Thing is, if we had perfect spelling and never posted a duplicate story, someone wouuld find something else to complain about. I guess its just easier to not care and ignore the bitching and moaning.
I always find it funny when I post a story, come back 90 minutes later, and see a couple dozen complaints that the story was a duplicate, but nobody bothered to email me and let me know. After I post a story, I have to go read 50 emails, or delete 50 submissions, I don't usually have time to read the 300-400 comments in the story;)
And just 'cuz we're alerted to typos doesn't mean we're gonna fix 'em either. If alerted, I often fix typos and grammar errors in stories. But I don't knock myself out about it unless its really a bad one.... We've got 10s of thousands of stories, it's hard to care that we missed an apostrophe;)
Well, if you wanted to post AC, you could simply wait the N minutes until the Mysterious Future becomes the obvious present, and post anonymously to your hearts little content;)
I guess what it comes down to is that of course moderation isn't going to be infallible. But what you're describing is beyond the scope of what I intend moderation to be. I want moderation to allow users to make a decision about how many comments they read, and have a reasonable shot at reading the N best comments in a story. I think moderation accomplishes that pretty well. Certainly not 100% of the time. But I think most of the comments moderated to 3-5 are better then the comments moderated down once or twice. Which is all I ever wanted the system to do.
We have exactly this in the code, and I assure you that much more than 20 minutes went into it. You're welcome to improve the code and submit patches... perhaps then you will understand exactly how complex of a problem you are truly describing;)
Am I being defensive? Heh. Maybe. It's just that I've been running Slashdot for five and a half years now, and trying to keep it as an Informal news source. It was built on that very premise, and I think that this is core to its appeal. But there's always a group of people who think that this is a flaw. I just don't get it! I'm not trying to be defensive, I just feel like people who make these arguments want to fundamentally change the very nature of what Slashdot is!
All of that is possible. Seems a little confusing to me tho. if a story was rejected,
I'd be more likely to just throw the baby out with the bathwater tho. Screw it. Thats the risk of posting to early stories. Besides, the number of stories deleted during that window would number very few. Probably just a few a week at most
Not a bad idea for the comments stuff. I worry a bit about scrapers tho. Also its worth noting that the users.pl page does list mod type on each comment. A user with 5 comments listed at Score:-1, Troll is a good tipoff).
Ads Disabled on Index is also the default setting. Index==Homepage.
Your second 3 points are exactly correct.
As for a form to alert admins, it'd be better if you just emailed the story poster. Thats true of dupes, typos, broken URLs, or flat out mistakes. Maybe someday we'll do a form
or something, but we don't wanna make it TOO easy;)
This is a sort of advertising holy grail. I'd love to see it happen, but you're not talking about a trivial change. You're talking about a fundamental shift in how advertising works on the internet. I'm not saying "No", but I am saying its a little beyond the scope of this story, and it stretches far beyond just Slashdot;)
Currently we have no plans to give subscribers more mod points. All we've noted is that there is a corrolation between moderation fairness and subscriptions. What we do with that information is totally up in the air. Frankly I don't see us doing much of anything with it any time soon.
Fortunately, I can disagree with you about the definition of "Professional". Do you believe South Park should have higher animation quality? Slashdot was designed to be an informal place. Should I change that just because there is a subscription system? I think not. Slashdot is what it is, and I think that the informal tone is part of its appeal. Part of that means you actively see mistakes happen. You may not like it, but I think that its just part of Slashdot. I work very hard to keep Slashdot consistent with my original purpose for the site.
As for a magazien or DVD, I'd love to see it happen. I just don't have the time and expertise and budget for it. If everyone clicks on banners and subscribes, then I bet such a thing would be quite possible.
Very likely. And also there is probably a pretty clear relationship between karma and subscribing. Thats why we've never really pushed forward on doing something substantial with this information. It's currently in the "That sure is Interesting" bin, and maybe someday we'll do something with it.
I could definitely see that sort of an option. It didn't make sense when we originally designed the system, but we always considered it. So maybe yeah, someday. More likely if someone submitted a patch.
We've considered such a ranking system, but we're scared that we'd create another video game out of Slashdot. We learned a lot from Karma. Users started abusing it. It's purpose was misunderstood and turned into a game. It was never really intended to be that- it was intended to be a useful indicator for moderation eligibility and a few extra features on the site.
So any ranking system we designed would have to be very carefully thought through.
Frankly I don't really care to see "The top 100 Slashdot Users" on a web page... but I would like to see "The Top 100 Recent Good Journals" or something. Personally I'm not interested in "Is Joe Good or Bad" I'm interested in "Is this journal a good journal and worth my time to read". Hence the threshold based moderation system. Someday perhaps we'll apply that to journals somehow.
I don't honestly remember. I believe what we did was graphed the number of dollars a person had paid us, against their M2 fairness score. The end result was a quite linear chart- the more you paid, the more "Fair" you were. Not totally surprising I guess.
It clearly is not a coincidence, but doing anything with that information would have to be thought through very carefully- just because a user is statistically more likely to moderate fair, that doesn't mean that they aren't going to. Every now and then you see someone who uses all 5 mod points to mod up 1st posts. They get killed in M2, but it does happen. We have to keep that sort of thing in mind when we make any changes in moderation.
My point is that some people take Slashdot far to seriously. We're not CNN. We're just some guys trying to post a fun mix of the serious, the important, and the entertaining. Lighten up!
