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?
Clearly you should switch to Timeline format for all content.
Don't you?
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
Seriously... a bit late, no? A lot of this flies directly in the face of stuff that Slashdot has been saying for years... comment reporting for abuse? Does this mean that abusive comments can be removed? That kinda defeats the point of the kind of discussion that Slashdot has been built on....
Finally proper unicode support.
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?
So, readers, what do you want to see in the coming months?
A clear separation between ads and stories.
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.
For the love of Linus please fix the bug that causes me to always have a notification that there is a reply to one of my comments. I have tried everything to delete it and nothing works. It is super annoying! If I click on the message it just says that message xxxxxxxxxx isn't found (where xxxxxxxxxx = message ID). Arghh!!!
Get a web developer
I want Slashdot back!
Lose the gimmicks. Slashdot was great because it focused on hard tech news, and tended to post things that the Slashdot community were interested in. Now, it seems to be at the whims of a few submitters (MrSeb, Hugh Pickens) with the editors asleep at the switch and posting stuff that's not even remotely tech news, typically biased political propaganda.
Stop creating your own vanity projects. You need to stop fantasizing that you're a news *source* and get back to being a tech news *aggregator*. We don't want you to create custom content, and especially not tripe like device destruction porn, reviews, reports from conventions (is there any bigger waste of video than a "from the convention floor" type report?) You're such a late entry to this space that it'll take years to get even remotely good at it, if ever. Find the great content out there, and post stories and links. That's it!
It's just absurd to think that these recent missteps were simple errors in judgement. The claim that the infamous hoodie video was intended (per Soulskill) as "a quick, silly, completely non-serious video" is suspect. Why would something *intended* as a silly video even be on the front page and not in Idle? How out of touch do you need to be to think that the readers wouldn't be offended and instantly assume an ad masquerading as a story?
And in spite of the massive negative feedback (which must have been massive indeed to rouse the editors from their slumber to actually acknowledge the problem), you *still* ran that atrocious Plantronics tripe, and pretended to be surprised that people hated it.
Honestly, the recent changes stink of you trying to pad your resumes.
Your website's profitability depends on the comments posted below. You depend on User Generated Content (UGC). This is where most users extract value from your site and the reason why people actually still visit Slashdot.
It's not the articles themselves, people only rarely read those.
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. If you post a Slashvertisement, not that I like them at least it is separate from the comment section so you're not pretending to be anything but a shill for another company. However, the comment section should represent real users and trolls -- not shills.
Slashdot needs Geekcode | Can anyone recommend any good SCIFI? My tastes: Foundation, Startide Rising, CITY, Ringworld,
I'd love to see more game reviews
The problem I think is that geeks no longer run Slashdot, they no longer choose the stories to post. Instead it's by social media/blogger types which is not what Slashdot's target audience is interested in...
Slashdot needs Geekcode | Can anyone recommend any good SCIFI? My tastes: Foundation, Startide Rising, CITY, Ringworld,
How about fixing the mobile version of the site? Its been broken for months:
- In Safari on my iPhone, going to slashdot.org fetches the 5 most recent stories. At the bottom of the page is a "Many More" link. Clicking it doesn't actually fetch the _next_ 5 oldest. Instead it fetches stories from earlier in the day SORTED IN THE REVERSE ORDER. This makes it very difficult to use the mobile site to catch up on news missed during the day. It wouldn't be so bad if .....
- The "Fullscreen" link at the bottom of the mobile version would actually work. The text says "Change view: Mobile - Fullscreen", leading one to believe that the fullscreen link should take you to the normal version of the site. But clicking it simply reloads the mobile version of the page with the "ss=0" URL parameter.
I've been here a while and my opinion is that Slashdot was fine until ads and videos started to steal space at the top of the page.
For the most part, it wasn't broken. Be very careful in what you fix. Gawker has gone to Hades with its redesign.
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.
If you ignore ACs because they are anonymous - you're an idiot.
Having to click 7 times to view all the comments on this page is very annoying. The link at the bottom of the page says "Get N more comments" where N is the total number of comments on the article. Clicking it only returns 5 at a time. This makes it hard to read discussions when you have to continually scroll to the bottom of the page, click a link, scroll back up, continue reading for a little bit, scroll back down, click a link, repeat.
Slashdot used to have a perfectly working front page for "today", plus specific URLs for the day before, the day before that, and so on. It used to employ some of the good principles of Roy Fielding's thesis on REST, where each page is a resource with a distinct address that makes sense. You could give someone a link and know exactly what they're seeing. Well no more.
Instead of that sane technical design, now we have some kind of utterly broken page expansion system linked through "Many More", and you never know what the hell you're looking at, and when you return from a nested page you're seeing something totally different. It's a technical disaster, and given that this pretends to be a technical site, its technical design is quite beyond the pale.
Bring back a bit of sane web technology please. Lose the totally unhelpful "Many More" which is a wholly broken design, and bring back dated pages.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
It's the retribution. For years we've been Slashdotting all these websites who had some cool content to show us. Now it's time for retribution and Slashdot all the reader's computers.
