Slashdot Coming Attractions 410
- Most Discussed: Highlighting recent stories with the most active discussions
- This Day on Slashdot: Featuring the biggest Slashdot stories of the day all the way back to the beginning.
We also pushed through a number of fixes to the user experience and upgrades to the site infrastructure in recent months including:
- Upgrading Slashdot to modern hardware and new versions of MySQL and Apache
- Cleaning up the topics pages
- Improving methods for sharing submissions
- Thumbnails for articles with videos
- Flag-a-comment abuse reporting
- Removal of old and unused Slashboxes
- A much overdue overhauling of the FAQ
- Fixes to user preferences
- The launch of the Slashdot Hall of Fame (that little badge icon next to the logo)
- Fixes to the D2 comment system. Highlights include bug fixes to the comment score slider, a better abbreviated view (if you quote the parent, that's removed so people can see your first sentence instead), and general reliability improvements to the AJAX magic
- And many more...
In addition, we're working on modules to highlight top submissions and we've launched Slashdot TV at http://tv.slashdot.org/ . We plan on launching more in the weeks to come. Some of these new sections will feature original content that isn't normally run on the front page. We're also planning a new mobile experience and we'll need your feedback to help us with the look and usability. Our goal through all these changes is to make your Slashdot experience a good one. We are listening to your complaints and concerns and promise to keep giving you News for Nerds and Stuff that Matters.
So, readers, what do you want to see in the coming months?
Source code (Score:5, Interesting)
Do you still provide the source code that runs the site? I remember that slashcode.com [slashcode.com] would track your changes in the past. Is this still true? I see that the last post there was in 2009.
Looking forward to exploring the changes... (Score:4, Interesting)
Unicode? (Score:5, Interesting)
I think its the 21st Century in the real world, but here it seems like its the 20th Century
Fix the CSS on my Android (Score:5, Interesting)
The top of the page is inaccessible for some reason on my phone. I can't click on my user link because it's "behind" the address bar. Other pages do not do this. Something weird with the CSS I think. So as long as things are being changed and stuff, fix the CSS eh?
In all seriousness (Score:5, Interesting)
Slashdot right now is the place to go when you want to read about 2 day old news. These days there's very little I see here that I haven't already seen on Ars, Engadget, Giz, TechDirt, BSG, etc.
I know the mission statement probably doesn't care all that much about Slashdot being a news breaker, it's always been more about the discussion, but the discussion becomes a bit stale when the story goes up 18 hours after the rest of the world posted about it. If you want the quality of commenting to rise again, make a concerted effort to get articles up in a more timely manner.
Mobile bugfixes (Score:3, Interesting)
How about fixing the mobile version of the site? Its been broken for months:
- In Safari on my iPhone, going to slashdot.org fetches the 5 most recent stories. At the bottom of the page is a "Many More" link. Clicking it doesn't actually fetch the _next_ 5 oldest. Instead it fetches stories from earlier in the day SORTED IN THE REVERSE ORDER. This makes it very difficult to use the mobile site to catch up on news missed during the day. It wouldn't be so bad if .....
- The "Fullscreen" link at the bottom of the mobile version would actually work. The text says "Change view: Mobile - Fullscreen", leading one to believe that the fullscreen link should take you to the normal version of the site. But clicking it simply reloads the mobile version of the page with the "ss=0" URL parameter.
Stop using fsdn.com (Score:5, Interesting)
Why do you put your stylesheet, icons, etc on fsdn.com instead of within slashdot.org? I ask because my work blocks fsdn.com (and no, they're not going to change it) since to corporate it's apparently either filled with porn or evil hackers. Which turns browsing slashdot.org back to using a lynx browser.
Host site critical elements in your own domain.
Re:So right (Score:4, Interesting)
Instead it's by social media/blogger types which is not what Slashdot's target audience is interested in
Sad, but apparently true. Certain topics (e.g. politics, social issues like race or gay rights, green energy/global warming, etc.) always draw more comments/page hits/advertising. I left Fark because it turned into a cesspool of blogger wannabes shouting at each other. Please keep the News For Nerds angle here, especially in an election year when every other media outlet is full of Unbiased Reporting (patent applied for 2012).
