Slashdot and SourceForge Sold, Now Under New Management (bizx.info) 1310
kodiaktau writes with a link to today's announcement that DHI Group, Inc. (which you might know better as Dice, the company that bought Slashdot and sister site SourceForge in 2012) today announced that it completed the sale of its Slashdot and SourceForge businesses (together referred to as 'Slashdot Media') to BIZX, LLC in a transaction that closed on January 27, 2016. Financial terms were not disclosed. DHI first announced its plan to sell Slashdot Media in July 2015 as part of its strategy to focus on its core brands, as Slashdot Media no longer fits within the Company's core strategic initiatives. KeyBanc Capital Markets Inc. served as the Company's exclusive financial advisor for the transaction. (FOSS Force has a short article with some more info BIZX and the sale.)
Meet the new boss (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Meet the new boss (Score:5, Funny)
We won't get confirmation until we see this story in the front page again in a couple of days.
Re: Meet the new boss (Score:4, Funny)
Don't worry. This is Slashdot. The dupe is due for about Sunday.
Re:Meet the new boss (Score:4, Funny)
same as the old boss
I would like to take this opportunity to welcome our new editorial overlords.
Re: Meet the new boss (Score:5, Informative)
Well, the new owner's main slogan is "We help Advertisers reach the right Consumer".
They may have a harder time with that here, though. I doubt they will find a lot of capital C consumers here.
So, over to something more interesting. There's talks of staff being shown the door. Any idea who, yet? Do they get to train replacements that will actually do the needful?
Re:The WHO! (Score:5, Insightful)
They also announced the focus will move from technology to Japanese Girl Bands.
3B Junior Rocks!
Re:Meet the new boss (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Meet the new boss (Score:5, Interesting)
It only took Soylent News a few weeks to implement working Unicode support. Apparently the code supports it, but most characters are filtered to prevent trolling. Back in the early days people would do things like post long strings to widen the page, or use Unicode characters to reverse text flow direction and the like. I'm not exactly sure what Soylent did to prevent that but they seem to have it sorted out.
Re:Meet the new boss (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes please! Check out my sig, this has been a really annoying issue for quite some time. Also, please encode in UTF-8 if you can. UTF-16 is dangerous [stackexchange.com] - namely because the vast majority of characters are only two bytes, but in rare cases they're four, so these cases usually slip past testing; often even libraries are broken in UTF-16, let alone individual programs, when it comes to 4-byte characters.
Other things to keep in mind:
* This is a site of nerds, so if someone posts a small chunk of code, it should display properly. Don't go all crazy on trying to "parse" and "prettify" posted text.
* For your sake, don't make the site vulnerable to injection (aka, *never* just paste a string from a user into one used internally). This is, again, a site full of nerds; they'll notice. And the less scrupulous will take advantage of it. Don't write your own sanitization functions, use internal library functions - preferably parameter binding and the such. And don't forget that injection is not just about SQL, it can affect any user string inserted into another that subsequently goes through a parser - there's XML injection, HTML injection, BASH injection, and so forth.
* If there's some coding project that you think would help the site but you don't have the resources to do it, turn to your readers. For example, if the site was being hit by spam bots in the comments or whatnot, I'm sure you could get more than a few volunteers who would contribute code if it means not having to read the spam.
* People screw up, that's normal. If you accidentally post a duplicate, just take it off the front page. You don't have to delete the comments (you could even put it back on firehose), but just try to keep the front page duplicate free.
* I'm not a big "oh, this site is inherently bad!" person, but a lot of people are, and they get angry when they see links to articles on certain sites (such as, for example, Forbes, due to their adblocker policy and malware history). Be aware of what sites are unpopular and try to avoid linking them, if you can. Most news is available from multiple outlets.
If you do this sort of stuff, people here will be very happy :)
Re:Meet the new boss (Score:4, Informative)
Whatever you don't "fix" classic by removing it!
Take back Slashdot (Score:5, Insightful)
New /. overlords? Get this site back to "News for nerds" and news that matters, and you'll keep me here.
Re:Take back Slashdot (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Take back Slashdot (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Take back Slashdot (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Take back Slashdot (Score:4)
I just want to say that I've always liked you, whipslash. I like the cut of your jib.
Re:Take back Slashdot (Score:5, Informative)
And no more paywalled source articles we can't read, please. Sorry StartsWithABang, it's not personal, but you write for a publication that doesn't want us ad-blocking types as readers.
Re:Take back Slashdot (Score:5, Funny)
I truly loved his articles.
Ok, that's overstating it. I loved it when he wrote an article. The content was negligible but you could count on really awesome comments.
