I really, really hope this is good news. I miss the actual "News for nerds" ethos that brought me here, and I've waded through a lot of sponsored "posts" and clickbait to sift out the kernels of actual news that remain.
New/. overlords? Get this site back to "News for nerds" and news that matters, and you'll keep me here.
I don't believe it. Is Slashdot going to stop those ridiculous paid links to forbes.com? What about the relentless left-wing social justice stories that blame nerds for everything wrong in the world? What about constant news-today-gone-tomorrow political stories that are general news, at best? I don't see any of those going away under any kind of new management. Irritating as fuck content has been around since the Jon Katz stories wouldn't stop appearing.
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.
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.
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.
Bah. This is news for nerds. If we're going to change the formatting options, let's go back to HTML being the only choice. If you can't figure out how to format your post with HTML tags, you don't belong here.
I hate to break it to you, 'nerds' have moved on in the last ~20 years. Not all nerds know HTML.
I didn't say "If you don't know HTML, you don't belong here", I said "If you can't figure out how to format your post with HTML, you don't belong here". Nerds can learn a few markup tags, if they don't already know them.
Trying to be happy is like trying to build a machine for which the only
specification is that it should run noiselessly.
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.
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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: (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 Saf
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Re:Take back Slashdot (Score:2)
I hate to break it to you, 'nerds' have moved on in the last ~20 years. Not all nerds know HTML.
I haven't written HTML in a decade (other than on Slashdot). Restructured Text, was invented for a reason.
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I hate to break it to you, 'nerds' have moved on in the last ~20 years. Not all nerds know HTML.
I didn't say "If you don't know HTML, you don't belong here", I said "If you can't figure out how to format your post with HTML, you don't belong here". Nerds can learn a few markup tags, if they don't already know them.