Thats an interesting idea. Not sure exactly how to implement it tho.
Submit a feature request or patch to our SourceForge project page. All
this is open source after all. (What, the Curtains?)
As I explained in the story, we're not taking anything away. Stories will be posted exactly the same as they were before. Subscribers will just have a chance to see most of them a little early. I usually post my stories 20-30 minutes before they go live. Subscribers will get to see them then, everyone else will wait until the scheduled release day.
And we've owned the Slashdot.com domain name for years. We started being a commercial entity about 6 months after we started... when the bandwidth stopped being free!
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think calling our advertisers "Morons" is really in our best interests... but our ad folks do try to keep alt tags right.
I always find it funny when I post a story, come back 90 minutes later, and see a couple dozen complaints that the story was a duplicate, but nobody bothered to email me and let me know. After I post a story, I have to go read 50 emails, or delete 50 submissions, I don't usually have time to read the 300-400 comments in the story ;)
And just 'cuz we're alerted to typos doesn't mean we're gonna fix 'em either. If alerted, I often fix typos and grammar errors in stories. But I don't knock myself out about it unless its really a bad one.... We've got 10s of thousands of stories, it's hard to care that we missed an apostrophe ;)
Well, if you wanted to post AC, you could simply wait the N minutes until the Mysterious Future becomes the obvious present, and post anonymously to your hearts little content ;)
If we do allow posting during the window, there will be a way to assign filters to those posts, so you will be able to easily ignore them.
I guess what it comes down to is that of course moderation isn't going to be infallible. But what you're describing is beyond the scope of what I intend moderation to be. I want moderation to allow users to make a decision about how many comments they read, and have a reasonable shot at reading the N best comments in a story. I think moderation accomplishes that pretty well. Certainly not 100% of the time. But I think most of the comments moderated to 3-5 are better then the comments moderated down once or twice. Which is all I ever wanted the system to do.
If we enabled posting for subscribers during TMF window, we definitely would not allow AC posting.
I think that the solution to this problem is more complex then just widening the scoring range. Read my journal for occasional thoughts on this issue.
I guess we're just going to have to disagree ;)
We have exactly this in the code, and I assure you that much more than 20 minutes went into it. You're welcome to improve the code and submit patches... perhaps then you will understand exactly how complex of a problem you are truly describing ;)
Am I being defensive? Heh. Maybe. It's just that I've been running Slashdot for five and a half years now, and trying to keep it as an Informal news source. It was built on that very premise, and I think that this is core to its appeal. But there's always a group of people who think that this is a flaw. I just don't get it! I'm not trying to be defensive, I just feel like people who make these arguments want to fundamentally change the very nature of what Slashdot is!
We definitely would not allow AC during that window.
Your second 3 points are exactly correct.
As for a form to alert admins, it'd be better if you just emailed the story poster. Thats true of dupes, typos, broken URLs, or flat out mistakes. Maybe someday we'll do a form or something, but we don't wanna make it TOO easy ;)
This is a sort of advertising holy grail. I'd love to see it happen, but you're not talking about a trivial change. You're talking about a fundamental shift in how advertising works on the internet. I'm not saying "No", but I am saying its a little beyond the scope of this story, and it stretches far beyond just Slashdot ;)
Currently we have no plans to give subscribers more mod points. All we've noted is that there is a corrolation between moderation fairness and subscriptions. What we do with that information is totally up in the air. Frankly I don't see us doing much of anything with it any time soon.
As for a magazien or DVD, I'd love to see it happen. I just don't have the time and expertise and budget for it. If everyone clicks on banners and subscribes, then I bet such a thing would be quite possible.
Very likely. And also there is probably a pretty clear relationship between karma and subscribing. Thats why we've never really pushed forward on doing something substantial with this information. It's currently in the "That sure is Interesting" bin, and maybe someday we'll do something with it.
I could definitely see that sort of an option. It didn't make sense when we originally designed the system, but we always considered it. So maybe yeah, someday. More likely if someone submitted a patch.
So any ranking system we designed would have to be very carefully thought through. Frankly I don't really care to see "The top 100 Slashdot Users" on a web page... but I would like to see "The Top 100 Recent Good Journals" or something. Personally I'm not interested in "Is Joe Good or Bad" I'm interested in "Is this journal a good journal and worth my time to read". Hence the threshold based moderation system. Someday perhaps we'll apply that to journals somehow.
It clearly is not a coincidence, but doing anything with that information would have to be thought through very carefully- just because a user is statistically more likely to moderate fair, that doesn't mean that they aren't going to. Every now and then you see someone who uses all 5 mod points to mod up 1st posts. They get killed in M2, but it does happen. We have to keep that sort of thing in mind when we make any changes in moderation.
My point is that some people take Slashdot far to seriously. We're not CNN. We're just some guys trying to post a fun mix of the serious, the important, and the entertaining. Lighten up!
According to our logs... 10s of thousands of readers ;)
Thats an interesting idea. Not sure exactly how to implement it tho. Submit a feature request or patch to our SourceForge project page. All this is open source after all. (What, the Curtains?)
And we've owned the Slashdot.com domain name for years. We started being a commercial entity about 6 months after we started... when the bandwidth stopped being free!
Pesky grammar. I probably should have just asked that people are polite. Thats really all I care about ;)