Well, anything flaimbait, is also off-topic, unless the story itself was flaimbait. The actual moderation that moderators use (besides funny) is mostly of no use.
Not a political website"? Are you kidding? People discuss politics on this site almost as much as technology.
That is not true. Except with specific issues technology always beats out political issues. People talk about politics out of passion, and then only few do. Techology is what Slashdot is all about. I challenge you to show me that not to be the case.
How often do you visit Slashdot, anyway?
Except for about a 45 day period, I have been reading slashdot for over five years (before they had ids) and usually check more than once a day.
How often have we had political discussions in response to non-political Disney-related posts...
That is a bad case for two reasons.
One, when dealing with companies, (similar to Microsoft) people unite to call them evil, as opposed to countries where there is usually a significant amount of people who disagree. That means that people can get away with saying it without much flaimbaiting, whereas with a country much flaimbait is likely to ensue.
Two, Disney affects everyone here, countries usually do not. So, even if it is flaimbait at least it has some relevance to the majority of readers. As such, large companies that affects many people can be argued as on-topic, where arguing about countries cannot.
Why do accuse me of being "anti-Israel" when all I'm doing is stating facts about the crimes
Because your reply was stated with passion.
And with "country" I mean the government running it
That needs to be stated clearly when talking about it. Most comments about coutries are about the people, not their government.
And at least I was honest: I didn't give any false pretenses about not being biased.
Which is good, but the need to state that proves how off-topic the comment was.:-)
you did it anyway
No, ultimately it is your choice. Trust me, I want to go at it too, but being off-topic and flaimbait, I won't.
Attention, moderators: when
No, they should continue to mod them down, as well as most political discussions. They are almost always flaimbait.
Why is it that almost everytime anybody posts something negative or even critical of Israel (with regards to their occupation of Palestinian land) it is moderated down, mostly for being "off-topic"?
Because it is flaimbait.
In fact, your first sentence is only an excuse for you to post your personal feelings which have absolutely no relevance to the topic at hand. Unless, of course, because of your political hatred of Israel, you want other to hate her too, and then not go. But, I believe *that* is flaimbait, and thus it should be modded down.
What was Slashdot affraid of?
Slashdot is not a political website. Something inherently political such as "Palestinians" has no place here. However, if they get something on the internet and are awaiting authority in the computer arena, political issues *might* be relevant, such as a discussion of their country-code, if posted as a story, the political issues would be on-topic.
To tell you the truth, I want to respond to the political aspects of your comments. They are filled with untruths that I believe can easily be corrected. I've already deleted more than one comment in this reply because it was offtopic. But if you want the replies, you'll need to start a Journal Entry for that, so as not to be off-topic.
When there's a cricket match in Zimbabwe (for the sake of argument, I know, this is Slashdot), would we moderate down any posts mentioning Mugabe?
If it would cause a bunch of responses, all particular to the politrical aspects of it, then yes, it would be modded down.
So, please start a JE on this, and do not post political issues to an other discussion.
I must say that I loved DN3D. I always felt that what Doom was to other games, DN3D was to Doom. And then there was "The Abyss" between it and "Stadium" you had a couple really fine Deathmatch levels.
I never actually liked Quake. The fact that your aim had to be so perfect never got to me. In Quake finding people was easy. Blasting them was harder. In Duke *finding* people was hard (such as in the Abyss) but blasting them was easy, unless they ran away, or were completely healthy with all the armor.
I also always found DN3D to be fun. Where Quake was too serious. It's great to see they released the code. I am certain it'll be ported, and a number of people will enjoy playing it.
The best part is, that we all know that when traveling faster than the speed of light in a vacuum, you can go backwards in time. So, by traveling slower than light in a vacuum, you move *forward* in time. As if this very moment I am traveling forward!
If you'd like to try this, get an airtight container and step inside. Remove all the air (such as with a match). Then start moving slowly. When you get out of the jar you sill notice that it is *later* then when you got in!
Oh please. You call *this* a discovery? I can't take this lightly. The University of Freedonia they've proven that it can actually travel at -5 mph in a vaccuum, though it reality it'll be much slower.
Whatever. I simply don't trust Nvidia. Even if they mean well today, they'll be well mean tomorrow. I don't understand why anyone still uses them. They lost my trust, and I'll never go back.
How exactly does one hold on to frictionless bearings?
Actually, after discovering the real answer of the square-root of two, I filtered some dirt, dehydrated some water, and desalinated some salt. I then came up with *exactly* what would hold them.
I was waiting for a better time to break this, but I guess now is good to. I have made a groundbreaking discovery in prime numbers.
No prime numbers can be divided by any number that falls inbetween the number one and the number itself! And, even more exciting, a rule that applies to all prime numbers. All prime numbers can be factored with the number one, but none can be divided by zero.
I hope none of you had anything important "encrypted" with PGP. Just stick to padless one-time pads for *real* security.
After I get the National Math Foundation to classify two as an odd number (and it is really odd considering it's the only even prime number) I'll have my third discovery that all prime numbers are odd validated.
I'd love to post more, but I really must get back to working on my perpetual motion machine. I was so close before, but recently I seem to have lost my bearings. Once I'm done I'll be heralded as the greatest man in the realm of science friction.
And if they become self-aware who said they'd even care?
That's a human trait. Why bother forcing it on others? Especially computer who are supposed to think logcally. Imagine a person that naturally thinks before he does (I), makes logic-judgments instead of value-judgements (T), and because he has no reason does not bother to come to conclusions (P). You'd have the ISTP/INTP. The space cadets, who are geniuses when then feel like it, or can get totally involved in anything. But, with no urges of their own, they'd likely be doing nothing unless told to. And then, they either always listen to what their told or always don't listen, dpending on their programming.
The future of AI will have nothing to do with personality. It will have to do with understanding the humans that they work with. Computers are all power and no brains, not little brains, *no* brains. They haven't the slightest idea of what to do, and don't care, simply because they do not have the capacity to. Humans to tell them what to do if they are to do anything, and even then, in excruciating details since they do not understand anything except the most basic instructions, which are nothing other than stimulus response.
The obvious next step in computers is making the computer pre-process a command from a human to define its own programs. And that is where the future of AI will (hopefully) go.
I am interested in the very same thing. With part of the website donated to solutions, and then list the various languages or libraries that it is done in. There is no reason to reinvent the wheel in every language gone to. And then there's the issue of taking the time to making it better.