Re:Stick a fork in it (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:A bit late for April Fools, isn't it? (Score:5, Interesting)
How about abusive moderation?
I have entire pages of comments (in fact if you just look at my comments right now, it's filled with that stuff), with comments that had been moderated up and down a few times, +5 to -1 to +5 to -1 or 0. All that while there are many replies to them, so clearly, these comments generate 'interest', whatever it is.
Does it make sense to have wild swings in comment moderation in that case, doesn't it mean that in reality those comments are at least 'interesting' enough to a large number of people?
It looks to me, the real problem with /. is a weird moderation scheme that encourages people to moderate not based on merit of the comment, but instead based on their own biases and it's used to silence opinions.
Re:Timeline (Score:3, Interesting)
I've been around here for over 15 years and seen it change over time. The latest incarnation with its automatic loading and fancy inline data retrieval sucks balls.
So new Slashdot... Is it good or is it whack?
From An Old Fart (Score:4, Interesting)
In 1995 I bought a Psion Series 3 organizer. [wikipedia.org]. Back then, 16 years ago, it was state-of-the-art. Despite modern advances, I'm still using it occasionally today, mostly as a small database and pocket-typewriter, even though it runs at 7MHz with 2MB ot storage/RAM. The reason is simple - you really don't need GHz of compute horsepower and billions of bytes of storage/memory when you're only working with text. I like this ethos in our media-saturated world, but Slashdot does seem to be railing against it, with pageviews gobbling up hundreds of K of bandwidth for what is essentially a few K of entropy.
I guess what I'm trying to say is "Don't be ashamed of keeping it simple guys. "
Better Archiving and Bookmarking (Score:5, Interesting)
Over the years since Slashdot started I have often read articles and insightful comments that I have later tried to find again, but to no avail. Google provides some relief, but searching through Slashdot's own system is a lost cause.
I have always wanted two things to change that:
1. A better archiving system, perhaps tab based or somesuch so that I can easily zip back through everything on, say, SCO.
2. The ability to flag or save interesting articles or even comments on articles such that I have a personal folder where I can save an article on Copyleft and then fold the comments such that Lawrence Lessig's insightful one remains visible underneath the article summary. Slashdot would be an even better geek touchstone then than it already is.
Re:Lose "Many More" link and provide per-date URLs (Score:3, Interesting)
Since "Many More" I'm often frustrated by not being able to navigate the article-stream in a meaningful way.
The feature I'm missing most (after getting rid of "Many More" ;-)) is a mode to read from old posts to the newer ones with current position saved between visits.
Re:A bit late for April Fools, isn't it? (Score:5, Interesting)
According to the Hall of Fame, I'm the most active commenter for this quarter (I really need to stop procrastinating), which probably means I will be ignored by the Slashdot overlords more than more people, but here are my inflation-adjusted two cents:
Most Discussed. Don't care. It's not like it's hard to see the comment counts on the front page.
This Day on Slashdot. Might be interesting. Probably not though - lots of slow news days. Sounds like an attempt at recycling old content.
Upgrading Slashdot to modern hardware and new versions of MySQL and Apache. Irrelevant to most users. Upgrading to a real database and a more modern web server might be interesting, if only for the flame war in the comments that it would provoke.
Cleaning up the topics pages. Long overdue. Although part of the problem is that most of the current crop of 'editors' are stunningly ignorant of their subject matter and so routinely file things in the wrong category.
Improving methods for sharing submissions. Yes, Slashdot needs more Facebook integration. And more Twitter integration. And it definitely needs to jump on the Google+ bandwagon! The last changes to this crap meant that my user CSS no longer blocks the share button, as it previously blocked the little 'I am an attention whore so desperate for approval that I want to help companies build a database about me' buttons. Please, please, please, provide a user option to turn off all of this crap, if you must have it.
Thumbnails for articles with videos. Even better would be an option of hiding all articles with videos from the front page. The last ones have all been spam, so I wouldn't even have wanted to read them in text form. I usually read Slashdot while waiting for a compile job to finish or while having a short procrastination break, so things that require 100% attention such as videos are of no interest to me. Stick them all in videos.slashdot.org and make it as easy to ignore as idle.
