One more thing about SEO spammers with/. accounts. They can create journals to host their crap, and there is NO way to report or moderate a rogue journal article. (you could report posts associated with one, but not the main article)
Infiniscroll is and has always been a bad idea. Try The Daily WTF forums for an example of infiniscroll taken to a completely stupid extreme. (along with a bunch of other stupidity courtesy of Jeff Atwood and Discourse)
Maybe you have some cookies blocked? I've never had to log back in on any browser after the first time.
The multiple 3LDs is because back in the old days (early 2Ks?) it was the trendy way to sort site content by category, and made it possible to have a slightly different "skin" for each category. I'm not sure it's bad enough to bother getting rid of it though.
Nerval's Lobster is (AFAIK) a bot. It was originally used for cross-posting articles from the boneheaded idea that was called "SlashBI", then became used for cross-posting crap from Dice. It's still yet another example of why we need to be able to filter by submitter.
This. I also don't like the variable article insertion position which is trying (badly) to emulate what the sidebar is for... stuff that appears regardless of what articles you see on the front page.
I only see 5 and 15 these days, never 10. I don't know why. I'll usually get 5 once, then 15 multiple times, each a week or two apart, then nothing for a couple of months.
Back when slashcode.com was still being updated with the current/. code (hey whipslash, want to bring that back?), I remember that there was something called "tokens", which accumulated as you did "good" things. I think one of the things was to read a lot of articles, but I can see how posting is useful too. Get enough tokens and you'll get mod points. Don't use up all your mod points within the 3-day window and you are likely to get mod points again soon.
Says the AC. Nope, AC default at 0 has been a day-one foundation of the/. moderation score system for multiple reasons. As the other guy said, "stand behind your comment". Also, we don't need "lazy ACs" who are posting AC simply because they can't be bothered to log in, and part of the reason for the 0 score is to encourage people to create an account.
Moderation score is not a popularity contest. It is to give an indication of the quality of the post. Moderation done by users is done based on the content of the post, but the source of the post is also important. A post where the user is willing to attach his name to it is inherently of higher quality than an AC post.
Whatever you do, don't ignore how the karma system works, or why we can no longer see our karma scores. The basic idea is as you get moderated up, you get a KP to record that you made a useful post. Likewise, when you get moderated down, you lose a KP because you made a bad post. If you post AC, there is nobody to change the karma points of, which is one reason why AC posts are inherently of lower quality.
If your karma goes negative, you default to 0 instead of 1, and if it goes really negative (like -10, which I think is the low cap), you start at -1. You can redeem yourself by making only good posts after that. Eventually, someone with mod points will see your good post at 0 or -1, mod you up, and you will become less negative.
If your karma goes above a certain level (I think it's +10), you can select to start at 2, which is sort of like modding yourself up. However this is really only supposed to be appropriate if you have something worth that extra point and technically it is not unreasonable to get an Overrated mod when you just leave it turned on. Karma caps at 50, and because seeing the actual number made "karma whoring" too easy, the actual number was hidden. "Gamification" just encourages bad posts, and a visible karma score was unintended gamification. (This also why increasing the maximum post mod past 5 is a bad idea, it just encourages gamification.)
Suggestion: make that +1 (post at score 2) checkbox visible when you make a post (and update its default checked state when a post is submitted). Back in the real old days of/. when we didn't have inline posting, it was always on the message posting page (I think). I just gave up years ago and left it turned off because it was too inconvenient to change for a single post.
I stopped when it became "here's a random post, +/-". What does that mean, + "I agree" / - "I don't", or + "I think its good post" / - "I think it's a bad post"? The metamoderation FAQ still mentioned the agree/disagree buttons for YEARS. Bring back old-school metamoderation!
While the mobile site may not be perfect, being forced to use it simply because of user agent strings is a problem. If you are using a tablet with a large enough screen, you should have the option of using the regular site. Mobile web browsers are a lot better now than they were ten years ago.
Allow us to filter by article submitter name. Old timers will surely remember the name "John Katz". Fortunately for our sanity, he always posted as an editor, and we were able to filter articles by the editor who posted them. (I can't find that filter option any more though.) Really, I'm only half joking, but it would be nice if we could do something about the clutter of all the articles by the usual suspects, like mdsolar, theodp, StartsWithABang, etc. I would be happy enough if you could set a config option to a list of names, and it folded the front page view of the article to just the title bar and who was the submitter. (People with no account can go stuff themselves, by the way. "Lazy ACs" are not good for/.)