One could say his articles were like the dud auditions on American Idle. You don't watch it for the crappy performance but for the vitriolic comments.
Re:Take back Slashdot (Score:5, Insightful)
I always found it hilarious how he never took on board any of the comments. People would give him useful hints like "it's too long", "this is rambling drivel" or "you have no idea what you are talking about, you fucking idiot" and he'd just ignore them and post the same shit the next week. I assumed it was some kind of parody, or maybe he was going for a kind of "most hated man on the internet" clickbait.
Re:Take back Slashdot (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Take back Slashdot (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: Take back Slashdot (Score:5, Insightful)
Please, cut back on the "everyone in your industry are chauvenists assholes and you owe us a place in your ranks" crap?
We don't need shit and abuse in our leisure time, we get enough on the job.
Re:Take back Slashdot (Score:5, Interesting)
Could you get feedback from us "veterans" that have been reading /. for the past, say, 15 years?
i.e. Some of the things I'd like to see fixed:
- Unicode support
- Fix the broken "lameness filter" -- You can't even post a reasonable length of code with it, nor provide a list of bullet points with short sentences.
- No more StartsWithAShill and other trolls
- Allow older accounts who have good standing being able to post faster. The 4 minute time-out is archaic compared to reddit
Re:Take back Slashdot (Score:5, Insightful)
I can agree on the Unicode support, but also see a problem with it since it opens up for spammers in Korean, Japanese and a kiloton of other languages as well as using unicode versions of lookalike characters that would make a word readable but hard to catch in spam filters.
But it may be good to at least review which Unicode characters that may be let through so that we may get a few fresh ones.
Re:Take back Slashdot (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:no more trolls? (Score:4, Insightful)
Not linking to click-bait isn't anti-free speech. The article *still* exists.
I just don't want to see /. cluttered up with spam.
Re:Take back Slashdot (Score:5, Interesting)
Since you seem to actually be reading these responses....
markdown. HTML was the latest and greatest we had when Slashdot came out. Let people write in markdown, restructured text, bbcode, html, latex.... Nikola and iPython can do it.
Unicode support. It's 2016. For the love of god, Unicode support.
How about a completely redone-HTML5 skeleton and have a design competition for who can theme it the best. CSS has come pretty far since 2001.
Re:Take back Slashdot (Score:5, Informative)
BBCode should also probably be on that list as an input option, ideally with a nice button-based interface for people who don't want to have to mess with typing markup while they write comments. And that interface should be mobile-friendly. If you've ever tried to post from an iPhone even once, you've probably developed a solid hatred for any sort of markup-based posting. The keyboard just doesn't work well for that. But there are ways to make at least semi-usable UIs for mobile devices.
Speaking of Safari/WebKit, somebody needs to actually try to use this website on Safari on OS X, and fix everything that doesn't work... like the Options button (and, for that matter, most of the overlay views, if memory serves).
Re:Take back Slashdot (Score:5, Interesting)
The deal closed less than 24 hours ago. We're going to look at all options in order to improve the experience. And, no, that doesn't mean we're going to roll out a crappy new interface without listening to user feedback. We want to make sure we get it right.
Hi Whiplash,
/. and SourceForge are. Presumably a sum of money exchanged hands for these sites and brands and it is not unreasonable for Bizx to expect to make that money back by some means.
First off, thank you for starting out by engaging the community but as you undoubtedly know we're a cynical, suspicious, curmudgeony lot...
Well let me put it this way, many of us would like some kind of idea as to what Bizx's long term plans for
The promises of listening to the community and doing right are all good and well... but as I said we're a cynical and curmudgeony lot so we're quick to go into "we've heard all this before" mode. Also that Bizx is a marketing company, knowing their motivations and desired outcomes would help allay many of our suspicions.
BTW, FWIW I hope for the best (experience sadly, has taught me to expect the worst). Also feature request: may we have an option to have an automatic translation of US customary measurements into Metric.
Re:Take back Slashdot (Score:5, Insightful)
Please fuck off. Slashdot is not Slashdot without the AC. There is no need for stupid reddit-ish "EDIT: Blahblahblah" bullshit. Say it right the first time your reply to your own post. Are you trolling?
Re:Take back Slashdot (Score:5, Insightful)
I can't say that allowing moderation and posting in the same article is a better idea either. There're enough articles that have become political and the people who have strong opinions on the positions they take shouldn't be allowed to mod in the same article. People get too emotionally involved and it will result in more bad moderation or abuse than potential good.
Re:Take back Slashdot (Score:5, Insightful)
I exclusively post AC. I get modded everything from -1 Troll to +5 Insightful to +5 Interesting.
