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