Slashdot Mirror
Minor Slashdot Updates
We made several changes today. Most of them are "Under the Hood" and you shouldn't see any difference since we tested the changes out pretty heavily on a devel box. Several odd little bugs have popped up tho, and we're squashing them as quickly as we can. Send your bug
reports to pater@slashdot.org. The only noticable change you should see is some structural changes to the user settings pages: it was getting pretty unwieldly so we split it apart to make it easier to deal with.
i am getting a weird bug - :)
between refreshes i get logged out.
i logged back in on the main page, and followed the user-info link at the top of the page for me, where i was asked to log in again. after logging in there, i was sent back to the main page.
back to square one.
the error is not applying to the replies, just to my userinfo. which worked on the third or fourth time through....weird
anyone else finding this?
OFTC: By the community, for the community
Things are probably being messed with as I type this but I'm having trouble getting and staying logged in. Seems OK at this very moment but I coundn't get in at all about 5 minutes ago.
I thought at one point that this would be a good idea, but I'm worried that it would foster too much competition and people just spewing out comments that are OK, or somewhat average, just hoping for a few that might get a few moderation points out of the moderators.
Oh, and I think that I might be able to tell you off hand who some of the people are with the highest karmas - often, somebody who is "known" within the community, e.g. ESR, Perens, maybe Havoc Pennington, or somebody like that will post in response to an article about them or written by them to answer questions relating to the article. Because they are the topic, and they are "known", they almost always get moderated straight up into the sky, because people like them.
I don't have any objection to that, I think if Perens posts about an article relating to himself, that's relevant, and he deserves to be moderated up. Just observing that "known" people usually have ridiculously high karmas.
Oh, and I know what you mean about the offtopic posts - it would be nice to have different moderations like Offtopic-Interesting that would maybe be worth +1 or +0.5 and Offtopic-Troll or whatever that would be the normal -1.
-- Truth goes out the door when rumor comes innuendo. -- Groucho Marx
You have to have 26 points before it starts +2ing your posts. And in response to the comment above the one I'm replying to, sometimes I wish I could make my views known, yet not have it affect my karma because of it. For example, I like Microsoft. Ohh, I said the dirty word. Anyways, sometimes I'd like to post arguements about why MS isn't all that bad, but then I'm afraid some zealous moderator would mark it as flamebait. Yes, I have seen that happen. And then because /. is messed up, I don't have the option to undo my plus 2 ranking, which could get me the moderation of "over rated". I've gotten a lot of that too, in fact, that's probally my biggest cause of losing karma.
Well, I guess it decided not to give me a +2. Hmm, do I post as anonymous, so when someone moderates it as offtopic, I don't lose karma, or as my real nick so it's easier to tell who I am? Another real life example.
for what little it's worth, here's how i do it:
for all intents and purposes, i treat insightful and interesting as equals while metamoderating. i agree that semantically (is that even a word?) this may not be the correct way to do it, but if the post deserves a +1, i'll play along.
redundants i almost always check by actually going back to the article and skimming through it. i've found that rarely does a post marked redundant deserve it. i'm just guesstimating, but i think it's only around 10% or so that i end up marking as fair. i'm not saying there aren't posts which don't deserve the 'redundant' label, but i generally only run into the ones which seem to suggest that the moderators need a dictionary.
offtopic is a toss up. if it's blatant one way or the other, i mark it as needed. if it's iffy, i'll check back through the thread if i've got time, or leave it alone.
"The things we wizards have to put up with."--Jethro Bodine
if nothing else comes of this story, i hope this gets instituted immediately.
add my vote for a 'duplicate' option, and get rid of 'redundant.'
"The things we wizards have to put up with."--Jethro Bodine
Moderation is a privilege,
/.
not a natural born right,
so please don't blow my karma,
out of malice and spite.
I login here anonymously,
because of what I say,
but sure it's politically incorrect,
do with me as you may.
'Cause I've got a'nother account,
with plenty of ++karma,
which is why I post this crap from here,
to save myself from --dharma.
A good citizen of
is what I really am,
but I've become disillusioned,
by all the lame-ass flim-flam.
I used to promote democracy,
"make everyone a moderator today!"
but now I've learned my lesson,
the clueless make you pay.
They mark up all the obvious,
so the technical just languish,
so finding ++informative,
means reading -1 in anguish.
No I don't think moderators,
are biased to their friends,
so maybe what Rob should do,
*cough*
is hire some editorial professionals!
Worse than an untouchable, when I reincarnate I'll be lucky to return as bacteria.
How come the posts aren't given a year-stamp, only dates? When I search for old stories, there's no way of telling which year it's from. This will become an increasingly important lack as the years go on and /. becomes older...
"Oppression and harassment is a small price to pay to live in the land of the free." -- Montgomery Burns.
Did I somehow miss a change to the moderation rules?
I found myself as a moderator a few minutes ago, found a comment to moderate up... and then discovered I had only one point. What gives?
--
"I personal[ly] think Unix is "superior" because on LSD it tastes like Blue." -- jbarnett
I had a problem with moderating, but it was slightly different. I only got one point. I moderated up a post funny, and then it said I was out of points. I sorta got gipped.
Weird things have been happening to me for a while.
For the longest time, no matter what I did, when I visited slashdot it told be I was logged out, and when I hit preferences it gave me a scare message that something had gone wacky and I had better try logging in again. This has been fixed recently, now after login I am correctly forwarded to slashdot.org/ instead of slashdot.org/slashdot.pl (or whatever it was).
Just recently I think I'm losing it, because articles on slashdot disappear magically, or reappear after the fact later in the listing (??). Sometimes I go home from work, or just reload slashdot, and find stories I didn't ever see before during the day in the listing...or some might be gone. Just the other day the Segfault article disappeared into thin air. Maybe rob pulled it or something but it disappeared off the listing for me.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
The person who marked this as flame-bait should eat a cock burger.
At any given moment in time, Rob and the boys have 200+ stories pending there review for posting on the 'one and only' /. Once the stories are reviewed they could be posted on another domain that would still be a source of add revenue for slashdot. (a few come to mind ..dotstash.org everythingelse.org blockhackers.org quickies.org).