AC posting encourages discourse and thoughtful expression unrestrained by social taboos. Elimination of AC's deprives the community of uncomfortable truths, criticism of dogma, and edgy satire.
Socrates was forced to drink poison hemlock in retribution for "sophistry" and making people look foolish. I hold many unpopular opinions that would result in ostracism if vocalized publicly. Some of these opinions are unpopular because they are wrong, and some of them are unpopular because they aren't. Posting anonymously allows me to argue them on their merits and have my beliefs shaped by the persuasiveness of the responses I receive.
Without this "sounding board" of anonymous speech the opinions which were both wrong and unpopular would have nowhere to go except to fester inside corrupting the integrity of my judgement. In many cases, I will deliberately take an extreme position that I don't believe just to play the devil's advocate and provoke a discussion I believe is worth having.
Slashdot is where I come to measure the quality of my thoughts, and to learn to more effective persuasion. The readership is more intelligent than the average Reddit user, and as a consequence: the moderation system offers me a somewhat unique way to numerically gauge an argument on it's unbiased merits.
For all these reasons: Slashdot comments section is a valuable institution providing freedom of speech on the internet and the marketplace of ideas as a whole.
Re:Take back Slashdot (Score:4, Insightful)
I sometimes post AC myself on a topic I want to know more about to incite knowledgeable people to inform me for example.
Maybe we should only allow anonymous posts from real accounts, so the drive-by AC's and lazy trolls can't abuse it.
Like an anonymous "idea box" in an office. It's sort of anonymous but only from the people who are employees.
That's exactly what Slashdot should NOT do! (Score:5, Insightful)
Holy fuck. The last thing Slashdot needs is to become another censoring shithole like Reddit or HN. If those sites have taught us anything it's that it's preferable to have real, true, open discussion, even if that means putting up with a few so-called "troll" comments every now and then.
If you want dumb, inane, watered-down discussion, then they the fuck don't you just go to Reddit and stay there?
Slashdot has a great opportunity to reinvent itself as a tech/science/math-focused site with an emphasis on unhindered discussion. The censorship you propose doesn't help with achieving that goal. In fact, what you're proposing will destroy Slashdot faster than anyone could ever imagine.
So-called "trolls" are a good thing. They're a sign of vibrant, vigorous discussion. That's why we see so few of them at Reddit or HN: those sites have the blandest circle-jerk discussion the world has ever seen!
Re: That's exactly what Slashdot should NOT do! (Score:5, Insightful)
It is a terrible trend of new age media to down vote dissenting views. Only group think supported here!
Re: That's exactly what Slashdot should NOT do! (Score:5, Insightful)
It is a terrible trend of new age media to down vote dissenting views. Only group think supported here!
I'd be happy if moderators learned the difference between sarcasm, humor, making valid point and actual troll / flamebait and didn't get their undies inappropriately bunched. [ Note: I'm not holding my breath. ]
Re:Take back Slashdot (Score:5, Insightful)
ACs also don't want to be mass down moderated just because someone had to be the adult in the room and state the obvious or wanted to play devil's advocate in order to explore different ends of a position.
If that annoys you, I suggest you get over it else face a boring echo chamber.
Re:Take back Slashdot (Score:5, Informative)
What about the relentless left-wing social justice stories that blame nerds for everything wrong in the world?
I would like to point out something. In many SJW situations the perpetrators enjoyed their 15 minutes of fame but later paid dearly.
Examples:
-Adria Richards (the PyCon Donglegate photo and tweet): after getting fired from Sendgrid during that incident she didn't find another job. Almost 3 years already.
-Jerelyn Luther (the shrieking bitch who screamed at a Yale teacher because he didn't agree with the "no offensive costume" policy of Yale): she closed all her online accounts, and her own mom removed her name from her company website...
In those cases the aftermath is a lot worse for the SJW than for the people they "shamed".
I strongly recommend Jon Ronson book about public shaming, it's fascinating.
Re:Take back Slashdot (Score:5, Interesting)
It's like removing the salt and spices from the food you eat.
You need some level of obnoxious people to keep things alive. If everything is just banana smoothies and teletubbies all day long you would get bored pretty quickly.
Re:Take back Slashdot (Score:5, Insightful)
No more "APK" posts, ban that spam-laden prick and put in a filter to stop him from polluting this site like he's done for the last several years.
Re:Take back Slashdot (Score:5, Informative)
No, it was never supposed to be that way. Firehose itself is pretty new, an attempt to turn slashdot into Digg. Get rid of it, and only put up highly technical articles like in the actual good old days,
Re:Take back Slashdot (Score:5, Insightful)
We're going to do our best to keep/bring back that "news for nerds" ethos and hopefully keep you here.