I am very much interested in such a project should anyone want to work on it.
CNN extremely liberal? CNN's war coverage is hardly distinguishable from Fox News.
Yes, the war is not as political as it is national. So, there may not be that much difference in the war arena. Go back to politics, and it is rather obvious.
You write that "everyone things that they are centrist"; if so, clearly you are quite politically conservative.
Pretty much. That is obvious.
It's not possible to be unbiased, so good journalists try to bend over backwards to counter their own bias.
Which IMNSHO, is a horrible idea. They need someone *else* to counter them.
Thus many reporters who vote Democrat were near-savage in their criticism of Bill Clinton.
Hardly. There were few to no reports about most of what he did. Most likely, they were just to the right of you.
But Fox News doesn't operate that way; they are open about their bias and don't try to correct for it.
Fox news was made to counter CNN's clout in the area, where there was only liberal media. So, they are certainly anything but liberal. But they are somewhat balanced, in certain areas. I think Fox news can be split into three main areas. News, Opinion, and talk. The Opinions they have are clearly conservative. As an example, Shawn Hannity's radio show. But when it comes to talk, they have Hannity and Colmes. Many people may not consider Colmes liberal enough, but that is not the point. There's also that round table at the end of the week that has a nice bunch. Those are balanced in that they have talk from more than one side. Finally, there's news. I find it for the most part to be unbiased. Maybe except for what they choose to report. But, again, there is no real way not to have bias there.
I don't have a problem with bias, as long as it's known. Everyone knows CNN is extremely liberal. Everyone knows Fox News is somewhat conservative. Everyone knows that the BBC is pro-Arab and anti-Israel. Everyone knows that Al-Jazeera is mostly pro-arab. Who cares? If anyone reported just facts, there'd either be too many bits or no connection in between them. In order to get a true picture of what is going on, you need to read news that is slanted both ways. So, read an American news source, and then ArabicNews.com (a pretty decent source). Or check Lebanon's Daily Star for a very much Arab slant.
Everyone thinks that they are centrist. Anyone right of them is conservative, anyone left is them is liberal. Which is why Democrats call ABC, CBS, and NBC conservative news, yet Republicans call it liberal news. That is also why Democrats call Fox News very conservative, and Republicans call in "balanced". But, the important thing is, that both the liberal and the conservative views are legitamite.
In order to report the news in an unbiased way, the reporter must assume an equidistant view from both warring sides. That is, the American news sources would have to decide that the Americans aren't automatically correct, and that Saddam isn't automatically wrong. The problem is, that legitamizes Saddam's regime to many who think it illegitamite, and that is something many do not want to do.
Also, unbiased reporting (which I don't believe exists) wouldn't have the flare behind it the biased reporting does. When people are biased, they go the extra mile to prove their point. I like that a lot better.
This thing is going to sit on the PCI bus? Isn't that where your hard drives are too? On older computers which use a 33 megahertz bus, that would mean that compression @33 megahertz would keep the hard drive receiving any of the data. So, it would actually have to compress it at a slower rate, unless it caches everything. Even at 133 megahertz, the hard drive would be both reading and writing when trying to compress, and that's without worrying about swap.
Good documentation is written for good software. If the software is just thrown together, so will the documentation. Problem is, when documentation is thrown together, it is somewhat useless.
If the software has a clear outline, the documentation can have a clear outline. And so on. However, in many projects, there is no clear outline. Just a kernel, and where people want to take it. Thus, documentation ends up being limited to how to use this particular feature.
Take Linux for example. It is a bunch of tools thrown together. As such, each individual tool has its own manpage. Though, there is hardly a man page on the entire system. Linux tools are written on a "gee, I need this" basis, and so, without a clear outline, there is no decent overall documentation.
With software in the open source world being written on an "I need this" basis, and then these people donate their time and energy, and outline may very well only hinder the process. But the documnetation aspect will suffer therefore.
In windows, I double-click setup.exe, a GUI pops up, I pick the destination and off it goes.
There are differences
Windows gives more choices.
Windows does not have a central installer.
Most Windows programmers have no clue as to how to install.
The Installer is a third party program.
Windows gives more choices.
On a general install, Windows asks where to install it. Linux follows the Un*x scheme, and gives less choices here. Also, Windows programs are larger, and thus there is an issue with how much to install. Linux binaries tend to be small, and so they don't bother asking what type of install you'd like. Finally, Windows programs are usually closed source, so the package lives in it's own little world. Linux packages are generally open source, so when you install a package it is an implicit choice. For example, a front-end, or a data file. With Windows it all comes in one closed package. In Linux they are separate packages, so choosing the package is like choosing an option.
Windows does not have a central installer.
This has changed recently with the Windows Installer, but it is not yet that popular. And things such as the uninstaller rely on the person programming the installer to put the appropriate entry in the registry. If they don't (and many don't) Windows has no record of it. So, each program needs it's own installation program. Linux distributions have a general installer that keeps track of everything. You can always query the rpm database, or the dpkg cache.
Most Windows programmers have no clue as to how to install.
You'll have to trust me on this one. I worked for WISE, and dealt with emails during my 20 or so months there. I proably answered over 20,000 emails (At least 30 emails a day), so I have a general idea. I also dealt with the newsgroups, but those people were vastly more intelligent.
For example. One person has a CD with tens of thousands of images on it and wanted to know how to make a link to *each* image in the start menu. I warned the person how this will use up much space due to the cluster size, and they agreed to only make links to the folders. Then there was that guy who after making temp files (instead of letting the installer handle them with its own feature) would delete *everything* in the temp folder. I warned him a well. Oh, there were people who just assumed the Windows directory was "C:\Windows", and people who hadn't the slightest idea as to what the registry was. And, these people wrote programs to run on your computer!
Thus, luckily, there are install programs for Windows. Linux does not seem to have these issues.
The Installer is a third party program.
Usually InstallShield, WISE, or InstallVise. So, they need frills to sell. In Linux all people care about is a packager, so it just isn't needed.
To sum that all up, Windows is a more complicated install with space issues, that relies on programs to register themselves, with programs written by the cluless, and has third part programs charge for their use to install. Thus, there are installers, with choices, and frills.
Linux has no need for all of that. So, the GUI just was never required.
Why can't someone make something like this for Linux? It would greatly improve the user experience in Linux. Instead of having to edit 8 configuration files, the user just starts setup.sh or something and the setup asks questions.
