Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot Outage Update
Obviously Slashdot has had some issues the past couple days. For those wondering, we inherited an aging hardware setup in the acquisition that was located physically far away from us. We made a big investment in a new hardware set up, and ran into sizable issues including a massive DDOS during the migration process. Going forward we expect much better uptime. If we inconvenienced anyone, we're sorry. If it's any consolation, it wasn't fun for us either, and our team worked non-stop for days to get Slashdot back online. With our new infrastructure in place, we will be dedicating a lot of time and resources this year to improving Slashdot.
We're not blaming anyone. It's just a fact that the previous setup was located across the country from us, and wasn't built by us, so it was not an optimal situation for us. Does it suck that we were down for a while? Hell yeah. Could we have done some things differently and perhaps better? Most definitely. Not sure what your objective with your comment is though.
Seems to me that such a system would discourage honest moderation and only serve to create "mod" wars. There is a reason why voting is a private matter and does not subject to voters to public criticism.
Besides, if everyone with mod points browsed at -1 as recommended most abuses would be corrected for. Slashdot has been part of my daily life for over 20 years and I would hate to see it devolve into petty popularity contests.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
whipslash inquired:
Anyone else have an opinion on this?
I do. It's a terrible idea.
Revealing the identities of moderators will merely give the trolls specific targets on which to concentrate their venom, without providing the community with any benefit in compensation. The current system, which prevents moderators from posting in a thread they moderate sort of works. De-anonymizing those mods, in addition to preventing the moderator from posting under his/her actual identity, will simply further discourage those of us who get mod points from using them at all. It's just Not A Good Idea.
If you want to do something actually useful about the moderation system, try revisiting the existing categories, instead. For instance, why do we need both Troll and Flamebait? They're essentially synonyms, after all. And why isn't there a -1 Misinformed or -1 Stupid, instead? Those would actually be useful additions to the mod categories for posts that are neither Trollish nor Flamebait-y, but are, instead simply, genuinely idiotic or factually wrong, but not inflammatory or critical in nature - and they'd be a lot more on-target for those kinds of posts than -1 Overrated, n'est ce pas?
Anyway, that's my fiftieth of a dollar. Thanks for asking ...
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