The stories could be posted there AFTER a 24 hour delay (thus keeping the speed cache' of /. in tact).
No comments, no moderation, no more work on the back end except, perhaps, a script for parsing and moving it over the to the store on the other domain. Just a st(r)eaming heap of rejected stories.
Since this is the first Slashdot thread in a while, I'll take the chance to say some stuff about the system:
I agree with the person who suggested a permanent "user forum" for such meta-discussions.
No! I'm already too affected by karma, sometimes too willing to post stupid comments that I suspect the moderators will like it, or reluctant to be honest on some controversial subjects (like what I really felt about the killing of the two spammers) because it would harm my karma. A ranking would just make it worse.
Apropos karma, I believe that too many gets an automatic 2. It is hard to find those articles which are moderated up because they contain a gem, among those articles that start with a high score because the posters sometimes in the past have said something smart. Maybe the karma should be based on some kind of weighted average, rather than a straight sum. That would help the problems that most of the hyperactive posters have an automatic score bonus.
Yeah, agreed, I usually leave them alone when meta-moderating. Because most often the articles in question are redundant or off-topic. So this is a suggestion to the moderators, be a litle more lenient of these deep down in the discussion.
Help for people trying to run the Slash engine is available from The Slash-Help Mailing List.
Thanks.
Yes, Virginia, there really is a CowboyNeal.
There should be an option for moderators to randomize the order which the posts are displayed. This will get rid of any chronological bias.
This is a great idea...
Heh. That's been lotsa changes over the last year - they are just subtle. Meta-moderation was a pretty big change, tho, IMHO.
Yeah, I'm that guy.
Can't. It'd be a massive amount of load on the servers - maybe someday, but not right now.
Yeah, I'm that guy.
I think some of these little suggestions are probably low on the slashdot priority list (widgets to unfold nested comments, a "suppress"/"revoke"/"edit"), and add a bit of complexity. However, I would agree that it is wasteful for moderators to use their point unnecessarily negatively, instead of on highlighting important things. E.g., those 2 or 3 "redendant" points could be used to pull some very interesting/informative comments out of the shadows.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
lol@"more valued member of the community". Damn, you people are sad. I don't derive any satisfaction from participating in this "community". I have fun reading and contributing comments and then I go about my life. I think you people should do the same and take yourselves a little less seriously.
It doesn't seem to be applying some of my preferences (like Nested vs. Threaded comments - I have it set as Nested in my preferences, but it seems to have just started ignoring that today.) Anyone else having similar problems, or did I just break something on my own?
- fader
No... I meant this:
s lashdot.org>
/will/ try something else, but we'll try this for awhile and see how it goes.
,'^~=-=-=-=----------------------- - - - -
Date: Tue, 23 Mar 1999 14:38:02 -0800 (PST)
From: Rob Malda <malda@slashdot.org>
To: iversen <signal11@mediaone.net>
Subject: Re: censorship or moderation?
In-Reply-To: <36F7EE2D.20C9A0B7@mediaone.net>
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.04.9903231437170.9222-100000@vanessa.
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII
If you don't like it, you can turn it off. Its 100% up to you. I make no bones that this system is flawed. But its what we've got until I try
something else. And I
rob"CmdrTaco"malda
malda@slashdot.org / What I lack in tuning and talent, I more than make
http://slashdot.org / up for in volume.
--
Great Job Rob, I commend you on all the work you've done. I mean, sure - it's warrented and everything, but I just think that with the amount of people who rely on SlashDot for all their news (just like I do), it's definitley a self-less act.
I'm one of those people who've tried to run the SlashDot Engine on my own and have tried countless times to post stories daily to no avail. It's been pathetic, and I have a story about every week - but hey, at least it's something.
Thanks to the not-so-behind the scenes people at SlashDot (Taco, Hemos, Roblimo, Nate, etc.). I can't speak for everyone else (but I could assume..) but I think it's all good.
Thanks again,
Matthew
_____________________________________
sortakinda.ca | canadian paraphrasing.
Is /THAT/ why all most posts are starting with Score 2? I thought something screwy was going on...
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Doh...well, I guess Rob changed it because I'm seeing 1...
i'm not worthy...
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
same here
Go to Preferences -> Customize Homepage, and there is a widget that lets you select what date format you want to use. Most of the options include the year.
--
Interested in XFMail? New XFMail home page
Me too, and I'd like to add that in the Reply-To box, the place where the previous comment is supposed to be is blank.
Every now and then, I get the urge to ask Taco and Hemos and the others at Slashdot about a particular thing (for instance, what's this thing do? And I don't think this works well...). However, I don't find myself taking the time to do this because I think it needs input from the rest of the community.
One thing that's been on my mind is "Where has Slashdot Radio been?" Considering the amount of e-mail swampage the Slashdot crew is probably under, I just don't take the time to e-mail them.
I was wondering, would it be possible to have a monthly (semi-monthly?) "Slashdot User Forum". All it would be is a regular Slashdot thread where people could post ideas about the site. I remember when someone posted to an Apache thread that the Apache section needed more moderators. That would be a post that would be exemplary of the kind of stuff I see going under this thread.
Just a thought that might make for a better Slashdot.
You should never take life too seriously - You'll never get out of it alive.
I think karma should be universal. I proposed an "auto-moderation" system, in which each person was always a moderator. The first thing this cures, is the need for moderators, and meta-moderators and meta-meta-moderators, and... etc. You would gain karma by "doing good stuff". If /posts/ you made were voted a /net/ positive amount, your karma goes up. If /moderations/ you made were in line with moderations of others (you are on the largest side), then your karma goes up (presumably, because most other people /agree/ with you).
I think this would simplify and automate things. There wouldn't need to be special rules and special cases. Slashdot would just moderate itself. Some care would have to be taken to see that all the constants are tweaked right so things to go awry, but once it's set, we're good. You'd get better karma by "doing good stuff".
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Me too .. Just now also !Actuall the "by" "on" "#" are all missing !
