Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: How Can We Improve Slashdot?
Hi all. Most of you are already aware that Slashdot was sold by DHI Group last week, and I very much enjoyed answering questions and reading feedback in the comments of that announcement story. There's no doubt that the Slashdot community is one of the most thoughtful, intelligent, and prolific communities on the web.
I wanted to use this opportunity to get a discussion going on how we can improve Slashdot moving forward. I am not talking about a full re-design that will detract from the original spirit of Slashdot, but rather: user experience, bug fixes, and feature improvements that are requested from actual /. users. We appreciated many of your suggestions in the story announcing the sale, and I have taken note of those suggestions. This story will serve as a more master list for feature requests and improvement suggestions.
We welcome any and all suggestions. Some ideas mentioned in the sale story were, in no particular order: Unicode support, direct messaging, increased cap on comment scores, put more weight on firehose voting to determine which stories make the front page, reduced time required between comments, and many more. We'd love a chance to discuss these suggestions and feature improvements and pros and cons here before we bring them back to our team for implementation.
I wanted to use this opportunity to get a discussion going on how we can improve Slashdot moving forward. I am not talking about a full re-design that will detract from the original spirit of Slashdot, but rather: user experience, bug fixes, and feature improvements that are requested from actual /. users. We appreciated many of your suggestions in the story announcing the sale, and I have taken note of those suggestions. This story will serve as a more master list for feature requests and improvement suggestions.
We welcome any and all suggestions. Some ideas mentioned in the sale story were, in no particular order: Unicode support, direct messaging, increased cap on comment scores, put more weight on firehose voting to determine which stories make the front page, reduced time required between comments, and many more. We'd love a chance to discuss these suggestions and feature improvements and pros and cons here before we bring them back to our team for implementation.
here's no doubt that the Slashdot community is one of the most thoughtful, intelligent, and prolific communities on the web.
You must be new here.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
There's no doubt that the Slashdot community is one of the most thoughtful, intelligent, and prolific communities on the web.
Used to be. Can you return it to that?
SourceForge still packages malware in its users distributables. Fix that first.
There's not enough content on the front page every day. I know there are many submissions that are made everyday that never make it to the front page. Perhaps loosening the filter or helping people post quality front page material would help. Sometimes good stories never make it through because the guy who wrote it has bad grammar or something. That's a shame.
That's being fixed as we speak. In fact, we've removed the DevShare program altogether already. Now we're working to remove bundled installers added by the project owners.
Because seriously.
"Mod, mod, mod...and another troll bites the dust."
Fresh, solid and intelligent articles on TECH, and a banning of any and all trolls. Start there.
Check the department.
It's lamentably inconsistent with the business sense of "moving forward", but it should be stated that the old "no_beta" slashdot was superior in nearly every way. That is, the less you manage to do, the more the loyal old farts (myself among them) will sing your praises. Make glitzy choices which head opposite to a clean text interface and you will lose four geeks to only one newbie gained.
Give me more ways to make people understand just how wrong they are when I write a reply that contradicts everything they said. Some way to really make them realize their stupidity and experience terrible shame because of it.
I think that would help your bottom line quite a lot, since that seems to be what the majority of people come to slashdot to do.
(Yes, this post is a troll. I won't apologize though, as that would violate slashdot tradition.)
By "tinkering" we're aiming to fix bugs, and add oft-requested features (https) etc. We're not trying to reinvent Slashdot here.
Will there be a separate "How do we fix Sourceforge" thread or do you want those questions here?
More Ponies !!!
I would just like to say... Thank you for asking. I don't really have any gripes other than make sure you display paid for posts with a clear "AD" banner or something.
He used to work on this site, would sometimes post stories as "Cmdr Taco".
Oh, yeah, and started the friggin' thing.
It'd be like Apple bringing Steve Jobs back, only not as expensive.,
Funny that this was not posted by Timmy.
Trolling is a art,
I actually like the current 5. If something has 5, it's enough to notice and probably worth reading. Other moderators can then spend time to up or downvote other comments, rather than pile on the bandwagon.
You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it dissolve.
Judging by the number of AC comments modded up to +5, I think that's throwing the baby out with the bath water.
I haven't seen much of a difference in quality between AC and logged-in comments. Both have trolls. Both have thoughtful insight. I'm not sure the ratio is much different.
HTTPS though, yeah. Agreed on that.
It's the only way to be sure.
Just a short list of ideas off the top of my head: * UTF-8. I used to get around it by using HTML entities, but nobody ain't got time for that now, and it's been a source of complaints for over a decade. * Click-bait headlines have no place in a site dedicated to serious technical subjects (or that at least takes technical subjects more or less seriously). * CmdrTaco, Hemos, and the rest of the original crew used to occasionally become involved in the discussions and rarely felt the need to withhold their opinions (iPod, anyone?), which gave the site a more personal feel -- a hybrid between a blog and a news site. This still can be seen in sites like some of the sites run by Gawker Media, and it seems effective in maintaining the readers involved. * If there will be editors, they ought to edit.
In Soviet Russia, Jesus asks: "What Would You Do?"
In no particular order:
* Editors who can spell correctly and understand english grammar.
* Some form of control over dupes, perhaps a commitment along the lines of "we won't repeat stories within 2 weeks of each other". This isn't about updates to previous stories, but ones where they are effectively the same posted back to back.
* Fix the mobile interface or get rid of it. As an example of busted - the "top commented" story does not display on my iPad4. I literally cannot see the most active content on the site when I visit using it (it's up to date and using Chrome).
