Slashdot Tweaks

First and foremost, we've moved the images to a new box. As many of you noticed, it was running temporarily off a non-standard port on the ad server. This was causing havoc for those of you behind firewalls. The new VA box is in place (blatant plug). It's horribly over powered (Dual P2) for the task at hand so to make things interesting (and to get Jesse to stop whining) we're trying out FreeBSD on it. I've also added several minor features to the comments section, as well as fixed a few bugs. Click the link below to read about them. Reparenting. As many of you noticed, comments that were highly rated often were not being displayed. This was because they were replies to comments that were below your threshold. I've changed it to reparent highly rated comments by defaults. This is an option though so if you liked it the old way, you can Log In and change it.

Its a little confusing at 0 or 1 because you'll get chunks of conversation that seem out of place... well, they are because their parent is missing. But at the higher thresholds its very useful.

Sort Modes I added a few new sort modes (primarily so that jwz would stop pestering me :) that some of you might like. The existing Oldest First/Newest First sort modes still maintained thread structure. I've added new options that blow the threading away for those of you who want to strictly read comments in order.

New Topic Icons if anyone has nice icons that we could use to represent Graphics (A paintbrush?), Education (pencil? those dumb hats?), Media (vomit? a newspaper?), Opinions (a soapbox?) Don't send me crap, but if you have a nice image, I'll make it fit Slashdot. I'm mainly looking for clean photos or illustrations that I can play with.

Moderation I had a few glitches that were causing an unhealthy number of moderation points getting reinsterted into the system. I've tweaked around some numbers and fixed some bugs that should help. A lot of the problems we were having was simply that there were several times the number of points available than I intended. It appears that it is very important to keep the number of points scarce so people take them seriously and don't simply abuse the hell out of their power.

I added an over/underrated option to the drop down list of flags- these options don't change the textual description of the comment, but they do change its value, although they are slightly more limited than the other ratings (You can't "Overrated" a comment down to -1). Hasn't been tested much yet. Trial by fire methinks :)

Misc I've pretty well finished rewriting the Moderator Guidelines at this point so I guess we can consider them out of beta. There are a few minor points that they don't make yet, as well as a few other points they ought to make, but they're pretty solid. Suggestions are welcome.

I put my plan file up on a web link. Since I took finger down (a loooong time ago) nobody really new what I was up to. I don't do a very good job of keeping it up to date.

Ah well, thats all for now. I still need to clean out the quickies bin and then I'm largely caught up... a few Slashboxes need work, a few minor features, a couple major features, and then I can let the dust settle again for a bit. I just got 3 DVDs of South Park and I think I've earned some R&R time. Plus, now that the wireless lan is up and running in the Geek Compound, I can keep an eye on things from my couch. Yum.

Comments

Re:FreeBSD v.s. other *BSD variants

[slk]

The main free variants of BSD are FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD. They have different focuses.

NetBSD aims to be a stable, portable research platform. It runs on more hardware than any of the others, but has the ugliest installation (at least on sparc, 1.4 requires you to computer the block offsets of the cylinders to partition a disk). However, it runs on virtually anything, and is quite stable.

OpenBSD forked from NetBSD some time ago. Their primary focus is security. It runs on a good portion of the hardware that NetBSD runs on, is probably a bit less stable, and has massive amounts of crypto included in the distribution by default.

FreeBSD is primarily on Intel, though there is also a port to the Alpha. It has the nicest (by far) userland and installation, and the largest collection of ports. Its primary goals are stability and performance, with a strong security element (though not nearly as paranoid as OpenBSD). I'd say its largest strengths are overall performance and especially network and general I/O performance, and its biggest weakness is that it only runs on x86 and Alpha hardware.

Right now my personal stuff runs FreeBSD, and a couple of the sparcs at work run NetBSD (mostly a Linux shop).

Test comment, any moderators?

[Anonymous Shepherd]

So this is a default +2 comment, if a moderator is willing to demonstrate this reparenting... make it a +3 comment, while making the parent 0 or -1, I guess?

I guess it's a waste of points though. =)


-AS

Moderation

[timothy]

I think the moderation scheme worked pretty well already, but these new tweaks are welcome.

Since I've only had moderator power once (and I'm trying to not let the sense of absolute power corrupt me absolutely), I am not an expert at the system really, but one thing I'd like to see in future updates to moderation would be a greater range of optional adjectival choices coupled with the filering scheme.

In other words, moderators could have the ability to choose not just "normal," "flamebait," "informative" and the handful of others, but instead could choose more descriptive ones (maybe on a sort of emotional / descriptive matrix with informative / uninformative as one axis and (what else) on the other. There are a lot of great adjective which fit certain types of posts very well ...

If there were choices like

- "vitriolic / negative / bilious" (just random mean-spitired spew)

- "contankerous" (good question or point, but with a bitter-old-man tone)

- indignant ("how can you say that's confusing, you cretin?! It's buried right there in plain sight 90 percent of the down the 10-page FAQ! Can't you even read?!)

- "intriguing" (someone suggests a wholly new way of looking at something that makes you realize "Hey, it's a face and a couple of cups!" or maybe just "Hey, that's a neat idea, we could do it X-way ..."

- "honest question" (I have lots of dumb questions, and they're not trolls ...)

A reader could go through a list of adjectives and select the type he'd like to read, and when logged in would remain blissfully ignorant of some hot flame wars or off-topic nonsense until he unchecked the boxes again ...

This is not terribly different from the way it is now, and I know the current system is already sort of complex, so please don't take this as criticism so much as suggestion. I just think a richer adjective selection would trim the fat from people's reading, let them get the posts they'd like in a much shorter time and avoid the frustration of reading yet another harshly-worded diatribe in response to yet-another ... etc. Especially since a matrix of adjectives would let people sort based on how each of those adjectives matters to *them* instead of assigning a single digit + or - to broad categories. There's even some flamebait, or possibly off-topic material that I'd like to see, if it is Intriguing or Laugh-Till-Snot Funny.

And it might improve the avg. Slashdotters vocabulary (already good! already good!) by forcing them to understand some obscure adjectives.

Thanks for the work, Rob and pals! Enjoy the Southpark shows!

timothy

p.s. Moderator ability is like jury duty, but less onerous.