... "follow me" the wise man said, but he walked behind
Slashdot radio's been coming out weekly still. I forgot about it for a bit as well, but it's now in a separate section in the links to the left on the main page.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
The present MetaModeration only moderates articles which moderators chose to touch. It does not moderate the moderation done by not altering an article. So toss in some unmoderated articles.
Since this is the first Slashdot thread in a while, I'll take the chance to say some stuff about the system:
a) There ought be a page that showed users ranked by karma. Or put a users rank on his page. Or at least show the percentile. I realize that Karma is not a competition, but I can't help but be curious who really is the top etc (and yes I realize I'm not "in the running", I just said its not a competition). Still, if people started treating it like a competition meta-moderating would get them, so it couldn't really hurt.
b) I'm bothered by "off-topic" and "redundant" moderating deep down in the discussions. There is no harm in people straying from the topic when its not in the main thread.
c) I see the "don't get +1" option has disappeared from below this window. Have the rules for getting +1 changed, or has the option been taken out? Why? To what?
-
1. My comment preferences "-1, nested, highest scored first" don't stick. But more important:
2. When I moderate, my total remains at 5! That means I could theoretically run through this entire thread, 5 at a time, and moderate everything either to +5 or -1.
This needs to be fixed IMMEDIATELY!
Glückwünsche, haben Sie Slashdot ermordet, indem Sie zum korporativen Druck beugten und Subskriptionen einlei
AP - Today 4 lawyers working for the team that recently won a $1 billion dollar settlement from Toshiba for a twelve year old floppy drive firmware bug instigated a class action suit against slasdot.org for continually presenting web pages with false or erroneous information. Said one user 'like half the time I can't log in or the list of comments is incomplete or the cookies are wrong or who knows what". Also being asked to join the suit are operators of web sites that have experienced the debilitating effects of being slashdotted - that is having page requests increase six orders of magnitude after having an article referring to their site posted on slashdot.org.
Said one webmaster who asked to remain anonymous "being slashdotted is just another form of a distributed DoS attack. Somebody should report these guys to the FBI. They should know that memory leaks in Microsoft IIS and Win NT 4.0 will cause gross instabilities under these kinds of loads".
Damage amounts in the filing have not been set yet, but informally members of the litigation team say they expect damages in the 11 figure ballpark.
---- 30 -----
Why not add a My Slashdot thing, where users can make their own mini-slashdot pages. They can post their own stories, and invite friends who then can post comments and stuff, just like the real slashdot, but personal. Could be like my.slashdot.org/username or something...
Heeeeell yeah, and free home pages with popup window ads (members.slashdot.org) oh and yeah, free web-based email accounts (mail.dotorgnow.org, oh and yeah, don't forget to preconfigure those webmail accounts for existing members.)oh and yeah, a ZDNN Slashbox, man, and oh yeah, TV listings! man, this site is a portal just waiting to happen!
======
"Rex unto my cleeb, and thou shalt have everlasting blort." - Zorp 3:16
Sacred cows make the best burgers.
I'd like it if people could optionally make their slashboxes publicly viewable.
Then they could be made available through a "Random users Slashbox" slashbox or by specifically entering their username.
I believe you'd stumble accross some interesting links that way, a sort of anarchic memepool (perhaps basing the chance of a users slashbox being chosen as the random one on their karma, to prevent slashbox spamming.)
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
I'm not sure about that one actually... You wouldn't have to make the pages dynamic, just make 2 versions when they're archived. One sorted on score, one just plain chronologicly. Ok, a few more M server space, but apart from that?
Just throwing an idea to all (having done a bit of moderation): I often find that I don't have time or deep interest in the subject to make a post, however I do have a few minutes to read all comments and moderate those that I feel are worth it. Since points appear regularly, I figure I must be doing something good (maybe that's the meta-moderation, I don't know). What I'm thinking is that if I the meta-moderation indicates that the slashdot crowd thinks I'm a good moderator, could I still get points even if I don't post for a long time ?
I'm not trying to argue that I should keep on moderating, I'm wondering if you should need to keep on posting to get the privilege to boost up good comments (or sink 'First Post') ? The fact that I don't have time to post doesn't imply I don't have time to read.
For something like this to work, someone would have to have attracted attention on themselves in the first place (by having a good karma) and then have a good review by their peers (through the meta-moderation). Kind of having two karmas (one for posting and one for moderating) or a karma that could be influenced by the meta-moderation (now that would be great).
Anyways, just throwing a suggestion.
P.S. : Some wicked sense of paranoia, and the fact that I'm coming out as a moderator, told me I should make this anonymous... sorry.
This is just what I have been thinking. I'm sure everyone has had the experience of posting a story, getting it spiked, then seeing it appear 2 days later. There's so much good stuff that (maybe rightfully) doesn't make the main board, but is still very timely and informative. I'd love to see a list of what was coming in, perhaps broken into last 3 hours, 3-6 hours, 6-12 hours, etc.
Moderation would be a big bonus, so the posts could be ranked by quality in each time slot. Then also, if every story started off with an initial score -1 to +1, you could have anything that made it to +5 in the first six hours be automatically promoted onto the main board. Additional negative moderation tags like "Wrong" or "Old" would help keep the rubbish down.
Of course, you'd still have to filter out some posts -- eg pr0n site spam, or libel you could get sued for. But I think this kind of live semi-automated ticker of stories coming in would make for a very impressive rapid-response news intelligence system.
I recently passed the 25 Karma mark and gained the new privilege of an automatic +1 rating to the posts I made (my Karma's currently 31, I just checked it). I was very proud of that accomplishment...it meant that I had contributed enough worthwhile discussion to be considered a valued member of the community.
Now, however, it seems I'm not getting that bonus anymore, and the option to post without it is gone.
What gives?
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
The source code driving slashdot's available, use it on your homepage yourself.
I personally doubt andover could make it's money back (from added hardware, bandwidth, developer's time) on such a feature...