Those programs that need editing, give you a great many more choices then the Windows programs. Though, many Windows programs have it in their "options" or "preferences", the draw back being that you *require* a GUI to get to those, which makes editing harder, slower, more limited, and not easily distributable to other computers.
This is why I like apt-get - one line setup. But every time I download something that's not part of Debian it turn into a horrible experience I wish I would have never had.
That's what unoffical sources are for, and what/usr/local is for.
You're always welcome to respond in a few days, or next week though.:-)
If M2 doubles, we'll get more accurate M2 because the numbers will slide up... 7 M2s per M1 or even 9.
I was unaware of that. I guess the solution would be to show where we are up to. So on Tuesday, are all of Monday's meta-modded? Or, if not that, what is the quality of the m2, 7 or 9? That's not nearly as good, however.
We probably could rank users or something based on the M2 that they do, but I'm still not sure if thats beneficial or not.
True. I'm mostly concerned about feedback. I'm trying to think what would interest me to m2 again. You showed interest in this, so I am trying to apply the idea to reality.
I don't like the idea of simply forking an entire journal & discussion. It just gets messy. Plus users could get double benefits or punishments for their discussion.
With only five karma points, I wonder. Though, I see the issue.
And I've seen many stupid journal entries that are actually useful because of a couple of intelligent comments.
Fine, but because of that you'd ignore the journals that are good by themselves? You do like to start out small, so why not at first only allow the journals that are inherently good without the comments, and shadow the journal into a story. If that works, you can think about the more complicated step 2.
I just don't care enough to bookmark them or anything;)
Bookmarking journals, with messages when other people respond to them, another one of my Slashdot wishes.:-)
According to Meta Moderation, our fairness is inline with the general population.
That's good to know.
since we've been having problems with robots
Wow. It's amazing. The more famous, the more hated. But why? Eh, oh well.
Yeah, I've posted a lot in the last 3 days, which is why I don't generally do it. I learned long ago that I have to budget my time.
Understood. I do appreciate the responses though. Thanx.
Getting deep into discussions means I don't have time to do other things that are usually more critical.
So is that the reason for subscriptions, so you can hire other people, and then you can spend more time responding....:-) (Yes, that was a joke.) I love a good discussion, and getting deeper into one can be very enjoyable to me.
I believe everyone can see their accepted submissions on their users page.
On the "Submit Story" page, yes, but without a link.
OK, a I checked more recent submission by a user off the front page. I guess it's only recent stories. Older stories don't show up there.
The problem with M2 feedback is that it would likely be depressing. I don't think users would necessarily be *encouraged* when they see that they just M2'd 10 times, and there are 10,000 remaining M2s in the system;)
Yeah, but when a few hours later come and the number has gone down, it would be good. Or of course, the opposite could be used. A meter going up showing how many m2s have been done. Although more complicated, having both might help.
Though, since people can only m2 ten or twenty daily (is the number correct?) there is little felt anyway. And when someone is all charged up to actually do something significant, there is no avenue for that. Though, I assume you guys tested out the correct m2 number and decided that 10 works and more doesn't.
And as for total M2s, we actually have that value internally, but I'm hesitant to post it because, like karma, it might be turned into a game.
And if it is a game, how could it be abused? I thought that when people went for karma, they went for good karma, and thus posted well. Although some people went for negative karma as well. If only the negative is the issue, you could even uncap karma and only show numbers when it is high enough, say the top five percent. I would think gaming that system has good results, since going bad only remove the indicator.
With total m2s shows, wouldn't that get more people to m2? Maybe match it with how many m2s were congruent with everyone else's m2 on that comment? Then, only show a number when it is high.
I hadn't thought about 'Shadowing' a journal into a story for a journals section. Thats not a bad idea, except that I suspect that many journals will become "Good" only by reading the comments posted.
I hadn't though about making a journal entry good because of it's comments. Should that really be worried about? Hmm.. That's a good point to ponder.
So the shadow sorta penalizes the comment posters.
Unless, you fork it with the current comments. Of course, you can get complicated about options of posted in one posting into the other as well, but a straight out fork might be best.
Plus it means that a general user would essentially be seeing something different then the author who 'Approved' the story in the first place.
Only if the comments matter. When only the journal matters, this is not an issue. If it is, maybe the comments that "made" it could be posted as an adendum in the story itself?
I guess I haven't bought into the comment-makes-the-journal yet. Any examples? I'm not denying it, I just don't seem familiar enough with the issue to fully understand what you are mentioning.
As for what I do, I delete submissions, read email, keep track of who's doing what, manage bugs in teh source forge project page, delete more submissions, read our anti robot reports,
*phew* breathe.....
moderate,
I guess that you get mote than five points?:-) I've heard the complaints of slashdot editors mod-bombing people. Never knew what to believe.
decide policy,
You do that on a daily basis? The changes here are only significant once in a while. How could this be a daily activity?
and hopefully when all of that is done, try to design new functionality for the site,
I know about that. Although, when I worked, it required knowing who was asking, because different people override others, and it just gets complicated. Being your own decision maker must be fun in at least this one coveted respect.
keep track of scheduling to make sure someone is always on the site.
I had been under the impression that you all managed the site simultaneously. Thanx for the heads up.
I'm a manager you see- a PHB.
But the real question is do you *enjoy* that?:-)
Truth be told there's very little time for that. I spent 2 full work days posting comments,
OK, I checked, and saw your posts (which seemingly were not barred by the two-minute inbetween posts limit) and saw 29 on Thursday, and 24 on Friday. Wow! I only made it near that once in my recollection, two days in a row would take the wind out of me (though exhhilirate me as well:-)
You also have your "one" submitted story on the bottom. I never noticed that before. Is that for editors only, or is it an option? And thanx for allowing to see are very old comments (even if not before '99). Those are really interesting!
and replying to email realted to the TMF plum.
I can only imagine. Though, hopefully you use the keyboard and not the mouse. I have practice in both, and replying to email by keyboard is *much* faster.
Thank god we don't do that every week.
Truth be told, the less you do here, the better I feel. I like the old and despise the new, with the exception of a few wants. So, I do agree with that sentiment, but for other reasons.
Thanx for the detailed reply. I really appreciate it.
Quick question. You familiar with the MBTI? If so, what's your type? I'm guessing ENTJ.