* Expand the friends/foes list limit. I've got a hell of a lot of trolls permanently downmodded from over the years and am capped out. Either this, or find another way to control trolls. I realize this doesn't affect ACs at all.
* Consider rewarding users with good karma with less delay between posts. I write pretty darn fast and have wandered away from more than a few good posts due to the speed limit.
* Come to think of it, I've never noticed a place to report bugs or a bug tracker. Is there one? I haven't gone looking.
I hate it when a summary says "frobozz version x.y.z has been released, this release has many new features and bugfixes", yet never tells me what frobozz does.
I also hate summaries along the lines of "Researcher discovers exploit in ABC using TSR algorithms tweaked with RNG enhancements. This can lead to new discoveries in FNG with QRZ and CDR possibilities". Then the summary never tells us what any of those acronyms mean.
Finally, remember this is news for nerds. Keep the BS articles (I'm looking at you Forbes) to a minimum.
One suggestion would be to allow a limited window of time where you can edit your comment. It doesn't need to be anything long, even 5 minutes or so would suffice, mostly to allow for typo correction that slips past.
Alternately, have those posts be pending for 2 minutes/5 minutes/whatever so no one else can see them, but you can still edit them until that point is up? Even with the preview function, I know there's tons of typos/etc that slip through, especially when posting from an autocorrecting mobile device.
1. WRT Unicode, the biggest problem is "smart quotes." The quickest solution to get rid of this annoyance is to use a regex to replace smart quotes with regular quotes. The rest can wait for more testing before rolling it out.
2. The current comment score cap works. It's less likely to promote group think as it can quickly be knocked back down or up without having an unreasonable distance to cover. People who worry about comment scores need to get over it - it's just a number. And if you're not browsing at -1, you're missing some good stuff that's gotten buried by the echo chamber. "It ain't broke, don't fix it."
3. Direct messaging? Are you kidding me? Promote use of journals more if you want to encourage inter-personal communications that might be off-topic in a discussion elsewhere. People can also put their email, skype, etc info in their profile if they really need interpersonal communications that are not public.
4. Reducing time between comments? That's only a concern if you have crap karma, and it's easy to go from zero to excellent in a few days, so anyone making any real contributions will quickly find this is not a problem.
5. Fix the color scheme that makes it almost impossible to see the link to the source of the article in the title bar. Go back to putting the link at the top or bottom of the story if it isn't already embedded.
6. Fix the mobile app on android. If you don't know what I'm referring to, try it for a while. You'll get the idea.
7. Do NOT allow inline display of images. Those of us who have already learned not to click on goat.se links don't need to be forced to see it again and again.
8. Get rid of the page between when you click on a link in your message list, and the actual message display. It's redundant.
9. It's not hard to allow people to append to their comments, with a time-stamped notice along the lines of "EDITED: 2016-12-24@whenever added the following" and then the new text. This way, nobody can change their original post, but they CAN correct it in the original place.
10. Increase the .sig length - even tweets are longer. People often use sigs to quickly identify other users (nobody looks at the user name).
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
I miss the old days where there was a side bar freshmeat feed of new SourceForge releases. Could we possible increase the SlashDot / SourceForge links this way? A running feed of releases would be nice, and it would help bring us back to our FOSS roots.
Also, in the scientific community (I'm in the cancer simulation field), "grand challenges" are popping up, where there would be a dataset or two, and a challenge to create an analysis or modeling tool for those data. Some really amazing creativity can emerge from those challenges.
It would be interesting if such a thing could be done here, similarly to the "ask slashdot" articles, but then linking to a development space on SourceForge to keep it going. I would love to engage the developer community here on our data standards and other cancer projects, and I hope they'd like to pitch in.
Thanks -- Paul
PS: Please consider stopping the SourceForge spam. I'm not sure I need any more "SourceForge Resources" emails on "Flash Storage for Dummies" and business intelligence / analytics / etc.
OpenSource.MathCancer.org: open source comp bio
no fuk u
Any thoughts on how to attract back some of the quality software that SourceForge previously chased off? Also, can I take the parent post to mean that you're also removing malware added outside of of the DevShare program? Is SourceForge going to commit to serving no Malware (or badware or adware or pick your euphemism), ever?
I want the power to decide who lives and who dies.
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
I've been a lurker for years at Slashdot and I always found the top headline stories fascinating, but this story made me sign up for an account immediately. I truly believe the internet is a better place because you exist. I love the spirit of Slashdot and the community around it: please keep true to your origins. So what made me sign up? Your mobile experience is awful. The performance is abysmal and the experience of dynamically loading stories is terrible. Your content is so fantastic that it gets marginalized by the bad mobile experience. If the budget allows, make a native mobile app for iOS (that fixes half of your performance issues right there). HTML5 is awful on mobile and the performance is awful. Specifically, the dynamic loading at the bottom of the page (i.e. infinite scroll) instead of pagination is painful on mobile. If you reload the page, you lose your place and have to dynamically reload the page totally. I could live with the small fix of pagination vs infinite scroll but then I think about offline content and performance and my yearning for a great native OS experience increases exponentially. Please do not ignore a great, native iOS experience.
/. used to be a quick loading site. i used slashcode many times because of that.
after the dice acquisition they loaded up with all sorts of flash ads, some with motion/video, some with sound. don't do that.
even to this day when i load the site on my mobile phone the ads are overwhelming. yes, i know, various adblockers etc-- there are still some instances where my browser (esp on android) the page loading stalls when using blockers. especially irritating when it happens in each article opened.
pre-dice:
cmndrtaco makes a site that builds an amazing community of mature and intelligent people, spreading their knowledge freely.
post-dice:
get your resume posted here for $$$$$, post a job ad for $$$$$
how can you the community help us help ibm help make you a $marter world?