I've asked Rob for a general discussion page, and/or a moderators issues page, several times, he's always nixed it. His argument is that he'd rather get mail on a topic because he reads his mail (funny -- I got an automated rejection to a story item I'd posted but wanted to give him an additional update on). To me this says he doesn't trust Slashdot to do what it should do: let the community bring up issues and moderate up the ones it thinks are important.
I end up posting "about Slashdot" issues to other fora, notably InfoWorld under the "Readers Roam" or "Readers Choice" columns, where a few intelligent minds are known to wander.
Slashdot is an interesting mix -- it's community voice, but only on those topics Slashdot has deemed we should talk about. I'm starting to find this limiting, and view the site a bit more as a news portal than as a discussion. Some things are excellent though -- last week's Bruce Schneier interview was one of the best online-interview format discussions I've ever seen.
What part of "gestalt" don't you understand?
This is good, with the possible problem that there are probably a fair number of redundant story submissions, which the moderating process won't handle terribly well. There might need to be some way of clustering a group of related topic posts together. The current moderation system doesn allow for this, there would have to be some sort of editorializing function to do this -- actually saying "foo is similar to bar but is dissimilar to baz".
...though, thinking, there might be a way to indication "relatedness" between stories. Stories with sufficiently high relatedness would appear on the same page. Sort of like Google or some of those idea management software things. Of course, the relatedness level could be set by users. Hmm....
What part of "gestalt" don't you understand?
I thought that the idea of Slashdot and moderation was that important, insightful, or otherwise high-quality posts would filter to the top.
If Slashdot can't handle bug reports in the article pages, it should at least have a bug reporting system which is open to public access. I don't see this on the slashlist or main page -- and there are certainly enough bug tracking systems around (Bugzilla, etc.).
Believe it or not, there are those of us around who like how /. works, but would like to see the process of helping it work better democratized further. GO ALL THE WAY.
Per your request, this page has also be emailed to you.
What part of "gestalt" don't you understand?
Very good point. Unfortunately, I can't post and mod, could someone else catch this?
What part of "gestalt" don't you understand?
I just blew coffee out my nose laughing!
I still don't see why you would want to bury the post for 24 hours, often annihilating its newsworthiness.
IMHO one of the greatest attractions of a slashdot discard list would be its up to the minute timeliness.
The big board would still have the additional (overwhelming) attractions of its group comment, its interactivity, and importantly its selectivity. Adding a discarded posts list would not in any way compromise slashdot proper.
okay, so how STALE is the pre0.3 release of slashdot code that's available for download??
/. since the inception can tell that *LOTS* of neat stuff has been added and *NOT* released.
/. needs a new angle to stay ahead of the pack... dynamic news forums are about as revolutionary as portals nowadays.
/. is making money with advertising and IPOs, then ALL contributors should recieve some sort of compensation. How about something like US $0.50 credit for each positive moderation on users posts? Ten cents for meta-moderating? $20 for writing an opinion piece... $2 for submitting a story that gets used.
C'mon, those of us who've watched
Why? Could it be due to andover.net not wanting to dilute slashdot by enabling more of us to set up our own personal slashdot-like sites?
well, I've got news for you, squishdot for zope provides a pretty good forum that's ridiculously simple to set up.
Why not release the RECENT slashdot code and let the slashdot community work on improving it as well?
... or is Slashdot now an opensource-for-profit site that advocates that everyone except themselves release their sourcecode and make money only from support?
Personally, I think that
I think that if
...
Why should I donate my time and thoughts *FOR FREE* to a *COMMERCIAL* operation?
Here's an example: A Linux user reads a Microsoft user's post. The Microsoft user is advocating the use of NT instead of Linux, providing some valid points. However, the Linux user is either blind to these, or considers them unimportant in the big picture, and moderates the post as "Stupid".
I don't understand the meaning of Complimentary in this case.
Is URL positive or negative? Is it to be used when a person provides an incomplete URL (I don't think this is sufficient reason to moderate someone down) or when he provides an informative or interesting URL (already covered by appropriate flags)?
--
where did that option for a daily headline digest in your email dissapear off to?
Reply to the thread I've just started.
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E2 IN2 IE?
Can't. It'd be a massive amount of load on the servers
So why not sort the comments when the stories are archived? Personally, I'd rather have forcible sorting by score than forcible sorting by post order.
I too have a slow connection, here's what I do to make it faster:
:)
If you are trying to move a slashbox... say... up 5 times, instead of clicking it, waiting for it to load and clicking it 4 more times and waiting to load, click it once, and then hit "reload" on your browser 4 times, make sure there is a pause in between so that about 1k of the page loads up. And Tada, the slashbox magically moved up 5 spots
_______________________________________________
There is no statute of limitation on stupidity.
A feature I would love to see is a callback feature. Some times I click on the submit button, and nothing happens, and I reclick on it. Then it turns out I submitted the same comment twice. Would be nice to be able to callback one of the submittions
Je ne parle pas francais.
A good link a succint, authoritative, on-topic, evidence-based reference can often be the most informative and useful post of all.
In fact I'd say any 'informative' post gains incredibility if it can link to some evidence to back it up.
The real distinction is with good analysis posts, which have the tag 'insightful'.
Could it not be done client-side, in javascript ?
Also, soon you will be able to use XML and style sheets to help -- like Mozilla's demo of different presentations of the same Amazon-like page.
This thing works on Lynx, LOL :-) You're right, it does. Incredible, considering the complexity of the main page and of the discussions, I am incredibly impressed by the end result. You can be sure that I'll remember this one.
Nice idea, and get's my vote... Also curious if hot-comments feed on themselves. Once you are listed you probably tend to stay listed...
I just noticed that on my Slashdot "homepage" that my time zone is set to "Eastern Daylight" time. Didn't the US just go to standard time? Does that mean that every slashdot user has to switch their preferences?
Personally, I live in Arizona - we don't do the daylight thing at all...The reason I have my clock set on the ET is because that is what timezone the Slashdot server is in.
You would think computers would be able to figure this stuff on it's own by now.
I said there was no text here :)
I'd really like to see <CODE> and <PRE> tags supported.