M2 Feedback I just don't know what information would be helpful. Maybe some general stats.... like 14,000 comments pending M2? Thing is that M2 uses 5-7 'votes' on each M1, so "Done" takes awhile;)
I can't say how other people take it, but I'm mostly concerned with knowing that it helped. So, say, every few hours a meter would show how much more needs to be done, would be nice. It doesn't need to show how many comments needs meta-modding, just how many meta-mods are needed at that time, to break even. (And if you can figure how to get ahead on meta-mods... (Yes, that is a joke, I'm not *that* stupid.))
As an added frill, a total amount of meta-mod on the user's page would be nice. But that is useless and a bragging point, but a frill nonetheless.
Some of the most obnoxious trolls on Slashdot have good karma.
I was unaware of that. Hmm.. how do they do that? I guess they store it up or something.
I'd rather make such an indicator more transparent. Perhaps a factor of reads, posts, moderation, and karma.
You mean reads and posts from different logged in users?
If you just want to go based on reads and comments, I'd go a step further and see what the user's average Journal to comment ratio is. If the user generally gets a few comments, it's a more likely journal as a candidate. Though, the more I think about it the more complicated that seems. So, I'm not sure reads and posts should matter all that much. Besides, that would negate the chances of those who change the default "Comments Enabled".
We'd likely still have some thin level of editor approval for cool journals to be approved by authors, and also, accepted journals would also become uneditable by the author.
Maybe you could shadow, or at least fork the journal into a story? This lets the writer keep his ownership, yet allows it to act as a normal story as well.
We have to be careful to not allow someone to get their journal accepted, and then replace the text with *##(*%#@*$@(#*&
Ooh. Taco used naughty words. I'm gonna tell Hemos on you...:-P
As for what we're busy with, Krow is busy with slash functionality specific to other OSDN sites besides Slashdot. Pudge is working on anti robot measures, Cowboyneal has a few bugs to fix, Jamie is working on all sorts of subscriber related functions. You can usually get a good idea of what we're working on by checking out the SourceForge project page. Anything with a high priority assigned to someone is usually being worked on. We always have "Secret" stuff that you guys can't see (like stuff related to denial of service attacks, robots, trolling, security etc etc) but you can often see with a quick glance of the 'Bugs' page and the 'Features' page what stuff is on the TODO list.
Thanx for the info. That was very interesting.... Hmm... but what do *you* do? (When not answering various comments.)
(Though, it would be interesting to know what you get in an average day. (Over a year ago when I still a job....) I used to come in, read slashdot, check email, answer any immediate things or schedule requests, check who's logged in to the db, remember what I did yesterday and continue, or something like that. Though every once in a while something had to be handled right away. While I was asking before I began to wonder if your days are predictable or not. If you guys work normal hours (I'd assume not) or things of that sort. That'd probably be interesting. Only because after reading the site for a few years, you tend to wonder about such things.)
Anyway, I signed up to slashcode-develepment and slashcode-general and to get the digest of each. I'll see how it goes.
M2 Feedback Yeah I guess I hadn't really thought so much about that. Someone should submit a feature request asking for more M2 feedback. I bet we could provide some nice charts or something in response to M2 so users could see where we were at at some point in time. Those charts wouldn't be real time or anything, but it would at least let people know where we're at.
That would be great. Real time isn't truly needed, just the basic idea to know, "I helped that!"
I do plan on signing up on the slashcode mailing list just after I finish this comment. I'll try to see what's going on, and then make the feature request, if noone else does.
Journals a "Cool" journal gets promoted, so the posting restrictions would have to change. I wouldn't want that to happen to my nice private little journal, so that would have to be an option.
Correct. It would have to be an option of, "Allow Journal in Public Pool (Note: If accepted, this would allow comment regardless of you current setting.) Either that, or shadow the journal so there are two instances of it, one public, one private.
Plus we'd have to make sure that users can moderate their own journal. We could use other factors as well (number of logged in users who visited the journal? number of posts? Number of up moderations?) but each of those can be gamed with a robot or something, so there's more to it then that.
I'm for a different system where those with higher karma can vote higher, but slashdot doesn't seen intent on that. So, I'd simply say that next to the Add Friend button, there's a "Vote for Public Pool" or something. Possibly limiting it to logged in users, and each person only getting a few votes per week. Ultimately, a slashdot editor has to choose which journals make it. Basically, the voting should make the job easier for the editor, by filtering out the less popular journals. Then, from a pool, an editor can accept or reject a journal for whatever the reason.
This could even be implemented in stages. That is, implement a vote system for journals, and have a ranking page, but no more.
As I said before, this is a complex problem that I would love to see solved, but don't really have the time to design the solution, and slahsteam doesn't have much time to code it...
Need I ask what you guys are busy with?:-) I don't think that's a fair question, but if you should ever be interested in answering, I'd love to know what goes on in an average slashdot day for a slashdot editor. Perhaps one of you has a journal on that already?
wrt to meta moderation, there is a link to see context.
I guess I must have been skimming too much to pay that much attention to it.
We break even on M2 most of the time, but some days we run short...
Maybe it would help it people would see a percentage? Like a cue, "this much more to go...." So it actually feels like a contribution. Just a thought. I guess meta-moderating is like a black box for the users, so without useful feedback it's hard to realize what it does. At least that's the way that I seem to take it.
We plan to expand journals at some point,
That would be great. There is so much there to be used, it would be a shame not to.
This is definitely an area where a user could come in and design a system that we could consider: code to rate hot journals somehow in real time to make a journals.slashdot.org that was really useful.
I was thinking that people get mod points to moderate journals, which basically puts them in a queue rated according to their pointage. Then, about once a week, an editor looks at them, sees those that are appropriate and posts them on a Journals page. Alternatively, pointage can be ascribed by how many comments a journal gets.
As long as the readers give out the points, the journals that gain the interest of many will have a chance to be read by more people. This process would obviously start out slowly, but with interest, would rapidly grow. Ideally, journals could rival as the main attraction on Slashdot.
Of course, some things would change, such as who can comment. Currently, you seem to haver your journals set to Friend of Friend. Should one of your journals get voted in, that would have to drop, and anyone would be able to comment there. I guess that means, a user should be able to choose for a journal to not be chooseable.
Slashdot Mirror
If this is something you do alot, get SQL Server DTS. It does this beautifully, as well as many other tasks.
Oh, first it's off-topic, now it's flamebait?
:-)
Well, anything flaimbait, is also off-topic, unless the story itself was flaimbait. The actual moderation that moderators use (besides funny) is mostly of no use.