It IS sacrilege. While I'm comfortable posting under my name, others seek anonymity by using nyms, and others via AC. There's no real difference between the latter two.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
The moderation system here is archaic and broken, and needs an overhaul. Instead of helping to promote discussion, it is often used as a tool of censorship and oppression. Given Slashdot's dwindling number of users, and its dwindling number of comments, anything that stifles discussion instead of enabling it is extremely harmful to this site's survival.
Now don't get me wrong, I'm not calling for something like the even more horribly broken systems we see at reddit, or Hacker News, or Stack Overflow. We don't need a moderating system here that enables gangs of abusive mods to go around attacking others. But major changes are needed here.
First of all, all comments should be shown by default, whether they were posted by logged in users or anonymous users. It's not 2004, when each story here used to get 300+ comments. These days it's rare to see a story get more than 100. As I scan the front page today, many of the stories that have been up for hours now are still under 50 comments. So the moderation system does more harm than good when only 1 or 2 comments are shown by default for each story.
Second of all, there should be no concept of a downmod. Downmodding is a feature that is always abused as a way to censor comments that are perfectly valid, but which happen to express the "wrong" point of view. Downmodding should be eliminated.
Third of all, the editors here should never moderate comments. Ever. There has been some suspicion that they have been doing this, as we often see perfectly good comments among the earliest posted get modded down to -1. These are vague -1 mods without any Troll, Flamebait, etc. specifier.
Fourth of all, this site needs to list who moderated each comment. It should show the username of the moderator, and what rating was given. If somebody's deemed responsible enough to moderate, then they should be willing to have their name attached to any and all moderation they do.
Fifth of all, there needs to be a way to deal with abusive moderators. Clearly the meta-mod system that's currently in place is not working well, as we see far too much abusive moderation. When it comes to abusive moderation, even one incident is one too many. The entire community, both registered and anonymous users, should be able to flag and revoke the moderating privileges of mods. The threshold for this should be low. Even one vote of non-confidence in a moderator should be enough to immediately and permanently strip that moderator of any and all moderating privileges.
Sixth of all, the posting limits needs to go. Like I said earlier, this site needs more comments, not fewer. The delay between comments should be minimized, down to perhaps a minute, if not less. Even this is not ideal, as it inherently imposes a daily cap on the number of comments which can be posted, which itself is a bad thing to have.
At this point, it would perhaps be preferable to remove the moderating system altogether. It made sense a decade or more ago, when the volume of comments was such that some order was needed. But those days are long gone. Now there are so few comments that they should just all be displayed, with users given the option of hiding (just for themselves, of course) comments that they no longer wish to see. What moderation does take place ends up causing way more harm than good.
This is a historic opportunity to greatly improve this site, and give it a leg up over its competitors. Those competitors, including Hacker News, Reddit and even Stack Overflow, are known for having moderation systems that are easily and readily abused to censor other users. Slashdot should learn from this, and strive to go the other way: create a technology-focused community where free discussion, even if it isn't the prettiest or nicest discussion, is enabled and promoted. Let us discuss issues with a freedom that we just don't find on so many other sites. But in order for that to happen we need to see some major changes to the moderation system here. Either it needs massive reform, or it needs to be completely eliminated.
Any particular reason why we couldn't allow uploaded pics, movies, etc.? It's not a text-only world--except here.
That's one of the things that makes Slashdot special. Visit the rest of the world if you want something different.
Put the "read more" link back after the story summary. Also put the comment count down there again. See soylent news for an example of how it use to be.
Also a couple of years ago slashdot had a wonderful mobile site that looked very much like the desktop site, but was extremely functional (commenting, moderating, filtering comments, everything). The latest mobile site is useless as far as I'm concerned. In fact I the desktop site is more usable on a phone than the current mobile site. Slashdot is not Ars Technica. Slashdot *is* the comments. The stories are just there to spur discussion.
Slashdot was "News for Nerds"
Lately though, half the posts are some SJW topic.
Bring back the tech.
I want you guys to succeed, and I realize that part of that formula is to serve up ads. But currently myself and quite a few others are using adblockers on slashdot because it's pretty crazy how much stuff is going on in the front page without blocking the ads. I'd be willing to turn off my adblocker for slashdot if there were text ads and they were integrated in a smooth way. Maybe a check box or something that we can flip to get a text-only experience.
It's not uncommon for comments to be moderated down not because they're not sensible, but because they're unpopular.
I would consider creating a "Devil's Advocate +1" moderation. Possibly also a Devil's Advocate badge for people with enough Devil's Advocate points.
Eliminating AC is pointless. As with any other site lacking sign-up fees, you just get throwaway accounts spamming the same crap that would normally be posted by AC's.
Yes we're committed to serving no unwanted ware. We need more than 4 days to fix this. We're working on a lot of things that we'll let everyone know about soon.
We're gonna fix the obvious things first (adware, deceptive ads, etc) before we get a separate thread for that.. But yes that would be a separate thread.
I wanted to use this opportunity to get a discussion going on how we can improve Slashdot moving forward.
Let's start by banning the phrase "moving forward" unless you're talking about physical motion in a forward direction. Without a time machine there is no other direction for the "movement" of which you speak.
Everything and its opposite is true. Get used to it.
