As I've mentioned elsewhere, you're talking about two different things. The reason it wasn't posted immediately is that we were attempting to put together a more detailed post. The reason I posted it now is because people started getting upset and suspicious about our lack of a post.
You're conflating two different things -- the story wasn't posted immediately because we were trying to gather more information. When I got in this morning, I saw people were upset that it was taking so long, so I posted it.
When we select submissions, voting is the strongest factor, but it's not the only factor — timeliness, factual accuracy, the degree to which it's on topic, and several other characteristics all factor in. For example, we're not going to run a 5-year-old story no matter how many people vote it up, nor a story about the sun being made of freshly chopped artichoke hearts.
There's been no pressure influencing my treatment of this topic.
The main reason it's late is that we were asking some questions internally so we could put up a more informative post on the subject. Unfortunately, communications were slow. Rather than keep waiting, I just put up the most accurate submission we've gotten. (May or may not still happen later.)
Ooyala is the company that does the video hosting/serving for our video content. A whois chain is probably less helpful than going to their public website.
Taboola is the company that handles the sponsored links between stories and comment sections.
How's the latency with Rocksmith? I've been meaning to give it a try, but I worry that trying to play anything fast will be an echo-y, syncopated mess.
I'm not on the Engineering team, and I don't make the Product decisions, so I'm not going to be of much help with your question. Yeah, the bugs probably should have been squashed before releasing -- but the Slashdot codebase is a monster, and there are a lot of edges cases among users, so I think the release is done under the "perfect is the enemy of good" philosophy. Hopefully we can get the big ones taken care of in short order.
We revamped the header and removed the left hand nav links, which hardly anybody used. There were some bugs introduced in the process, which we're now taking care of. That's pretty much it!
Actually, we scrubbed the beta. Announcement here. The only thing we've rolled out today was a new header and removing the left-hand nav links, which hardly anybody used.
He actually worked for us before the acquisition, writing for our standalone news site experiment. Later on he moved over to Dice and took over their news site instead.
He goes through the same submission process as everyone else, and we don't post everything he submits. I suppose you could call that "interaction" if you want, but we don't discuss submissions with him any more than we do with the average user.
Well, as I mentioned in another comment, the problem was more than a simple hardware failure. From what I've heard hanging around the siteops team while they worked on it yesterday, the problem wasn't something easily foreseeable -- complex software has complex interactions, sometimes. Keep in mind that we're also sharing infrastructure with SourceForge and a few smaller sites.
Also, for as much abuse as Dice takes around here, they really had nothing to do with the outage. Our infrastructure and teams were in place before the acquisition, and Dice doesn't interfere with that. It's our own fault. As for valuing Slashdot -- the degree to which they've left us alone to operate the site suggests to me they value it just fine. They haven't done anything to the editorial side -- I go months at a time without even interacting with anybody from Dice. People who dislike the Beta like to blame Dice for it, but it isn't as if we didn't do site redesigns before the acquisition.
Maybe -- we try to avoid navel-gazing, but if the failure case is unique enough we might post something. That said, we wouldn't run anything until the siteops team finishes their postmortem, and I wanted to head off the speculation so it didn't send multiple stories into offtopic-land.
It was more than a simple hardware failure -- the storage cluster software we're using had an issue that not only obliterated data, but managed to take out its own repair functionality. We had proper backups and didn't lose anything permanently, but had to do a much larger rebuild than if a disk just died.
Before anyone asks: we've been down most of the day because of a disk that went bad in one of our servers. Siteops has been slaving away at a lengthy restore, and hopefully we're good to go, now. Apologies!
Slashdot Mirror
As I've mentioned elsewhere, you're talking about two different things. The reason it wasn't posted immediately is that we were attempting to put together a more detailed post. The reason I posted it now is because people started getting upset and suspicious about our lack of a post.
You're conflating two different things -- the story wasn't posted immediately because we were trying to gather more information. When I got in this morning, I saw people were upset that it was taking so long, so I posted it.
