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?
Timeline (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Timeline (Score:5, Funny)
Like
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (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?
Re:Timeline (Score:5, Insightful)
New site design sucks balls.
Why is there no "html only, no javascript, AJAX, or other cycle-wasting garbage" option in the control panel?
With just 3 tabs open in Firefox on Linux, all of them Slashdot stories:
Every time I scroll the page, CPU usage jumps to 100%
That doesn't happen on any other sites except mainstream ad-laden garbage sites like Facobook or CNN.
Bring Back April Fools!! (Score:4, Informative)
I really missed that this year....
OMG...no ponies....
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
When I came to Slashdot this year, I thought "SlashTV" was the Aprils Fools Joke...
I was wrong...
Re:Bring Back April Fools!! (Score:5, Insightful)
There should be one and only one joke per site on April Fool. The fun is in working out which is the April Fool story. It's not fun having the whole day lost to real news.
Re: (Score:3)
I dunno...at least on Slashdot...one day out of 365 for just being silly...is just fine with me.
It isn't like you're gonna miss anything major, all the 'real' stories are still in queue, and will come out after the April Fool's ones.....
You really want to bring my machine to its knees (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't you?
Re:You really want to bring my machine to its knee (Score:5, Funny)
It's the retribution. For years we've been Slashdotting all these websites who had some cool content to show us. Now it's time for retribution and Slashdot all the reader's computers.
Obligatory... (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3)
Yo dog I see you like Slashdotting so we put some Javascript in yo Slashdot so you can get Slashdotted while you Slashdot.
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.
Re:Source code (Score:5, Insightful)
The people here are as much of a problem as the site.
there's plenty of "forks" of slashdot. slashdot is one of the oldest tech news blogs with a comment section - before blogs were blogs. reddit&etc are all forks of slashdot in one way. most communities forked are pretty much about tits and ass though, not tech - and there's plenty of tits and ass on the internet thank you very much already.
but the things which make slashdot different is that there's been traditionally no deletion of posts, no editing to change you seem like a winner in a troll fest - just the raw deal. if you want to say fuck you, then you can say fuck you. just keep the train going and keep the "featured" stories the fuck off - and book reviews posted only on slashdot the fuck off too - actually any stories apart from ask slashdot which aren't links to actual stories somewhere the fuck off. usually it doesn't even matter that the submission blurb is faulty - the comments fix that usually fast enough.
btw. ajax blows. and gnaa trolls should have free reign, you don't want to see that stuff then don't read at -1. it's still entertaining to see what is the flavor of the month in that section.
if something new needs? well, a wordlist that would automatically +(for the viewer using it) comments which had a word from that wordlist. that way you could see gnaa posts or whatever you wanted.
A bit late for April Fools, isn't it? (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously... a bit late, no? A lot of this flies directly in the face of stuff that Slashdot has been saying for years... comment reporting for abuse? Does this mean that abusive comments can be removed? That kinda defeats the point of the kind of discussion that Slashdot has been built on....
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
It was a request by all the vendors who pay for the slashvertisements we've had lately. Err, I mean 'stories'.
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: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: (Score:3, Insightful)
Either way you're producing value to the operators of the site by encouraging user interaction.
- Ok, but if that were the case, then why would wild swings in comment moderation affect 'karma', which gives moderators the ability to silence the commentator? Karma on this is not just a meaningless number, it is used to shut down a poster, so just pushing it down a bit prevents one from making more than 25 comments, then less than that, eventually the ability to comment disappears altogether.
In fact I argue that /. moderating mechanism causes (probably unintentionally) posters whose comments generate th
Re: (Score:3)
Re:A bit late for April Fools, isn't it? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd like to see the old metamoderation system reinstated; the new one doesn't work nearly as well. The day before yesterday had a LOT of bad mods.
Re:A bit late for April Fools, isn't it? (Score:5, Insightful)
I think this is important. A long time back I always used to metamod, there was practically a permanent link at the top of the page, and I'd click it, give a bit of feedback and then go on to browse /.
today, apart from the fact that I don't fully understand if I should be metamodding bad mods as + or -, or if its the post I'm +/- on that matches to the mod +/-... the link is never there, so I don't bother.