Not a political website"? Are you kidding? People discuss politics on this site almost as much as technology.
That is not true. Except with specific issues technology always beats out political issues. People talk about politics out of passion, and then only few do. Techology is what Slashdot is all about. I challenge you to show me that not to be the case.
How often do you visit Slashdot, anyway?
Except for about a 45 day period, I have been reading slashdot for over five years (before they had ids) and usually check more than once a day.
How often have we had political discussions in response to non-political Disney-related posts...
That is a bad case for two reasons.
One, when dealing with companies, (similar to Microsoft) people unite to call them evil, as opposed to countries where there is usually a significant amount of people who disagree. That means that people can get away with saying it without much flaimbaiting, whereas with a country much flaimbait is likely to ensue.
Two, Disney affects everyone here, countries usually do not. So, even if it is flaimbait at least it has some relevance to the majority of readers. As such, large companies that affects many people can be argued as on-topic, where arguing about countries cannot.
Why do accuse me of being "anti-Israel" when all I'm doing is stating facts about the crimes
Because your reply was stated with passion.
And with "country" I mean the government running it
That needs to be stated clearly when talking about it. Most comments about coutries are about the people, not their government.
And at least I was honest: I didn't give any false pretenses about not being biased.
Which is good, but the need to state that proves how off-topic the comment was.
you did it anyway
No, ultimately it is your choice. Trust me, I want to go at it too, but being off-topic and flaimbait, I won't.
Attention, moderators: when
No, they should continue to mod them down, as well as most political discussions. They are almost always flaimbait.
Why is it that almost everytime anybody posts something negative or even critical of Israel (with regards to their occupation of Palestinian land) it is moderated down, mostly for being "off-topic"?
Because it is flaimbait.
In fact, your first sentence is only an excuse for you to post your personal feelings which have absolutely no relevance to the topic at hand. Unless, of course, because of your political hatred of Israel, you want other to hate her too, and then not go. But, I believe *that* is flaimbait, and thus it should be modded down.
What was Slashdot affraid of?
Slashdot is not a political website. Something inherently political such as "Palestinians" has no place here. However, if they get something on the internet and are awaiting authority in the computer arena, political issues *might* be relevant, such as a discussion of their country-code, if posted as a story, the political issues would be on-topic.
To tell you the truth, I want to respond to the political aspects of your comments. They are filled with untruths that I believe can easily be corrected. I've already deleted more than one comment in this reply because it was offtopic. But if you want the replies, you'll need to start a Journal Entry for that, so as not to be off-topic.
When there's a cricket match in Zimbabwe (for the sake of argument, I know, this is Slashdot), would we moderate down any posts mentioning Mugabe?
If it would cause a bunch of responses, all particular to the politrical aspects of it, then yes, it would be modded down.
So, please start a JE on this, and do not post political issues to an other discussion.
I must say that I loved DN3D. I always felt that what Doom was to other games, DN3D was to Doom. And then there was "The Abyss" between it and "Stadium" you had a couple really fine Deathmatch levels.
I never actually liked Quake. The fact that your aim had to be so perfect never got to me. In Quake finding people was easy. Blasting them was harder. In Duke *finding* people was hard (such as in the Abyss) but blasting them was easy, unless they ran away, or were completely healthy with all the armor.
I also always found DN3D to be fun. Where Quake was too serious. It's great to see they released the code. I am certain it'll be ported, and a number of people will enjoy playing it.
A dupe of a dupe, about an RFC that's not even that funny.
Oh well, at least there's a spelling mistake to laugh at. "Insecure systems MAY chose to crash," Go figure...
The best part is, that we all know that when traveling faster than the speed of light in a vacuum, you can go backwards in time. So, by traveling slower than light in a vacuum, you move *forward* in time. As if this very moment I am traveling forward!
If you'd like to try this, get an airtight container and step inside. Remove all the air (such as with a match). Then start moving slowly. When you get out of the jar you sill notice that it is *later* then when you got in!
Oh please. You call *this* a discovery? I can't take this lightly. The University of Freedonia they've proven that it can actually travel at -5 mph in a vaccuum, though it reality it'll be much slower.
Whatever. I simply don't trust Nvidia. Even if they mean well today, they'll be well mean tomorrow. I don't understand why anyone still uses them. They lost my trust, and I'll never go back.
How exactly does one hold on to frictionless bearings?
Actually, after discovering the real answer of the square-root of two, I filtered some dirt, dehydrated some water, and desalinated some salt. I then came up with *exactly* what would hold them.
I was waiting for a better time to break this, but I guess now is good to. I have made a groundbreaking discovery in prime numbers.
No prime numbers can be divided by any number that falls inbetween the number one and the number itself! And, even more exciting, a rule that applies to all prime numbers. All prime numbers can be factored with the number one, but none can be divided by zero.
I hope none of you had anything important "encrypted" with PGP. Just stick to padless one-time pads for *real* security.
After I get the National Math Foundation to classify two as an odd number (and it is really odd considering it's the only even prime number) I'll have my third discovery that all prime numbers are odd validated.
I'd love to post more, but I really must get back to working on my perpetual motion machine. I was so close before, but recently I seem to have lost my bearings. Once I'm done I'll be heralded as the greatest man in the realm of science friction.
And if they become self-aware who said they'd even care?
That's a human trait. Why bother forcing it on others? Especially computer who are supposed to think logcally. Imagine a person that naturally thinks before he does (I), makes logic-judgments instead of value-judgements (T), and because he has no reason does not bother to come to conclusions (P). You'd have the ISTP/INTP. The space cadets, who are geniuses when then feel like it, or can get totally involved in anything. But, with no urges of their own, they'd likely be doing nothing unless told to. And then, they either always listen to what their told or always don't listen, dpending on their programming.
The future of AI will have nothing to do with personality. It will have to do with understanding the humans that they work with. Computers are all power and no brains, not little brains, *no* brains. They haven't the slightest idea of what to do, and don't care, simply because they do not have the capacity to. Humans to tell them what to do if they are to do anything, and even then, in excruciating details since they do not understand anything except the most basic instructions, which are nothing other than stimulus response.
The obvious next step in computers is making the computer pre-process a command from a human to define its own programs. And that is where the future of AI will (hopefully) go.
I am interested in the very same thing. With part of the website donated to solutions, and then list the various languages or libraries that it is done in. There is no reason to reinvent the wheel in every language gone to. And then there's the issue of taking the time to making it better.
