QuakeNet: Government-Sponsored Attacks On IRC Networks

Barryke writes "Like FreeNode, it seems more and more legitimate businesses or non-profit organizations are being targeted by government subsidiaries in attempts to disrupt and spy on their users. IRC network QuakeNet has posted a press release condemning these efforts. Quoting: 'These attacks are performed without informing the networks and are targeted at users associated with politically motivated movements such as "Anonymous." While QuakeNet does not condone or endorse and actively forbids any illegal activity on its servers we encourage discussion on all topics including political and social commentary. It is apparent now that engaging in such topics with an opinion contrary to that of the intelligence agencies is sufficient to make people a target for monitoring, coercion and denial of access to communications platforms. The released documents depict GCHQ operatives engaging in social engineering of IRC users to entrap themselves by encouraging the target to leak details about their location as well as wholesale attacks on the IRC servers hosting the network. These attacks bring down the IRC network entirely affecting every user on the network as well as the company hosting the server.' One of those tactics applied by governments is the DDOS, which (perhaps not so) coincidentally, is what their suspects are accused of. Is this irony or hypocritical?"

Comments

Fuck Beta!

[Anonymous Coward]

Please post this to new articles if it hasn't been posted yet.

On February 5, 2014, Slashdot announced through a javascript popup that they are starting to "move in to" the new Slashdot Beta design.

Slashdot Beta is a trend-following attempt to give Slashdot a fresh look, an approach that has led to less space for text and an abandonment of the traditional Slashdot look. Much worse than that, Slashdot Beta fundamentally breaks the classic Slashdot discussion and moderation system.

If you haven't seen Slashdot Beta already, open this [slashdot.org] in a new tab. After seeing that, click here [slashdot.org] to return to classic Slashdot.

We should boycott stories and only discuss the abomination that is Slashdot Beta until Dice abandons the project.
We should boycott slashdot entirely during the week of Feb 10 to Feb 17 as part of the wider slashcott [slashdot.org]

Moderators - only spend mod points on comments that discuss Beta
Commentors - only discuss Beta http://slashdot.org/recent [slashdot.org] - Vote up the Fuck Beta stories

Keep this up for a few days and we may finally get the PHBs attention.

Discussion of Beta: http://slashdot.org/firehose.p... [slashdot.org]
Discussion of where to go if Beta goes live: http://slashdot.org/firehose.p... [slashdot.org]
Alternative Slashdot: altslashdot.org [altslashdot.org] (thanks Okian Warrior (537106))

Re: Fuck Beta!

[Anonymous Coward]

If you want "pathetic and obviously ineffective", take a look at beta.slashot.org, setting a new standard for toxic waste.

Re: Fuck Beta!

[dmbasso]

Your apathy leads nowhere. Our action perhaps will bear fruits, who knows...

But you're mirroring the regular population apathy in politics. Most people take no action because "it is obviously ineffective", as The Man brainwashed you to think.

At least here it is pretty easy... if they don't listen to me (us), I'll not use the shit that's being imposed. But if I don't manifest my opinion, I can't even complain later.

So fuck beta, and FUCK YOUR APATHY.

Re: Fuck Beta!

[cervesaebraciator]

Pathetic and ineffective? It's just a bad link. Here, I'll fix it:

Alternative Slashdot: altslashdot.org (thanks Okian Warrior (537106))

Re:Fuck Beta!

[Aighearach]

I've been here since the 90s, what makes you think I'm going to let Mr. Coward tell me how to mod?

Next you'll suggest I read articles! lol

As to the summary, which I skimmed, I already know about the freenode blog that it links, because I'm a freenode user. And the blog doesn't talk about the big bad gubermint DDoSing freenode. Actually it talks about cooperating with law enforcement in handling DDoS attacks, but that there aren't enough resources to track down the command and control servers so nothing is likely to get done on that front.

It is actually some insidious FUD, trying to imply that FOSS == Anonymous, which is totally absurd. Freenode is a white hat IRC network.

Re:Fuck Beta!

[dmomo]

Don't forget to comment on reddit:
http://www.reddit.com/r/social...

Re: Fuck Beta!

[Em Adespoton]

Er, not that wiki appears to already be feeling the effects of slashdotting just from curious people looking at the front page.

Re:Fuck Beta!

[mickwd]

When I went to uni, more years ago than I care to remember, I would return home from time to time at the weekend, and go out with the lads on a Saturday night. As it was a rural area, we'd drive to the nearest big town, visit a pub and then go on clubbing.