This is another black eye on slashdot, IMHO. The search function has never been useful. I don't know how they managed to devise such an awful search function - it often seems to return anything but what I am actually searching for - but they did. I remember some time several years back the search function was broken enough that slashdot allowed google to index the site and the searches all went through there, which was a massive improvement.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Polls belong on the sidebar. But don't believe just me. Go back and look at all the prior discussions about it.
Actually just go back and look at /. history. Whenever the old management did something contentious there was always a lot of vocal and well reasoned arguments as to why what they did was BS. The trouble was that nobody at /. actually listened.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
Better would be to allow people to comment in a discussion they've modded, so they can explain why, or if the discussion later on takes a more interesting turn.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Thank you for the information. I'll wait to see that then, before getting into it too heavily.
There is a separate comment somewhere around here on bad financial models, but that one is focused on slashdot. However, a similar mechanism could be applied to sourceforge, and the "charity share broker" in that version (which might be slashdot or the new owners of slashdot) would reasonably deserve a percentage of the funded projects. Just hosting the projects is not enough. Most projects need support in their preparation and even stronger support in evaluating whether or not they have succeeded.
As regards eliminating malware, I think that the lack of a good financial model naturally results in bad financial models filling the vacuum. However, this is more deeply related to the question of why anyone participates in a project on sourceforge in the first place. My own feeling is that relatively few of the programmers have much idea about a viable financial model, though a significant number are still hoping to 'strike it rich' by creating a great program that evolves into a financially successful story. There are some good programmers who are donating their free time, but most of them are going to get drawn off by more lucrative opportunities. Also a significant number of newbies hoping to learn or get a reputation or both...
One thing about the suggestion of funding projects with charity shares... The project proposal that includes a contributor with a track record will stand out, even if that established contributor wants to include some apprentice programmers in the project.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
He might have worked for DICE. We are not DICE so those won't be around anymore.
More specifically, it appears that some of us (such as myself) are on a list of people who never get mod points. I have not had mod points in ~2 years IIRC. My karma is consistently excellent here. Others have reported the same.
There also have been times when people have been given differing numbers of mod points. It used to be that people would only get 5. Then some people started getting 10. Some people claimed they got as many as 15. I never heard an explanation for that, either.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
As a long time user, I used to have an option to turn off advertising... I want that back
I came, I conquered, I coredumped
There is a common pattern with aggregator sites today which deal with scientific press releases to simply regurgitate press releases that other sites are posting. These stories are typically chosen because they fit a narrative which the Slashdot community already believes. But, such "news values" are not in the spirit of Silicon Valley, which has a strong tradition of leading the world on issues related to science and tech.
...
...
Modern aggregator sites today are increasingly realizing that there are two types of stories: those stories which exploit the users by feeding their worldviews back to them (directly termed "exploitation") and those stories which encourage users to learn new ideas which might challenge their preconceived notions ("exploration"). Slashdot has since the beginning focused entirely upon exploitation, which satisfies the user base, but also makes the tech community more insulated from competing views. This is most obvious with regards to what is happening at the geographical center of the tech world, in the Mission in San Francisco (where there have been some high-profile incidents with regards to gentrification and overall disrespect for the native culture), but the effects of such policies are also -- perhaps more importantly -- observable in the world of science.
Why not try a bit harder to educate the tech community on some of the most vocal critics of both science and tech? There is a rather long list of such critics to work with, some of them have very impressive CV's, and some of the claims they've made have been really quite extraordinary.
Martín López Corredoira is an astrophysicist, philosopher and academic whistleblower. He has published more than 50 cosmology and astrophysical papers on subjects like the structure of the Milky Way, stellar populations, and observational astronomy topics which required analytical calculations, computer simulations, statistics, photometrical and spectroscopical observations and analysis. He wrote in The Twilight of the Scientific Age
"A superficial view may lead us to think that we live in the golden age of science but the fact is that the present-day results of science are mostly mean, unimportant, or just technical applications of ideas conceived in the past."
"There are several reasons to write about this topic. First of all, because I feel that things are not as they seem, and the apparent success of scientific research in our societies, announced with a lot of ballyhoo by the mass media, does not reflect the real state of things."
"Science is not a direct means for reaching the truth. Science works with hypotheses rather than with truths. This fact, although recognized, is usually forgotten. It gives rise to the creation of certain key groups within science which think that their hypotheses are indubitably solid truths, and think that the hypotheses of other minority groups are just extravagant or crackpot ideas
all through history, and even now, there have been many instances of discussion about how to interpret aspects of nature, with various possible options without a clear answer, in which a group of scientists have opted to claim their position is the good or orthodox one while other positions are heresies."
Or, how about Jeff Schmidt, who published a scathing critique of the physics graduate program titled Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look at Salaried Professionals and the Soul-battering System That Shapes Their Lives?
"My thesis is that the criteria by which individuals are deemed qualified or unqualified to become professionals involve not just technical knowledge as is generally assumed, but also attitude -- in particular, attitude toward working within an assigned political and ideological framework."
"At the end of the week the entire physics faculty gathers in a closed meeting to decide the fate of the students. Strange as it may s
I vote against this. Trolls will simply use sock puppets, and there are also other reasons people may wish to make certain posts anonymously, such as self-censorship due to where one is working, etc.
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
How do you feel about logarithmic scaling instead of absolute caps? Both for rating comments and for karma? The system would track the actual numbers, but normally we would only see the rounded exponent.
If you like the idea, then we have to argue whether the base should be 2, 10, or e. Even the natural log comes out in the wash?
