The State of Slashdot: Https, Poll Changes, Auto-Refresh, Videos, and More 546
As of yesterday, Slashdot now serves over https. In addition, the polls have been moved exclusively to the right rail, and will not show up with the other stories any longer. We've also disabled auto-refresh, and fixed various issues with search and other features. In the last few weeks, we've also discontinued videos, and removed the "Jobs" section of the site. You can follow all of the changes on the Slashdot blog.
Where's my UTF8? (Score:3)
Just kidding, I'm sure fixing slashcode for that is going to be a nightmare.
Re:Where's my UTF8? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Where's my UTF8? (Score:5, Insightful)
Okay you know what, the changes around here--including responsiveness to user opinions--are getting really, really nice. Thank you.
Re:Where's my UTF8? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
Thanks for all the great work.
Re:Where's my UTF8? (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Where's my UTF8? (Score:5, Insightful)
Just want to say that your presence in some of these threads reminds me a lot of the old days, when Taco et al. would post about what was going on, what they were doing, even comment in stories. It's been sincerely missed, and it's a VERY welcome return.
Thanks for buying this place. It will be nice to have /. actually turn back into the awesome site that it once was. Before the dark times. Before the Empire.
Re:Where's my UTF8? (Score:4, Insightful)
Most of the time, when people say "Slashdot isn't the same as it was 15 years ago!", I reply with "You're not the same as you were 15 years ago!". Things change, and they can't always be like they were in the beginning. But this is one of those things that I miss too - having people who actually run the site comment on what's going on. And, although he probably won't see this reply due to nesting, I totally admire whipslash for diving into these threads like he/she has.
Re:Where's my UTF8? (Score:5, Informative)
Look like subscriptions [slashdot.org] is still a thing, assuming you have an account.
Re:Greater moderation transparency? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd argue against seeing moderation data. Yeah, I've been modded down on comments that I thought shouldn't be modded down, but I don't really need to know who did it. We have enough noise on here without people calling out others who modded them down.
I call bullshit. (Score:5, Informative)
I am consistently modded down for having a conservative viewpoint. I generally don't even log-in anymore because when I do post a conservative viewpoint, my inbox is shortly after filled with "fu republican" type posts.
Funny. I've been posting as an evil, stealing-candy-from-babies Republican here for years (Note the nominally low UID? Yeah, that long.).
I can think of maybe, MAYBE one or two rude messages I've received from fellow users over the years.
And my karma's quite good...
So...Unless you're posting some absolutely whack-job stuff, I call bullshit.
Re:I call bullshit too, on you (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't confuse "having a conservative viewpoint" with "having a conservative viewpoint and spouting bollocks", as while the two overlap, the criticism you receive is usually due to the bollocks-spouting and not the conservatism. This is patently obvious judging by the plethora of conservatives who are not regularly down-modded into oblivion. It's clearly not your being a conservative that is causing the backlash, but what you are doing with your conservatism. It's rather disingenuous to ignore the highly opinionated stance you've adopted over these last few years and simply blame everything on people hating on conservatives.
Any user on Slashdot who goes out of their way to repeatedly promote some narrative in the way you have should expect the ghosts of said narrative to follow them around.
Re:Greater moderation transparency? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm a centrist who believes that there should be a lot of compromise, and your party currently hates compromise, so from my perspective if you're giving a "conservative viewpoint" that is the same as the Republican talking points, I'm going to down-mod for 2 reasons; it isn't actually your perspective, just party-flag-waving regurgitation, and it is probably not a reasoned viewpoint that allows other views to exist.
I down-mod people on the left for the same reason, usually from the Green Party. Democrats at least support compromise and their views don't exclude Republican views; they are openly and explicitly willing to compromise.
So I can see that depending on the actual common views in each party over time, there would be a different balance of down-mods for not being constructive, and just asserting conclusions, etc.
A lot of slashdot users are actually quite conservative, but they're not Republican Party flag-wavers and they don't regurgitate talking points. They're conservatives who still believe in compromise, in civic duty, in honesty.
What percent of modern "conservatives" will even agree that Democrats love America and love the Constitution? 1%? 2%? "They're tryin' to take er guns!" "Who?" "Them their liberaaals!" "But they say they support the 2nd Amendment too, and you can keep your guns." "FROM MY COLD DEAD HANDS YOU HIPPIE!" That is basically how the conversation goes.
Re: (Score:3)
I am consistently modded down for having a conservative viewpoint. I generally don't even log-in anymore because when I do post a conservative viewpoint, my inbox is shortly after filled with "fu republican" type posts.