Flag-a-comment abuse reporting. As you say, a step backwards. Slashdot isn't Slashdot without trolls. Mod them down, but don't delete them.
Removal of old and unused Slashboxes. If they're unused, no one will notice or care, so this is irrelevant to everyone. If, as I suspect, by 'unused' you mean 'some people use them, but I don't' then you're just trying to bill removing a feature that people use as an improvement. I suggest you quit Slashdot and get a job at Apple.
A much overdue overhauling of the FAQ. Again, long overdue. Note that overhaul usually implies improvement and please remember that when you do it.
Fixes to user preferences. Bug fixes are good. Currently lots of this stuff was broken by the Web 2.0!11111eleventyone rewrite.
The launch of the Slashdot Hall of Fame. Dear God No! The 'achievements' section was bad enough. I thought this was an April Fools joke when it was launched, but it stuck around. Now we have more of this crap. Clever people are able to learn from the mistakes of others. Most people can learn from their own mistakes. The sign of total idiocy is failing to learn from your own mistakes. Now we have a hall of fame which is going to promote exactly the same behaviour as the old public karma numbers, a system Slashdot abandoned for very good reasons. Please, learn from your mistakes, don't keep repeating them.
Fixes to the D2 comment system. Maybe next time you could do this before making it default? For the record, I mostly like the D2 system. The biggest bug, however, is that you can type a long comment and then accidentally hit cancel instead of preview and lose it (which you couldn't with the old one, as browsers would warn you if you tried to navigate off a page with a full text field). Fix that first! Slashdot always embodied the ugly-but-functional school of design. The rewrite made it no less ugly, but made it less functional. We're happy with Slashdot being ugly, but please make it actually work. Another example: it still requi
My requests (Score:5, Interesting)
Moderation (censorship) is always abused. (Score:3, Interesting)
First of all, let's understand that "moderation" is a very misleading term. When comments can be flagged and then subsequently removed, it's censorship.
Second of all, censorship of any form is always abused. It doesn't matter who is involved, or the medium in question, or the topics being discussed. The moment censorship is allowed, it will be abused.
You say it'll only be applied in cases of "spam" and "GNAA trolls". Well, that's already too far. In case you haven't realized it, those "GNAA trolls" are actually very insightful and witty parodies of the RIAA, MPAA, and similar organizations. All it takes is one user who is too feeble-minded to see that, and one editor who is too dim-witted, and now a very worthwhile comment is gone.
As we've seen at basically any other site with any form of censorship, perfectly legitimate comments are disappeared far too frequently. Your comment doesn't rave incessantly about Apple's over-hyped device of the day, and this hurts somebody's feelings, so it's deleted. Your comment points out that PHP is full of security holes, and this offends somebody, so it's deleted. Your comment suggests that nginx is more lightweight than Apache, and this makes somebody angry, so it's deleted. Perfectly legitimate opinions are crushed under such a system.
At least Slashdot has managed to avoid that kind of blatant censorship for the most part. I can at least read comments that others dislike. Most of the time, the most interesting, insightful, and intellectually-deep comments are found with a -1 rating. But if such comments are now just gone, those of us who want to read the best content don't even have the ability to do so.
Re:So right (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:So right (Score:4, Interesting)
Linux was just starting to get noticed as a viable alternative to Unix. and the height of the Tech boom where most of the posters where making 6 figure salaries in jobs that pay them to sit in been bags chairs and play pin ball most of the day with some time in the middle where you got some work done. So the average poster had money to waste on fun technology, and free time to tinker. Good Times... However unfortunately it wasn't a sustainable and us Techs have been humbled back to our lot in life as Middle class work, in the cube, not bad but not great either. So as time went on a lot of technology had became far more made for consumer market, and now small size is really popular making DIY projects less likely, DYI cell phone will look more like a Zack Moris 1980 cell phone. As the DYI do not have the resources to much such a densely packed system.
Re:Dear Slashdot Management (Score:5, Interesting)
If you allow your user base to be diluted by commercial interests, your profits will dwindle as less users come here to socialize and learn. That is why you need to keep the comments off limits for gaming by media and PR companies.
