I try to reply to every email sent to me provided it is polite.
Again, we're not really trying to discuss issues with the moderation system in this discussion. We have big plans for the system. We can talk about them some other day.
Again I think you guys don't quite understand the work required to actually run the site. I can run the site, or talk about running it. Like right now, I am participating in this forum. I am replying to whatever comment I can. But I can NOT do this, AND get the next story ready to go. I had to hand that task off to the guy scheduled to take the afternoon shift. Reading 500 comments and replying to 20 of them takes more time than I have before the next story goes live.
I try to reply to my email. But there are only so many hours in the day.
I think you just convinced me to add nofollow's to the submittor URLs. The fact that the link is not directly related to the subject matter means that it should not be indexed by search engines as related. This is precisely what nofollow is for.
This is specifically one of the things that we want the new mod system to deal with. Essentially this is a matter of self-tagging your comment. "I know i am offtopic. I'll say so". It would go a long ways towards keeping articles on topic.
I absolutely agree- and this illustrates a problem with our meta moderation system, and something that the redesigned system needs to address. The fact is that some comments make it to Score:5 and really are very offtopic. The system needs to account for that somehow. We have some ideas, but we'll talk about that some other week.
ok maybe i'm just taking the bait, but I thought that this is exactly what I'm trying to do today. Admittedly I used practical examples to illustrate problems, but I don't think that was my point.
I always favor the submission that comes in first. If I have 5 stories that are the same subject matter, I open all 5 in tabs, and start at the first tab. If it's really bad i'll check #2 or #3. But if it's even close to workable, i'll choose it.
I prefer to reward speed over quality. But that is a flexible rule too.
As for the rest of your comments, I disagree with Slashdot going downhill. I disagree with editors trying or not. But I will say that what we post is largely reflected by what is submitted by our readers. IF you don't like the stories we select, post more technical ones. As it stands, I can't post what isn't in my bin.
If you submitted a patch that figured out a way to programmatically do that, i'd consider it. But I can't think of a good way to do it. One story might have a thousand URLs.
We can disagree on what makes a good Slashdot article- some people hate gramatical errors or spelling problems. Those don't bug me. For me, improper hyper linking bugs the snot out of me. I choose to edit what I think matters the most. You are welcome to disagreee. But I think Slashdot ought to remain an informal place. And just like how people in the pub might not use gramatically perfect language, people on-line don't spell correctly. I choose to leave things more "Real". It's a stylistic choice.
This has long been a struggle for us. It's addressed extensively in the FAQ as well, but the fact is that it's not a scalable solution. There are 2 issues, the first is simply finding the time to give 300-400 people some piece of feedback every day. Even if it takes 15 seconds to write a sentance, you still have to multiply that by 300-400, and suddenly your day just got a couple hours shorter.
The other part is that feedback begets feedback. If i tell you why, you might disagree. That ends up in my inbox, and suddenly i have to spend 5 minutes writing an email explaining why. Again, suddenly my day gets a couple hours shorter.
Thats one thing that a lot of people just don't understand- when you're talking about ANYTHING regarding submissions, you have to multiply it by hundreds. Anything regarding comments, by thousands. And anything regarding page views, multiply by millions. Manpower and CPU are harder to deal with when you start dealing with those numbers, and we are limited on both.
Again, that works in theory. But not always in reality.
the spammer is taking the time to submit many many stories to get a couple through. The casual user only submits the stories he thinks are the absolute best.
If we pick a dozen stories, they can't all be the very very best. There will be a few stories that are not as great... and a few that simply are of interest to a different subset of readers. A spammer submits 10... if i order them in terms of how widely known they are, #1-5 are submitted 20-30 times... but number 8 and 9 maybe only once or twice.
But again, i don't want to throw out a good submission just because a user doesn't have appropriate karma/history/low UID.
Good stories are good stories if they come from you, me, or a guy who's return link is a pyramid scheme. My top priority has always been selecting the right story.
You are over simplifying tho. If part of my job is to get a dozen stories out there that i think are worth reading, sometimes that might mean EXACTLY re-writing a submission. Rejecting and waiting for another is not always feasible.
that system works fine with the top half dozen stories of the day. The one on ZD-Net AND CNN AND news.com AND msnbc.com. It doesn't work for anything more obscure.
