Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot Coming Attractions
- Most Discussed: Highlighting recent stories with the most active discussions
- This Day on Slashdot: Featuring the biggest Slashdot stories of the day all the way back to the beginning.
We also pushed through a number of fixes to the user experience and upgrades to the site infrastructure in recent months including:
- Upgrading Slashdot to modern hardware and new versions of MySQL and Apache
- Cleaning up the topics pages
- Improving methods for sharing submissions
- Thumbnails for articles with videos
- Flag-a-comment abuse reporting
- Removal of old and unused Slashboxes
- A much overdue overhauling of the FAQ
- Fixes to user preferences
- The launch of the Slashdot Hall of Fame (that little badge icon next to the logo)
- Fixes to the D2 comment system. Highlights include bug fixes to the comment score slider, a better abbreviated view (if you quote the parent, that's removed so people can see your first sentence instead), and general reliability improvements to the AJAX magic
- And many more...
In addition, we're working on modules to highlight top submissions and we've launched Slashdot TV at http://tv.slashdot.org/ . We plan on launching more in the weeks to come. Some of these new sections will feature original content that isn't normally run on the front page. We're also planning a new mobile experience and we'll need your feedback to help us with the look and usability. Our goal through all these changes is to make your Slashdot experience a good one. We are listening to your complaints and concerns and promise to keep giving you News for Nerds and Stuff that Matters.
So, readers, what do you want to see in the coming months?
Do you still provide the source code that runs the site? I remember that slashcode.com would track your changes in the past. Is this still true? I see that the last post there was in 2009.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
- Evelyn Beatrice Hall
As a casual user, I do find that some of these features are less than immediately obvious - is there a beginner's guide to some of these features?
I think its the 21st Century in the real world, but here it seems like its the 20th Century
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
The top of the page is inaccessible for some reason on my phone. I can't click on my user link because it's "behind" the address bar. Other pages do not do this. Something weird with the CSS I think. So as long as things are being changed and stuff, fix the CSS eh?
Slashdot right now is the place to go when you want to read about 2 day old news. These days there's very little I see here that I haven't already seen on Ars, Engadget, Giz, TechDirt, BSG, etc.
I know the mission statement probably doesn't care all that much about Slashdot being a news breaker, it's always been more about the discussion, but the discussion becomes a bit stale when the story goes up 18 hours after the rest of the world posted about it. If you want the quality of commenting to rise again, make a concerted effort to get articles up in a more timely manner.
Why do you put your stylesheet, icons, etc on fsdn.com instead of within slashdot.org? I ask because my work blocks fsdn.com (and no, they're not going to change it) since to corporate it's apparently either filled with porn or evil hackers. Which turns browsing slashdot.org back to using a lynx browser.
Host site critical elements in your own domain.
How about abusive moderation?
I have entire pages of comments (in fact if you just look at my comments right now, it's filled with that stuff), with comments that had been moderated up and down a few times, +5 to -1 to +5 to -1 or 0. All that while there are many replies to them, so clearly, these comments generate 'interest', whatever it is.
Does it make sense to have wild swings in comment moderation in that case, doesn't it mean that in reality those comments are at least 'interesting' enough to a large number of people?
It looks to me, the real problem with /. is a weird moderation scheme that encourages people to moderate not based on merit of the comment, but instead based on their own biases and it's used to silence opinions.
You can't handle the truth.
Over the years since Slashdot started I have often read articles and insightful comments that I have later tried to find again, but to no avail. Google provides some relief, but searching through Slashdot's own system is a lost cause.
I have always wanted two things to change that:
1. A better archiving system, perhaps tab based or somesuch so that I can easily zip back through everything on, say, SCO.
2. The ability to flag or save interesting articles or even comments on articles such that I have a personal folder where I can save an article on Copyleft and then fold the comments such that Lawrence Lessig's insightful one remains visible underneath the article summary. Slashdot would be an even better geek touchstone then than it already is.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
According to the Hall of Fame, I'm the most active commenter for this quarter (I really need to stop procrastinating), which probably means I will be ignored by the Slashdot overlords more than more people, but here are my inflation-adjusted two cents:
Most Discussed. Don't care. It's not like it's hard to see the comment counts on the front page.
This Day on Slashdot. Might be interesting. Probably not though - lots of slow news days. Sounds like an attempt at recycling old content.
Upgrading Slashdot to modern hardware and new versions of MySQL and Apache. Irrelevant to most users. Upgrading to a real database and a more modern web server might be interesting, if only for the flame war in the comments that it would provoke.
Cleaning up the topics pages. Long overdue. Although part of the problem is that most of the current crop of 'editors' are stunningly ignorant of their subject matter and so routinely file things in the wrong category.
Improving methods for sharing submissions. Yes, Slashdot needs more Facebook integration. And more Twitter integration. And it definitely needs to jump on the Google+ bandwagon! The last changes to this crap meant that my user CSS no longer blocks the share button, as it previously blocked the little 'I am an attention whore so desperate for approval that I want to help companies build a database about me' buttons. Please, please, please, provide a user option to turn off all of this crap, if you must have it.
Thumbnails for articles with videos. Even better would be an option of hiding all articles with videos from the front page. The last ones have all been spam, so I wouldn't even have wanted to read them in text form. I usually read Slashdot while waiting for a compile job to finish or while having a short procrastination break, so things that require 100% attention such as videos are of no interest to me. Stick them all in videos.slashdot.org and make it as easy to ignore as idle.