I think a spam mod would be more helpful - flag posts for review
...I obey the laws of physics....
In 1995 I bought a Psion Series 3 organizer.. Back then, 16 years ago, it was state-of-the-art. Despite modern advances, I'm still using it occasionally today, mostly as a small database and pocket-typewriter, even though it runs at 7MHz with 2MB ot storage/RAM. The reason is simple - you really don't need GHz of compute horsepower and billions of bytes of storage/memory when you're only working with text. I like this ethos in our media-saturated world, but Slashdot does seem to be railing against it, with pageviews gobbling up hundreds of K of bandwidth for what is essentially a few K of entropy.
I guess what I'm trying to say is "Don't be ashamed of keeping it simple guys. "
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
This may not apply to the newcomers who read the site in AJAX mode. I prefer the classic mode (yes, I'm that old).
When reading comments I would appreciate a toggle to "expand all comments" so that I can see comments ranked below my default viewing threshhold. It mostly applies when I'm moderating and would love to be able to browse at 0 or -1 to catch the good comments that were late to the first post party; given that you can only see "Re: [parent post title" instead of the body of the comment, you tend to not bother clicking on them to avoid an endless dance of "click, hit -Back" to see what they wrote.
There are also occasionally discussions where I would be interested to see the back-and-forth between others because they seem particularly well-informed or even funny but their subsequent replies aren't modded as highly as their originals, so you have to enter the "click, hit -Back" game again if you want to see the whole thing.
I still love Slashdot, but having that "expand all comments" option would improve my experience.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
I'm disappointed to see utter bullshit like "Flag-a-comment abuse reporting" and "Thumbnails for articles with videos" and "general reliability improvements to the AJAX magic" included in this list.
I intentionally avoid sites like reddit, StackOverflow, and especially Hacker News, because of the high degree of censorship that goes on at such places. You can't hold, never mind express, a non-mainstream opinion there. It really stifles the discussion. At least Slashdot allows differing opinions and ideas to be expressed, without the outright censorship we see elsewhere.
The worst part about the censorship is that it happened to people who were expressing absolutely correct, yet unpopular, ideas. Many of them were merely years ahead of the rest of the crowd. For example, some people who I saw get targeted a lot were those who didn't have a raging hard-on for Ruby on Rails. They'd correctly point out that Rails is a pretty typical framework, and similar functionality had been available in Perl, PHP and Python years earlier. They'd correctly point out that there's nothing special about Rails' ORM. They'd correctly point out that Ruby's and Rails' performance is actually quite horrible. Yet despite being completely correct, they'd receive hundreds or even thousands of unjustified "mod-downs" and in some cases would have their comments removed and they'd then be banned from the subreddit. As somebody who came from Slashdot, I found that behavior to be abhorrent. At least I could see such discussion at Slashdot, where it was just gone at some of these other sites.
What's all this video crap, too? Reading is so much more efficient than watching video. I'm not going to waste 15 minutes watching some useless video when I could read a transcript or even an article expressing the same information in one or two minutes. So don't even bother with this thumbnail bullshit. As users, we don't want videos. The only people really pushing videos are those who want to cram more "vibrant" advertising nonsense down the throats of "consumers".
And for crying out loud, we don't need "general reliability improvements" to the AJAX crap. STRIP IT THE FUCK OUT! Get rid of it! Go back to the good ol' dropdowns for selecting the moderation level and the number of posts to view. Go back to using to using proven techniques that, get this, actually work and are usable!
I was hopeful that we'd see some great changes when Slashdot first came to us asking for suggestions. But now I fear that Slashdot will become another intolerant shitheap among the reddits and Diggs and Hacker Newses of the Internet. We don't want censorship. We don't want bullshit videos. We don't want half-assed, buzzword-compliant functionality ruining the site.
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.
First of all, let's understand that "moderation" is a very misleading term. When comments can be flagged and then subsequently removed, it's censorship.
Second of all, censorship of any form is always abused. It doesn't matter who is involved, or the medium in question, or the topics being discussed. The moment censorship is allowed, it will be abused.
You say it'll only be applied in cases of "spam" and "GNAA trolls". Well, that's already too far. In case you haven't realized it, those "GNAA trolls" are actually very insightful and witty parodies of the RIAA, MPAA, and similar organizations. All it takes is one user who is too feeble-minded to see that, and one editor who is too dim-witted, and now a very worthwhile comment is gone.
As we've seen at basically any other site with any form of censorship, perfectly legitimate comments are disappeared far too frequently. Your comment doesn't rave incessantly about Apple's over-hyped device of the day, and this hurts somebody's feelings, so it's deleted. Your comment points out that PHP is full of security holes, and this offends somebody, so it's deleted. Your comment suggests that nginx is more lightweight than Apache, and this makes somebody angry, so it's deleted. Perfectly legitimate opinions are crushed under such a system.