We don't accept paid advertisements on the main page, period. The reason you don't see a warning is because we don't do it.
That said, anybody who works for a company that wants a piece of hardware reviewed, just contact us. We'll review almost any gizmo or gadget. I don't think thats a paid advertisement- we just like to play with gadgets and talk about them. It's almost like that is a core part of Slashdot... talking about technology, hardware, gadgets etc.
This constantly frusterates me. Other sites do this, and we pay the price. We aren't paid for our story selection process. Never have been. But the accusations always exist. I know i should ignore it, but it still gets old.
I try to strip out extra URLs. For example if the story is on Foobaz.com, i'd prefer to link the article directly and not the article AND foobaz.com each with their own hyperlinks. Likewise some users include wikipedia entries and such. I try to strip those out. Ideally the only URL in the story is the attribution and the link the story is about. Occasionally there are a few links that add substantially, or might directly link things like pictures. Those I like to keep. But if it doesn't add substantially to the topic of the article, my preferencei s to yank it.
I truthfully don't pay a lot of attention to the name of the submittor. I've deleted like 80 submissions this morning. I couldn't tell you the names of any of them. The only reason I "Care" who a submittor is, is that there are a few users who, if i post their story, I get hatemail from readers who angrily complain that I am obviously under their employ!
Usually what that means is that the story was posted, but then disabled for some reason. Perhaps we found it was a dupe, or we found another, better URL later.
I often do try to follow links back to the source article. If meta links don't add anything, i'd prefer to remove them and link more directly to the original. If however the meta link adds substantial commentary, i like to read them.
our search system needs a lot of work. Our source code is available. If someone wants to help, that'd be swell. We have some dupe checking code. It works often. Of course it can never be perfect. We post a lot of stories about certain topics, some closely related. It gets messy fast.
And the no-follow thing seems awkward to me. It seems like i'm saying a URL is not worthy. Now sometimes that may be true, but where's the line? If i think your vanity domain name is ugly because I hate orange? Scammers? It's a spectrum of judgement that i'd prefer to simply ignore.
I've made that point here as well. It's actually the unique names that get noticed. Roland and BB both have very memorable names, so it makes them all the more obvious when they have multiple stories accepted.
but i think that a user who gets a story posted to Slashdot should be allowed to link their vanity domain. Thats part of the fun!
This is a very perfect example of an arms race situation. I can't ban them, they'll get a new account/ip etc. And it doesn't solve the problem. We deal with the same issues in the moderation system.
This is something i'm going to try to do more often. It's just very hard to keep up with it. I'm going to have to spend many hours replying to comments and e-mails based on this story. The Slashdot system is good for many many discussions, but not so strong when *I* am the single lynchpin, and people use email, IM, and the forum system to communicate with me.
Slashdot Mirror
Again, we're not really trying to discuss issues with the moderation system in this discussion. We have big plans for the system. We can talk about them some other day.
Conspiracy Solves: BB Submits his stories mostly in the evening. SM posts most of his stories in the evening.
I try to reply to my email. But there are only so many hours in the day.
I think we'll have that up soon.
This is specifically one of the things that we want the new mod system to deal with. Essentially this is a matter of self-tagging your comment. "I know i am offtopic. I'll say so". It would go a long ways towards keeping articles on topic.
I absolutely agree- and this illustrates a problem with our meta moderation system, and something that the redesigned system needs to address. The fact is that some comments make it to Score:5 and really are very offtopic. The system needs to account for that somehow. We have some ideas, but we'll talk about that some other week.
I think that was part of my purpose in posting this article.
ok maybe i'm just taking the bait, but I thought that this is exactly what I'm trying to do today. Admittedly I used practical examples to illustrate problems, but I don't think that was my point.
I prefer to reward speed over quality. But that is a flexible rule too.
As for the rest of your comments, I disagree with Slashdot going downhill. I disagree with editors trying or not. But I will say that what we post is largely reflected by what is submitted by our readers. IF you don't like the stories we select, post more technical ones. As it stands, I can't post what isn't in my bin.
If you submitted a patch that figured out a way to programmatically do that, i'd consider it. But I can't think of a good way to do it. One story might have a thousand URLs.