Flag-a-comment abuse reporting. As you say, a step backwards. Slashdot isn't Slashdot without trolls. Mod them down, but don't delete them.
Removal of old and unused Slashboxes. If they're unused, no one will notice or care, so this is irrelevant to everyone. If, as I suspect, by 'unused' you mean 'some people use them, but I don't' then you're just trying to bill removing a feature that people use as an improvement. I suggest you quit Slashdot and get a job at Apple.
A much overdue overhauling of the FAQ. Again, long overdue. Note that overhaul usually implies improvement and please remember that when you do it.
Fixes to user preferences. Bug fixes are good. Currently lots of this stuff was broken by the Web 2.0!11111eleventyone rewrite.
The launch of the Slashdot Hall of Fame. Dear God No! The 'achievements' section was bad enough. I thought this was an April Fools joke when it was launched, but it stuck around. Now we have more of this crap. Clever people are able to learn from the mistakes of others. Most people can learn from their own mistakes. The sign of total idiocy is failing to learn from your own mistakes. Now we have a hall of fame which is going to promote exactly the same behaviour as the old public karma numbers, a system Slashdot abandoned for very good reasons. Please, learn from your mistakes, don't keep repeating them.
Fixes to the D2 comment system. Maybe next time you could do this before making it default? For the record, I mostly like the D2 system. The biggest bug, however, is that you can type a long comment and then accidentally hit cancel instead of preview and lose it (which you couldn't with the old one, as browsers would warn you if you tried to navigate off a page with a full text field). Fix that first! Slashdot always embodied the ugly-but-functional school of design. The rewrite made it no less ugly, but made it less functional. We're happy with Slashdot being ugly, but please make it actually work. Another example: it still requi
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
So true. And one thing that occurred to me recently: I've been reading Slashdot for over 10 years and I've seen editors come and go, but I have never seen an advert for the job of Slashdot editor advertised. Every tech news site I read has posted ads for editors and writers in that period, but not Slashdot. It is the one site that doesn't try to recruit staff from its readership. It's also interesting to see how high the UIDs are for a lot of the Slashdot editors - several of them apparently didn't even have Slashdot accounts until after they got the job. It's therefore not really surprising that they'd be a bit useless.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
If you allow your user base to be diluted by commercial interests, your profits will dwindle as less users come here to socialize and learn. That is why you need to keep the comments off limits for gaming by media and PR companies.
Seconded. I originally came to Slashdot for the quality of the discussion and of the comments, some truly enlightening, and the feeling that a collectivity was forging opinions on subject matters important to us all, reflected by the apt slogan 'Stuff that matters'. I could read Steve Wozniak, NewYorkCountryLawyer, etc, many people at the forefront of stories they were commenting. Not only celebrities, but some pillars of this community, people like eldavojohn, etc. whom you would always count on to intervene wisely in a discussion.
Only Slashdot has managed to attract and cultivate such a community --people who normally don't have time or interest for social networks, so perhaps the term 'socialize' is less apt here than the one of 'community interests'-- and if Slashdot were to lose these people, it would be to never being able to regain them, and to lose its essence. So do all the innovating you want, but please never lose sight of the essential.
If your comments consistently produce large discussions and your mods swing several times during that discussion, I would say you're doing it right. Or you're a master troll. Either way you're producing value to the operators of the site by encouraging user interaction.
On a related note, I would like to request an achievement for getting a +3 or greater Troll/Flamebait Mod.
Women are like electronics: you don't know how damaged they are until you try to turn them on.
Hear, hear!
<RANT>
The changes have NOT been for the better lately.
Slashdot is turning into yet another video blog, and can't pull that off for two reasons - it's too late in the game, and the users who bring the content that gives the site value don't communicate in video. Remember the old saying that a picture takes up more bandwidth than a thousand words. It's true. And videos? The signal/byte ratio is so low that it's worthless for a tech forum.
And the "share" icons for Facebook/Google/Twitter? If we wanted to do social networking, we would go to a social networking site! If we wanted our friends there to see what we posted here, we'd ask them to come here! Don't give Facebook tracking information about me by including their icon, god damn it.
And fix the text input parser. Never mind Unicode, it can't even handle ISO-8859-1, for cripes' sake! Anything not US English and a very limited number of other characters fails.
Oh, and what worked before, like <UL> lists, doesn't anymore. Because the "designer", and I use this term loosely, decided that his or her view of presentation was more important than the actual tags.
So half the tags listed under "Allowed HTML" don't work anymore, or do a completely wrong thing. Either fix it, or get rid of them.
No, slashdot has not become better. Some of us old farts stick around here for old times sake. And it's not that we don't embrace the new - we do, when it makes sense. We don't sit hacking on PDP-11s, we move with the times. But Slashdot doesn't move with the times, it implements broken stuff for its own sake, without solving any problem or making the experience anythiing but crappier.
Oh, and get rid of the Varnish cache if you can't keep it running correctly. I'm SO sick of seeing Varnish error messages or a front page that suddenly reverts to an older version with the top story gone unless I force reload until I get a fresh varnish cache. Don't you have any sysadmins anymore?
</RANT>