The metamod was very important to keep the moderators honest. It is more important than the moderation and deserves more attention from the devs because of that.
GOD DAMN IT, THIS IS WHY I AVOID REDDIT! (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm disappointed to see utter bullshit like "Flag-a-comment abuse reporting" and "Thumbnails for articles with videos" and "general reliability improvements to the AJAX magic" included in this list.
I intentionally avoid sites like reddit, StackOverflow, and especially Hacker News, because of the high degree of censorship that goes on at such places. You can't hold, never mind express, a non-mainstream opinion there. It really stifles the discussion. At least Slashdot allows differing opinions and ideas to be expressed, without the outright censorship we see elsewhere.
The worst part about the censorship is that it happened to people who were expressing absolutely correct, yet unpopular, ideas. Many of them were merely years ahead of the rest of the crowd. For example, some people who I saw get targeted a lot were those who didn't have a raging hard-on for Ruby on Rails. They'd correctly point out that Rails is a pretty typical framework, and similar functionality had been available in Perl, PHP and Python years earlier. They'd correctly point out that there's nothing special about Rails' ORM. They'd correctly point out that Ruby's and Rails' performance is actually quite horrible. Yet despite being completely correct, they'd receive hundreds or even thousands of unjustified "mod-downs" and in some cases would have their comments removed and they'd then be banned from the subreddit. As somebody who came from Slashdot, I found that behavior to be abhorrent. At least I could see such discussion at Slashdot, where it was just gone at some of these other sites.
What's all this video crap, too? Reading is so much more efficient than watching video. I'm not going to waste 15 minutes watching some useless video when I could read a transcript or even an article expressing the same information in one or two minutes. So don't even bother with this thumbnail bullshit. As users, we don't want videos. The only people really pushing videos are those who want to cram more "vibrant" advertising nonsense down the throats of "consumers".
And for crying out loud, we don't need "general reliability improvements" to the AJAX crap. STRIP IT THE FUCK OUT! Get rid of it! Go back to the good ol' dropdowns for selecting the moderation level and the number of posts to view. Go back to using to using proven techniques that, get this, actually work and are usable!
I was hopeful that we'd see some great changes when Slashdot first came to us asking for suggestions. But now I fear that Slashdot will become another intolerant shitheap among the reddits and Diggs and Hacker Newses of the Internet. We don't want censorship. We don't want bullshit videos. We don't want half-assed, buzzword-compliant functionality ruining the site.
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: (Score:3)
Some of us old farts stick around here for old times sake.
That's about the only reason I stick around, too.
And a 6 digit claiming to be an old fart makes me feel positively ancient...
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.)
Re: (Score:3)
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Do you guys remove GNAA posts and the like these days, or have the crapflooders actually gone elsewhere? I can't remember the last time I saw an ascii-art goatse. Inquiring minds want to know.
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
Re:A bit late for April Fools, isn't it? (Score:5, Informative)
The comment abuse flag is just a way to more quickly catch robo-trolls and spammers. We do ban spammers, but as long as you're not trying to sell shoes, handbags, pills, or treasure maps you have nothing to worry about. On second thought, I probably won't ban you if you're trying to sell treasure maps.
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 actu
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 ;)
Unicode (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Unicode (Score:5, Informative)
Nope, still broken.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
Well, Slashdot offers complete Unicode support!
But it's limited to the U+0000 to U+007F range
Explanation (Score:3)
Slashdot users have been clamoring, begging, pleading for Unicode support for years.
And we never get it.
It should have been a simple fix back in 2004 or so. By 2008 it was embarrassing. In 2012, given all the other changes and upgrades to the site, it is absolutely un-fucking believable that we have to post in Latin.
So what is the REAL reason why it has never been added? There must be a non-technical explanation for something so obvious to be broken for so long.