Also keep in mind that that AC may not actually have the best interests of/. in mind. The moderation system may not be perfect, but it works pretty good. You should be putting more weight on user IDs below, say, 500000 or so, because they've been here the longest and have "seen some shit". And maybe we even know how the system works, because we remember when karma points were still visible.
The moderation system here is archaic and broken, and needs an overhaul. Instead of helping to promote discussion, it is often used as a tool of censorship and oppression.
See that? It's an "everybody knows" premise with no support for the premise. From a poster who is anonymous for no good reason. I would like to see some actual examples where the moderation system is causing problems that can be addressed individually, not this "everybody knows" crap that goes along with a call to change everything. Basically, I see a lot of "solutions" here to problems that haven't been demonstrated to exist. So all these other places are "horribly broken", but/. isn't, but yet we still need to make all these changes to fix it? Um, right. "Historic opportunity"? That's more bullshit than you'll find at a cattle yard.
One fundamental part of/.'s moderation system that AC seems to ignore is that you don't get mod points all the time. You have to read a lot of threads, then you get (IIRC) "tokens" on your account that eventually become mod points. If you don't use them all, you are likely to have mod points come back a few times over the next weeks, then eventually the run of mod points ends. This ensures that the same people aren't moderating all the time. There are no "gangs of abusive mods". All the places that have problems let anybody mod anything at any time, and look what that did for Digg. It just causes circle jerks and group think. Now there's some "gangs of abusive mods"! Also, negative mods only go to -1, there is no need to go stoning people into the dirt.
Higher mod score cap? Seriously, what for? The point of moderation score is to allow a reader to choose a filter level, with base comments having a separate filter level from replies. It's not meant to be a reward for the poster (and note that each non-Funny up mod adds a karma point to the poster, thus affecting the balance of the whole system), it's meant so that readers can have a way to sort out the good and bad posts. Anything that reaches 5 would probably be good enough to attract however many points you set the cap to, which only drains the moderation system of points that could be put somewhere else.
Eliminate down-mods? Well aren't we just a big hugbox here! Down mods are specifically to let abusive posts be controlled without needing active moderators who are/. employees. Abusive as in spam, and we do get SEO spam every now and then, and those gibberish junk posts. Speaking of that, when I hit the little report flag next to a message and type "SEO spam", does anyone ever even read that or do anything about the post or its poster?
Non-anonymous mods? Yeah, so the crazies who get modded down all the time can know who to send flames to? It's not like we can mod any time we feel like it. I find it amusing that he wants mods to be non-anonymous, but it's okay for him to post anything he wants anonymously!
Metamod system? It's not working well because the UI is confusing, thus discouraging its use. How about fixing it from "+/-" back to "agree/disagree", or at least explicitly document at the top of the metamod page what + and - mean? As it is now, the +/- is ambiguous, does it mean the post should have been moderated up or down or that you agree or disagree? That's why I quit messing with it years ago. Someone was way too in love with their little +/- buttons from the firehose.
Posting delays? Never been an issue for me as a logged-in user. If you write a message long enough to be worthwhile, you aren't going
Ah, that butterfly ballot. I still believe it happened because they were driving busloads of senior citizens (or illiterates, or both) to the polls, and told them something like "vote for the second guy or your Social Security will get cut off!" Pat Buchanan was the second hole, but not the second candidate, which was Gore. The people loading them on the bus wouldn't have known that a butterfly ballot was in use at that specific polling place, thus interleaving the order of candidates.
Go look up pictures of it, it was pretty clear where you had to punch if you knew the name of the candidate and could read, but not if you were simply told to vote for the "second" candidate by someone who had not actually seen that a butterfly ballot was being used. And the double-punches? They could happen if you could read, but quickly went for the "second" hole, then made a second "oops" punch after reading. So it was a bad user interface, but it was more bad in the context of making "dirty tricks" fail.
Ironically, punch card voting systems were in the process of being removed, but due to lack of money, low-income districts, the very ones that had the most problems with them, were more likely to still have them. (see "The Low-Income Paradox") So it is entirely plausible that the party workers involved in sending busloads of people to the polls might not ever have seen a butterfly ballot themselves!