I am very much interested in such a project should anyone want to work on it.
CNN extremely liberal? CNN's war coverage is hardly distinguishable from Fox News.
Yes, the war is not as political as it is national. So, there may not be that much difference in the war arena. Go back to politics, and it is rather obvious.
You write that "everyone things that they are centrist"; if so, clearly you are quite politically conservative.
Pretty much. That is obvious.
It's not possible to be unbiased, so good journalists try to bend over backwards to counter their own bias.
Which IMNSHO, is a horrible idea. They need someone *else* to counter them.
Thus many reporters who vote Democrat were near-savage in their criticism of Bill Clinton.
Hardly. There were few to no reports about most of what he did. Most likely, they were just to the right of you.
But Fox News doesn't operate that way; they are open about their bias and don't try to correct for it.
Fox news was made to counter CNN's clout in the area, where there was only liberal media. So, they are certainly anything but liberal. But they are somewhat balanced, in certain areas. I think Fox news can be split into three main areas. News, Opinion, and talk. The Opinions they have are clearly conservative. As an example, Shawn Hannity's radio show. But when it comes to talk, they have Hannity and Colmes. Many people may not consider Colmes liberal enough, but that is not the point. There's also that round table at the end of the week that has a nice bunch. Those are balanced in that they have talk from more than one side. Finally, there's news. I find it for the most part to be unbiased. Maybe except for what they choose to report. But, again, there is no real way not to have bias there.
I don't have a problem with bias, as long as it's known. Everyone knows CNN is extremely liberal. Everyone knows Fox News is somewhat conservative. Everyone knows that the BBC is pro-Arab and anti-Israel. Everyone knows that Al-Jazeera is mostly pro-arab. Who cares? If anyone reported just facts, there'd either be too many bits or no connection in between them. In order to get a true picture of what is going on, you need to read news that is slanted both ways. So, read an American news source, and then ArabicNews.com (a pretty decent source). Or check Lebanon's Daily Star for a very much Arab slant.
Everyone thinks that they are centrist. Anyone right of them is conservative, anyone left is them is liberal. Which is why Democrats call ABC, CBS, and NBC conservative news, yet Republicans call it liberal news. That is also why Democrats call Fox News very conservative, and Republicans call in "balanced". But, the important thing is, that both the liberal and the conservative views are legitamite.
In order to report the news in an unbiased way, the reporter must assume an equidistant view from both warring sides. That is, the American news sources would have to decide that the Americans aren't automatically correct, and that Saddam isn't automatically wrong. The problem is, that legitamizes Saddam's regime to many who think it illegitamite, and that is something many do not want to do.
Also, unbiased reporting (which I don't believe exists) wouldn't have the flare behind it the biased reporting does. When people are biased, they go the extra mile to prove their point. I like that a lot better.
Interesting, though I'll wait until I can apt-get it.
I'm still shaking from the horrors of using Ximian as a deb source.
Yeah, I'm stupid. Correct me where I'm wrong.
This thing is going to sit on the PCI bus? Isn't that where your hard drives are too? On older computers which use a 33 megahertz bus, that would mean that compression @33 megahertz would keep the hard drive receiving any of the data. So, it would actually have to compress it at a slower rate, unless it caches everything. Even at 133 megahertz, the hard drive would be both reading and writing when trying to compress, and that's without worrying about swap.
Token ring is stil around, and some newer technologies are based on it.
Hmm.. Not a bad idea. Not bad at all.
I will say that this is the UI specification, but documentation would be good at it too.
Good documentation is written for good software. If the software is just thrown together, so will the documentation. Problem is, when documentation is thrown together, it is somewhat useless.
If the software has a clear outline, the documentation can have a clear outline. And so on. However, in many projects, there is no clear outline. Just a kernel, and where people want to take it. Thus, documentation ends up being limited to how to use this particular feature.
Take Linux for example. It is a bunch of tools thrown together. As such, each individual tool has its own manpage. Though, there is hardly a man page on the entire system. Linux tools are written on a "gee, I need this" basis, and so, without a clear outline, there is no decent overall documentation.
With software in the open source world being written on an "I need this" basis, and then these people donate their time and energy, and outline may very well only hinder the process. But the documnetation aspect will suffer therefore.
There are differences
Windows gives more choices.
On a general install, Windows asks where to install it. Linux follows the Un*x scheme, and gives less choices here. Also, Windows programs are larger, and thus there is an issue with how much to install. Linux binaries tend to be small, and so they don't bother asking what type of install you'd like. Finally, Windows programs are usually closed source, so the package lives in it's own little world. Linux packages are generally open source, so when you install a package it is an implicit choice. For example, a front-end, or a data file. With Windows it all comes in one closed package. In Linux they are separate packages, so choosing the package is like choosing an option.
Windows does not have a central installer.
This has changed recently with the Windows Installer, but it is not yet that popular. And things such as the uninstaller rely on the person programming the installer to put the appropriate entry in the registry. If they don't (and many don't) Windows has no record of it. So, each program needs it's own installation program. Linux distributions have a general installer that keeps track of everything. You can always query the rpm database, or the dpkg cache.
Most Windows programmers have no clue as to how to install.
You'll have to trust me on this one. I worked for WISE, and dealt with emails during my 20 or so months there. I proably answered over 20,000 emails (At least 30 emails a day), so I have a general idea. I also dealt with the newsgroups, but those people were vastly more intelligent.
For example. One person has a CD with tens of thousands of images on it and wanted to know how to make a link to *each* image in the start menu. I warned the person how this will use up much space due to the cluster size, and they agreed to only make links to the folders. Then there was that guy who after making temp files (instead of letting the installer handle them with its own feature) would delete *everything* in the temp folder. I warned him a well. Oh, there were people who just assumed the Windows directory was "C:\Windows", and people who hadn't the slightest idea as to what the registry was. And, these people wrote programs to run on your computer!
Thus, luckily, there are install programs for Windows. Linux does not seem to have these issues.
The Installer is a third party program.
Usually InstallShield, WISE, or InstallVise. So, they need frills to sell. In Linux all people care about is a packager, so it just isn't needed.
To sum that all up, Windows is a more complicated install with space issues, that relies on programs to register themselves, with programs written by the cluless, and has third part programs charge for their use to install. Thus, there are installers, with choices, and frills.
Linux has no need for all of that. So, the GUI just was never required.
