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 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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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
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?
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
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'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?
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.
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.
(netscape crashed and as a sideeffect submitted my comment while editting)
... Still, if people started treating it like a competition meta-moderating would get them, so it couldn't really hurt.
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.
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.
Ranking would just aggravate the problem. There's already some poeple here that post WAY too much (i.e. signal11) Also this would simply encourage the disreputable game of "Beat the Moderators" Frankly, posting what you think is the "correct" thing to post is Wrong and serves no purpose. Those that do that contribute nothing, and simply demonstrate their spinelessness and tendencies for conformity.
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.
A better solution would be to have the posters have to opt-in to the +1 bonus rather than opt-out. Most of the +1 comments don't deserve the bonus, and it should only be used when the poster thinks that his comment should be moderated up.
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.
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.
ARGGH! I ALWAYS mark those as unfair. During the DragonBall processor article, someone went in and marked the entire thread about treating PalmPilots like the DragonBalls from "DragonBall Z" as off-topic. OH COME ON!!! Off topic should be for "FIRST POST" and "Every 5 minutes a child dies..." posts. Most of the other stuff makes sense if you actually read the thread.
"Redundant" is a worthless moderation catagory. Half the posts here are "redundant".
One more thing about the moderators. They've taken to moderating up posts that simply repeat whatever news article posted as "5 Informative". My God! The poster did nothing! Any moderator that actually read the article would realize this. Perhaps before you can moderate a discussion you should have to actually have to read the article in question. (a wrapper script with a cookie would do nicely)
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.
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?
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.
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?
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
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
It's because Andover isn't selling/distributing a closed-source Slash engine to users/victims who are then unable to maintain/improve it.
There is no hipocrisy on this issue.
The only people who make blanket condemnation of all closed source programs are kooks. Other people who understand the merits of open source, also understand why open source is valuable, and under what conditions it is desirable. If you have that level of understanding, then you won't have a problem with Slashdot.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
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?
I don't think Rob took it out. I do think he's trying to do more of a graduated thing, though. I also think he's upped the hard threshold for the bonus (as evidenced by the fact that I don't have it yet, even though I've seen people with lower karma than me with the bonus).
I also think he's tweaking the bonus system. The "moderate this down" option for replies doesn't seem to be working (I get this from reading other posts, not because I've experienced it). IMVHO, I think that if your karma's that high, you should have complete control over your bonus points and how they are spent.
censorship is a form of noise, which actively seeks to drown out content with silence - Crash Culligan
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.
Slashdot isn't just Slash. It's an instance of the Slash engine. The Open Source mantra doesn't _directly_ apply to it.
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The Internet is the Suppository of All Knowledge. You get it in the end.
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've long been frustrated by the lack of information in meta-moderation.If something is moderated "redundant", I have no idea if it actually is or not because the context is missing.Ditto "overrated"; I do not have the score information on the page to make an independent evaluation.I almost always avoid rating those.
Keep refining the system, it'll get there someday.
--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
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. --
Well surely they can help a pull down list that has say 5 standard reasons and choose from it when they poke around the story. Dont think it it too big to ask for.
Manifest
... "follow me" the wise man said, but he walked behind
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?
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!
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.
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.
The whole "fair"/"unfair" bit doesn't work well for me, either. I'd rather M2 work more like this:
For example, suppose this comment got moderated up once as Insightful and at about the same time got moderated up as Informative, and later got moderated down as Overrated. Depending on your frame of mind, all three moderations could be reasonable. (Particularly if the two +1 moderations came in about the same time such that the moderators didn't see each others' moderation. There's an inherent race condition in moderation.)
Now suppose the M2 page for three different users show one of the three moderations. In each case, it will show the state of the comment at the time it was moderated. (Perhaps, in light of the race condition mentioned above, it might be better to show the state of the comment as the original Moderator saw it, since two people could moderate the same comment without seeing each others' moderations ahead of time. It's not their fault that they don't automatically reload everytime someone else moderates.)
User 1 might see the first moderation's starting state: "Score: 1". User 1 gets to pick how they would've moderated the comment, given that starting score. Assuming they pick a moderation that's at least somewhat aligned with the Insightful moderation that was actually applied, then the moderator's karma goes up. If User 1 picks a moderation which may be in the same +1 direction, but is semantically completely different (eg. Funny), then the effect is neutral. If User 1 picks a moderation which is semantically similar but in the opposite direction (say, "Troll"), then the effect is negative on the original moderator's Karma.
User 2 gets a similar scenario, only they're presented with the post showing an original score of 2. (Or, if the race condition I mentioned above existed at the time of moderation, it too would show "Score: 1".) Their input is compared against the second moderation that was performed, namely, the Informative moderation. The same process applies.
In any case, User 3 would get to see the "Score: 3" initial state, and their response would be compared to the Overrated moderation.
The end result is that the semantic issue is abstracted away. Rob and company can decide how sematically similar Informative is to Insightful when they build the correlation lookup table. I'm guessing all "positive" moderations are at least loosely tied together (maybe a factor of 0.25, if you treat identical moderations as 1.0 correlation -- slightly more for the generic "Underrated" vs. the rest). Same story for the negatives.
At any rate, I don't think it ever really makes sense to call a particular act of moderation "fair" or "unfair", particularly if the comment was being marked with a postive moderation. Perhaps "appropriate" or "inappropriate" work better than "fair" or "unfair."
--JoePS. I'm going to CC: this to CmdrTaco as well.
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Program Intellivision!
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 :)
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.
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
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.
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.