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
At this point, https is probably just breathing hard.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
Give back the subscribe feature so we can pay money to avoid ads. It hasn't worked in ages. I used to like to give other commenters gift subscriptions if they said something I found particularly entertaining or enlightening. It was like moderating, but with cash.
You are welcome on my lawn.
As a side note for sourceforge, can you allow direct download links instead of a redirecting landing page? There are sure to be other reasons for other people but for me I remotely manage via a command line many (1000s of) windows boxes. It would be nice to be able to easily download tools without hitting redirect roadblocks. On linux I can wget or curl around that but not so easy on windows.
Silence is a state of mime.
"There's no doubt that the Slashdot community is one of the most thoughtful, intelligent, and prolific communities on the web."
I agree with that. Unfortunately, there are people who use Slashdot comments as a way of acting out their anger and wasting everyone's time. I have some ideas about how to help improve that situation.
I'd like to help Slashdot, as a volunteer.
Slashdot has a higher percentage of stories interesting to me than any other site I've been able to find. To choose stories interesting to technically-knowledgeable people, it is necessary to understand their sub-culture. Dice Holdings didn't seem to have anyone who even began to understand that culture.
I've seen ads on Slashdot from IBM, for example. The person who wrote those ads obviously didn't understand how to get technically-knowledgeable people interested. One opportunity for Slashdot managers is to help technology companies improve the quality of their advertising. Too often ads are designed and written by departments that have no one interested in the product. Better ads would draw more customers and would make Slashdot more popular with advertisers.
I was an advertising copywriter for technology ad agencies in Los Angeles. This is an ad I wrote to get business: Professional writing is more than just writing. (That sentence is a Service Mark.)
Let me know if there is some way to have a discussion about how I might be able to help.
It's pretty popular around here - /. should look into it.
Soylent already fixed Slashcode - sync and send pull requests. They haven't stolen this community and they're not going to with their editorial style, which doesn't fit the folks here.
Slashdot Inc. or whatever has done a very poor job of stewardship of Slashcode for over a decade. It's silly, really - keeping all the bugs secret is never what kept people here.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I often read Slashdot using Safari on my iPhone 6+. The mobile site has several very intrusive problems. Really, it's the most broken website I regularly browse. Many features that I can take for granted as working on other websites due to the nature of web browsers (e.g. the browser "back" button) simply don't work. I often resort to using the iPhone's features to bypass the mobile site to go to the desktop site instead. (If anybody is wondering how to do this: Hold down the "reload" button, and then choose "Request Desktop Site"). Specific problems with the mobile site include:
1) The 'back' button is broken. If I am on the home page, and I click on an article title, and then click some sort of option (e.g. "Outstanding") to filter down the returned articles, and then want to go back to the home page, the browser's 'back' button does not work. (Clicking it typically takes me to the site I was browsing before I started browsing Slashdot.) This is hugely irritating. If I want to go back to the home page and pick another story, I typically have to use the on-screen keyboard to type slashdot.org into the URL control again. Please Don't Break The Back Button!
2) In a situation such as described in 1), the "Stories" button at the top of the page doesn't work either. Clicking the "Stories" link to go back to the homepage only seems to work if no other links have been clicked since the story was clicked on from the homepage. If other options (e.g. "Outstanding") have been clicked, the Stories button either does nothing, or my click goes "through" it to whatever was under the button (which may be a random link from within the story comments, resulting in some surprising destinations.) The fact that the Stories button doesn't work is actually kind of ironic, since a simple link to "slashdot.org" would be trivial to implement, work just fine, and not have the problems that the current implementation does. Instead, it seems to be trying to keep some sort of memory as to what the previous page was, but whatever it's doing doesn't work.
3) The set of default filtering options when I enter a story page, even without logging in, should be such that I see a small but reasonable number (say, 20-30) of top-rated comments. As things currently stand, I usually have to click something like "Outstanding" to get to a resonable filtering state, which triggers problem #2 that I mentioned above.
4) When I attempt to use filtering on a story's comments, the site attempts to filter out comments that are too low for the currently set threshold. However, the header of the filtered-out comments are displayed quite large, and the text "Filtered due to preferences" is also displayed quite large, with excess whitespace around it. The net effect is that the filtered-out comments take up almost as much space as they would have if they hadn't been filtered out, which defeats the purpose of filtering them out in the first place. I think filtered out comments should have their headers displayed in font large enough to be (barely) legible, but otherwise use minimal space, and preferably be displayed completely on one line. They should not try to draw attention to themselves: They should be unobtrusive so I can focus on the comments that haven't been filtered out, and click on the filtered-out ones only if I want to get more details on a particular thread.
Anonymous posting has become a haven of trolls, far from it's original goal of protecting people when discussing work conditions and the like.
Allowing anyone to post as anonymous without login simply paves the way for endless trolling. The value of the comment section has diminished greatly over the years because of stupid comments.
Enforcing authenticated login, federated from elsewhere to tender to the laziest if need be, would at least allow for some accountability by weeding out repeat abusers of the comments section.
Logged-in, members could still post with anonymity to allow a return of the original intentions.
NO NO AND NO
Anonymous is a defining feature. There are tools to tune out trolls and spam and they work (they may need fine tuning but are otherwise powerful). Do not be lazy, use them. Without the freedom to post in a TRULY anonymous fashion then speech is stifled and groupthink, echo chamber like discussion worsens. I want to be challenged by viewpoints that do not met my expectations and may run afoul of social, governmental or employment considerations. I want to be able to post them should the desire arise as well.