Why can't someone make something like this for Linux? It would greatly improve the user experience in Linux. Instead of having to edit 8 configuration files, the user just starts setup.sh or something and the setup asks questions.
Those programs that need editing, give you a great many more choices then the Windows programs. Though, many Windows programs have it in their "options" or "preferences", the draw back being that you *require* a GUI to get to those, which makes editing harder, slower, more limited, and not easily distributable to other computers.
This is why I like apt-get - one line setup. But every time I download something that's not part of Debian it turn into a horrible experience I wish I would have never had.
That's what unoffical sources are for, and what
you sure are chatty ;)
:P
:-)
;)
:-)
:-) (Yes, that was a joke.) I love a good discussion, and getting deeper into one can be very enjoyable to me.
I'd prefer "inquisitive"
I'm calling this good after this message.
Sure. No problem. I'm going to respond anyway.
You're always welcome to respond in a few days, or next week though.
If M2 doubles, we'll get more accurate M2 because the numbers will slide up... 7 M2s per M1 or even 9.
I was unaware of that. I guess the solution would be to show where we are up to. So on Tuesday, are all of Monday's meta-modded? Or, if not that, what is the quality of the m2, 7 or 9? That's not nearly as good, however.
We probably could rank users or something based on the M2 that they do, but I'm still not sure if thats beneficial or not.
True. I'm mostly concerned about feedback. I'm trying to think what would interest me to m2 again. You showed interest in this, so I am trying to apply the idea to reality.
I don't like the idea of simply forking an entire journal & discussion. It just gets messy. Plus users could get double benefits or punishments for their discussion.
With only five karma points, I wonder. Though, I see the issue.
And I've seen many stupid journal entries that are actually useful because of a couple of intelligent comments.
Fine, but because of that you'd ignore the journals that are good by themselves? You do like to start out small, so why not at first only allow the journals that are inherently good without the comments, and shadow the journal into a story. If that works, you can think about the more complicated step 2.
I just don't care enough to bookmark them or anything
Bookmarking journals, with messages when other people respond to them, another one of my Slashdot wishes.
According to Meta Moderation, our fairness is inline with the general population.
That's good to know.
since we've been having problems with robots
Wow. It's amazing. The more famous, the more hated. But why? Eh, oh well.
Yeah, I've posted a lot in the last 3 days, which is why I don't generally do it. I learned long ago that I have to budget my time.
Understood. I do appreciate the responses though. Thanx.
Getting deep into discussions means I don't have time to do other things that are usually more critical.
So is that the reason for subscriptions, so you can hire other people, and then you can spend more time responding....
I believe everyone can see their accepted submissions on their users page.
On the "Submit Story" page, yes, but without a link.
OK, a I checked more recent submission by a user off the front page. I guess it's only recent stories. Older stories don't show up there.
The problem with M2 feedback is that it would likely be depressing. I don't think users would necessarily be *encouraged* when they see that they just M2'd 10 times, and there are 10,000 remaining M2s in the system ;)
:-) I've heard the complaints of slashdot editors mod-bombing people. Never knew what to believe.
:-)
:-)
Yeah, but when a few hours later come and the number has gone down, it would be good. Or of course, the opposite could be used. A meter going up showing how many m2s have been done. Although more complicated, having both might help.
Though, since people can only m2 ten or twenty daily (is the number correct?) there is little felt anyway. And when someone is all charged up to actually do something significant, there is no avenue for that. Though, I assume you guys tested out the correct m2 number and decided that 10 works and more doesn't.
And as for total M2s, we actually have that value internally, but I'm hesitant to post it because, like karma, it might be turned into a game.
And if it is a game, how could it be abused? I thought that when people went for karma, they went for good karma, and thus posted well. Although some people went for negative karma as well. If only the negative is the issue, you could even uncap karma and only show numbers when it is high enough, say the top five percent. I would think gaming that system has good results, since going bad only remove the indicator.
With total m2s shows, wouldn't that get more people to m2? Maybe match it with how many m2s were congruent with everyone else's m2 on that comment? Then, only show a number when it is high.
I hadn't thought about 'Shadowing' a journal into a story for a journals section. Thats not a bad idea, except that I suspect that many journals will become "Good" only by reading the comments posted.
I hadn't though about making a journal entry good because of it's comments. Should that really be worried about? Hmm.. That's a good point to ponder.
So the shadow sorta penalizes the comment posters.
Unless, you fork it with the current comments. Of course, you can get complicated about options of posted in one posting into the other as well, but a straight out fork might be best.
Plus it means that a general user would essentially be seeing something different then the author who 'Approved' the story in the first place.
Only if the comments matter. When only the journal matters, this is not an issue. If it is, maybe the comments that "made" it could be posted as an adendum in the story itself?
I guess I haven't bought into the comment-makes-the-journal yet. Any examples? I'm not denying it, I just don't seem familiar enough with the issue to fully understand what you are mentioning.
As for what I do, I delete submissions, read email, keep track of who's doing what, manage bugs in teh source forge project page, delete more submissions, read our anti robot reports,
*phew* breathe.....
moderate,
I guess that you get mote than five points?
decide policy,
You do that on a daily basis? The changes here are only significant once in a while. How could this be a daily activity?
and hopefully when all of that is done, try to design new functionality for the site,
I know about that. Although, when I worked, it required knowing who was asking, because different people override others, and it just gets complicated. Being your own decision maker must be fun in at least this one coveted respect.
keep track of scheduling to make sure someone is always on the site.
I had been under the impression that you all managed the site simultaneously. Thanx for the heads up.
I'm a manager you see- a PHB.
But the real question is do you *enjoy* that?
Truth be told there's very little time for that. I spent 2 full work days posting comments,
OK, I checked, and saw your posts (which seemingly were not barred by the two-minute inbetween posts limit) and saw 29 on Thursday, and 24 on Friday. Wow! I only made it near that once in my recollection, two days in a row would take the wind out of me (though exhhilirate me as well
You also have your "one" submitted story on the bottom. I never noticed that before. Is that for editors only, or is it an option? And thanx for allowing to see are very old comments (even if not before '99). Those are really interesting!
and replying to email realted to the TMF plum.
I can only imagine. Though, hopefully you use the keyboard and not the mouse. I have practice in both, and replying to email by keyboard is *much* faster.
Thank god we don't do that every week.
Truth be told, the less you do here, the better I feel. I like the old and despise the new, with the exception of a few wants. So, I do agree with that sentiment, but for other reasons.