Then imagine what your inbox would look like if you started modding down some of the trolls that do deserve to be modded. Some people take comments that they don't like very personally to the extent that they send abusive PMs or even harrass you by replying to all your posts in other discussions to continue the fight. But think how much worse would that be if they knew exactly who modded them down to -1.
When you are moderating, you don't want to be so scared of certain, vindictive people that you avoid doin
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
Knowing who modded a comment makes moderation worthless. If they do that, I'm out of here. You'll never get honest moderation when the moderator has to fear retaliation.
Exactly. I already get clusters of down-mods sometimes, from days past, after making a controversial post, like saying something positive about systemd.
Re: (Score:3)
after making a controversial post, like saying something positive about systemd
You're a braver man than me. That's the slashdot equivalent of calling the Pope the Anti-Christ on the Vatican web site.
Re: (Score:3)
Metamoderation used to be "Here's a comment and a moderation to it, was that moderation appropriate?". Last opportunity I had it was "Here's a comment. Should it have been moderated up or down?" even if I wouldn't spend a mod point on it if the point were highly radioactive.
auto-refresh sucked. Beware UTF8 injections (Score:5, Insightful)
Thanks for getting rid of auto-refresh. It sucked to have the page refresh while typing or scrolling.
Be careful when you do unicode. I know that's often requested, so it'll probably be done, but be aware it makes protection from injection attacks (including sql & script) much trickier. You probably want do do encoding on output and bound parameters on input, rather than trying to filter input.
The last day or two I had error saying I was posting from an open proxy, on multiple devices and networks. It seems something went wrong with that detection- possibly detecting your own load balancer.
Re:auto-refresh sucked. Beware UTF8 injections (Score:4, Informative)
Re:auto-refresh sucked. Beware UTF8 injections (Score:4)
I've been reading slashdot for a long, long time, but only started posting within the last year or so.
Allowing editing of posts for during a grace period (10 minutes? 30 minutes?) would be a most welcome addition, if only to let me fix things when I screw up closing a italic tag.
But either way, thanks. It looks like you guys are working hard to make slashdot as good or better than it used to be.
Re:auto-refresh sucked. Beware UTF8 injections (Score:5, Insightful)
I dunno, It really doesn't seem fair to let people edit the historical record, especially when people start replying to them. Waaaay too easy to put words in someone's mouth by making it look like they're objecting to something they didn't, etc. You need something similar to gmail's undo feature, which delays sending for a few seconds instead of actually calling the mail back once it's been committed.
Although that functionality does already exist in the "preview" button.
Re: (Score:3)
They could simply allow editing so long as there are no replies/mods on the comment, as LJ does.
Or, better yet, do editing history, like Facebook (of all things) does.
Re:auto-refresh sucked. Beware UTF8 injections (Score:4, Insightful)
Allowing editing of posts for during a grace period (10 minutes? 30 minutes?) would be a most welcome addition, if only to let me fix things when I screw up closing a italic tag.
How about an option that forces you to use preview? That will solve your problem without affecting anyone else.
Note, I sometimes botch a comment. If I cared, I'd always use preview.
Re:auto-refresh sucked. Beware UTF8 injections (Score:5, Interesting)
Does anyone actually want Unicode, or just a small subset of features missing from whatever encoding they now use, in the dominant encoding of the era? We've lived with parsimony for a long time now, just scrub everything in Unicode that isn't obviously a feature with a minimal down-side.
Here's a sane approach. Go to the New York Times or The Atlantic or the WSJ or The Economist, download the top 1000 articles from the last 100 days and include every character you consistently find there (plus obvious gap fillers). That's all I ever wanted. Few or none of these characters will facilitate injection attacks. Then people can suggest other parts of Unicode on a case by case basis.
Good grief, why would anyone adopt the whole seething enchilada all at once?
Until late 2013, ad networks didn't support HTTPS (Score:4, Informative)
I had in fact been wondering for quite some time how come a technology oriented site isn't securing traffic with TLS.
Because until relatively recently (September 2013 [googleblog.com]), ad networks did not support HTTPS [archive.org]. Thus browsers would block ads as mixed content. So in order to make the ads appear, Slashdot would redirect HTTPS visits from non-subscribers to HTTP.
Re: (Score:2)
Great start though. I too would like to see UTF8, but low-hanging fruit first. I guess it's time to change my sig.