Abuse of Unicode (5:erocS) (Score:3)
And no, it won't end up with Zalgo invading the comments. Comments abusing the character set will be modded down and nobody will see them
Last time it happened, it was worse than Zalgo (use of diacritic stacking to "dirty" up a post). People were putting bidirectionality override characters into comments to break the layout [slashdot.org].
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?
Fix copy and paste on the iPad (Score:2)
At the moment (iOS5.1) I cannot highlight anything on the page outside of a text area so I can't copy and paste...
Re: (Score:3)
It's like that on my work computer too (XP, IE7).
My wish... (Score:5, Insightful)
So, readers, what do you want to see in the coming months?
A clear separation between ads and stories.
Re:My wish... (Score:4, Funny)
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.
Re:In all seriousness (Score:5, Insightful)
If something that is 2 days old doesn't count as news, then I don't read news.
The people who want news the second it's released can go somewhere else, I'm here for the discussions.
Re:In all seriousness (Score:4, Insightful)
A lot of those other discussion systems are crap. Poor threading, infinite up/down votes, pre-moderation (think Apple app store: you can spend lots of time writing a great comment, but it doesn't mean it'll get posted), etc. Worse, articles can be updated as the story changes, after comments have already been made, so the initial comments can be wildly off base.
The level of intelligence in commenters on those is typically far lower too. Trolls from both sides of the political spectrum can derail a perfectly good discussion.
Re: (Score:3)
While I appreciate the desire for timely news, there are also up sides to the delay.
One big up side is that the story has somewhat settled down and there's more facts going around than speculation and knee-jerk reactions.
In that respect, though, I do
reply to comments STILL broken - please fix! (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
+1
What do I want? (Score:5, Insightful)
I want Slashdot back!
Lose the gimmicks. Slashdot was great because it focused on hard tech news, and tended to post things that the Slashdot community were interested in. Now, it seems to be at the whims of a few submitters (MrSeb, Hugh Pickens) with the editors asleep at the switch and posting stuff that's not even remotely tech news, typically biased political propaganda.
Stop creating your own vanity projects. You need to stop fantasizing that you're a news *source* and get back to being a tech news *aggregator*. We don't want you to create custom content, and especially not tripe like device destruction porn, reviews, reports from conventions (is there any bigger waste of video than a "from the convention floor" type report?) You're such a late entry to this space that it'll take years to get even remotely good at it, if ever. Find the great content out there, and post stories and links. That's it!
It's just absurd to think that these recent missteps were simple errors in judgement. The claim that the infamous hoodie video was intended (per Soulskill) as "a quick, silly, completely non-serious video" is suspect. Why would something *intended* as a silly video even be on the front page and not in Idle? How out of touch do you need to be to think that the readers wouldn't be offended and instantly assume an ad masquerading as a story?
And in spite of the massive negative feedback (which must have been massive indeed to rouse the editors from their slumber to actually acknowledge the problem), you *still* ran that atrocious Plantronics tripe, and pretended to be surprised that people hated it.
Honestly, the recent changes stink of you trying to pad your resumes.
So right (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem I think is that geeks no longer run Slashdot, they no longer choose the stories to post. Instead it's by social media/blogger types which is not what Slashdot's target audience is interested in...
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: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: (Score:3)
> I want Slashdot back!
Seconded. This is not Slashdot, this is Slashdot theatre, stages by bad actors with no technical expertise whatsoever.
It has gone from a place were you would find serious technical news stories to one of the worst places on the net. Always looking for the next outcry and the next provocation posting, worse than even the tabloid press.
Re: (Score:3)
I don't think that's staff's fault. Back when slashdot was young, almost everyone on the internet was a nerd. Now everyone and his dog is on the internet, and what's worse, we've gone from being social pariahs to being kewl (Damn but I never thought I'd live to see that). So you have hordes of semiliterate and aliterate muggles who think they're nerds because they can boot Windows and use an iPhone, and they're coming to slashdot submitting stories, voting in the firehose, etc.
We're even outnumbered at slas
Re: (Score:3)
And I want my comments back!