I do have one suggestion, since you appear to be participating... Please take care with the distinction between nerd stuff and fandom. The two have a lot of overlap, but at the moment fandom is seeing a popular resurgence that takes it far away from nerdy subjects. It can be fun, but part of the reason that Slashdot became successful in the first place was that it catered to a subculture rather than catering entirely to mainstream culture.
There is a limit on the size that something can grow when it doesn't embrace mainstream culture, but entities that attempt to make that transition usually falter as they alienate their subculture userbase far faster than they attract mainstream participation. That may mean that Slashdot and other sites like it have an upper bound, but it's better than closing up shop.
Re:Take back Slashdot (Score:5, Insightful)
There is a limit on the size that something can grow when it doesn't embrace mainstream culture, but entities that attempt to make that transition usually falter as they alienate their subculture userbase far faster than they attract mainstream participation. That may mean that Slashdot and other sites like it have an upper bound, but it's better than closing up shop.
That's exactly right. It's the Unix philosophy: do one thing and do it right.
I think it's useful to know that a lot of us around here have been here for literally decades at this point. It's hard to believe. I'm a mid-5-digit-uid guy and I've been here since 1998 or 1999. But the site has almost been around for 20 years now. We've grown up here. I was around 30 when I signed up, I'm almost 48 now.
Slashdot is seeing the same trend as everywhere else where most younger kids are going somewhere else and this is a fairly consistent bunch of older guys. The point is that if you lose us there's unlikely to be anyone waiting in the wings to take our place.
The Dice years - as they'll be known historically - sucked. We don't care about SJW stories. I mean, seriously, a bunch of 50 year old guys just don't give a fuck about that shit. Excuse my French.
Let's have news for nerds. We've done it before. We saved Hotmail, we spammed Alan Ralsky in real life, we had fun.
Let's get back there.
Re:Take back Slashdot (Score:5, Interesting)
Part of what I view what has happened with Slashdot, and it is not alone, is that forums are everywhere today. And not just forums but all sorts of different takes on the genre.
I'm going to say some pretty obvious things but back when I 1st discovered the site there was no Facebook or some means of having a forum type discussion on every website. (I honestly don't remember when I 1st made this login but it was a long time ago now. Rob still had links to his favorite sites as part of the content.) So having not only having a forum that was dedicated to "News for Nerds" that also incorporated a system that tried, oh how it has tried over the years, to self moderate the comments was a pretty unique thing.
And while /. still is somewhat unique in its moderation system there are so many options for people these days who want to express their viewpoint that it is tough to point to anything that /. might have as a strong draw. I say that also with the idea in mind that so many people prefer to live in their own echo chamber such that they are not often look for an educated discussion, rather just a way to be a part of their flavor of groupthink. (And /. has been guilty of that as well of course.)
I don't envy you the challenge of keeping /. relevant and something that will not just be a money sink. It would take way more thought than I wish to do here this late at night. (I was hoping that this post would come earlier when the news broke on the web but cest la vie.) However I will say that I will be keeping a close eye on what the direction of the overall site. Especially things like G+ trying to force me to disclose personal information or any thing like that. The very moment I get a bad vibe from the site or the direction I think that it is going I'll add slashdot.org localhost to my hosts file and that will be that.
Not trying to come across as combative but I felt the need to say as there has been a strong push by many corporations to monetize every part of their IP/data/etc. And I'm not looking for some promise of how exactly you will make /. something other than a money sink. That is for you to figure out...ethically.
Re:Take back Slashdot (Score:5, Insightful)
So here's some unsolicited advice (yay!):
Websites that change owners frequently pretty much scream "potentially valuable asset that nobody has figured out how to make money on!" Because if they did actually make money, they wouldn't be getting sold. So Slashdot is a pretty obvious money sink, but it does have a desirable reading audience, many of whom are absurdly vocal about how they don't want to read ads, subscribe or otherwise do anything that would, you know, make the site profitable.
My advice? Focus on content quality - Slashdot could easily post 3x the stories it does today, and have better QA - just by maybe hiring someone with some journalism credentials rather than making the people who write the back end server code pretend to be editors. Improve the quality and make it "must read" material that people are willing to pay for. And try encouraging some writers to create original content - not BS video interviews with talking heads from sponsors, but actual longform journalism. If Slashdot is actually a good enough read, you can monetize a subscription tier that echoes "Slate Plus," "ESPN Insider," etc.