Re:Where's my IPv6 (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Where's my IPv6 (Score:5, Informative)
You might wanna look at what headers slashdot sends as well: https://securityheaders.io/?q=... [securityheaders.io]
Re:Where's my IPv6 (Score:4, Insightful)
How can I give you money for this? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:How can I give you money for this? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:How can I give you money for this? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:How can I give you money for this? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:How can I give you money for this? (Score:4, Insightful)
I've been on slashdot since quite close to the beginning. (I had another user name before this one, too bad I abandoned it before low UID was something worth bragging rights). I had never really considered subscribing before.
After the changes you've been making, and knowing a bit about your plans, I'd be happy to subscribe just to vote with my wallet in favor of what's going on, even if a subscription doesn't have any benefits whatsoever beyond knowing that I'm supporting a good thing.
My wallet is not very thick but I think there are thousands of others who feel similarly.
Keep up the good work!
Re: (Score:3)
Much appreciated. Since I frequent this site on a daily basis, I might as well support it.
Re: (Score:3)
FYI, subscriptions never entirely went away. I paid once and did not choose to suppress ads (I wanted some of the other benefits [slashdot.org]), so my subscription never expired and I still have the little asterisk next to my name on posts to this day.
BLASHPEMER! (Score:5, Funny)
and removed the "Jobs" section of the site
You're going to pay dearly for you lack of faith when HE returns to Earth save *pple yet again.
Awesome (Score:5, Insightful)
Good, good (Score:5, Insightful)
Good, good, good, good, good... Wait, what is this? Positive changes, nothing to complain about?
I don't even know what to do.
Good job Slashdot, keep it up.
Re: (Score:2)
Thank you :-) (Score:3)
Thank you, whipslash!
And thanks also to your colleagues who did the work, provided support, and indeed those who made the tea or supplied the jokes. It's all useful, and progress has been made on Slashdot!
Re: (Score:3)
Hmm. I have javascript disabled, but I wonder if that was what had made the layout look funny lately (harder to read) cuz now that problem seems to have gone away.
Anyway, it's great that Slashdot is once again about the users. Thumbs up.
Re: (Score:3)
I suppose someone could complain about that - or about any number of things. I only meant that I found nothing to complain about.
Personally the removal of auto-refresh is my favorite change of all. So annoying when I'm reading the summary of an article halfway down the page, and the whole thing reloads, invariably scrolling the summary I was reading off the screen. Good riddance!
Re:Good, good (Score:4, Funny)
Well, someone probably could complain about auto-refresh, though I personally found it a silly waste of the servers' resources.
My biggest complaint is that the green color used in the header bars clashes with the curtains in my office.
Re:Good, good (Score:5, Interesting)
Congratulations, thats a big step (Score:5, Informative)
The quality of the improvements and the effort of the new team is visible, it even gets an A on ssl quality test [ssllabs.com].
Good job and don't rest on the laurels, get working on the Unicode support because that's one of the missing features.
Great job! (Score:3)
It's amazing what applying some focus can do in a short period of time.
Kudos.
Examining the certificate (Score:5, Interesting)
When connecting to Slashdot, I'm now cryptographically guaranteed to be talking to (drumroll please) Dice Holdings, Inc!
So... are we being MitM'd by Dice, trying to get their old property back?
Re:Examining the certificate (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Examining the certificate (Score:4, Informative)
How exactly is verifying a site's identity by relying on the site itself, via the same channel, any better than zero authentication at all?
Where's the like button? (Score:3)
No, not the facebook one!
All these changes were exactly what bugged me for the past little while here on /. , and I've been here for a while. Kudos!
thank you (Score:4)
just saying thanx
Comments link (Score:5, Insightful)
HTTPS and Interstitials. (Score:5, Interesting)
When I connect to wifi hotspots in things like Coffee shops, they intercept the web access and route the connection to their "accept our stupid legal thing you didn't read".
If I connect to a https web site, this doesn't work, because the redirected endpoint doesn't present the correct cert.
So I always start by connecting to Slashdot, because it's not https. Now I'm going to have to find a different non-https web site.
Re:HTTPS and Interstitials. (Score:5, Funny)
I use sco.com. Might as well make the litigious bastards do SOMETHING useful...
Re: (Score:3)
So I always start by connecting to Slashdot, because it's not https. Now I'm going to have to find a different non-https web site.
Slashdot should still work fine for that. When you type "slashdot.org" into your browser it goes to the HTTP site first and gets redirected to the HTTPS version. The coffee shops, etc., will intercept that first request and do their thing there. You won't get the redirect until you actually make a connection to http://slashdot.org./ [slashdot.org.]
Personally, I use http://google.com/ [google.com] for that same purpose. It has redirected to HTTTPS for quite some time now, but it still works fine, for the same reason.