At my glacial pace, I am finally thinking of starting a blog. It occurred to me that I have a wealth of comments I have posted over the years here. Give us a "12-click" method that exports all of your comments out into your choice of a few file types.
For a site that talks about the evils of lock-in, I made a half hearted attempt to neo-google (Startpage) my comments from Slashdot by using a web search engine.
Game reviews? (Score:4, Informative)
Go out gracefully (Score:2)
Let's be honest. Slashdot's time has past. It's now a place to see "news for nerds" that everyone has already seen and discussed to death for days elsewhere, and to see "stuff that matters" but only where "mattering" is a some connection, any connection, anything to get the word "Apple" in the headline of an article.
The advertisements posted as articles were the straw that broke the camel's back.
Go out gracefully, Slashdot.
A list (Score:2)
Grammar-check
Repeat Story Detector
More Cowbell
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.
No more Ads in the Articles! (Score:2)
Wasn't very broken, don't fix much (Score:4, Informative)
I've been here a while and my opinion is that Slashdot was fine until ads and videos started to steal space at the top of the page.
For the most part, it wasn't broken. Be very careful in what you fix. Gawker has gone to Hades with its redesign.
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.
This is what is needed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
It's configurable. At the top right of the screen, click "Account", then click the "Posting" link/tab; for Comment Post Mode, choose "Plain Old Text".
Viewing comments (Score:3, Insightful)
Having to click 7 times to view all the comments on this page is very annoying. The link at the bottom of the page says "Get N more comments" where N is the total number of comments on the article. Clicking it only returns 5 at a time. This makes it hard to read discussions when you have to continually scroll to the bottom of the page, click a link, scroll back up, continue reading for a little bit, scroll back down, click a link, repeat.
Stop refreshing (Score:3)
I'm not a fan of having the home page constantly refresh. I prefer to do that when I'm ready. You know, the way it worked for years. ;)
Unfortunately, with the way it is currently working, I actually end up reading slashdot less, as I lose my place.
And no, I don't RSS or other feed junk, have always hated that.
Lose "Many More" link and provide per-date URLs (Score:5, Insightful)
Slashdot used to have a perfectly working front page for "today", plus specific URLs for the day before, the day before that, and so on. It used to employ some of the good principles of Roy Fielding's thesis on REST, where each page is a resource with a distinct address that makes sense. You could give someone a link and know exactly what they're seeing. Well no more.
Instead of that sane technical design, now we have some kind of utterly broken page expansion system linked through "Many More", and you never know what the hell you're looking at, and when you return from a nested page you're seeing something totally different. It's a technical disaster, and given that this pretends to be a technical site, its technical design is quite beyond the pale.
Bring back a bit of sane web technology please. Lose the totally unhelpful "Many More" which is a wholly broken design, and bring back dated pages.
Re: (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.
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. "
Expand All Comments (Score:5, Insightful)
This may not apply to the newcomers who read the site in AJAX mode. I prefer the classic mode (yes, I'm that old).
When reading comments I would appreciate a toggle to "expand all comments" so that I can see comments ranked below my default viewing threshhold. It mostly applies when I'm moderating and would love to be able to browse at 0 or -1 to catch the good comments that were late to the first post party; given that you can only see "Re: [parent post title" instead of the body of the comment, you tend to not bother clicking on them to avoid an endless dance of "click, hit -Back" to see what they wrote.
There are also occasionally discussions where I would be interested to see the back-and-forth between others because they seem particularly well-informed or even funny but their subsequent replies aren't modded as highly as their originals, so you have to enter the "click, hit -Back" game again if you want to see the whole thing.
I still love Slashdot, but having that "expand all comments" option would improve my experience.
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.
NNTP (Score:3)
Yeah, there's probably still some mention of it in the FAQ, but seriously, how plausible is it that a few Slashdot readers opting to use their favourite news client to read what's on these pages represents a serious loss of advertising revenue?
Slashdot's gotten "prettier" over the years, but no amount of Web 2.0 is going to offer features (commonplace 20 years ago) that encourage and facilitate proper discussions.