Thanx for the detailed reply. I really appreciate it.
Quick question. You familiar with the MBTI? If so, what's your type? I'm guessing ENTJ.
M2 Feedback I just don't know what information would be helpful. Maybe some general stats.... like 14,000 comments pending M2? Thing is that M2 uses 5-7 'votes' on each M1, so "Done" takes awhile ;)
:-P
... Hmm... but what do *you* do? (When not answering various comments.)
....) I used to come in, read slashdot, check email, answer any immediate things or schedule requests, check who's logged in to the db, remember what I did yesterday and continue, or something like that. Though every once in a while something had to be handled right away. While I was asking before I began to wonder if your days are predictable or not. If you guys work normal hours (I'd assume not) or things of that sort. That'd probably be interesting. Only because after reading the site for a few years, you tend to wonder about such things.)
I can't say how other people take it, but I'm mostly concerned with knowing that it helped. So, say, every few hours a meter would show how much more needs to be done, would be nice. It doesn't need to show how many comments needs meta-modding, just how many meta-mods are needed at that time, to break even. (And if you can figure how to get ahead on meta-mods... (Yes, that is a joke, I'm not *that* stupid.))
As an added frill, a total amount of meta-mod on the user's page would be nice. But that is useless and a bragging point, but a frill nonetheless.
Some of the most obnoxious trolls on Slashdot have good karma.
I was unaware of that. Hmm.. how do they do that? I guess they store it up or something.
I'd rather make such an indicator more transparent. Perhaps a factor of reads, posts, moderation, and karma.
You mean reads and posts from different logged in users?
If you just want to go based on reads and comments, I'd go a step further and see what the user's average Journal to comment ratio is. If the user generally gets a few comments, it's a more likely journal as a candidate. Though, the more I think about it the more complicated that seems. So, I'm not sure reads and posts should matter all that much. Besides, that would negate the chances of those who change the default "Comments Enabled".
We'd likely still have some thin level of editor approval for cool journals to be approved by authors, and also, accepted journals would also become uneditable by the author.
Maybe you could shadow, or at least fork the journal into a story? This lets the writer keep his ownership, yet allows it to act as a normal story as well.
We have to be careful to not allow someone to get their journal accepted, and then replace the text with *##(*%#@*$@(#*&
Ooh. Taco used naughty words. I'm gonna tell Hemos on you...
As for what we're busy with, Krow is busy with slash functionality specific to other OSDN sites besides Slashdot. Pudge is working on anti robot measures, Cowboyneal has a few bugs to fix, Jamie is working on all sorts of subscriber related functions. You can usually get a good idea of what we're working on by checking out the SourceForge project page. Anything with a high priority assigned to someone is usually being worked on. We always have "Secret" stuff that you guys can't see (like stuff related to denial of service attacks, robots, trolling, security etc etc) but you can often see with a quick glance of the 'Bugs' page and the 'Features' page what stuff is on the TODO list.
Thanx for the info. That was very interesting.
(Though, it would be interesting to know what you get in an average day. (Over a year ago when I still a job
Anyway, I signed up to slashcode-develepment and slashcode-general and to get the digest of each. I'll see how it goes.
M2 Feedback Yeah I guess I hadn't really thought so much about that. Someone should submit a feature request asking for more M2 feedback. I bet we could provide some nice charts or something in response to M2 so users could see where we were at at some point in time. Those charts wouldn't be real time or anything, but it would at least let people know where we're at.
:-) I don't think that's a fair question, but if you should ever be interested in answering, I'd love to know what goes on in an average slashdot day for a slashdot editor. Perhaps one of you has a journal on that already?
That would be great. Real time isn't truly needed, just the basic idea to know, "I helped that!"
I do plan on signing up on the slashcode mailing list just after I finish this comment. I'll try to see what's going on, and then make the feature request, if noone else does.
Journals a "Cool" journal gets promoted, so the posting restrictions would have to change. I wouldn't want that to happen to my nice private little journal, so that would have to be an option.
Correct. It would have to be an option of, "Allow Journal in Public Pool (Note: If accepted, this would allow comment regardless of you current setting.) Either that, or shadow the journal so there are two instances of it, one public, one private.
Plus we'd have to make sure that users can moderate their own journal. We could use other factors as well (number of logged in users who visited the journal? number of posts? Number of up moderations?) but each of those can be gamed with a robot or something, so there's more to it then that.
I'm for a different system where those with higher karma can vote higher, but slashdot doesn't seen intent on that. So, I'd simply say that next to the Add Friend button, there's a "Vote for Public Pool" or something. Possibly limiting it to logged in users, and each person only getting a few votes per week. Ultimately, a slashdot editor has to choose which journals make it. Basically, the voting should make the job easier for the editor, by filtering out the less popular journals. Then, from a pool, an editor can accept or reject a journal for whatever the reason.
This could even be implemented in stages. That is, implement a vote system for journals, and have a ranking page, but no more.
As I said before, this is a complex problem that I would love to see solved, but don't really have the time to design the solution, and slahsteam doesn't have much time to code it...
Need I ask what you guys are busy with?
wrt to meta moderation, there is a link to see context.
I guess I must have been skimming too much to pay that much attention to it.
We break even on M2 most of the time, but some days we run short...
Maybe it would help it people would see a percentage? Like a cue, "this much more to go...." So it actually feels like a contribution. Just a thought. I guess meta-moderating is like a black box for the users, so without useful feedback it's hard to realize what it does. At least that's the way that I seem to take it.
We plan to expand journals at some point,
That would be great. There is so much there to be used, it would be a shame not to.
This is definitely an area where a user could come in and design a system that we could consider: code to rate hot journals somehow in real time to make a journals.slashdot.org that was really useful.
I was thinking that people get mod points to moderate journals, which basically puts them in a queue rated according to their pointage. Then, about once a week, an editor looks at them, sees those that are appropriate and posts them on a Journals page. Alternatively, pointage can be ascribed by how many comments a journal gets.
As long as the readers give out the points, the journals that gain the interest of many will have a chance to be read by more people. This process would obviously start out slowly, but with interest, would rapidly grow. Ideally, journals could rival as the main attraction on Slashdot.
Of course, some things would change, such as who can comment. Currently, you seem to haver your journals set to Friend of Friend. Should one of your journals get voted in, that would have to drop, and anyone would be able to comment there. I guess that means, a user should be able to choose for a journal to not be chooseable.