In Slashdot's "glory days," it didn't have a lot of competition. There was no Gawker/Gizmodo/iO9/whatever to read about the coolest Star Wars prequel rumors; people came to Slashdot for that. Even though there's a lot of competition now, Slashdot (barely) hangs on to a superior virtue: a better quality of commenters and a better moderation system than other "nerd" sites. Slashdot was never very well managed, even back in the "CmdrTaco/Hemos Glory Days." Inject some QA into the story vetting/writing process and you'll see a resurgence of readership.
Let me continue to beat this dead horse: all that Slashdot really has going for it is a (minority) smart readership and a superior comment rating system. Explore and improve that. Gamify the f--k out of Karma. Do profiles on crazy frequent Slashdot contributors (not Bennett Hasleton) and let them have a real name and a voice. More badges, go back to numerical representations of karma, give higher upmods to really good contributors, whatever. Reward posters that get a lot of up- or down-mods because they're usually saying something interesting one way or another, even if they're being mod-bombed by ideologues. Reward longer posts. Finally introduce a "-1, Factually Incorrect" mod. This mod system is your real asset - pay some attention to it, which hasn't been done in many many years.
Thank you for showing up to answer questions. Please continue to be engaged. Slashdot has always shown an astonishing lack of self-awareness! Why were there thousands of off-topic posts about how much Beta sucked and why? Because Slashdot's editors didn't even think through the idea that people have opinions of their product enough to introduce a way for people to have meta-discussions about Slashdot. When your readers/commenters are the "product" to your advertisers, how do you not give them a place to comment/vent/respond about Slashdot itself? In the 15+ years I have read this site, I don't remember a single post from "management" saying "how are we doing? comment here." That's just either willful disregard of feedback or idiocy. And seriously, the site itself gets sold, and the post about it is when somebody else submits a link? YOU DON'T THINK THAT'S SOMETHING YOU COULD HAVE ANNOUNCED YOURSELVES? I mean, WTF?
Lastly, please just be open. What's working, what's not. I think people would be willing to turn off ad blockers or pay for Slashdot if someone in charge just said, "Hey, we lose money on this site. We need help. How are you willing to support us? Do you want to donate (a la Wikipedia) in exchange for having ads turned off? Would you be willing to subscribe? Can we do more ads if they follow a certain vetting process?"
It's sad to admit this, but Slashdot has been my "home page" since at least 1999. I'd hate to see it go away, and I'd love to keep it alive and healthy, as long as it's worth keeping.
Re:Take back Slashdot (Score:5, Insightful)
Gamify the f--k out of Karma.
We've both been around long enough to remember numerical Karma, I think. I know I remember building up a fairly high number, and then "spending" it with some silly trolls just for grins and giggles. Have you thought through the whole idea of gamifying it?
Anyway, I don't actively block ads on Slashdot--they're just collateral damage of script blocking. The script blocking is just there to avoid security and/or poor page performance issues. If the new owners can actually find a way to make me view ads without killing the site, they wouldn't just be fixing Slashdot--they'd be demonstrating a model that could fix the web in general.
Yes, that's a tall order and I'm skeptical. I don't know if it's the ad networks or the advertisers, or what; but the state of the art in ads is for them to be annoying as hell to end-users. You'd have to go back to regular old non-animated GIFs served from the same domain in order for me to view ads, and I think that's a tough sell to advertisers, or ad-networks, or anybody that's built a web site in the past 15 years.
This is not quite the same as gamifying Karma, but I think if they borrowed the "gold" concept from reddit and kept their hands off the moderation and Karma systems they might have something. You know how that works? Users buy "gold" for other users. Getting gold unlocks some site features, the money goes to reddit. There is a thing that tells you how much server time the gold purchase has provided.
I'm not sure how much of reddit is funded by gold, but it's probably a big chunk. I've gotten it once--it's way harder to get than a +5 comment, at least for me; but then I don't intentionally try to play to that crowd just for Internet points...
Re:Take back Slashdot (Score:5, Funny)
You guys should hire Jon Katz.
Re:Take back Slashdot (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Take back Slashdot (Score:5, Funny)
we're listening to you guys.
Now I know Slashdot is in trouble...
Re:Take back Slashdot (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Take back Slashdot (Score:4, Funny)
No, you mix it up with NSA - the only agency that really listens to you.
Slashdot isn't the government though.
Re:The moderation system needs massive changes. (Score:5, Insightful)
Second of all, there should be no concept of a downmod.
Without downmod SlashDot will become a dumpster diving experience. I find the StackExchange system interesting, where each downmod costs you a little karma. I am not advocating it, as there is probably more trolls than modders on this site at any given time. On the other hand, the downmodding of unpopular opinions is vicious.