As it is now, I'm inclined to view the words on my screen like grafitti on a bathroom wall. Some of it may be worth reading, but trying to make real sense of it often isn't worth the trouble.
Block Annoying Users (Score:3, Informative)
I would appreciate being able to block an annoying user within a threaded discussion. Just, a "please be invisible right now because you post way too much" button. I've tried switching my relationship to those folks and it does nothing.
My requests (Score:5, Interesting)
Article Submissions (Score:3)
There ought to be a way for longer term community members or those who consistently are ahead of the curve with the news cycle to accrue a greater chance of having their article submissions accepted. Even better would be a way for community members to give each other props in that regard, as in "I'd like to hear more from Joe, he always has insightful things to say on the subject of artificial DNA."
Perhaps I'm wrong, but neither karma nor consistently high mods appear to be linked to submissions chances that way. Of course there is the potential for abuse from shills, but you the editors ought to be able to quickly check out the bona fides of a userID's contributions and vet the validity of the acclaim.
How about more technology stories? (Score:5, Insightful)
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: (Score:3)
YES.
Slashdot has never been a place I would point someone at looking for a well-formed webpage, but over the years it just keeps getting worse. After the last 'upgrade' the site is completely unusable without blocking the javascript. It really is ridiculous. A tech site should really learn to use HTML and generate webpages.
Comment removed (Score:3)
My thoughts of what Slashdot needs (Score:5, Insightful)
I have been reading Slashdot for years and posting for just as long and here is what I think Slashdot needs:
1.Posting that focuses more on "News for Nerds" and less on useless crap. Bring in more technical stories and less political and legal stories. A post that sued for violations of is not "news for nerds".
Looking at the front page as of now (and going a page or 2 back), "Browser Emulation of 1975 Computer Runs First 16-Bit Home Game " is a good story, its very much "news for nerds".
"MIT Institute's Gloomy Prediction: 'Global Economic Collapse' By 2030 " is not "news for nerds". Yeah sure some people ran some computer simulations but there is no geek/nerd angle.
"Yahoo Layoffs Begin, CEO Sends Employees Apologetic Letter " is also not "news for nerds". Just because its a tech company doesn't mean the fact that people are being fired is "news for nerds".
2.Better editing of what gets posted (e.g. checking for spelling errors, looking for dupes, making sure links work etc)
3.A complete ban on posting any article that is behind a pay wall or requires a login to read the content, no matter how good it might be (e.g. the recent Nature cancer study link that is pay walled). This includes linking to the New York Times unless the link works without the need to log in.
4.No more posting of "slashvertisments" (i.e. articles that are clearly written just to sell whatever product they are writing about)., The recent "Nokia Lumia 900 Reviews " article is an example of this, reviews of a new smartphone (no matter how good) is not "news for nerds" (unless its a phone like the GTA04 that is specifically built to be "open").
Same thing with endless posts about the latest iPad or other must-have gadget. Unless its specifically a geeky or nerdy product like the GTA04 or the Raspberry Pi, its not "news for nerds" and there are plenty of other places to read about that stuff. Slashdot is not Engadget. It's also not Autoblog (the recent story about the Volt sales numbers isn't "news for nerds" either. A technical article on just how the Volt battery packs work on the other hand would definatly qualify as "news for nerds")
5.Do not implement comment flagging or removal. Yes, comments get posted that shouldn't be (e.g. links to goatse) but people mod those down or post replies saying "link in parent post is NSFW". Slashdot should have a policy of never removing comments unless legally required to do so. (even spam generally gets modded down pretty fast)
6.Redo the code for the site. Get rid of a lot of the fancy Javascript and AJAX and stuff and go back to a much leaner Slashdot. Replace the "many more" link and rewrite the display system for frontpage and firehose so that its possible to bookmark (or return to) a specific state with a specific set of articles visible and so you wont loose your place when you click on a link that takes you away from the firehose page.
Make the loading of the next batch of articles for the front page or firehose much faster.