Re:HTTPS and Interstitials. (Score:4, Informative)
It really shouldn't work.
The plaintext version of slashdot uses http 301 (moved permanently), which causes the browser to simply skip connecting to the plaintext version the next time and connect directly to the redirected https URL.
Google.com however, uses http 302 (moved), which does not cause this caching to occur, and will work just fine for this purpose.
If Slashdot had used the "Strict-Transport-Security" header as well, your browser should categorically refuse to connect to the plaintext version (after your first connection) until the expiry date has been reached (usually quite a few weeks into the future)
If you can use http://slashdot.org/ [slashdot.org] the same way you use http://google.com/ [google.com] your browser has security issues.
Thanks (Score:5, Funny)
Now I can finally remove the [FUCK BETA] tag from my sig. Took only two years, but better late than never! :)
Thank You (Score:4)
At one point in the last couple of years, I was on the verge of bringing up the change password dialog, typing a bunch of random characters, NOT recording it and logging out. So I would not be able to log in again even if tempted.
After some consideration, rather than just give up on the site, I moved /. to the bottom of my daily links list and started focusing my time and attention elsewhere, while checking back only occasionally.
I'm beginning to be glad I didn't. Thanks for the positive changes.
The real challenge will be to get those who did give up to return and give /. another try (and then stick around).
What's that strange feeling? Why, I believe it's hope. How unusual.
WhipLash: Second Apology (Score:5, Insightful)
When the company you work for took over SlashdotMedia and therefore Slashdot, I kinda flipped out and talked a whole lot of doom and gloom bullshit. No less, I was downright mean about it. In fact, I was mean and rude to you directly. As someone who has been here since day one, I was kinda panicked about Slashdot's continuation. In turn, your replies to my flaming were level-headed and even kind. It did not take me long to realize I was wrong about all if it and apologize. After reading this, I apologize twice over.
Hey, can you find me three digit ID account? It was attached to a long gone ihatehotmail1979@hotmail.com - I know that is a long shot of a question.
Re: (Score:3)
Wow! (Score:5)
Thanks, good work. (Score:4)
Been here a good while, come most days...guess I like the place although Dice sure did their best to ruin it.
Glad I stuck it through, and "thanks" for the positive changes.
Against the flow, (but then again, I am a BSD neckbeard), don't listen to the bunnies screaming for UTF8.
It'll increase your attack surface, hence give you a butthurt of work if you do it right, for...what?
I've never seen a funny or insightful post that would have somehow been more hilarious or intelligent if it had accents in it.
HTTPS \o/ (Score:4)
we wuv you (Score:3)
thank you
Do Not Disable AC (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Do Not Disable AC (Score:5, Informative)
long(ish) time user saying thanks! (Score:3)
It is a pleasure to peruse the site again after its digression into... commercialism?!. I had almost given up on it. Thank you for working to bring it back.
Awesome guys, thanks! (Score:3)
I'm a long time user (mid-90s?) and happy to see the site breathing a breath of fresh air!
Markdown please (Score:3)
One thing though: can we please have GitHub flavored markdown for comments?
1. Faster/easier to type than verbose and pedantic HTML. (no more typing <br> after and between lines!)
2. It should make it easier on your end to sanitize input.
3. It should make it much easier to support posting snippets of code.
4. Previews could be generated as-you-type or on-click on the client-side. For example, see the StackEdit extension on Chrome.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I really don't want to learn yet another proprietary markup language. So can we please keep it a standards based markup instead of flavor of the month? Thanks.
Re: (Score:3)
How? By sticking your head in the sand and pretending that since it's a text-based format, you don't need to parse it, you can just shove it into whatever library came up as the first hit in a search for "convert markdown html perl"?
markdown is a DWIM syntax, and that sort of thing is always extremely complicated. HTML is simple and predictable to parse. markdown is anything but. If you disagree, show me an EBNF for markdown.
I do agree that better
Great Job (Score:3)
I just turned off AdBlock for the first time in years.
Videos (Score:3)
On the subject of video, it's not inherently a bad thing. It was just never done well before. Poor editing and poor sound, poor choice of subjects, etc. I seem to remember one of some maker talking all about how his project worked, but no-one thought to actually get a decent shot of the thing in question.
If you've got a story about a new kind of 3D printer which, I dunno, prints sideways or something, I wouldn't say no to a short, small, illustrative video.
Now, have you fixed it so the "Ads disabled" button will stay ticked forever?
A simple thank you! (Score:3)
Sorry to be "that guy" (Score:4, Insightful)
Thank you! (Score:3)
Autorefresh (Score:4)
OMG THANK YOU FOR REMOVING AUTO REFRESH.