BIZX is destroying Slashdot!!! (Score:5, Funny)
Man, things sure were a lot better back when Dice owned this place.
Re:BIZX is destroying Slashdot!!! (Score:5, Funny)
Feels like it was only yesterday. Such is nostalgia.
Re:BIZX is destroying Slashdot!!! (Score:5, Funny)
Back in my day, people would wait more than a day before pining for the old days. They sure don't make nostalgia like they used to.
Re:BIZX is destroying Slashdot!!! (Score:5, Funny)
I for one welcome our new BIZX overlords! Wait, WTF is a BIZX anyhow?
It's what you IZX after I make you eat my SHIZX, BIZX.
Fo-SHIZX my DIZX, BIZX.
Re:BIZX is destroying Slashdot!!! (Score:4, Insightful)
Bizx LLC is an advertising and marketing company. So... I don't really hold out much hope of improvement.
Serious question (Score:5, Insightful)
The announcement implies there are 30 (thirty) people working at SlashDot. Given the poorly edited article summaries and near-daily front page dups, what do these thirty people actually DO?
Re:Serious question (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Serious question (Score:4, Funny)
Yes, a soupçon of Unicode support would be a boon to those of us who wish to drop in the occasional pretentious foreign phrase, name-drop our visit to Düsseldorf or Tromsø, or bring up El Niño for the umpteenth time.
Re:Serious question (Score:5, Informative)
Because right now, you have to write ñ as ñ instead of just hitting option-n followed by n.
Re:Serious question (Score:5, Funny)
Cold-calling people for ads?
Better financial models? (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, my main reaction is "What? Again?" Been following slashdot off and on for some years, and mostly impressed by the LOST potential. Could do so much better, but obviously the financial models don't work that way.
Say.... What if you could buy a $10 charity share to implement a new feature or support a server for the next year? If enough people chip in, then the feature gets funded or the server keeps running. If not, maybe you'll see something else you want to support--or they can rewrite the project until it is persuasive enough to get the donors. I think most people are basically nice folks, and if you make it easier to do nice things, then they will do so.
Point to the opposite extreme. Microsoft has terrible service, but their financial model works great. Ditto a number of other highly offensive but profitable companies, usually distinguished by their mediocre software and services. Slashdot (and open source) could do better?
Open to Questions (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Open to Questions (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Open to Questions (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Open to Questions (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Open to Questions (Score:5, Funny)
You paid money for Slashdot and could not work out a lower user id than 4433507 as a part of the sale?!??!
I'd go for 666 if you were you. :)
Re:Open to Questions (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Open to Questions (Score:5, Interesting)
Logan, thanks for introducing yourself to me and answering my questions posted as AC in the SpaceX article. I've been around here since around 1999, so I've seen things change a lot over time. I have some suggestions to make, and I'd be interested to hear what you and the other editors have to say.
* Bring back a focus on Linux and FOSS. While I enjoy other topics, too, this is a sister site to SourceForge and FOSS is in Slashdot's DNA. Slsahdot used to have lots of sections (Ask Slashdot, Apple, BSD, YRO, Science, etc...) and some of the stories now posted to the front page could go into those sections. There were stories whenever new versions of the Linux kernel, FreeBSD distributions, and some software packages. Those were good and placed a greater emphasis on FOSS. Renewing a focus on YRO would be great, too, because those rights are under attack now more than ever.
* There used to be a good amount of original content on Slashdot, things like interviews, book reviews, articles written by Jon Katz. I understand that it may not be worth paying someone to write original content, but why not solicit it from users? I'd love to see more of an emphasis on Ask Slashdot and interviews.
* There were also follow-ups on stories that had been posted recently, and they were grouped together into a single article. This was called Slashback. As I recall, that was posted weekly. I'd love to see that come back.
* Please eliminate the restrictions that only allow users posting at -1 to post twice a day. Yes, they're trolls, but they'd also post in journals and converse with other users in their journals. I think there's more AC trolling because of those restrictions (I'm guilty of this), more mod points and effort wasted, and perhaps less interaction between logged-in users. While they're trolls, they were also responsible for much of the culture and humor of this site (e.g., ALL YOUR BASE, IN SOVIET RUSSIA, Natalie Portman and hot grits, can you imagine a Beowulf cluster of, etc...) and were entertaining. It's part of what made the site fun for a lot of people, and I think you'd bring more people here if you relaxed some of the restrictions.