Actually, the RNC also has superdelegates, mostly actual members of the RNC, around 120 or so. It's just that the DNC has an absurd number of them. Approximately 20% of DNC delegates in 2008 were superdelegates, making about 820 votes.
Clearly you don't know much about *NIX if you think that a file system is the same as a hard drive, and that every directory entry in the file system corresponds to a collection of sectors on a hard drive. Besides, this isn't even about deleting everything from the / root, you can also start at the root of the fake file system that represents the EFI variables, or do a recursive delete that goes backwards like "rm -rf.*".
Or it may simply be unable to access things like USB and SATA controllers when their configuration is erased. If it was unable to access keyboard and display, you wouldn't be able to use a "reset to defaults" option, if there even was one.
Don't forget the scripts that fail to work with path names that contain blanks! This is quite common on OS X when the hard drive is usually named "Macintosh HD". (I renamed mine to "Macintosh-HD" just in case.)
Their newer modems are a lot better than the old stuff. NVG598 and Pace 5268AC are good modems and the latter does 802.11ac. I've heard that the NVG510 really is crap, and if you are still running anything by TwoWire with UVerse, I can't even feel your pain. See if you can get them to replace yours a new one.
I was at an anime convention downtown (Austin) that weekend, staying at the hotel, and that morning I had decided to drive home to check up on the internets. When I got home, it was already on Drudge. I realized that while I had been driving up I-35, it had broken up in roughly the direction I was facing while driving. I also lost a digital camera memory card that weekend, fucking SmartMedia flash cards, and fuck Olympus for using them (in their smaller xD version) way after SD was the clear winner. It was a 128MB and that was new enough that it was a two-chip card, so probably wires inside broke from flexing the (rather thin) card.
Roughly the same for me (heard it from someone that I thought of as being a bullshitter), except that I was in the main computer terminals room, and had to go down to the student center in the basement to see it on TV.
Slashdot Mirror
One more thing about SEO spammers with /. accounts. They can create journals to host their crap, and there is NO way to report or moderate a rogue journal article. (you could report posts associated with one, but not the main article)
Infiniscroll is and has always been a bad idea. Try The Daily WTF forums for an example of infiniscroll taken to a completely stupid extreme. (along with a bunch of other stupidity courtesy of Jeff Atwood and Discourse)
Maybe you have some cookies blocked? I've never had to log back in on any browser after the first time.
The multiple 3LDs is because back in the old days (early 2Ks?) it was the trendy way to sort site content by category, and made it possible to have a slightly different "skin" for each category. I'm not sure it's bad enough to bother getting rid of it though.
Fire Nerval's Lobster.
Nerval's Lobster is (AFAIK) a bot. It was originally used for cross-posting articles from the boneheaded idea that was called "SlashBI", then became used for cross-posting crap from Dice. It's still yet another example of why we need to be able to filter by submitter.
This. I also don't like the variable article insertion position which is trying (badly) to emulate what the sidebar is for... stuff that appears regardless of what articles you see on the front page.
I only see 5 and 15 these days, never 10. I don't know why. I'll usually get 5 once, then 15 multiple times, each a week or two apart, then nothing for a couple of months.
Back when slashcode.com was still being updated with the current /. code (hey whipslash, want to bring that back?), I remember that there was something called "tokens", which accumulated as you did "good" things. I think one of the things was to read a lot of articles, but I can see how posting is useful too. Get enough tokens and you'll get mod points. Don't use up all your mod points within the 3-day window and you are likely to get mod points again soon.
Says the AC. Nope, AC default at 0 has been a day-one foundation of the /. moderation score system for multiple reasons. As the other guy said, "stand behind your comment". Also, we don't need "lazy ACs" who are posting AC simply because they can't be bothered to log in, and part of the reason for the 0 score is to encourage people to create an account.
Moderation score is not a popularity contest. It is to give an indication of the quality of the post. Moderation done by users is done based on the content of the post, but the source of the post is also important. A post where the user is willing to attach his name to it is inherently of higher quality than an AC post.
Whatever you do, don't ignore how the karma system works, or why we can no longer see our karma scores. The basic idea is as you get moderated up, you get a KP to record that you made a useful post. Likewise, when you get moderated down, you lose a KP because you made a bad post. If you post AC, there is nobody to change the karma points of, which is one reason why AC posts are inherently of lower quality.