We'd usually visit the same pub, but every few months the pub we went to would change.

Why?

We didn't go to the pub with the best beer, the best music, the best seats. No, we just went to the "place where everyone else went". From time to time, everyone in town would get bored with one place and move on somewhere else which then became the new "place where everyone went". That made it (for us, at that time) the place with the best atmosphere.

What Dice needs to realise is that all that Slashdot is is one of the "places where everyone goes" for computer / techie discussion (OK, so it's not the only one, but you get my drift). This site has no value, other than being the "place where everyone goes".

It won't be at all difficult for someone to set up Dashslot, or Slushdirt or whatever, with the same formula as traditional Slashdot, and once word gets around that new site will be the "place where everyone goes" instead of here. Slashdot will become the new Kuro5hin, a steep and tragic decline from former glories.

And that new site might even have decent editing and Unicode support.

About the beta.

[Anonymous Coward]

It is now official. Netcraft has confirmed: Slashdot is dying.

        One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered Slashdot community when IDC confirmed that Slashdot page views has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all websites. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that Slashdot has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Slashdot is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by the stupid fucking beta website and the wholesale discard of user feedback.

        You don't need to be the Amazing Kreskin to predict Slashdot's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Slashdot faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Slashdot because Slashdot is dying. Things are looking very bad for Slashdot. As many of us are already aware, Slashdot continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.

        Slashdot Beta is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core users. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time Slashdot users Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: Slashdot is dying.

        All major surveys show that Slashdot has steadily declined in market share. Slashdot is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Slashdot is to survive at all it will be among S&M enthusiasts. Slashdot continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Slashdot is dead.

That crippling bombshell sent Slashdot fans into a tailspin of mourning and denial. However, bad news poured in like a river of water.

Fuck the beta.

Beta feedback helps

[Sowelu]

I'm not going to quote them without permission, but from talking with one of the editors, some of our sentiment about the beta is shared by them, and they really do want user feedback to help things go in the right direction. Presumably they have no power directly, but if literate and thought-out comments get submitted to the beta feedback, they will do what they can to send them upwards. Don't just complain in the comments, help the editors help you, at least some of them are on your side.

Re:Beta feedback helps

[aardvarkjoe]

We've tried that already. The feedback was ignored.

It's obvious that whoever is working on the new site either lacks the skills or the desire to match the functionality of the current interface. No amount of feedback is going to change that, and so the Beta will always suck.

Do they want to stop the complaining? That's easy. They don't have to get rid of the beta. They just have to formally commit to keeping the classic interface available, and make it straightforward to use it instead.

Re:Beta feedback helps

[demontechie]

The beta feedback discussion for the last couple days has been literate and well thought out, but there has been no public response of any kind. Not even a half-hearted "we hear you and we'll see what we can do about making classic available in perpetuity, but no promises."

And with the revelation of Dice's view of the slashdot finances projections, and the heavy handed mass downmodding it's hard to see what reason the users have to retain any faith in the editors or their superiors.

Re:Beta feedback helps

[carlos92]

If you have access to the editors, let them know that nobody is discussing the stories today. In a day or two this will be a ghost town, they don't have much time to process the feedback.

Re:Beta feedback helps

[Soulskill]

Believe me, we're well aware of what everybody is discussing.

Re:Beta feedback helps

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

As an example, you just linked to 4 different, individual posts within threads. The Beta site doesn't even have post IDs, even on the user's home page, so linking to an individual comment is impossible. SID and CID are GONE in the new Slashdot.

Re:Beta feedback helps

[Koen Lefever]

Believe me, we're well aware of what everybody is discussing.

Is that why suddenly our comments get massively downmodded now?

Folks with mod point get the complaints to +5 and suddenly they are back to "0 Offtopic".

Re:Beta feedback helps

[Soulskill]

It's all any of us are talking about today (and most of what we've talked about for the past few months). Whatever changes get made, they need time to be decided on and implemented. I'm sorry it doesn't go faster, but that's why we still have the classic site available.

Re:Beta feedback helps

[bluefoxlucid]

Soulskill, your stakeholder management is poor. Up on the front page there is a big "We are shoving this down your throat soon" message thrown at your customers--executive stakeholders, low power, high interest, low influence. You've largely shuttered them out, rather than keeping them informed; you've solicited comment and not informed them at large that their comments are heard and being discussed actively. This is producing customer backlash.