* I'd love to see the current code powering Slashdot to be released as FOSS. One of the great things about Slashdot was Slashcode. It also brought in some community involvement as people could suggest and implement improvements to the site. While this was probably quite a small percentage of users, some contributed and others ran Slash on their own sites. It was also a great gesture that a site about FOSS also released its own code as FOSS.
* Editors were generally unwilling to link to paywalled sites or sites that did sketchy things. The NY Times was the one exception to this. I'd like to see less things on sketchy sites and those with obnoxious ads (Forbes). If people like Ethan want people to read their content, I'd rather they submit the content as stories on Slashdot rather than linking to Forbes, which has served malware ads while demanding people turn off their ad blockers.
Openness and Honesty (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd recommend some amount of openness and honesty. If in doubt, consider what happened when Dice tried to stifle the story on what they were doing to Sourceforge, and then tried to stifle that they'd stifled the story. While everyone here has been happy to hear from you, if they get the idea that you won't follow through with what you said or want something to quietly go away, they can get viscous. I think nerds place a much higher value on honest and efficient communication.
Re:Open to Questions (Score:5, Insightful)
Some details to consider:
1. Promote the Firehose more ( http://slashdot.org/recent [slashdot.org] ) - it seems that too few people don't realize that they can vote for stories that they have.
2. Improved spam filtering so that links to stories on questionable sites doesn't have to appear at all. Also comment spam like this APK spam that has started to appear lately should at least be slowed. (Moderation option "Spam" that can be used without mod point loss should be possible for comments that have some spam characteristics, and if a number of moderators tag it as Spam it probably is.)
3. There's no guide to what the color coding means in the Firehose.
Re:Open to Questions (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Open to Questions (Score:5, Funny)
Where the hell did Beta go? Everyone here seemed on board and then whoosh, nothing. Like a giant vacuum where no one can hear you compliment the web 3.0 interface. It's a wasted opportunity.
Re:Open to Questions (Score:5, Insightful)
Where the hell did Beta go? Everyone here seemed on board and then whoosh, nothing. Like a giant vacuum where no one can hear you compliment the web 3.0 interface. It's a wasted opportunity.
That ... that goes beyond the pale, even for Slashdot trolling. You might as well be reading out load from the Necronomicon.
Re:Open to Questions (Score:5, Insightful)
Can we save the cynicism for when they actually do something bad?
Re:Open to Questions (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Open to Questions (Score:5)
I like that plan. I wish you well. Remember always that you are now a steward of a couple of big pieces of internet history and lore.
Re:Open to Questions (Score:5, Funny)
Man your 30th birthday is going to SUCK!
Re:Open to Questions (Score:4, Interesting)
I've seen this comment by you a few times and I wanted to add my two cents. Hopefully this is as good a place as any to add them.
SourceForge damaged themselves to an incredible degree in my eyes by their various deceptive practices. The tone-deaf (and obviously fake) customer care team responses about dealing with the malware, coupled with the lack of follow-up to any of their promises about the matter, was particularly insulting. That being said, SourceForge is not dead to me.
However, individual projects are. The people behind some of the more popular software projects hosted at SourceForge were all too happy to jump onboard with malware bullshit and to spin and spin to try and justify their decision. FileZilla and PDFCreator come to mind immediately, and I'm sure I could think of another half-dozen if I went back through the software I use day-to-day and consider my history on that item's function.
My recommendation (which I hope you will consider, but not necessarily follow) would be to hunt these projects down, decapitate them, and actively solicit a functional replacement (sponsor the fork!). I will NEVER use FileZilla again. I will NEVER use PDFCreator again. I may remove the DNS blackhole that currently keeps my organization safe from SourceForge's current shitpile, but the project folks who were happy to compromise themselves can burn in hell forever.
Without quality software, there will never be any reason to again visit SourceForge, with or without malware smeared all over its pages.
Thanks again for stopping in. You've got a hell of an uphill battle with SourceForge, I wish you the best of luck.
The layoff part can't be true (Score:5, Funny)
From their website (Score:4, Interesting)
"As a leading digital media company, we publish hundreds of popular web sites and provide advertising solutions for multiple industries such as travel & tourism, telecommunications, personal finance, credit, business products and more."
I'm not sure if that is good or bad, but I think we can probably expect more ads.
Re:From their website (Score:5, Funny)
NEW OVERLORDS (Score:5, Funny)
I for one welcome our new BIZX overlords... oh man I feel so lame ;-p
Attention new management (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Attention new management (Score:5, Funny)
Along with new management, great new changes! (Score:5, Funny)
I hear they'll redo the site to update it with a more modern look. I think they'll set up a site with test modifications, and call it 'Slashdot Bis' while collecting feedback, which they expect will be nearly universally positive.