If your karma goes negative, you default to 0 instead of 1, and if it goes really negative (like -10, which I think is the low cap), you start at -1. You can redeem yourself by making only good posts after that. Eventually, someone with mod points will see your good post at 0 or -1, mod you up, and you will become less negative.
If your karma goes above a certain level (I think it's +10), you can select to start at 2, which is sort of like modding yourself up. However this is really only supposed to be appropriate if you have something worth that extra point and technically it is not unreasonable to get an Overrated mod when you just leave it turned on. Karma caps at 50, and because seeing the actual number made "karma whoring" too easy, the actual number was hidden. "Gamification" just encourages bad posts, and a visible karma score was unintended gamification. (This also why increasing the maximum post mod past 5 is a bad idea, it just encourages gamification.)
Suggestion: make that +1 (post at score 2) checkbox visible when you make a post (and update its default checked state when a post is submitted). Back in the real old days of /. when we didn't have inline posting, it was always on the message posting page (I think). I just gave up years ago and left it turned off because it was too inconvenient to change for a single post.
It is not clear to me what you mean by "feed". Do you mean RSS?
Listen to this guy. And if you (whipslash) don't know who he is, stop right now and find out. I'm going to make you look it up.
I stopped when it became "here's a random post, +/-". What does that mean, + "I agree" / - "I don't", or + "I think its good post" / - "I think it's a bad post"? The metamoderation FAQ still mentioned the agree/disagree buttons for YEARS. Bring back old-school metamoderation!
Add a kill files option for article contents too. This should include the submitter name.
While the mobile site may not be perfect, being forced to use it simply because of user agent strings is a problem. If you are using a tablet with a large enough screen, you should have the option of using the regular site. Mobile web browsers are a lot better now than they were ten years ago.
Allow us to filter by article submitter name. Old timers will surely remember the name "John Katz". Fortunately for our sanity, he always posted as an editor, and we were able to filter articles by the editor who posted them. (I can't find that filter option any more though.) Really, I'm only half joking, but it would be nice if we could do something about the clutter of all the articles by the usual suspects, like mdsolar, theodp, StartsWithABang, etc. I would be happy enough if you could set a config option to a list of names, and it folded the front page view of the article to just the title bar and who was the submitter. (People with no account can go stuff themselves, by the way. "Lazy ACs" are not good for /.)
Be careful about what you ask for and how you filter. You would have filtered your own message by simply discussing that which you don't like.
Also keep in mind that that AC may not actually have the best interests of /. in mind. The moderation system may not be perfect, but it works pretty good. You should be putting more weight on user IDs below, say, 500000 or so, because they've been here the longest and have "seen some shit". And maybe we even know how the system works, because we remember when karma points were still visible.
The moderation system here is archaic and broken, and needs an overhaul. Instead of helping to promote discussion, it is often used as a tool of censorship and oppression.
See that? It's an "everybody knows" premise with no support for the premise. From a poster who is anonymous for no good reason. I would like to see some actual examples where the moderation system is causing problems that can be addressed individually, not this "everybody knows" crap that goes along with a call to change everything. Basically, I see a lot of "solutions" here to problems that haven't been demonstrated to exist. So all these other places are "horribly broken", but /. isn't, but yet we still need to make all these changes to fix it? Um, right. "Historic opportunity"? That's more bullshit than you'll find at a cattle yard.
One fundamental part of /.'s moderation system that AC seems to ignore is that you don't get mod points all the time. You have to read a lot of threads, then you get (IIRC) "tokens" on your account that eventually become mod points. If you don't use them all, you are likely to have mod points come back a few times over the next weeks, then eventually the run of mod points ends. This ensures that the same people aren't moderating all the time. There are no "gangs of abusive mods". All the places that have problems let anybody mod anything at any time, and look what that did for Digg. It just causes circle jerks and group think. Now there's some "gangs of abusive mods"! Also, negative mods only go to -1, there is no need to go stoning people into the dirt.
Higher mod score cap? Seriously, what for? The point of moderation score is to allow a reader to choose a filter level, with base comments having a separate filter level from replies. It's not meant to be a reward for the poster (and note that each non-Funny up mod adds a karma point to the poster, thus affecting the balance of the whole system), it's meant so that readers can have a way to sort out the good and bad posts. Anything that reaches 5 would probably be good enough to attract however many points you set the cap to, which only drains the moderation system of points that could be put somewhere else.