To repeat.. the coward should remain among us with no blocking or authentication at all.
Silence is a state of mime.
Another thought: Stop Auto-Refresh. If I have to do something else, I want to come back to a Slashdot page the way I left it.
(C) I don't think everything about Beta was bad. However, it screwed up the moderation system, and depending on whether posts used <p> tags, the formatting was different. Those two things killed it for me. If you fixed those, I'd take another look.
I agree with you here. We're not going to make Slashdot a Reddit clone. I'd like your take on how we can keep the front page more timely (ie. very interesting breaking news making the front page), without relying 100% on an editor who might post it too late. Should we show some stories automatically on the front page that have reached a certain level of popularity within the firehose?
Slashdot used to be a technology site. Under Dice it became a collectivist yes-man only question what we tell you to question navel-gazing tool.
I personally grew tired of all the Gamer Gate articles exclusively from the "men are bad" side of things.
I got tired of all the "We already have accepted that climate change is 100% man-made now how do we convince the idiots" articles.
I got tired of the "You're all bad people because women chose to go into job fields other than technology" articles.
The Slashvertising I wasn't 100% against - I completely understand - the site needs to earn a little money to stick around, but come on, a lot of it was lame and much of it was sneaky by trying to pass itself off as an article.
Slashdot actually became anti-science during the Dice years since they actively discouraged doing what scientist do - questioning everything - by posting globalist slanted crap.
Of course I among others enjoyed calling them on it.
If you go back to what Slashdot did in just about any iteration before Dice you're doing a good thing.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
Allow the use of Markdown for comments. I rarely even hand-write HTML in my day job.
Freedom to fear. Freedom from thought. Freedom to kill.
I guess the War on Terror really is about freedom!
There have been in the past (can't really speak for now yet) a lot of articles that made the front page and seemed to have bypassed the firehose. Those articles tended to be crap, and had submitters that always posted links to particular websites. The submitters and said stories were universally derided but they still kept coming. Nerval was a prime example, but there were others EG The Hackaday guy and people like Bennet Hasselton. It was things like that that gave us all a bad feeling about /.
(Now that I think about it, the bypassing the firehose wasn't the problem - it was the low quality of story)
If you are cleaning up your act as you say (and I really believe that based on your engagement) then all you need to do is correlate individuals with high submission rates against the domains that their stories come from, and ask is this reasonable?
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
I can't believe I'm saying this, but yeah, what AC said.
I've seen a couple comments requesting no downmods, eliminate trolls, get rid of AC. All have some valid reason for saying so, but to give in to that would be detrimental to preserving one of the more important features of /. - the opportunity to come here and not be too coddled. I get that we want to favorably alter the signal to noise ratio, but I don't think that's the way to go about it.
When I hear someone say "Get rid of AC," I interpret that as "Children should be seen and not heard,' where adults == people who have taken the time to register, and who have some form of local reputation on the line. You're not wrong, but you're missing out on some priceless truth from time to time if you do that.
You will never eliminate trolls as long as you have the internet. Wasting too much energy in that regard is unwise.
Think carefully before tweaking the mod system. It ain't perfect, but it has achieved a remarkable balance.
"Slashvertisements", articles buffing some *amazing-cool-new-product-service-thing*, need to be reduced. There is a big difference between a new technological discovery or application for said discovery, and the latest gizmos that somehow involve technology.
Get the polls the hell out of the main article feed.
I've seen whipslash respond to the Unicode and HTTPS requests, so no need to drum on those.
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
I read. I do not listen, or watch on the web.
Please focus on science and tech - no more videos, no more polls.
Everything that's been added on from the original /. chased people away.
I don't want a mobile or tablet experience. I want articles submitted by geeks, for geeks.
I don't need fancy layouts, I don't need dancing icons - heck, I adblock story icons because I just want text.
Oh, and an edit feature - give me a "Oh shit" minute timer to fix typos.
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
Please integrate with ChangeTip.com or Coinbase.com to enable Bitcoin tipping of commenters.
For a tech site, slashdot should be an IPv6 enabled website
I don't know if you are interested in this but...
During the 2nd war in Iraq, one of the most interesting accounts was a lone blogger in Baghdad who made nightly posts about what was going on and his views on the situation. He wasn't a journalist or anything, just a guy in an apartment watching missiles destroy buildings in his city. Sadly, he wasn't allowed to continue his reporting after the fall of the regime.
Since we're nerds, it should be possible to get interesting views from conflict areas around the globe in an anonymous manner. Perhaps partner with WikiLeaks to get anonymous interviews and points of view from these areas.
They say that the first casualty of war is the truth, but we're now living in an age where the average reader can dig down to find original sources for some of the media bias and spin.
I would love to read the (anonymous) views of a Chinese engineer, or Indian customer support person, or a Cuban hacker, or Ukranian spammer.
I would find it much more interesting than a talking-head video of some software package founder.
If you're interested in being a primary news source, having the occasional "scoop" where the MSM refers to Slashdot as the breaking story, and have the courage for a high-level of journalistic integrity, then you could do this. Let WikiLeaks handle the anonymity and authentication, you just post the interviews.
It's not for the faint of heart, but it's something you could do.
Sorry to reply to myself, but just after I posted, I recalled one of my pet peeves - please don't allow any autoplaying ads. I promise I'll allow you guys through adblocker (hell, you guys need to recoup your investment somehow ... ) if you'll just get rid of those damn things.