You should change the primary message in everyone's face to reflect what's been said here, and to notate that you are considering further changes and delays before moving to a full public release. Make prominent also that you have decided on the short-term availability of Slashdot Classic after launch as yet another metric. Provide a larger update page describing how this will handle--more discussion, more sampling, surveying, and then when and how you will launch. Maybe detail a launch process where everyone is set to New Slashdot by default, with a Slashdot Classic option that resets once per month at most, after major changes, so that the metric of who immediately runs back to Slashdot Classic can be re-sampled after major changes.

I suggest Tres Roeder's book "Managing Project Stakeholders" particularly for your review. The other book (A Sixth Sense for Project Management) is more useful in closed quarters, but I can recommend both.

Re:Beta feedback helps

[unitron]

"Whatever changes get made..."

aren't really necessary in the first place, at least not the ones represented by beta.

Trying to optimize beta is like switching around the order in which influenza symptoms occur. It's still a disease.

Re:Beta feedback helps

[unitron]

In spite of probably half or more of all comments made today being anti-beta, not one of the anti-beta submissions has been moved from gray title bar to green title bar, so that it can be "the" we-hate-beta thread.

If your corporate overlords are thinking "just ignore them and they'll go away", that may be one of the few things about which they've been right lately.

Because right now it's looking like we will be going away, from the 10th to the 17th.

Possibly never to return.

I think there's definitely a Valentines Day Massacre coming, only question is will the victim be beta or your userbase.

Re:Beta feedback helps

[Sowelu]

Okay, devil's advocate, even though by now I'm just coming across as a huge apologist.

We're vocal. We're probably even a majority. But is it /entirely/ unbelievable that some people don't care that much about the beta thing, and really do just want relevant comments? Sure it's important to deal with the beta, but some people are content to fiddle while things burn. I can totally see some of those people downvoting this stuff (for a while, until they run out of points and give up).

Of course--the day that Slashdot deletes comments, even beta-hostile ones, is the day that the exodus becomes unstoppable. It's only happened what, once before, and the backlash lasted months. I don't think we'll hit that point.

Re:Beta feedback helps

[labnet]

Soul skill. I've managed a company for 20 years. I have two jobs. Manage problems and add value. If a customer or employee comes with a problem, the first thing I do is acknowledge the problem (whether I agree or not) by restating the problem in my own words. This 1. Helps me understand the problem 2. Defuses the initial emotion from complainant. /. Management has always been opaque, but in this case lack of communication has caused the biggest protest I have ever seen here. Yet this is the first grain of acknowlegment from a stakeholder and in a forum post rather than a banner announcement.
DICE needs to man up and have the empowered decision maker communicate directly by acknowledging the problem; being the beta site significantly reduces the community experience by using too much whitespace, reducing information density, and breaking below threshold comment summarisation; then detail a course of action. Even if management is bloody minded enough to continue with beta, at least have enough fortitude and character to tell the community. If you are having tough internal debates, make us a part of the debate so it can bring clarity to your conversation.
Silence is the the worst way to deal with crisis.

Beta a Bust

[LordFlower]

Beta sucks. I will not be back if Beta is made mandatory.

Soulskilll and Timothy

[Princeofcups]

Give it up guys. You know that no stories are going to be discussed. Today is the end of the old Slashdot. Start sending out resumes, since this is going down in a blaze of glory.

Hey, the first story we should get on the replacement site when set up is an interview with Rob and Roblimo on why they really left Slashdot and left these incompetents in charge.

Re:Soulskilll and Timothy

[carlos92]

They won't give it up because they still don't get it. They think of the site users as the audience, as if the value of Slashdot was the articles. Just in case Dice reads this: the value is in the comments from the community, some of which are less biased and more informative than the referenced articles. Some are written by experts in the matter, or contain perspectives that a journalist doesn't have. Sure, most of the comments are junk, but the mod system helps you with that. But nobody from Dice will read this, because if they read Slashdot they would have already seen it.

Re:Soulskilll and Timothy

[ShaunC]

Hey, the first story we should get on the replacement site when set up is an interview with Rob and Roblimo on why they really left Slashdot and left these incompetents in charge

The lameness filter says I should probably not opine on how the true reason is:

$$$$$$$$$$$

I don't blame them for leaving; really, I don't. I'd have cashed out too! I do blame the new stewards of the Slashdot domain and brand for fucking it all to hell. A few years ago, "Dice" was, to me, "a tech job site." Now, "Dice" means, to me, "that moronic company who fucked up Slashdot."