When we select submissions, voting is the strongest factor, but it's not the only factor — timeliness, factual accuracy, the degree to which it's on topic, and several other characteristics all factor in. For example, we're not going to run a 5-year-old story no matter how many people vote it up, nor a story about the sun being made of freshly chopped artichoke hearts.
There's been no pressure influencing my treatment of this topic.
The main reason it's late is that we were asking some questions internally so we could put up a more informative post on the subject. Unfortunately, communications were slow. Rather than keep waiting, I just put up the most accurate submission we've gotten. (May or may not still happen later.)
Ooyala is the company that does the video hosting/serving for our video content. A whois chain is probably less helpful than going to their public website.
Taboola is the company that handles the sponsored links between stories and comment sections.
How's the latency with Rocksmith? I've been meaning to give it a try, but I worry that trying to play anything fast will be an echo-y, syncopated mess.
Most testing is done in the four major desktop browsers. We support those going back three versions.
The bug will be fixed, and the feature will be back.
I'm not on the Engineering team, and I don't make the Product decisions, so I'm not going to be of much help with your question. Yeah, the bugs probably should have been squashed before releasing -- but the Slashdot codebase is a monster, and there are a lot of edges cases among users, so I think the release is done under the "perfect is the enemy of good" philosophy. Hopefully we can get the big ones taken care of in short order.
The Older/Newer buttons broke with our code push yesterday (tags went into hiding, too). Hope to have them fixed soon. My apologies!
Until it's fixed, you can use this link as a workaround if you'd like: http://slashdot.org/?page=1
If you increment the page number, you can see successive pages.
We revamped the header and removed the left hand nav links, which hardly anybody used. There were some bugs introduced in the process, which we're now taking care of. That's pretty much it!
Actually, we scrubbed the beta. Announcement here. The only thing we've rolled out today was a new header and removing the left-hand nav links, which hardly anybody used.
Just a bug. Will be back.
Would you mind sending a screenshot to feedback@slashdot.org? I can't seem to reproduce this one. Thanks!
Nope, not intentional -- will probably do another code push tomorrow to fix that and a few other small problems. Thanks!
Thanks for the report. We'll try to get that fixed ASAP.
Announcement here.
He actually worked for us before the acquisition, writing for our standalone news site experiment. Later on he moved over to Dice and took over their news site instead.
He goes through the same submission process as everyone else, and we don't post everything he submits. I suppose you could call that "interaction" if you want, but we don't discuss submissions with him any more than we do with the average user.
Should be updating correctly now. Thanks for the note.
Well, as I mentioned in another comment, the problem was more than a simple hardware failure. From what I've heard hanging around the siteops team while they worked on it yesterday, the problem wasn't something easily foreseeable -- complex software has complex interactions, sometimes. Keep in mind that we're also sharing infrastructure with SourceForge and a few smaller sites.
Also, for as much abuse as Dice takes around here, they really had nothing to do with the outage. Our infrastructure and teams were in place before the acquisition, and Dice doesn't interfere with that. It's our own fault. As for valuing Slashdot -- the degree to which they've left us alone to operate the site suggests to me they value it just fine. They haven't done anything to the editorial side -- I go months at a time without even interacting with anybody from Dice. People who dislike the Beta like to blame Dice for it, but it isn't as if we didn't do site redesigns before the acquisition.
Waste not, want not.
Maybe -- we try to avoid navel-gazing, but if the failure case is unique enough we might post something. That said, we wouldn't run anything until the siteops team finishes their postmortem, and I wanted to head off the speculation so it didn't send multiple stories into offtopic-land.
It was more than a simple hardware failure -- the storage cluster software we're using had an issue that not only obliterated data, but managed to take out its own repair functionality. We had proper backups and didn't lose anything permanently, but had to do a much larger rebuild than if a disk just died.
We were in read-only mode most of the day while some server issues were fixed. Sorry for the downtime!
Before anyone asks: we've been down most of the day because of a disk that went bad in one of our servers. Siteops has been slaving away at a lengthy restore, and hopefully we're good to go, now. Apologies!