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.
You're welcome and thanks for the feedback. We will make sure of this.
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.,
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.
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
I want the power to decide who lives and who dies.
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
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?
Think carefully about the AC's motivations. He's not offering to help you or Slashdot.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
There's a reason for two decades of success on a fickle internet.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Not great points, he's been modded down to -1 by his peers :) You did ask for our opinions, you may want to watch comment scores for this gathering of ideas.
Trolling is a art,
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.
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
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.
They already have it. It's called "+1 Underrated."
Good, inexpensive web hosting
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.
You must really hate mobile users with a band cap if you want all comments shown by default.
Downmodding serves a purpose, and abuse is corrected by the "intelligence of the herd." Besides, if you want all comments shown by default, you should also be browsing at -1. There's absolutely nothing to prevent the individual user making that choice - but it should remain a choice.
As for identifying moderators - your " 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 - by the same logic, you should have to be logged in to post any comment. Furthermore, by that logic, nicks or nyms shouldn't be allowed, but almost everyone hides behind a nym. And you're posting AC - hypocrite much?
"When it comes to abusive moderation, even one incident is one too many." - come off it. The perfect is the enemy of the good, and really, I've been mod-bombed, and you don't see me getting upset about it. It's just people expressing an opinion, not deciding as to whether to launch WW3.
Posting limits need to STAY. The quickest way to get fewer active users s to allow anyone to crap-flood. 30 posts in 4 hours and 50 posts a day is usually enough. Yes, it's frustrating to hit those limits when you have several heated discussions going on, but let's keep some perspective here - it's only the internet.
Moderation needs to STAY. It's one of the ways to keep users engaged.
Several of your points are so obviously detrimental that it's obvious you're just trolling.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Indeed. A higher moderation cap is fine, and better backend tools to block persistent spam-trolls would be nice. And obviously we want unicode. But let's not go too far and end up with a WSYWIG interface or whatnot. ;) If I post a piece of C++ code or whatnot in a conversation about C++, it should post without complaining. The "basic nature" of the comment system is fine, it just has long-overdue "maintenance" to conduct.
On the other hand, I'm not a fan of the profile design of "modern" Slashdot. First off, it's archaic, with blanks for things like AIM handles and the like. The boxes on the right display information but don't have easy links to change it, you have to browse through an overly elaborate profile menu. And on smartphones it prioritizes a bunch of silly "awards" taking up the whole profile space, rather than one one generally most wants to see, their comment history so that they can keep up with discussions that they've been involved in. Remember, the key design feature people want in mobile versions is they behave like the normal website, just to display properly. The last thing people want is functionality-limited, strange-behaving interfaces. And if the user wants the full version, it should be easy to click over to it, and it should remember the user's choice.
As for stories, the biggest complaints people have are 1) the story is inappropriate (not something Slashdotters are generally interested in, something that seems like shameless advertising disguised as a story, etc); 2) the source is unpopular (such as Forbes); and 3) it's a duplicate. Rather than having people complain about this in the comments, it'd be nice if you had a simple way people could report stories that could lead to timely corrections. Story removal should be done in analogous to removing a symlink - the story's webpage should still exist, with all of the comments, but it shouldn't appear linked from the front page.
There are some squabbles that you're just not going to win at. For example, people who yell at each other as being "SJWs" or "MRAs" and blame all of the world's evils on the other group. Stopping that sort of thing isn't really your job. But stopping people like the APK spammer - people who nobody want around - yeah, feel free to do that. :)
As for your core business, advertising - people generally are fine with it so long as you "play by the rules". That is, stop the malware, don't allow anything that relies on deception, anything offensive, popover ads, etc. A button over the ad to block further from a certain source that the user doesn't like would be nice. And of course you should allow people to subscribe to an ad-free service by paying a small regular fee. Another example of "not playing by the rules" that you should avoid would be secretly inserting sponsored stories and disguising them as news. People really don't like that sort of thing. But legitimate advertising, even targeted advertising... hey, you have a business to run and sites cost money, we understand.
Be good to us, we'll be good to you. :)
It's times like this I wish I had a friend named 'The Professor'.
More: a lot of the Slashdot crowd is hardcore on privacy issues. So you should make it a policy to not retain any more information than is necessary to operate the site - for example, no IP logs or anything like that (except to the point needed for spam fighting). As for data gathering for advertising purposes, that's going to be a controversial one - as an ad company, you probably have interest in that, but a lot of Slashdotters are going to be uncomfortable with that. If you do plan to pursue that route, may I suggest a middle ground? Make it optional, enable it by default if you must, but make it easy for those who care to shut it off.
(I'm not among those who care, but I know there are plenty of people here who do)
It's times like this I wish I had a friend named 'The Professor'.
I'm not sure what the higher mod cap achieves. When I have points the fact that some comments are maxed out just means I have to look for other worthy comments to mark up (or down).
Nullius in verba
Please! Don't do it! I beg of you! Say NO! to editing of comments! EVER! A person can post a response and or correction. Editing will ruin everything! Comments set in stone is Slashdot's saving grace, that and the archives. Don't ever let them be edited... And resist the temptation for unicode also. You don't need the hassles.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
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.
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.
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.
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
Agreed. PLEASE -- Keep the mod cap at +5. It's high enough to make excellent posts stand out, and it's also high enough that a single downmod by someone who just wants to disagree isn't going to make the comment invisible. There's absolutely no reason for higher mod scores except to have a "popularity contest," and that's not what good moderation is about... here it's just about making the decent posts stand out from the herd.
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
- 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.
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
Yes, clearly labeled slashvertisements are fine by me too. But no ads disguised as regular stories.
It's times like this I wish I had a friend named 'The Professor'.
There's absolutely no reason for higher mod scores except to have a "popularity contest," and that's not what good moderation is about
Actually, being able to easily see the best comments in a 1000-comment thread would be useful. Other commenting platforms have this feature and it works really well. One thing it does is make the time and subthread of posting completely irrelevant. Currently, +5 posts at the bottom of a story are read far less often than those at the top, I believe.
The key point is the 'popularity contest' and 'best' part of it. If the moderation process is unable to provide accurate ratings, the final 'ranking' will be inaccurate and unusable. Otherwise, it makes sense to include a 'sort by highest rated (post/thread)' functionality.