Re:Soulskilll and Timothy

[Soulskill]

We know most of the discussion will be centered on the beta. Some people will want to read news anyway, so we'll keep posting.

You folks are certainly welcome to keep commenting about the beta; we're reading all of it, and we're communicating it to the Product team who makes the decisions about the design.

Re:Soulskilll and Timothy

[LordFlower]

Good.

And know that we do not hold anything personally against anyone.

Re:Soulskilll and Timothy

[Soulskill]

We've had the community involved since October, actually.

Re:Soulskilll and Timothy

[Anonymous Coward]

Can't please everyone.

And hey, it's easier to get all riled up in your parent's basement than it is to get involved and give proper feedback.

What I have seen repeated many times so far, is that the pubic feedback options for Beta actually *HAVE* been used, and that the issues mentioned in that feedback has been consistently ignored, A La what happened with Metro, Gnome3, and Unity.

It looks more and more like the current crop of UI developers does not know how to accept that their architectural marvels can be so poorly recieved that people would be willing to salt the earth and nuke the site from orbit to rid themselves of it, and instead "Just cant understand why people dont love it."

There does not need to be a reason to dislike something. For instance, think of the food you most despise. Why do you despise it? Can you quantify exactly what it is about that food that sets you off, and makes you go elsewhere? Could you give insightful feedback about what might be done to improve it, (that does not involve simply not serving that food-- because that option has been categorically decried as "Unhelpful".)

Most of the time, the answers to those questions will be a resounding "no", because personal preferences dont NEED reasons, and often times, dont even really HAVE a quantifiable reason to cite. People simply dont like the thing.

When you have resounding negative feedback like this over a product, the question you need to ask is "What DO you want?", not "Oh, so you dont like the taste of liver and onions? How would you make liver and onions more palatable?" The former establishes good will-- the second one shows that you dont really care about what your consumer wants, and intend to make him eat liver and onions regardless.

In the case of /., the community HAS stated, emphatically and repeatedly, EXACTLY what they want-- They want a no-nonsense, low resource, and high data density version of classic with editing abilities for registered users, and unicode support, that does not break the commenting system and is very lean on data bandwidth and computational resources for rendering.

So far, the response from the beta team has been the sound of crickets chirping, followed by announcements that liver and onions will be served on feb 10.

If slashdot's beta team members would grow a pair like soulskill just did 2 posts up, and actually come in and discuss this matter with the community, it would really show some good will on their part.

As is, they are only just digging the hole deeper with their bullshit.

Re:Soulskilll and Timothy

[arth1]

"We know most of the discussion will be centered on the beta. Some people will want to read news anyway..."

This is the news today.

Indeed. Stuff that matters.

Re:Soulskilll and Timothy

[mrchaotica]

"Involved" doesn't mean "nod and go 'mm-hmm' then do whatever the fuck you were planning to do anyway;" it means "actually make changes to implement the community's desires."

Anyway, since you're allegedly listening, here is a partial list of the problems I have with Beta:

• THERE IS NO HYPERLINK TO THE INDIVIDUAL POST NUMBERS ANYMORE!!!!!!!!!! How am I supposed to reference another comment (other than the one I'm directly replying to) without the ability to link to it?
• The default comment title when replying is missing.
• The "from the ... dept" text is missing on the list of stories on the front page (and is in the wrong place on the individual story's page).
• The story tags are missing everywhere.
• Posts should always have precise timestamps, not this "__ minutes/hours/days/weeks/months/years ago" bullshit.
• Why are you wasting my horizontal space?
• This unordered list is missing its bullet points (of course, classic fucks that up too...).
• The two things that people actually wanted fixed -- Unicode support and maybe more allowed HTML -- are hardly any better with beta than they were before.

Re:Soulskilll and Timothy

[AmiMoJo]

Horizontal space is a trickier question. Some readers demand words that go from one side of their 1920px-wide monitor to the other. Usability studies have shown that doing so actually decreases readability. Given that we can't set a different width for every user, we've got to try to figure something out.