They are nothing but disruptive bandwidth wasters. I actively avoid companies who use them.
Any ad network exec that wants to inflict those on someone should be kicked squarely in the crotch.
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
Being one of the greybeards who still reads Slashdot, I'll add a few:
- Add the ability to edit comments until they are moderated or have a reply
- Stop linking to Forbes articles and posting Slashvertisements
- Stop running articles about Martin Shkreli or other things that have nothing to do with "News for nerds"
- For the love of all things absurd, please add CowboyNeal back as the final poll option
- If you need money to operate the site, try asking for it from readers. That way you can reduce or eliminate advertising useless junk that nobody wants
Slashdot's first reaction to VMware
Would anyone be interested in the option to see the most popular stories from the firehose on the front page? They'd have to hit a very high popularity threshold and also would be marked/color-coded as such.
Over the years, Slashdot has changed it's style sheets to introduce lots and lots of whitespace.
The site *used* to present a lot more information in a lot less space, and the signal-to-noise ration was much higher. You could see many more articles on the front page, see many more comments on one page and so on.
Every time the style changed, people complained.
We're now at the point where the information is watered down so much that about half the front page is vertical whitespace.
Get rid of some of it! Make the front page more information dense, so we can quickly see if there is something there of interest without having to mouse around the page.
Should we show some stories automatically on the front page that have reached a certain level of popularity within the firehose?
I like that, if done only in the absence of timely editing. Too much voting on what stories make the front page is what killed Digg, but as a fallback it sounds great - and in any case, have it as a way to call the attention of the editors to certain stories!
More timely stories is great, but too many stories means not enough comments on any of them.
Other gripes: /. breaks stories over pages in certain views. It's frustrating to see the same thread in 3 consecutive pages with maybe 1-2 changed posts at the very bottom. :)
* Fix the way
* Allow editing of posts, at least for a limited time to fix embarrassing typos - we'd all seem more literate.
* Fix the bulleted lists! They work worse than manually typing "*"s last I checked.
Thanks for taking an interest.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I just waded through this whole mess of comments. 99.9% of them are stupid ideas. By far the most important way to KEEP slashdot good is DON'T FUCK WITH IT. It doesn't NEED "fixing", and these ideas would ruin it.
Other suggestions: better threading, better mobile support, mobile app, Markdown default, Unicode support, and opt-in/opt-out direct private messaging.
Back when I first registered here, metamoderation consisted of examining how posts had been moderated and judging it was deserved or not. That is, you'd be given a post and told that it had been given a +1 Informative, and asked if it deserved that. I really enjoyed helping out that way and almost never failed to metamoderate.
Now, you're shown a set of posts that have been moderated and asked if they're good posts or bad posts, with no idea of how they were originally rated. You have no context, no way of knowing if you're being asked to judge an upmod or a downmod (For all I know, you're being asked to judge all the mods a post received in one lump.) and no way to tell what effect your decision will have.
It's been years, now, since I've even bothered with metamodding, but if you went back to the old style where people knew just what moderations they were checking, I'd gladly start doing it again, and I doubt I'm the only person here who feels that way. Metamoderation used to serve an important function here, and I'd like to see that come back.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
So, don't read those comments. It's not like you can't filter them out by browsing a +2 or something. Slashdot was founded by the intricate details ACs provide.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
1. It's nice to see you're already communicating with the users. It's something I could never get previous leadership to do. Keep it up! You won't be able to bring them everything on their wishlist -- but don't let that stop you from telling them what you are bringing them, and why the other stuff got pushed lower on the priority list. They're reasonable folks; as long as you're working with them, they'll be on your side.
2. Small changes are better than big ones. Don't push ahead with a massive, grand plan and assume the community will jump on board (like video and beta). If they tell you they don't want it, they don't actually want it. When in doubt, trust Tim L. and Tim V. Nobody cares about the site and its users as much as those two.
3. Build for the community you have, not for the one you want. Don't chase the hockey stick. It's not going to happen. But there's still a path for evolving Slashdot to support an incredibly broad tech/geek community.
4. Nobody should make decisions about the site without being an active user.
5. Ask the community for help more often. The biggest area that needs it right now is submissions. They're the base from which all content flows, and they've been slowly drying up. Submission needs to feel less like screaming into the abyss. Consider reviving the IRC channel to give people direct, instant access to editorial. Try to find ways to solicit particular submissions from known experts. (For example, a submission about a new C++ release from an actual C++ engineer is worth its weight in gold.
6. Reward readers for doing things that benefit the site. Used a mod point? +1 subscriber (ad-free) page. Got a score:5 comment? +10 pages. Accepted submission? +10 pages. Or more. Be generous; these are your most valuable users.
7. Empower and invest in editorial. It is literally their job to know and understand the community, so they shouldn't lose fights centering on the community.
8. Ads have been in a bad place for a couple of years. Pulling it back will cost you revenue in the short term, but may ensure the site's sustainability in the long term.
9. Slashdot's founder, Rob Malda, still cares deeply about Slashdot. I'm sure he'd be willing to offer some advice.
You've been saying a lot of the right things about Slashdot an SourceForge. I sincerely hope you make it all happen.
Best of luck,
Jeff
whipslash, you are doing yeoman's work...
I know absolutely nothing about the company that just bought slashdot, nothing, but judging by your comments on this post you understand the slashdot system and are trying to fix it by tweaking things like firehose weighting...I'm glad you're not trying to re-invent the site.
