comment only once and can't overcome some serious haters who disagree with your opinions, nor posts in threads I comment in - which is most of which appears on the main page. I'm not a mod here - I'm just a regular guy.
So dig into the depths of Idle, of YRO, of stuff that doesn't hit the main page and is four or five days old where moderators don't go. Search out the thread eight replies deep where the spambots don't go. Post there a comment that isn't stupid, off-topic or flamebait, three or five times a day. I'll mod it interesting or insightful as appropriate for the post, and we both win because I'll get a good metamod.
Do it daily and I'll get you all the karma I can. Thrice a day works better. If you've got a scripted hater then it's best you abandoned this ID because scripted haters never sleep, and every mod up I do, they'll mod down. I don't know why I don't have scripted haters yet - certainly I deserve them more than you. You probably don't have any.
I'll follow you for a year and if you go positive Karma and get stupid I'll put you back in Purdah the same way I got you out.
If that doesn't do it, I'll have a word with folks and root cause it. I don't have any sway with the Gods of /., but I may hope to get an audience and if you're not a total idiot I might appeal to them.
And it wouldn't hurt to be a subscriber. You wouldn't believe how cheap it is, or how informative. With that you can go to unlimited depths and read a commenter's entire history - as I did with yours - and get where they're coming from before you reply to them.
Since I'm talking about your comment history, there's a lot of great stuff in there. You screwed it up by commenting on first posts, memes, and suchlike. You've got a lot of interesting stuff to share - you're a bright kid and not someone who belongs in Purdah. Work on your "Comment Subject" skills and try to balance your sense of funny with informative stuff that brings something we didn't know.
So. Dig in and gimme some stuff I can mod up without killing my own status and I'll fix your Karma issue until you turn into a fucktard and I have to mod you back out. Deal?