HTML/CSS are not designed for doing fixed layouts like you want. They are designed to give hints about layout so that the browser can then flow things as the user prefers or is necessary for their screen size. That's why Classic is so good. You can view it well at 1920px on a monitor (as I normally do with a 15" laptop, 22" monitor at work and 24" monitor at home) and on a mobile phone in portrait mode (800px wide).

If I found it unreadable I'd just make the window smaller. Don't pick a width and force it on me, let me decide. That's why Classic is great, it's an actual proper web site and not some lame attempt to copy print media like a million other shitty blog style news sites.

NO to Beta

[mccotter]

Do not make beta mandatory. Keep classic.

donotwant Slashdot Beta

[acid_andy]

Dice, Editors, your silence is deafening! Slashdot is News for Nerds but no true Nerd wants your Beta. Stop pretending this problem will go away. Maybe you actually hope it will go away, maybe you hope Slashdot itself will go away. Whatever - at least have the decency and respect for your long term readers to give some kind of response to all the negative feedback. Why not keep two versions of the site? If Beta was done properly it would all be a CSS skin with some scripts that could all be swapped out. You already have a mobile site, so it can't be to improve appearence on mobiles, tablets, phablets, touchscreens, etc. Oh sorry, I forgot, that wouldn't keep the advertisers happy. Slashdot was awesome while it lasted.

Re:donotwant Slashdot Beta

[CanHasDIY]

Commenting is certainly not an afterthought. It's at the top of our list for things that need more work. We know you come to the site for the comments (as we ourselves did back in the '90s).

So... You've known all along that the main reason we come here for the discussions; the beta's been going on for what, the better part of a year? And commenting is still horrifically broken.

Not to bust your chops, but that's kinda the definition of an afterthought, bro.

Save Slashdot Classic

[Bob9113]

Shame, I'd actually like to discuss this topic. But, then I'd be jeopardizing every future discussion.

Javascript dancing baloney and giant pretty pictures belong on USA Today, not Slashdot.

The meat of Slashdot, the substance that draws viewers here instead of the alternatives, is the comments. Lose those comments and you will lose the eyeballs. Lose the eyeballs and you will lose the ad revenue.

Alternatively, you can accept that you made a mistake, keep Slashdot classic, and keep the steady flow of cash. Make the right business decision, here, Dice. Don't kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.

Alternative alternative: Dice; make us an offer. If you really have written this thing off, give us your stats so we can crunch the numbers and tell us your price. It should be pretty clear that the path you're on will not be lucrative, so show your lowest and best offer. There's some pretty affluent folks here, and this place is important to us. If the workers at Harley Davidson could do it, surely it is possible for us to do the same.

No legitimate discussion until Slashdot classic is restored. Sacrifice a few days of discussion now to save all the days in the future. The Spirit of Mohdri Dragon Lives! (feel free to get drunk and naked while posting)

BetaNet: DICE-Sponsored Attacks on Slashdot

[ShaunC]

Cut this shit out. Revert. Take the DICE Marketing department out for a nice big lunch, drinks and all. Then send them home for the weekend. Then undo the damage they've done.

I'm sadly sure that this is an intentional ploy to drive away long-time users ("geeks" and "nerds") who have contributed so much that, like me, they're eligible to disable advertising. What they don't understand is that even if my karma was shit (we don't get numbers anymore, I guess mine would be 50++++++), I'd still be using Ghostery and AdBlock to block the ads without Slashdot's generous option.

Wake up, guys. This is a tech site. The comments make the site. The users make the site. We aren't going to sit around and watch it go to shit. You will have nothing, ZERO left if the beta interface goes into production, except for a few new users who came over from MSNBC.

Writing, wall, see it, hope you have negotiated a nice severance package.

Re:BetaNet: DICE-Sponsored Attacks on Slashdot

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

The Marketing Department at DICE Cybernetics Corporation are a bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes.

Slashdot Clone?

[Keick]

Ok, I tried the beta. Yeah its not pretty, the comment section is pretty small width wise, it looks HORRIBLE on my iPad... The client side filtering of comments completely ignores my long time preferences, etc etc.

To the point; Many have asked about cloning Slashdot, and retaking the community site. But has anyone thought about how such a mission could be accomplished? Yes I know I can go grab slashcode and standup a 16 core xeon box to toss on my 100mbps connection. But what about the users, the stories, the comments. We can't just screen scrape those to stand up a new site.

In what possible way could we honestly standup a new slashdot that is community owned?

Brett

"As we migrate our audience"

[skillrod]

That's one way to look at it what this Beta will do.