Many of us are programmers and sometimes post small snippets of source. You can do indentation with nested <BLOCKQUOTE> tags, but that takes a while to format.
I hate looking at left justified code.
While we are talking about /. - I keep wondering why no one ever gets upset that /. is effectively a closed source system? This would not be a problem if /. wasn't the home of people who complain and moan that OpenSource is the only way to go and get all upset about it. Yet, the slash engine continues to be developed for commercial gain without any new releases. Other OpenSource programs expose the development tree - why not /.? Hypocracy(sp) is always a sign of doom.
hmm, sounds like your profile has some whacked settings? try upping the comment size limit to like 4096 or something. Also set it to not reparent posts for threads below your threshold?
You can always just post as an AC and include your name in the post, like I'm doing now.
----- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored --Chandon Seldon
Hmm, this seems fixed now. Thanks Rob!
My comments aren't starting at Score:2 anymore though, despite my karma still being high. Did Rob remove this feature or is it broken?
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
OK, there are nonproductive threads that never go away like first post, KDE/GNOME, NT/Linux (I'd use GNU/Linux, but that would be confusing), bitchin' Beowulf clusters, etc.
I would especially like to make "bad-attitude" posting an option in addition to posting as an AC -- such comments would be free from moderation, and viewable at the 0 or -1 threshold without loss of karma. That may seem a bit strange, but just by lowering your threshold (mine is at -1), you're asking for it.
Long comments are overrated. Why do I never see Read the rest of this comment... at the bottom of a page? My "Long Comment Bonus" is big (10000), and my "Max Comment Size" (4096), shows a whole lotta text. Sure, there are times when they're appropriate, if there's information to be shared (though a link would be better, if not as impressive). Slashdot forums are for discussions, not treatises.
I want a "Maximum Threshold" to complement the "Minimum Threshold", and I would set my range from -1 to 3 -- the trolls and flames are frequently more interesting than the lengthy comments I spoke of. This would also be a help to moderators, whose range could be set from 0-1 in order to sort out the gems from the germs.
--
E2 IN2 IE?
i've even set my users page as home on a couple of systems (quick poll: how many computers do you have with /. as the start page? (4)). Then if you click on a story you have login again.
I e-mailed Rob about this a while back, maybe I should send it to pater@slashdot.org??
(and getting that (no +1 button) back would be nice)
+&x
Someone suggested making a page ranking users by Karma. I'm not so sure that's a good idea; it would turn Slashdot into a contest. Granted, it's a good contest, seeing as you can only win by being fair in moderation and thought-provoking in posts, but it still runs counter to the spirit of a news site.
Also, as for the +1 bonus thing. I think it's fine the way it is. I also think that once a person's Karma gets very high (if you get the +1 bonus at 25, then this should be at +50 or so) they should have the ability to burn a Karma point and get one additional +1 bonus for that post only. By default, this bonus isn't turned on, and the fact that you have to burn a Karma point to do it will discourage its abuse (not to mention that very few people have Karma high enough to do this). It allows for someone to post something they really think is important at a higher level, but now without paying for that extra point. It also is another reward for someone with a truly exceptional posting record.
But please, please email me rather than or addition to posting here. Then I can filter the reports to the correct places.
Thanks again.
Yes, Virginia, there really is a CowboyNeal.
Too clever (for puns and such)
Stupid
URL
Complimentary
Well?
First of all, let me say thank you to all of the people that make Slashdot possible. Rob and the boys for having the vision, and everyone world wide for contributing to what is perhaps the most content rich and timely sources for info-tech around. Everyone's continued effort shows, and we all benefit from that effort.
Under the existing system, anyone can contribute. This a good thing, because it draws on the resources of hundreds of thousands of users world wide scouring news sources all over the globe in order to contribute to slashdot. This insures that even the most casual reader will have access to the latest information about the state of IT and it's impact on the world. Once a story of posted on the site, people from all different walks of life get a chance to analyze the story and give there interpretation of the consequences of this latest development.
The effect of this system is motivating more and more people to want to contribute. More and more people go out of there way to sift through countless technical articles to find the one that is impactful and interesting.
Once this one little nugget is submitted to slashot.org as a potential story, Rob and the boys have the (sometimes thankless) job of sifting through the sea of submissions to pick the few that will fit into the finite space available.
They have done a spectacular job so far and every day is proof-of-concept that this open source approach to news gathering is not only adequate, but extremely readable and informative. How ever there is a lot of effort that winds up on the 'cutting room floor'.
Couldn't some of that effort be shared? Couldn't some of that effort, diligent research done for a story submission, be readable by other people? The hi- tech field is very very diverse and will touch more and more industries every day. If an engineer in Zibobway runs across a little snippet that has an impact on my field of interest, I would love to read more about it.
So how do we solve the problem? Here is just one idea.
When a story is submited and rejected, It goes in one of 2 places either ..slashdot/stories/rejected/Slashstash directory on the system. the other go into ..slashdot/stories/rejected/.
This 'Siskel and Ebert' way of moderating is quick, effective, and works in realtime (using the existing story editors on slashdot) and requires no changes to the code. Once a story is placed in ../slashstash a Script and parse, time.date stamp it, and move it to the store on another domain. there the post will sit for 24 hours. After 24 hours, it would appear on the slashstash.org (pick your fav domain name here) site with a banner add. This would insure that the attractiveness of slashdot (it's timeliness) is not compromised. No more work on the back end. No more additions to the already successful /.
Is this plausable?
...of some weird bug in the communication between the three Slashdot servers. Hard-type one of the IP addresses (and change slashdot.org to that IP address whenever you can), and things seem to work MUCH better.
:-)
Yes, I've filed a bug report. And yes, this seems to affect most of the problems described in the other comments
/* Steinar */
(This comment is of course GPLed.)
The redundant rating is really abuse. In most of the cases, redundant posts are honest mistake. case 1) Double post case 2) Same and important subject being echo by follow /.ers
I agree they poeple don't want to see them, but the -1 score shouldn't hurt the poster's karma. Rob, thank about it.
