Welcome to Slashdot, wherein a technologically challenged media critic comes nose to nose with an army of Linux Geeks and lives to tell the tale...

Hit the link below to read a few notes regarding the default threshold, anonymous posting, and the various modes available for comment display. Its fun and exciting for everyone. Or maybe not.

I've attached the logs from last nights IRC Forum on SlashNET. Next time around we'll have somebody interesting to talk to, but if you're curious what I have to say about things, go ahead and click the link. It was nice talking to everyone, we'll do this again sometime I'm sure.

Last minute reminder that your chance to throw virtual pies or virtual beers at my head is today at 6pm (My time:EST) on irc.slashdot.org in #Forum. I'll answer questions about Slashdot or whatever people are interested in. It'll be fun. Next note that I made a significant change to the comments display system last night. This change isn't necessarily permanent, and is definately open to alteration. Some of you have noticed and emailed already about it. Click the link below to read my description and explanation. I'm going to give it a few days, and put it to a poll.

So Jon Katz wrote up a pretty nifty write up of Slashdot. Check it out if you're interested. Its a pretty glowing piece, so everyone pat yourself on the back and then go about your lives as usual. Speaking of Slashdot, just a quick reminder that we've got that IRC forum tomorrow on SlashNET at 6pm eastern. It's your chance to request features that are probably already on my TODO list but I won't have time to write until after graduation or complain about AC posting or cookies and whatnot. Wesley Crusher questions will get you /ignore'd *grin*.

My-Mugs has set us up a page where you can go and order Slashdot Coffee Mugs. So if you want to help keep Slashdot chugging, or just want to drink more coffee but are to lazy to clean any of your existing cups, check it out. Either way is fine by me.

The Opers on SlashNET (the Slashdot IRC network:irc.slashdot.org), desperate for something productive to do, have been planning to run regular forums for awhile now. For some reason, they've decided that the first victi.. err, guest, to be me. Presumably nobody more interesting was available. So I'll be online on Saturday at 6pm Eastern (who am I kidding? I'm normally online, but this time its official) to answer any questions folks have about Slashdot. This is all you ACs chance to insult me in realtime instead of in the comments section! And the rest of you can ask real questions about moderation, scoring, why cookies don't work, or whatever else comes up. You can get some help connecting over at the SlashNET Homepage. Hopefully next time we'll get someone interesting.

So I was greeted this morning to a crazed server- with almost 400 comments, every httpd fork was serving up the MS Memo story and bringing the server to its knees. I think I know how to solve it, and will work on that after classes are done today, but in the mean time, I've disabled viewing replies off the article. I'll reenable it tonight and you guys can read it then. Sorry about the hassle.

Assorted odds and ends to babble about late on a friday night. Read if you feel like it. Ignore if you like. Updates on Slashdot's code etc.

Just figured I'd quick explain what that jobs link is over on the left hand side of the page. There are 3 or 4 extremely common feature requests for Slashdot, and a service to help find jobs is probably #3 (after AC filtering and a mailing list, which both are coming as well). So click that thing if you're interested in employment. I'm not in charge of it, it's run by Developers.Net, I'm merely throwing it up here because of the huge number of people who asked for something like this on Slashdot. So if you're an unemployed bum, and want to alter that have at it.

I've got several misc. comments to babble about related to Slash, Slashdot, and whatever else I think of before my ISP times me out (this will also answer the mystery of the (score:x) thing that several of you have emailed about), so click the link below to read it if you're interested.

Tarcus writes "The Guardian national newspaper in Britain mentioned Slashdot in the supplement "The Editor" on Saturday October 10th. There's a link on their "Sites we like" page The entry in the paper and on the page runs: If you are not technically inclined, look away now. Slashdot is the place where the IT industry's insiders, and would-be insiders, discuss the latest technical news. If your company's internet team read Slashdot, they're probably pretty good at their job. That said, they won't have much time to do any work because they probably spend their whole day reading and sending messages to Slashdot. "

Ever since Chips & Dips I've tried to reserve 5-15% of Slashdot stories for humor. So today I posted something pretty tasteless. Something that was obviously a hoax. Something that anyone who bothered to look at the link would know was a fake. It was funny, but I didn't flag it as humor because then nobody would have fallen for it. I won't do that any more. The flip side of that is that I can't post hoaxes any more without flagging them as humor. Takes a lot of the fun out of my day, but I guess I'll always have the huge number of hate mail from today's boner to keep me warm at night. It bums me out to know that I can't post something on my own web site, but I guess I'll get over it. It's probably for the best. In the future I guess I'll put that sort of stuff on Taco Hell.

Allright, we're back in business. Long series of calamities that I won't bother to explain here. It might be a hard drive problem, so I'll be making backups every 30 seconds from here on out. Hopefully we won't have any more of these little unscheduled interuptions for awhile.

The Slash source release is wrapping up. I've decided to get a version out the door before I go to work on moderation stuff. The Look & Feel stuff is pretty much functional now (within reason). Check out Taco Hell or Slash to see how different articles on the same server can look. There are glitches yet, but for the most part, things look pretty good. Hit the link to read some notes on the moderation debates, as well as a few notes about recent changes to Slash.

We've got a problem on Slashdot. Along with amazing growth we've experienced in the last 6 months, we've suffered some of the same problems as usenet. Namely the signal to noise ratio on the comments is getting out of control. There are real gems in the comments section, but wading through 'I got the first comment!' crap, or huge rampant offtopic debates is wasting bandwidth and time of the thousands of readers who just want the good stuff. Keep reading to read the deal. Updated read the end

Well folks its friday and I'm ready to relax, so I'm going to take a second and just unload the list of stuff that has changed here recently. Also, note that I've added a link on the left hand menu to 'Ask Slashdot'. We're going to start posting more of them, but only put the more relevant ones of the homepage itself. This will be handled by Cliff Wood who has done a great job filtering these things for us. Hit the link below to read to Slashdot notes.

Browsing the web (instead of coding -- CVS frustration) tonight, I came across Linux Preview, a site which appears to track slashdot articles and translate them into spanish. It's not only an attractive site, with additional touches like Classical Music MP3s, but is also a great idea: many spanish people can now enjoy our articles. It's just a shame that it neither credits slashdot, nor our contributors, but instead claims its own copyright.I hope Francisco Burzi gets my hint... Update: Hint taken. Thanks.

Numerous Slashdot tidbits to report today. For those of you who are interested, you can click the following. Hear about the new comments code, read the exciting bugs list, behold the wacky comments about SlashNET, admire my response to Segfault's recent article, and of course, behold the results of my adventures with my new breadmaker.

The new comments code is in. Hit the link below to read a relatively up-to-date list of the outstanding issues with it. I'm going to bed. Looking forward to reading a few hundred flames from people complaining about it tomorow *grin*. Note IE and Lynx are broken right now. I'll hopefully fix it tomorrow. It's a problem with my Set-Cookie:, so if you are familiar with that stuff, check it out and let me know what I'm doing wrong.