I've relied on slashdot for *no bullshit* and "see-it-here-first" techie news...what they call "stuff that matters"
More than anything, slashdot for me has been educational. I learn about the issue reading through the comments. Haha, yeah lol, there are trolls and idiots but I just ignored that...the good comments here can be from phd's researching the topic or the engineers who actually code the AI gadget in the article under discussion!
I've been reading since 2001, but didn't even log in to comment until 2006, because I honestly didn't think I had anything to contribute because the level of discussion was so high and relevant. True story!
As long as slashdot has the user-base and maximizes the capabilities of the slashdot CMS to foster productive discussion this will be one of the best techie news sites anywhere!
Thank you Dave Raggett
Slashdot was "News for Nerds"
Lately though, half the posts are some SJW topic.
Bring back the tech.
You can't have news sections of general interest like "Your Rights Online" and ignore gender issues in tech. You can't be a professional in tech and ignore gender issues in education or in the workplace.
I think a key part is simple: good story quality. Key steps:
The discussions are sometimes interesting - and sometimes not. But I think if the stories start higher-quality, the follow-up discussion is more likely to be better.
In the longer term, the system for entering text is... quirky. Has someone considered using Markdown? Yeah, Markdown processors vary, but lots of people know Markdown (e.g., via GitHub), and specs like CommonMark and libraries like Red Carpet make it fairly painless.
Good luck!
- David A. Wheeler (see my Secure Programming HOWTO)
On the list
Appreciate the feedback. You have a legendary UID.
I like how you're acting on the site already. Please show us that you can make this site great again.
- Add the ability to edit comments until they are moderated or have a reply
This would have to be done carefully, i.e. you can't post an edit after someone has clicked the reply button (not actually posted the reply). And the person replying would need to be notified if the post had been changed since the page was loaded.
Earlier in this discussion someone suggested to allow appending comments to your own post with a timestamp, but not editing the original text. That might be a better approach.
There was a post years ago when they (CmdrTaco? it was a long time ago) mentioned that people who post too much, or post too little don't get points.
I assume I'm right on the edge of not posting enough, as I'll post something for the first time in a week or two, and then suddenly get mod points.
(and I've *never* gotten more than 5 ... this is actually the first time I've heard of it)
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
Also would be very interested in Markdown for comments.
And the links actually go to the correct story.
I'd say that one of the problems that's come up over the years is that the 'community' aspect has been stripped away --CmdrTaco would actually post & contribute to discussions. Back when RobLimo was hired, there was posting introducing him, so we had a clue who the hell he was. And his username was unique enough that you could find other stuff that he had done to get an understanding of his personality.
These days, /. often seems more like a zookeeper throwing food to the monkeys -- wait, no, that's unfair -- a zookeeper actually monitors the monkeys to see if anything's wrong. I suspect that the current /. editors rarely read the comments that people post, as we'll often point out problems with the articles that then sit for hours without getting fixed.
It often feels more like the editors are suckered in by the clickbait titles & summaries ... but why? Those approaches are to try to trick people to visit site ... as you're not doing the whole 'related stories' linking from other sites stuff, at most the only benefit here is extra page views as people discuss just how lazy and stupid the current /. editors are.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
I'll add my +1 for putting Slashdot on IPv6 quickly, and then Sourceforge too when you have time. Virtually all ISPs, colos and hosting providers offer IPv6 already, and all the well known CDNs have done so for many years. With IPv6 uptake at 10% and growing ever faster, it's beginning to look bad for a tech site not to have IPv6 enabled. (It works perfectly, seamlessly and effortlessly, by the way.)
While many good ideas have been suggested in this thread, 4 of them stand out for me as very clear technical interests for many techies:
The huge interest in security and privacy among Slashdot readers make the first two items of special importance. It's no longer an innocent world of academics and enthusiasts like yesteryear, and readers need to protect themselves and the companies from which the site is often read with link encryption and effective script restrictions.
It's no surprise that use of NoScript is huge among the technical readership, nor that the JS orgy of forbes.com was despised so much.
My best wishes for this new era of Slashdot. I'm looking forward to another (almost) two decades of interesting technical discussion. :-)
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
1. Less javascript in the stories list and the story pages. Preferably none. We don't need or want a spiffied up interface.
2. The current meta-moderation system is completely ineffective. Years ago Slashdot hat a workable meta-moderation system which kept moderators more or less honest by denying moderation points to users who mismoderated posts. With the current system, nobody blinks at down-moderating folks simply because they disagree. Bring back the old meta-moderation mechanism.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
It's annoying when Slashdot is the only feed that I read that actively strips out its links from the feed. So, when I want to see something referenced in a story, I need to open the Slashdot post in my browser, wait until I have a Wi-Fi connection, re-read the story to refresh my memory, find the right link, click on it, and finally see what I wanted to see (assuming I'm not on the subway and haven't lost the connection by the time I've clicked on the link).
The user experience would be far more humane if I could just click on the link directly from my feed reader. I might actually be inclined to comment more when I don't have to waste so much time just to find a link.
A visual distinction for new comments loaded, if I "Check for New Comments". I would like it to be a little easier to find the new comments that were added. A shading change on the subject line or on the border would suffice; something small. Just some visual cue to let me know that this comment was added after the initial page load and/or "Load all Comments". I would think it would only work for "Check for New Comments" because (like this thread) 250+ comments be marked as "new".
A number of times I read all the comments on an interesting subject and at the end I want to see what was added after (could be a lot or few). I "Check for new Comments" and I spend most of my time re-reading the same stuff to try and find the new comments.
Cheers and best of luck.