Assorted Slashdot Changes

I've attached a summary of the major changes and bug fixes below. These are regarding Nested Mode, Anonymous Posting, Highlight Thresholds, and Login Problems. Also some comments about moderation. If any of these things are on your mind, read on.

1. I enabled the time zone selection stuff (you probably noticed some craziness with the times this morning while I was ironing some kinks out). You can choose your time zone in the User Preferences (default:EDT).
2. I think I've fixed nested mode- it was almost as borked as Anonymous Posting which also should be fixed now. (god the conspiracy theorists love it when I break code- the story refreshing daemon hiccuped last night, and I get accused of censoring and removing stories because the static page isn't updating. Broken code == Evil Rob. I know how it works. God I need a beer).
3. I also added an interesting feature that I call the "Highlight Threshold". Basically, once a discussion has "Comment Spill" (Default:100) messages in it, it switches to indexed mode (it just displaying subject, byline, score and time). Comments the excede the Highlight Threshold (default:4) are displayed in full. This allows you to quickly spot and read high rated comments without bothering with extra clicks, or losing the flow of the discussion. I like this a lot. Much of the benefit of Order by Score but without the tradeoff of losing the original discussion order.
4. I'm still working on the various login problems people are having. Usually its a firewall or a proxy server thats filtering cookies, but there is some stranger stuff too. I'll figure it out, but it'll take longer if people keep emailing to complain and/or suggest features that I'm planning on, but just haven't had time yet. Hang in there- I'm working as fast as I can over here.
5. Moderation Guys have patience here. I've picked 400 people to test out a lot of stuff with in a fairly controlled way. In the next few weeks I'll start rolling out features that will allow more scoring at the hands of the masses. Stop flaming and let me debug what we have before I start implementing the rest. I'm working on a system that will have a limited pool of points that will be dispensed to participants in a fair way. Hopefully. I'm simply not going to rush it. We're learning a lot with 400 moderators. This is a great intermediate step.
6. As a whole, I think the system is stabilizing again. There are still some posting problems and login problems that need fixing, but so far most of the feedback has been pretty positive. At least, the good mail outweighs the hatemail so I'm breakin' even. I appreciate the feedback- most of the suggestions that are coming in are things that I'm planning, or I've already decided not to do. I apologize for not replying to everyone, but I'm behind enough as is. Once the dust settles a bit from this round I'll go in for more.

Comments

Why?

[drsoran]

Why do you do your development on a live web server? Shouldn't you try ironing out the bugs, move the development to another server and then fsck around with that until it's stable? I love slashdot, but I don't see other sites on the net having the incredible amount of problems that plague slashdot each and every week simply because you choose to do active development on the server. That's just crazy. If you can't get it to run on any other server then perhaps you should stop adding new features and bloat until you CAN get it to stabily run on another box no?

Very promising, and an Original Idea for posts

[planet_hoth]

Way to go Rob, the new discussion features seem to be really coming together nicely! At the very least, they are already a big improvement over the old, albeit simpler system.
As promised, I have an Idea for Slashdot comments. How about allowing moderators to only *add* to a messages score? Here's why I think this would work better:

* Less people moaning about censorship, because no one has the power to have fewer people read your post. If it's offtopic/inane/flamebait, etc, it simply will not be moderated up to a higher score.
* People with unpopular, yet reasonable views cannot have their views squelched by the majority. If even one or two moderators think he/she has a legit point, they will show up on high threshholds, even if the majority of moderators want to censor it.
* Under this system, the more you try to get people to agree with you, the more people will see your post. If you want to be heard, it will pay not to be TOO antisocial.
* Moderators will have less opportunity to abuse their power. Currently, a "loose cannon" moderator could go through and moderate down all of a person's posts, giving them a negative overall score and removing any chance that person had of being a moderator in the future.

One thing Slashdot has plenty of is negative feedback. My system would promote more positive feedback, in a wholly non-censoring manner.

Aaron

Moderation Problems

[burnsbert]

I've mentioned this before, but this seems to be the proper forum to bring this up. It seems to me that moderators are upgrading the ranking for posts they _agree_ with and downgrading the ranking for posts they _disagree_, rather than rating the posts based on their cogency and how ralated they are to the topic. Look on the Utah/censorship discussion, and you'll see that the a bunch of anti-censorship posts got 4's and 5's, while the highest rating someone arguing in favor of the Utah school board could hope for was a 2.

Does anyone disagree with this assessment? I will read any (non-flame) rebuttal with an open mind.

-Eric

Take your time...

[Gruuk]

Take all the time you need; after all, it is YOUR site. There are no perfect sites on the web, but Slashdot is already good and can only get better with all the effort you put in it. I'm curious though as to how this moderation experiment will work out. Anyway, keep up the good work and don't forget your asbestos suit.