Re:"As we migrate our audience"

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

THAT's the problem right there. They think we're the AUDIENCE and not the CONTRIBUTERS.

NEWSFLASH: We don't come here for the stellar editing, we come here to make and read and reply to each other's comments. YOU'RE not supplying the content, WE are. Display some ads and stay out of the way, or expect most of us to "migrate" to another site.

Fuck beta

[NoImNotNineVolt]

If Dice doesn't reconsider this redesign by the 17th, I guess there won't be anything left to do on here other than earn membership in GNAA.

Car analogy time

[Bob the Super Hamste]

Car analogy time:
I have gotten rid of vehicles that sucked less than the Slashdot beta. Seriously even that '85 Bronco II where everything was rusty, none of the body panels matched, and that had bad compression on the #5 cylinder sucked less than beta.slashdot.org.

Re:Car analogy time

[OzPeter]

Car analogy time:

I have gotten rid of vehicles that sucked less than the Slashdot beta. Seriously even that '85 Bronco II where everything was rusty, none of the body panels matched, and that had bad compression on the #5 cylinder sucked less than beta.slashdot.org.

Yeah ..I've heard that about Bronco's .. seems like they haven't had a good run for years

Beta

[riis138]

Please learn the lesson that M$ should have learned with Windows 8. Don't push a cantankerous and cranky user base towards a pseudo-modern U.I.

FUCK BETA

[vivek7006]

FUCK BETA. I want my classic back. And one more thing, FUCK BETA!

2014: Will Slashdot Beta Be The End of Slashdot?

[AmicoToni]

Another Slashdot reader since 1998 here. Not for much longer, presumably: if Beta stays I will most certainly leave, as may others will, no doubt. Appalling.

BETA SUXX0RS!!!

[tedgyz]

Sorry Dice, but I have to jump on the beta-hata wagon. I'll just point out two things:

1. Right side bar squeezes out comments. We are here for the comments, not whatever crap you want to cram down our throats.
2. Vertical spacing of text wastes tons of real estate. It looks like a High School book report padded to fill the required pages.

Dice Holdings, Inc: Please consider your next steps carefully. The /. castle was not built in a day, but it can easily be destroyed in a day. You have one chance to avoid a mass exodus. As others have said, eyeballs == advertising $$.

Stop trying to squeeze blood from a stone. The reason we come here is because most other news sites suck. If you want to throw your hat into the sucky news site ring, all I can say is good luck with that.

Re:Stop Beta!

[dkman]

Trying to be more constructive I sent this message to the feedback email:

There are a lot of users who do not like the beta design. I don’t especially hate it, but I do like the turquoise bars signifying the start of a new thread or comment. The beta uses a larger font which is not nearly as apparent.

Comments are also very squished with the right bar eating so much space. 3 comments deep you can fit 70 characters opposed to 140 in classic. I also don’t like the font change in comments.

In reality I do hate the squished comments. I wrote that part before I went into comments.

Re:C'mon editors

[faedle]

The fact that's buried in the Slashdot Blog and not prominently featured in either the "you're gonna get beta whether you like it or not!" popup and/or a sticky on the Slashdot front page tells this long-time Slashdot user that your "Product Team" isn't really interested in our honest feedback.

Beta sucks, period. It's a design change the users haven't asked for and don't want.

Why Do You Think We Read Slashdot? (Fuck Beta)

[boolithium]

We are geeks. We can get tech stories from a billion places on the web. Actually, we don't really need web browsers, if all we want to do is read tech articles. There are better news readers than browsers. We read these stories here, because we know a bunch of smart people are going to provide context in the comments. Some are programmers. Some work in the industry. Some are hobbyists. Some are fanboys. But the comments let us refine our opinions on a piece further, and god forbid, teach us something. If that is not there, I can just fire up a newsreader and read the same product without ever coming here.

And?

[kbahey]

Soulskill,

Aaaand?

Dice can't see it, since they are new here (he he)... but you and the editors should know well what I am about to say:

The most loyal long time most avid readers of Slashdot, are not trolling the site, in protest of the failed beta. Never thought I would see the day ...

Where is GNAA, Natalie Portman grits, and frist prost when you need them!

I sent feedback on the beta months ago on the survey, and sent it again today. I sent emails for feedback, and I posted this several times:

Requiring Javascript to browse the site is suicide!

Please, save the site from your managers ...