Support modern features like IPv6 and Unicode (if Google can do IPv6 there is no reason Slashdot cant do it)
7.Make it easier for people to use the fire-hose to mod articles up or down and in particular to down-vote the spam and ads that get posted there whilst allowing the legitimate articles to shine through so they can be front-paged.
8.Ban URL shorteners or pre-expand the URL before they get posted. This prevents people posting shortened URLs that really point to goatse.
9.Completely cease and desist using proprietary technologies (such as Flash) for any part of the site. If you must have video clips, use HTML5 audio/video by default (preferably with WebM rather than H.264 where possible). If you do need to use Flash (for browsers that dont have HTM5 audio/video support), make sure its only used for browsers that dont support HTML5 audio/video.
No video (Score:3)
I dislike video. I can read articles at my speed/leisure, skim over them while I'm doing other stuff. Video has a fixed duration, and sucks up my attention for the whole duration.
Maybe I'm just a curmudgeon, but I dislike this tendency of the Internet turning into... TV.
plain text (Score:3)
I stay with Slashdot out of habit I suppose; sometimes the discussions are insightful. The moderation system is adequate. I think there's room for some clever indexing and searching of past discussions. Most of the rest is fluff and the web is saturated with it.
Slashdot could well add additional forums for other topics. If kept as simple and direct as possible, they could succeed, but they should not be mixed into the main system. Not interested in videos, but perhaps a 'future forum' that allows anticipating trends instead of reporting yesterday's news...
I was happy with the old text based BBS systems when the discussions were relevant. That kind of simplicity can keep Slashdot unique, worthwhile and accessible in places where fancy programming just doesn't work.
Shill problem (Score:2)
You are right, this will be just as abused just like the current moderation system by shills.
I really would like a user preference that lets me block users greater than a certain UID. This is because there are very few genuine users over a certain ID.
Anyone with me? How do we slow down the shills?
Dear Slashdot Management (Score:5, Insightful)
Your website's profitability depends on the comments posted below. You depend on User Generated Content (UGC). This is where most users extract value from your site and the reason why people actually still visit Slashdot.
It's not the articles themselves, people only rarely read those.
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. If you post a Slashvertisement, not that I like them at least it is separate from the comment section so you're not pretending to be anything but a shill for another company. However, the comment section should represent real users and trolls -- not shills.
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: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
I am a real person :(
What about a way to block specific users, which in turn ALSO blocks all their moderation?
Say some group of shills mods post Y down to oblivion, by having them on your block list, those down mods are invisible and not counted. You now see the post for how it is, and if anyone else modded it +1 whatever, you would see that as well, as long as they aren't on your block list as well.
Of course, this could be the way it is currently, but as a /. noob, I don't have a good enough idea of what
That would break the confidentiality of moderation (Score:4, Insightful)
What about a way to block specific users, which in turn ALSO blocks all their moderation?
That would break the confidentiality of moderation. Block a user on your account and compare the scores when viewed through that account to the scores seen by Anonymous Coward. Then you can see how the user modded every comment.
Re:Shill problem (Score:5, Insightful)
There are very few interesting posters over the 2M UID mark... but there are some. There are now over half a million accounts in that range, so it would be a bit surprising if none of them ever said anything interesting. That said, there are probably a lot of patterns that you can watch for to spot mod abuse. For example:
Or you could just bring back the old metamod system. You know, the one that actually worked, where anyone in the oldest 90% of accounts could do it, but had no control over the posts that they metamoderated.
Re: (Score:2)
I am sure they would have done that already, but the editors can't find page 3 :-)
Re:Stick a fork in it (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3)
Um, what?
Slashdot has by far a better signal to noise ratio than Facebook and Reddit.
There might be some problems with moderation, but again, far better than the detritus on those two sites.
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.
Re: (Score:3)
Nobody is complaining about the advertisements that are marked as advertisements.
The complaints are about the advertisements masquerading as articles. I don't see a lot (1-2 a day, if that) but it does happen. The question is - are these advertisers paying slashdot (unlikely), paying the folks who pick the articles (possible but still not very likely) or have they simply found a way to abuse the submission process (most likely).