CY
Selfish. :P~
I have been an addict (if that word can ever have a proper meaning it is here!) of /. for about an yr months now.. Yup..I can hear laughter from seasoned /.ers !
/. system . Had I think mailed Rob but as busy as he is, no replies so far :)
/. :
/. are ever busy pple, but look at it this way.. one less of those showcase/conferences and we could have easily have had a new version of the code.
/. and have been unlucky to have all of then rejected :) So from personal traumatic experience I suggest that when a story is rejected, it would be better to give a small reason for y it is done. Nothing big.. a small "repetetive"/"cheap"/"stupid" will do. It gives you an idea why the heck your stories were rejected. Saves you from hear aches u see .. !
/. but maybe we can have a thread whose sole aim is to get user inputs and suggestions. Sometimes when u get too involved with a system , people within tends to loose the "outsider" or "outer" view which is VERY important to have.
I have always wanted to suggest some things on
So here it is again, what I would like in
(*)This might be moderated as flamebait, but..
/. advocates open source movement. It is rather ironical for such a site to have an _ANCIENT_ version of its own source code published. I know that pple behind
(*)I have occassionally submitted some stories to
(*)Donno if this has ever been done on
Now that was the first 2 cents of my 2000000 cents series. Rest if suggestion 3 is implemented.
Mystic
... "follow me" the wise man said, but he walked behind
Ok.. It is working now.. Thanx Rob !
... "follow me" the wise man said, but he walked behind
Sorry, but the moderators seemed to have missed this one.
Y W00D U 3V3R W4NT 2 F1LT3R 4NY 1 P4RT1CUL4R US3R 0UT?!?!??%*?%?
:wq
:WQ
------ ------ ------
ALL HA1L B1FF, TH3 M05T 31337 D00D!!!!!1
------ ------ ------
ALL HA1L B1FF, TH3 M05T 31337 D00D!!!!!1
:WQ
------ ------ ------
ALL HA1L B1FF, TH3 M05T 31337 D00D!!!!!1
------ ------ -
Posted by cookieman.k:
I find your idea interesting. Greets:
actually haizy posted that im just letting her borrow my slashdot account right quick
How about periodically shuffling blocks of threads with the same score, to even out the exposure?
Well, this wouldn't work if your sort is set to chronological order.
Also, typically only one or maybe two posts at the top level end up with scores of 4 or 5, so shuffling their order will have little impact.
My journal has hot
Since when has Rob pansied out and quit tinkering with code on the main server? That was half the fun of reading slashdot back in the day!
Juiced? Or Not?
karma seems to be broken. i haev a karma--; and a karma++; today and neither had any effect on my karma (ie, it didn't go down with -- and it didn't come up with ++).
OFTC: By the community, for the community
>Why not add a My Slashdot thing
>so if any of you readers think this is a cool idea, reply and say so
I think it's a damn stupid idea. This is not fucking Yahoo!. If that's the kind of service you want, go back to AOL. Idiot.
More importantly, Karma shouldn't be a contest. Allowing extremely high Karma values encourages people to chase after them. A better system might be to set a maximum Karma of a few points higher than the threshold for the bonus point option. That way, even Signal 11 will only be able to make a few first posts before he loses his bonus point. The bonus point threshold can then be scaled such n% of the users have it.
Gates' Law: Every 18 months, the speed of software halves.
You're slipping Rob. You never bothered with testing your new code on another server before you put it on your production system before! :-)
Actually, it already does that when I hit reply (except that the parent message is quoted above rather than below. Minor detail -- either way works.) How is yours configured?
As long as we're talking about the Reply page, is there any way we can get wider text boxes? I hate typing in these little tiny portals on the screen. Maybe make it configurable on the user page, so that the crowd using 1600x1200 with a flyspec-3 font can coexist with the crowd using 640x480 and a courier-24 font?
Also, could you escape out & symbols, replacing them with & when constructing the default text in the comment box for "Preview Mode"? That'll make all of the &symb; style symbols work properly when clicking Preview. (Right now, I kluge around it by hitting Back after a Preview so I don't have to hunt for all the &symb; symbols embedded in my comment.)
--Joe--
Program Intellivision!
Live with it and read the rest of the posts. A lot of good posts come from anonymous people who never get moderated up because the moderators are ALSO elitist fucks.
If Slashdot were truly open source, we wouldn't have to wait and hope that Rob gets around to implementing our favourite feature. We could implement it ourselves.
Then we'd only have to wait and hope that Rob approves and accepts our patches.
Slashdot isn't just Slash. It's an instance of the Slash engine. The Open Source mantra doesn't _directly_ apply to it.
--
--
The Internet is the Suppository of All Knowledge. You get it in the end.
When I hit "reply to this", in the space where it's supposed to show the comment I'm replying to, it just shows:
(Score:)
by on (#)
(User Info)
It seems all the database fields are left blank, with just the formatting text coming through. This happens on every comment I've tried to reply to so far...
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I have "light" mode on.
5 9.shtml whereas the link from the main page is of the form http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=99/10/30/174323 2&mode=thread .
If I click on a story from users.pl (one that i commented on), it forgets it is supposed to display the story in light mode, but if I click on a comment I made on a story, it looks fine.
Perhaps this is because the link from the user page is of the form
http://www.slashdot.org/articles/99/10/29/13132
The shareholder is always right.
I experienced the same stuff. (also the one with the replying-to block lacking the text)
I assume you already filed the bug report?
--
Weasel
So th %)" sssssssss exblahins IT
Ooops, looks like the maximum comment lenght got set to 0
While I agree that a reason for rejected articles would be nice, it's not really feasible. I know you said a *short* reply, but when they get hundreds of submissions a day, even that is a bit much. To even have a one word reply to 400+ submissions, that would take a considerable amount of time/effort on the part of the editors. That time is likely much better spent now.
---
I hope you're not pretending to be evil while secretly being good. That would be dishonest.
it looks like the default threshold is now 0. Can't see any comments without clicking on the link that says "Read the rest of this comment..."