About BIZX (Score:5, Interesting)
Existing sites from BIZX are sites such as MyVoipProvider.com and 123Business.com. Just.. look at those two and draw your own conclusions.
Re:About BIZX (Score:5, Funny)
"It looks like I went back in a time tunnel to 1998. "
As opposed to how joyously Slashdotters receive the smallest change to that 1998 style.
Offshore (Score:5, Funny)
This probably means all us commenters are going to have to train our Chinese replacements.
Hire some new coders... (Score:5, Insightful)
Seasoned C++ dev here and would love to work remote for you writing new code. Attend conferences, etc.
Reader every single day of my life since 1999, always posting anon but I do have a 4-5 digit UID iirc.
Surely you have heard of what the Soylent News guys are doing... I could never remember to keep going there but I did like what they were doing and I think you should offer to join forces with them. They had sane demands.
Wish you got back to the hacker/code-monkey feel with extensive coverage of open source conferences and a more relaxed editorial tone. The sarcasm and non-pc tones especially shaped the feel that I enjoyed.
Keep politics out of here *except* all the privacy issues as well as NSA and government surveillance stuff which should be *increased* in volume. Examples....
* John Kerry doing X/Y/Z -> NO
* Senate passing a bill to backdoor encryption -> YES
* Trump insults $MINORITY -> NO
* Russian hackers infiltrate $COUNTRY's telcom and ISPs -> YES
* Hillary takes a poop -> NO
Help expose people to new things they've never heard of instead of just repeating the already-trending buzzwords. For instance when everyone else talks about a new Arduino board (could care less), perhaps you could mention something more obscure and hacker-ish such as ZigBee or whatever. If my non-tech-savy friend knows all the issues, please don't cover it here. Only new stuff without repeating it.
Important, please assume the average reader is a daily one and not an every-other-day reader. That means *NOT REPEATING CONTENT*. I want to stress that I do my best to hit this site every day unless I'm literally ill, and then I'll use the [prev] buttons to catch up on my own. I think most people I've ever met who also use slashdot are the same. It seems the site now thinks we are 2 to 3 day consumers and it just regurgitates news for a few days as if I wasn't here to spot that same stuff yesterday or the day before.
If anything, let me tell you that your presence in the comments section is a good thing. We all seem to revolt quite obviously when something is bad. The previous owners seemed "distant" and blind and deaf to all the complaining. I understand ignoring some small grassroots troll group but when literally 90% of the comments are supporting the same complaint, LISTEN.
Another thing, we are more of a "get-off-my-lawn" type than most readers. Do not ever force anything upon me. You have no clue what us programmers do. I had coded some nice parsing scripts to layout slashdot in a console quite cleanly and wish there was a richer api to fetch the content as if I wasn't even on the website. Imagine offering up the whole site's backend API without requiring a registration id and throttle/rate limit instead? Boy, I'd code up so many cool embedded viewers inside all my favorite apps.... Provide the content and let me re-craft my own digestion of that similar to RSS readers but enhanced.
That's enough for now. So far by just being here you seem to have a better chance than absent-dice. Cheers.
But seriously.... (Score:4)
....how about on the stories that are not yet "official" but are available to logged in users (grey title bar instead of green), let them comment, if they wish, and then if the story makes it to the official front page, just move it there, comments and all, instead of re-posting it and losing those comments in the process.
How about restart SourceForge from the ground... (Score:4, Interesting)
The company's core strategic initiatives (Score:5, Funny)
Apparently a bunch of nerds discussing tech and saying whatever the fuck they want didn't turn out to be the easy cash machine they expected it to be.
> 900 comments (Score:5, Funny)
They should sell slashdot more often.
Re:Must be desperate to buy noted malware host SF (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Must be desperate to buy noted malware host SF (Score:4, Interesting)
How about getting rid of non-functioning "Disable Advertising" buttons?
Classic works great for mobile (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't like the "mobile" site introduced by Dice either.
As you may know, down at the bottom of the page is a link to use the "classic" interface. That's always worked great on all my mobile devices, even old tiny ones, and it works great on a desktop too.
I check Slashdot a couple times per day, mostly on my phone. The good old-fashioned simple html of Classic works fine imho.
Re:Possibly Good? (Score:5, Funny)
[...]and we can get some editors who actually read the site?
And destroy a tradition that dates back to when the site was independent, and run for love not money? Blasphemy!
Re:Possibly Good? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Possibly Good? (Score:5, Funny)
The old ones have awakened!
The end is nigh!