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.

Comments

A /. readers lament...

[negative_karma]

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!

Login Problems

[CowboyNeal]

A lot of people are reporting login problems. Please quit your browser, delete your /. cookies and restart. This /should/ help fix it. Email me if you're still having problems.

Thanks.

"Slashdot User Forum"

[Shaheen]

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.

Class Action Lawsuit Names Slashdot.org

[the eric conspiracy]

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 -----

Moderating without posting

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes!

[KMSelf]

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.

Please Email Me Instead of Posting

[CowboyNeal]

First of all, thanks for all the bug reports. They've been a huge help.

But please, please email me rather than or addition to posting here. Then I can filter the reports to the correct places.

Thanks again.

My 2000000 cents on /. !

[Manifest]

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 !

I have always wanted to suggest some things on /. system . Had I think mailed Rob but as busy as he is, no replies so far :)

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 /. 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.

(*)I have occassionally submitted some stories to /. 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 .. !

(*)Donno if this has ever been done on /. 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.

Now that was the first 2 cents of my 2000000 cents series. Rest if suggestion 3 is implemented.

Mystic

Possible feature - Thread Shuffling?

[Wooly-Mammoth]

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

Re:Possible feature - Thread Shuffling?

[Uruk]

I've noticed this too - similarly, when moderators come in, a lot of the time the posts that are good tend to go very, very high, and some posts that are OK but maybe not 5 material stay stuck at 1 or 2 because they're somewhat buried. It's not the moderators fault, just that whatever pops up first is what gets the most attention. Some moderators do look at things from the bottom up though so they can get a chance to see some things that maybe haven't gotten a fair shake, or a look at all.

The problem is compounded when you have an article that gets 500 replies because I don't think slashdot automagically inserts more moderation points into the pool on days where the comments are bit more nuts than other days.

Whenever I think about "Wow, wouldn't that be cool" on slashdot, I find that in 5 minutes you can come up with a list of 40 things that would be really cool. And if everybody did this, then Rob's todo list in plain text would be bigger than the whole slashdot database. :)

So sometimes I think there's a dilemma - suggesting features is a slippery slope, but at the same time, other features would be neat too. Whatever the case, Rob has already done a pretty fucking amazing job on slashdot, and either way I'm going to be happy.

Re:Karma, moderation and meta-discussion

[Mr Z]

The whole "fair"/"unfair" bit doesn't work well for me, either. I'd rather M2 work more like this:

• Include the parent and response posts via a link named "context". That way you could open a link in a new browser window to find the context of the post.
• Rather than ask "fair" or "unfair", ask the meta-moderator how they would have moderated the comment given the conditions that were present at the time it was moderated the first time, and use that to judge the moderation that was actually performed. The slash-engine could then use the M2 totals to judge the quality of the M1 moderations that were performed.

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."

--Joe

PS. I'm going to CC: this to CmdrTaco as well.

--

Reject List

[gad_zuki!]

What would put a big pizza-eating grin on my face would be a page showing the stories you've rejected and the link/message associated with it.

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.

Preserve Preferences on Archived Stories?

[Kozz]

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.