Eliminate down-mods? Well aren't we just a big hugbox here! Down mods are specifically to let abusive posts be controlled without needing active moderators who are /. employees. Abusive as in spam, and we do get SEO spam every now and then, and those gibberish junk posts. Speaking of that, when I hit the little report flag next to a message and type "SEO spam", does anyone ever even read that or do anything about the post or its poster?
Non-anonymous mods? Yeah, so the crazies who get modded down all the time can know who to send flames to? It's not like we can mod any time we feel like it. I find it amusing that he wants mods to be non-anonymous, but it's okay for him to post anything he wants anonymously!
Metamod system? It's not working well because the UI is confusing, thus discouraging its use. How about fixing it from "+/-" back to "agree/disagree", or at least explicitly document at the top of the metamod page what + and - mean? As it is now, the +/- is ambiguous, does it mean the post should have been moderated up or down or that you agree or disagree? That's why I quit messing with it years ago. Someone was way too in love with their little +/- buttons from the firehose.
Posting delays? Never been an issue for me as a logged-in user. If you write a message long enough to be worthwhile, you aren't going
Ah, that butterfly ballot. I still believe it happened because they were driving busloads of senior citizens (or illiterates, or both) to the polls, and told them something like "vote for the second guy or your Social Security will get cut off!" Pat Buchanan was the second hole, but not the second candidate, which was Gore. The people loading them on the bus wouldn't have known that a butterfly ballot was in use at that specific polling place, thus interleaving the order of candidates.
Go look up pictures of it, it was pretty clear where you had to punch if you knew the name of the candidate and could read, but not if you were simply told to vote for the "second" candidate by someone who had not actually seen that a butterfly ballot was being used. And the double-punches? They could happen if you could read, but quickly went for the "second" hole, then made a second "oops" punch after reading. So it was a bad user interface, but it was more bad in the context of making "dirty tricks" fail.
Ironically, punch card voting systems were in the process of being removed, but due to lack of money, low-income districts, the very ones that had the most problems with them, were more likely to still have them. (see "The Low-Income Paradox") So it is entirely plausible that the party workers involved in sending busloads of people to the polls might not ever have seen a butterfly ballot themselves!
Actually, the RNC also has superdelegates, mostly actual members of the RNC, around 120 or so. It's just that the DNC has an absurd number of them. Approximately 20% of DNC delegates in 2008 were superdelegates, making about 820 votes.
You're surprised that crappy programmers that don't even think about such possibilities are employed to do BIOS work for motherboard companies?
Clearly you don't know much about *NIX if you think that a file system is the same as a hard drive, and that every directory entry in the file system corresponds to a collection of sectors on a hard drive. Besides, this isn't even about deleting everything from the / root, you can also start at the root of the fake file system that represents the EFI variables, or do a recursive delete that goes backwards like "rm -rf .*".
Or it may simply be unable to access things like USB and SATA controllers when their configuration is erased. If it was unable to access keyboard and display, you wouldn't be able to use a "reset to defaults" option, if there even was one.
Don't forget the scripts that fail to work with path names that contain blanks! This is quite common on OS X when the hard drive is usually named "Macintosh HD". (I renamed mine to "Macintosh-HD" just in case.)
Clearly it is time to designate Pluto as a superfund site now that we have found such large quantities of dihydrogen monoxide on it.
Their newer modems are a lot better than the old stuff. NVG598 and Pace 5268AC are good modems and the latter does 802.11ac. I've heard that the NVG510 really is crap, and if you are still running anything by TwoWire with UVerse, I can't even feel your pain. See if you can get them to replace yours a new one.
I was at an anime convention downtown (Austin) that weekend, staying at the hotel, and that morning I had decided to drive home to check up on the internets. When I got home, it was already on Drudge. I realized that while I had been driving up I-35, it had broken up in roughly the direction I was facing while driving. I also lost a digital camera memory card that weekend, fucking SmartMedia flash cards, and fuck Olympus for using them (in their smaller xD version) way after SD was the clear winner. It was a 128MB and that was new enough that it was a two-chip card, so probably wires inside broke from flexing the (rather thin) card.
Roughly the same for me (heard it from someone that I thought of as being a bullshitter), except that I was in the main computer terminals room, and had to go down to the student center in the basement to see it on TV.