On every story, I've noticed the first post accumulates a lot of attention, getting the most replies, etc. This is somewhat unfair, because a lot of times it's a fairly uninteresting post or a simple question, but it pulls in all the hits. By first post, I don't mean first chronologically - I have my sort set by highest scores, but even in that case, if there are 5 posts with score 2, the first one has a sort of gravitational effect.
How about periodically shuffling blocks of threads with the same score, to even out the exposure? I don't think it matters if a later thread is placed above an earlier one - I've rarely seen any context flowing chronologically across threads.
w/m
-- I'm not a freak show, I'm a mammal. --
moving each one in single increments
How exactly do you 'move' anything??? Am i missing something here?
Okay, bad joke... but more seriously - when are you going to try something new with the moderation system? Over a year ago when the system was first started, you said you'd try something new. Ummmm... soooo, when will we see something new?
--
While we've got a /. story here, I'd like to put in a request for a feature.
Whenever I adjust my slashboxes, its a serious pain to get them set where I like it, moving each one in single increments and having to reload the front page each time on a slow connection.
Could we possibly have an easier way of doing this? Maybe a series of dropdown menus on our preferences page.
Anybody else like this idea?
Oops.
Incidentally, a request for a feature. If a post below my threshold has replies above my threshold and I've viewing in threaded mode, show the original post anyway, otherwise all the replies get "orphaned" and I see all these "Re:" posts commenting on things I never read in the first place, which is kinda confusing.
Hey well I can log in ok and all but comments are displayed Threaded even though I have it set to Nested, don't know why. Post Anonymously is a good feature for ACs who want custom stuff. Keep up the good work guys!
For the people who accidentally click [Submit] twice and so on, could we have a "Suppress Post" button that users could use on their own posts? It'd put move the post to a score of -1 (or maybe even -2) immediately and would allow people a chance to clean up embarassing mistakes without completely sweeping them under the rug.
To prevent abuse, you might want to tie a -1 karma to the feature. Otherwise people might just stop using [Preview] altogether, or might start posting "guerrilla posts" -- posting something inflammatory, and then suppressing it before the moderators hit them. The -1 karma is much smaller than the 2 or 3 "Redundant" moderations, but is a large enough disincentive to prevent abuse, I think.
At any rate, it'll provide a way for posters to clean up after themselves.
Thoughts?
--Joe--
Program Intellivision!
When I hit "Reply to This", I see your message above this message I'm typing. Not sure what settings cause that but I can (and did!) scroll back up and re-read your message while I respond to it.
If you ment to quote back the origional message *IN* the reply, I *strongly* (but hopefully, nicely 8) disagree. I don't enjoy reading the same message time and time again. I really don't enjoy reading MY message (and all its typos) time and time again!
I've also found that many people who have the option of quoting back the entire message often start to just insert one or two word replies mid-paragraph -- replies, which when actually found, are rarely worth the effort. It increases the amount of data without increasing the amount of meaning. And, it encourages people to write poorly (or encourages poor writers to write, not sure which)
Nick.
The only times I've moderated a comment as redundant is when there were two identical or near identical comments from the same person. This is usually a mistake on the poster's part. I think that 'Redundant' should be replaced with 'Duplicate'. Moderating a comment as Duplicate would lower the comment's score, but not affect the user's Karma. This would allow moderators to clean up the duplicates without punishing the author.
I haven't seen it raised yet, so I'll do it. How about the ability for us ubercool elitist logged in folks to filter out comments based on userid? There's only one or two folks whose comments I don't want to see regardless, but they exist.
And just to cap it off, collect and rank these commonly filtered ID's in a slashbox... "Top 10 boneheads" by what amounts to reader poll... Might not be such a good idea, if people compete for Karma they'd prolly compete for bonehead status too.
Since it's a static page you could pregenerate it. Flat makes understanding threads difficult.
--
"L'IT c'est moi!"
Odd that you would feel the need to avoid bad karma, since you seem to think your comments have value regardless of your karma.
AC's can be moderated down just as easily as logged-in members... the only difference, obviously, is that YOU are not being moderated down. But if your opinion had the value of "fighting the establishment", one would think you would be proud enough to stand behind your own words.
Also, if you truly think moderation and karma are stupid, what better way to protest it than to proudly throw out intelligent, briliant, anti-brainwashed-society posts and let them be moderated down, just so you could point at them and say, "Hey, all these wonderful, non-ass-kissing posts got moderated down, this proves how stupid slashdot is!!"
I respectfully submit that a truly unbiased opinion that is thoughtfully stated will (at a minimum) receive a total moderation that balances out. The only reason you should fear being moderated down is if you are saying something that is obviously aimed at starting a war... regardless of who it is aimed at starting a war with.
I also respectfully submit that anyone who would miss your posts if your account were moderated down would just as easily miss them if they are posted AC. And those who would actually read your posts will see them regardless, because they browse at -1 anyways.
Going out on a limb here with a related topic - why not have the moderators of the day do a little to help the Slashdot boys out, and moderate the submission queue? That way, the "hot" stories that need to be posted immediately can be bumped up, while the ones that aren't time-dependent or as interesting can sit until the guys have the time to sort things through.
... not too sure if that would work efficiently enough or not, but it's something to think about.
What the hell is going on? Someone hacked /.? I tried to login after some weeks posting as AC, and this thing said I entered the wrong password. What??? Before losing 1h trying to login, the only solution was to create an account. Fine, created, but after 12h I don't know where's the mail that was sent to me with the password. login: root password: bug Welcome to Slashdot, running Debian (shit) 1.0 kernel 2.0.27 # perl COMMAND NOT FOUNDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD DDDDD
IMO, whoever first came up with the "My..." idea should be shot and then rot in the deepest pits of hell. For one thing, it encourages lots of terrible portal sites. It also sounds incredibly stupid, and isn't even the correct use of the word "My".
For example, who is the "me" in "My Computer"? Is it a user who reads everything displayed on his screen out loud? Is it the computer, in which case simply "Me" would suffice? Or is it Bill Gates, which seems to be the most likely case? ("This is MY computer. I'm giving you the privilege to use it productively. Whoops, I just took away that privilege, so here's a blue screen.")