At least Slashdot has managed to avoid that kind of blatant censorship for the most part. I can at least read comments that others dislike. Most of the time, the most interesting, insightful, and intellectually-deep comments are found with a -1 rating. But if such comments are now just gone, those of us who want to read the best content don't even have the ability to do so.
There are very few interesting posters over the 2M UID mark... but there are some. There are now over half a million accounts in that range, so it would be a bit surprising if none of them ever said anything interesting. That said, there are probably a lot of patterns that you can watch for to spot mod abuse. For example:
Or you could just bring back the old metamod system. You know, the one that actually worked, where anyone in the oldest 90% of accounts could do it, but had no control over the posts that they metamoderated.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
In soviet Russia, Slashdot slashdots YOU.
"I have no special gift, I am only passionately curious." - Albert Einstein
How about less politics and more technology stories? If I want to read about politics, I'll go to a political web site.
I'd like it to load fast and use a LOT less AJAX.
I'd like less features, not because I hate features, but because they usually add more crap which needs to be loaded.
I'd love it if you got rid of the whole hiding comments thing, for example. It plays hell with searching and scrolling. Just show 'em all. That'll help you with flagging inappropriate, anyhow. You'll get a lot more feedback if you put everything in front of everyone's eyeballs.
What about a way to block specific users, which in turn ALSO blocks all their moderation?
That would break the confidentiality of moderation. Block a user on your account and compare the scores when viewed through that account to the scores seen by Anonymous Coward. Then you can see how the user modded every comment.
I really missed that this year....
OMG...no ponies....
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
I have been reading Slashdot for years and posting for just as long and here is what I think Slashdot needs:
1.Posting that focuses more on "News for Nerds" and less on useless crap. Bring in more technical stories and less political and legal stories. A post that sued for violations of is not "news for nerds".
Looking at the front page as of now (and going a page or 2 back), "Browser Emulation of 1975 Computer Runs First 16-Bit Home Game " is a good story, its very much "news for nerds".
"MIT Institute's Gloomy Prediction: 'Global Economic Collapse' By 2030 " is not "news for nerds". Yeah sure some people ran some computer simulations but there is no geek/nerd angle.
"Yahoo Layoffs Begin, CEO Sends Employees Apologetic Letter " is also not "news for nerds". Just because its a tech company doesn't mean the fact that people are being fired is "news for nerds".
2.Better editing of what gets posted (e.g. checking for spelling errors, looking for dupes, making sure links work etc)
3.A complete ban on posting any article that is behind a pay wall or requires a login to read the content, no matter how good it might be (e.g. the recent Nature cancer study link that is pay walled). This includes linking to the New York Times unless the link works without the need to log in.
4.No more posting of "slashvertisments" (i.e. articles that are clearly written just to sell whatever product they are writing about)., The recent "Nokia Lumia 900 Reviews " article is an example of this, reviews of a new smartphone (no matter how good) is not "news for nerds" (unless its a phone like the GTA04 that is specifically built to be "open").
Same thing with endless posts about the latest iPad or other must-have gadget. Unless its specifically a geeky or nerdy product like the GTA04 or the Raspberry Pi, its not "news for nerds" and there are plenty of other places to read about that stuff. Slashdot is not Engadget. It's also not Autoblog (the recent story about the Volt sales numbers isn't "news for nerds" either. A technical article on just how the Volt battery packs work on the other hand would definatly qualify as "news for nerds")
5.Do not implement comment flagging or removal. Yes, comments get posted that shouldn't be (e.g. links to goatse) but people mod those down or post replies saying "link in parent post is NSFW". Slashdot should have a policy of never removing comments unless legally required to do so. (even spam generally gets modded down pretty fast)
6.Redo the code for the site. Get rid of a lot of the fancy Javascript and AJAX and stuff and go back to a much leaner Slashdot. Replace the "many more" link and rewrite the display system for frontpage and firehose so that its possible to bookmark (or return to) a specific state with a specific set of articles visible and so you wont loose your place when you click on a link that takes you away from the firehose page.
Make the loading of the next batch of articles for the front page or firehose much faster.
Support modern features like IPv6 and Unicode (if Google can do IPv6 there is no reason Slashdot cant do it)
7.Make it easier for people to use the fire-hose to mod articles up or down and in particular to down-vote the spam and ads that get posted there whilst allowing the legitimate articles to shine through so they can be front-paged.
8.Ban URL shorteners or pre-expand the URL before they get posted. This prevents people posting shortened URLs that really point to goatse.
9.Completely cease and desist using proprietary technologies (such as Flash) for any part of the site. If you must have video clips, use HTML5 audio/video by default (preferably with WebM rather than H.264 where possible). If you do need to use Flash (for browsers that dont have HTM5 audio/video support), make sure its only used for browsers that dont support HTML5 audio/video.
I don't agree. If you're making crap comments yourself, you're likely to mod others' crap comments up.
What I'd like to see is removal of the "time between posting" limit removed for comments in your own journal, and responding to comments that show up in your "notifications" page. If you get a highly rated comment you're likely to have lots of responses, many of which demand answers or further comments. And some of us read pretty fast.
Free Martian Whores!