That was the single most frustrating and annoying thing in the history of everything on the internet. It was worse than obnoxious ads even. The text you reading simply vanishing before your eyes and refreshing and landing in a difference spot every time and then having to find where you were at was just... urgh!!
Good job (Score:3)
Just another low ID user offering some encouragement.
Thank you. (Score:3)
Thank you.
Slashdot: Home for nerds, community that matters (Score:4, Insightful)
A few years ago (before the last buyout) /. was my main technical news source. I came primarily for the community, then for the content, and lastly for some humor at the polls. No, not reporting on current political campaign polls, although I do remember watching the politics section go live.
I want to share a little bit of my story: When I was a wee lad not yet in highschool my family got dial-up. I was so excited! The internet was new and so amazing. It was a very short time until I came across slashdot and for some reason I got hooked. I think it was the engineering humor and conversation (or perhaps jokes about a gritty Natalie Portman), but something about it stuck. This site tremendously sparked and influenced my love of technology. I'm now a successful fully-employed member of society (in an IT field no less!) and I can honestly blame ./ culture for much of my development.
I've learned services, like friends, come and go. I was active in, and then watched, Digg dissapear. I saw some of the glimmer of Kuroshin. I've piddled around in Reddit. Slashdot was always in the back there though, if sometimes only because of distantly fond memories.
I watched as certain strategic decisions ticked the "she's not going to make it jim" flag in my mind and I began to write Slashdot off. Recently however there is a new light behind the community. There is a new vibrancy. It's because you who are in charge are like us once again (one of us, one of us!). You understand that this isn't about the monies, it isn't about pageviews and numbers, it's about technologists by day who can take a few minutes to just be nerds and talk and discuss with each other. It's about having slashdot as hobby, an interest, someplace where I can hang up the coat and hang out for a while. You've started to remember that and it is showing. We, the community, see it. I feel at home here once again.
Keep up the good work - here's to hoping ./ and it's community can be a home for the geeks, the nerds, the techies and all those inspiring to be. Thanks guys, she's looking good again!
Thanks, and Keep Posting! (Score:3)
Real nice to have an actual human posting up about what's going on, and responding to comments. /.
Thanks for thinking about us users (yeah, how about that!) and glad to be looking forward to future
Hey new team, you won me back! (Score:3)
YeaIh, I know: your strategy wasn't "how the hell can we get water-and-sewer to come back to slashdot?" But thought I'd say thanks: your changes to the site, but moreover, your APPROACH to the site, makes Slashdot the kind of place I'm excited to come back to.
Really glad to have a new team behind the steering wheel. This was my most-visited site on the Internet for many years, but over the past two I've probably visited a handful or so, and mostly to post snarky comments inviting people to check out other sites. Now, I'm back. ... and very impressed. Let me help you get the word out.
Re:Can't Post (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Disable ads is a fraud (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Disable ads is a fraud (Score:4)
I hope you will. Sorry for getting irritated...
Re: (Score:3)
Is it true that APK has a child molestation conviction? Because that's what I heard.
Re:Disable Anonymous Cowards... (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Disable Anonymous Cowards... (Score:4, Informative)
If you don't like the comment, DONT FUCKING READ IT.
Logical fail. The only way I can tell if I like a comment or not is to read it.
I'm sick of little pussies like you with their hurt feelings blaming your Facebook "sad face" sticker situation on the ACs
You must have me confused with someone else. I don't do Facebook.
Re: (Score:3)
But surely you must admit that there are occasional prime comments by AC's. :)
Re: (Score:3)
Yup, didn't get an account until they added moderation. The early, mostly anon years were fun, trolls and all.
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Nice Changes For Sure, But...... (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
It looks like the AC is talking about two different things. You got an answer about metamoderation, but there is also mod points which is normal moderation. Mod points are only given to users with excellent karma (I think), which shows on this page: https://slashdot.org/~Gaygirli... [slashdot.org] but I think only for you. I seem to get 5 or 15 points a week to use to moderate posts, which is done by clicking on a drop box that shows next to the Share link on the bottom of each post, but only when you have mod points.
I
Re:Count me back in. (Score:4, Interesting)
--Your efforts are appreciated. Keep up the good work :-)
--Aside: A few weeks back I wanted to get in contact with you to recommend something, but it didn't coalesce - so at the risk of going a bit offtopic I will post it here. You may want to see if you can work a deal with O'Reilly books to sell at a discount to Slashdot users. It's tech-related and would seem to be a good match for the site. Just a thought.