--
Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
Rolling on the floor laughing!!! :-P
"That way if the moderators think, 'Bah, who wants to read about Stan Lee's prostate - reject' it'll show up on that page ready for all Stan Lee/prostate fans."
This is one of the funniest things I've heard in a loooooooong time. Thanks for making me laugh.
----------------
"Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds." - Albert Einstein
Co-founder and designer at Music Nearby: http://musicnearby.com
Don't forget the fact that many, many Slashdot articles were before threading, no less moderation. (I don't think Hemos has forgotten, but this seems to be the approperate post to reply to).
To go through and thread many of the old stories would take ages for the minimal return, and I think that's why the archived articles are flat mode anyway (or was it because it's Rob's personal preference? I remember him saying something back when he was implementing threading saying he was keeping flat mode around if only because he liked it...).
As a result of all this, flat mode, chronologicly sorted is the lowest common demoninator...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Also, sometimes I'll have 3 or 4 "reply to" windows open, along with the suporting documents. Replying is sometimes a non-linear process, and having the parent message quoted below the COMMENT and IMPOTANT STUFF would be very helpfull.
BTW. . Rob is a taco :)
I just happen to be around Holland, MI this weekend and I plan on pelting Rob's house with a few dozen cartons of eggs. Anyone care to join me? Rob, would you like toilet paper too?
Wahoo!
1. For meta moderation, posts for which there's a lot of contention over the moderation score (i.e. posts which are moderated both up and down) should be the target of meta moderation, since this indicates disgreement over the moderation.
/. don't understand the effect of this, so we sometimes see AC text without any paragraphing (since explicit paragraph and line break tags are needed in html mode)
2. For anonymous coward posting, do not default to 'HTML Formatted'. First time posters to
I'm always asked to log in again when i view articles from userinfo pages or from archives.
other people get this too?
OFTC: By the community, for the community
That way if the moderators think, 'Bah, who wants to read about Stan Lee's prostate - reject' it'll show up on that page ready for all Stan Lee/prostate fans.
With all the rejections I'm sure someone could run their own slashdot.reject.org site and still make it worthwhile reading.
Is this the guy you confess to?
&my_confess "I found a /. bug, damn it! $!";
sub my_confess /bin/mail -s pater@slashdot.org") or print "Couldn't mail pater: $!";
{
system ("echo \'@_\' |
}
Beer recipe: free! #Source
Cold pints: $2 #Product
on any news topics.. apart from read this comment...
When I click on a story I get 3 errors:
1. displays very few comments (2 out of 23 in this case)
2. all comments say "Read the rest of this comment"
3. nested even though set to threaded
I have a screenshot at ftp://128.253.254.56/slash.jpg
big-time
Okay... what I'd like to see:
In Nested mode, a control to open/close comment bodies without having to send another request to /., using DHTML's display property.
Course, it won't work on much other than IE, and Javascript is still Evil (obv.) but I reckon it'd be useful, anyway.
--
This comment was brought to you by And Clover.
My comment got eaten during the transition. Such a shame, since it was the most insightful, interesting, funny and flamebait troll I ever posted.
Till now, when I posted any story to /. it showed in my submission list in descending order. i.e the latest submitted was always on top. But the story that I submitted on 31st showed at the bottom ! Has the order been reversed or is this a bugyyyy ??
... "follow me" the wise man said, but he walked behind
Where did karma go? I don't see the +1 bonus (or -1, which some people have!) being applied. I don't mind, but sometimes that will mean more work for the moderators.
---
pb Reply rather than vaguely moderate me.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I'd love to base a discussion board around the slashdot concept: it has everything I need. However, how would I explain using the self-proclaimed alpha version of slash?
... I'm too busy ironing out kinks and adding features to take a couple days and create a distributable tar ball...
Please! Spend a couple of days putting together a tar ball; otherwise, numerous others will have to repeat all the work you've already done.
FROM CODE PAGE: You can download an ancient version of [slash] below
...you will have problems! This is fairly alpha code) you are on your own.
---
Moderators, please check down long threads for worthy posts to moderate up instead of just poking around the root posts.... this one above is particularly good.
unfortunately, i'm not sure you're right about this. most 'redundant' moderated posts aren't redundant at all, rather some of these yahoos seem to think that redundant is a catch-all category for 'stupid posts that i don't like.' take for instance the first post in the next article about the ghost web cam. THE FIRST POST was marked redundant...*throws up hands in disgust.*
thank the gods metamoderation is around...is it actually having an affect, though?
"The things we wizards have to put up with."--Jethro Bodine
I'm having trouble logging in. Usually I do it via cookie, but today /. isn't seeing my cookies. Some of the /. screens show me as logged in, but others don't. When I go to the login screen, it tells me my password is invalid. Then going to my user page, it shows it, allows me to update it, and the bookmark link has the same password that failed... I'm confused.
It seems like every week or so some article comes out which bashs some point about Open Source/Free Software/Linux/etc. Inevitably a bunch of people flame the article, and then a few people post intelligent comments saying, "We should really do something to fix this problem." Wouldn't it be better to have a special label for posts like this? Not "insightful", but "inspirational" or "pro-active" or something. I'd much rather we as a community actually fixed these problems rather than just state that they need fixing.
Also, lots of comments are labelled "informative" just because they have a URL to some useful reference. Could we have a separate name for these posts, different from posts that actually contain information?
Just my two cents...
-Ted
Perhaps this defeats the purpose of "archiving" the stories when they get old, but. . .
When I want to search Slashdot for a given topic, the search results are often of stories that have been archived. The problem is that when I want to read the worthwhile comments on a particular story, its very difficult because the archived page shows ALL comments, not just the ones above my threshhold. Hell, I even have to wade through the -1 postings of "first post!" and crap like that... Would there be any way to make the moderated-up comments displayed at the top?
You could sort the threads by score, highest to lowest, top to bottom. Is this too difficult to do without increasing server load / database size? Any thoughts on this?
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
I only post comments when someone on the internet is wrong.