Seconded. I originally came to Slashdot for the quality of the discussion and of the comments, some truly enlightening, and the feeling that a collectivity was forging opinions on subject matters important to us all, reflected by the apt slogan 'Stuff that matters'. I could read Steve Wozniak, NewYorkCountryLawyer, etc, many people at the forefront of stories they were commenting. Not only celebrities, but some pillars of this community, people like eldavojohn, etc. whom you would always count on to intervene wisely in a discussion.
Only Slashdot has managed to attract and cultivate such a community --people who normally don't have time or interest for social networks, so perhaps the term 'socialize' is less apt here than the one of 'community interests'-- and if Slashdot were to lose these people, it would be to never being able to regain them, and to lose its essence. So do all the innovating you want, but please never lose sight of the essential.
Re:A bit late for April Fools, isn't it? (Score:5, Interesting)
If your comments consistently produce large discussions and your mods swing several times during that discussion, I would say you're doing it right. Or you're a master troll. Either way you're producing value to the operators of the site by encouraging user interaction.
On a related note, I would like to request an achievement for getting a +3 or greater Troll/Flamebait Mod.
Re:GOD DAMN IT, THIS IS WHY I AVOID REDDIT! (Score:5, Interesting)
Hear, hear!
<RANT>
The changes have NOT been for the better lately.
Slashdot is turning into yet another video blog, and can't pull that off for two reasons - it's too late in the game, and the users who bring the content that gives the site value don't communicate in video. Remember the old saying that a picture takes up more bandwidth than a thousand words. It's true. And videos? The signal/byte ratio is so low that it's worthless for a tech forum.
And the "share" icons for Facebook/Google/Twitter? If we wanted to do social networking, we would go to a social networking site! If we wanted our friends there to see what we posted here, we'd ask them to come here! Don't give Facebook tracking information about me by including their icon, god damn it.
And fix the text input parser. Never mind Unicode, it can't even handle ISO-8859-1, for cripes' sake! Anything not US English and a very limited number of other characters fails.
Oh, and what worked before, like <UL> lists, doesn't anymore. Because the "designer", and I use this term loosely, decided that his or her view of presentation was more important than the actual tags.
So half the tags listed under "Allowed HTML" don't work anymore, or do a completely wrong thing. Either fix it, or get rid of them.
No, slashdot has not become better. Some of us old farts stick around here for old times sake. And it's not that we don't embrace the new - we do, when it makes sense. We don't sit hacking on PDP-11s, we move with the times. But Slashdot doesn't move with the times, it implements broken stuff for its own sake, without solving any problem or making the experience anythiing but crappier.
Oh, and get rid of the Varnish cache if you can't keep it running correctly. I'm SO sick of seeing Varnish error messages or a front page that suddenly reverts to an older version with the top story gone unless I force reload until I get a fresh varnish cache. Don't you have any sysadmins anymore?
</RANT>
Re:A bit late for April Fools, isn't it? (Score:4, Interesting)
The flag feature just puts the comment into a report; editors can then choose to ignore the report, or magically downmod to -1. The comment can still be moderated back up if other folks decide to do so. In theory, it's a great way to avoid burning mod points on trolls and to instead use them for modding up insightful commentary.
Hope that clears things up!
Feel free to tell me to choke on a whiffle bat, however ;)
Re:GOD DAMN IT, THIS IS WHY I AVOID REDDIT! (Score:4, Interesting)
Nobody removed or banned you for "stating a dislike of the USA gun laws." If you'd like you can mail me your username or uid and I can take a look, (assuming something really did happen to your account and your not just trolling.)
Simpler, less AJAX (Score:4, Interesting)
I'd like it to load fast and use a LOT less AJAX.
I'd like less features, not because I hate features, but because they usually add more crap which needs to be loaded.
I'd love it if you got rid of the whole hiding comments thing, for example. It plays hell with searching and scrolling. Just show 'em all. That'll help you with flagging inappropriate, anyhow. You'll get a lot more feedback if you put everything in front of everyone's eyeballs.
Re:Suggestions (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't agree. If you're making crap comments yourself, you're likely to mod others' crap comments up.
What I'd like to see is removal of the "time between posting" limit removed for comments in your own journal, and responding to comments that show up in your "notifications" page. If you get a highly rated comment you're likely to have lots of responses, many of which demand answers or further comments. And some of us read pretty fast.