We can disagree on what makes a good Slashdot article- some people hate gramatical errors or spelling problems. Those don't bug me. For me, improper hyper linking bugs the snot out of me. I choose to edit what I think matters the most. You are welcome to disagreee. But I think Slashdot ought to remain an informal place. And just like how people in the pub might not use gramatically perfect language, people on-line don't spell correctly. I choose to leave things more "Real". It's a stylistic choice.
The other part is that feedback begets feedback. If i tell you why, you might disagree. That ends up in my inbox, and suddenly i have to spend 5 minutes writing an email explaining why. Again, suddenly my day gets a couple hours shorter.
Thats one thing that a lot of people just don't understand- when you're talking about ANYTHING regarding submissions, you have to multiply it by hundreds. Anything regarding comments, by thousands. And anything regarding page views, multiply by millions. Manpower and CPU are harder to deal with when you start dealing with those numbers, and we are limited on both.
the spammer is taking the time to submit many many stories to get a couple through. The casual user only submits the stories he thinks are the absolute best. If we pick a dozen stories, they can't all be the very very best. There will be a few stories that are not as great... and a few that simply are of interest to a different subset of readers. A spammer submits 10... if i order them in terms of how widely known they are, #1-5 are submitted 20-30 times... but number 8 and 9 maybe only once or twice.
Good stories are good stories if they come from you, me, or a guy who's return link is a pyramid scheme. My top priority has always been selecting the right story.
that system works fine with the top half dozen stories of the day. The one on ZD-Net AND CNN AND news.com AND msnbc.com. It doesn't work for anything more obscure.
That said, anybody who works for a company that wants a piece of hardware reviewed, just contact us. We'll review almost any gizmo or gadget. I don't think thats a paid advertisement- we just like to play with gadgets and talk about them. It's almost like that is a core part of Slashdot... talking about technology, hardware, gadgets etc.
This constantly frusterates me. Other sites do this, and we pay the price. We aren't paid for our story selection process. Never have been. But the accusations always exist. I know i should ignore it, but it still gets old.
I try to strip out extra URLs. For example if the story is on Foobaz.com, i'd prefer to link the article directly and not the article AND foobaz.com each with their own hyperlinks. Likewise some users include wikipedia entries and such. I try to strip those out. Ideally the only URL in the story is the attribution and the link the story is about. Occasionally there are a few links that add substantially, or might directly link things like pictures. Those I like to keep. But if it doesn't add substantially to the topic of the article, my preferencei s to yank it.
I truthfully don't pay a lot of attention to the name of the submittor. I've deleted like 80 submissions this morning. I couldn't tell you the names of any of them. The only reason I "Care" who a submittor is, is that there are a few users who, if i post their story, I get hatemail from readers who angrily complain that I am obviously under their employ!
Usually what that means is that the story was posted, but then disabled for some reason. Perhaps we found it was a dupe, or we found another, better URL later.
our search system needs a lot of work. Our source code is available. If someone wants to help, that'd be swell. We have some dupe checking code. It works often. Of course it can never be perfect. We post a lot of stories about certain topics, some closely related. It gets messy fast.
And the no-follow thing seems awkward to me. It seems like i'm saying a URL is not worthy. Now sometimes that may be true, but where's the line? If i think your vanity domain name is ugly because I hate orange? Scammers? It's a spectrum of judgement that i'd prefer to simply ignore.
but i think that a user who gets a story posted to Slashdot should be allowed to link their vanity domain. Thats part of the fun!
No, not obviously. Often stories are NOT submitted by a non-problem user. If it was, there wouldn't be a problem ;)
I would guess that most days a couple dozen stories are postable. We probably get 30-50 submissions to those stories that are usable.
This is a very perfect example of an arms race situation. I can't ban them, they'll get a new account/ip etc. And it doesn't solve the problem. We deal with the same issues in the moderation system.
This is something i'm going to try to do more often. It's just very hard to keep up with it. I'm going to have to spend many hours replying to comments and e-mails based on this story. The Slashdot system is good for many many discussions, but not so strong when *I* am the single lynchpin, and people use email, IM, and the forum system to communicate with me.