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.
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.
Thanks.
Yes, Virginia, there really is a CowboyNeal.
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
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?
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 -----
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.
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?
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?
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
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. --
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?
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.
--
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.
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.