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Slashdot Code Update

Posted by CmdrTaco on Fri Jan 04, 2002 01:57 AM
from the read-this-stuff dept.
You will likely notice a variety of changes in the comments system if you are logged in. Most of these changes surround the new 'Zoo' system which implements (among other things) a sort of killfile function, and much more. Logged in users have the ability to flag each other as Friends or Foes, and assign bonuses and penalties appropriately. So if a user annoys you, you can easily not read their comments any more. If you notice any bugs, feel free to submit them or let krow or me know.
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  • Woohoo. (Score:4, Funny)

    by rakslice (90330) <raksliceNO@SPAMgmx.net> on Friday January 04 2002, @02:00AM (#2783763) Homepage Journal
    New code. Coolness. Now where's that remove-double-posts feature? =)
    • Re:Woohoo. (Score:4, Interesting)

      by drsoran (979) on Friday January 04 2002, @03:59AM (#2784075)
      Or better yet, a delete/edit function so you can go back and edit your own posts. Everyone has done it. You go and post a message and think of more to add or you just want to delete it entirely. Why not allow deleting/editing your own posts?
      • Re:Woohoo. (Score:5, Insightful)

        by EasyTarget (43516) on Friday January 04 2002, @04:28AM (#2784118) Homepage Journal
        I don't want editing as such, revisionism is a bad thing.. and would definitely be abused by many of the trolls and lamers that crawl out of the woodwork on /. like forums.

        But an ability to annotate your -own- posts (i.e. an ability to add timestamped, limited length comments to the text of the post so they are visible to everyone viewing the post) would be very cool. Allowing for apologies/corrections/additional info to be placed in the comment by it's author, without despoiling the original comment..
        • The problem with this is making a fairly decent comment (or stealing one from a semi related story) and then going back once it is +5'd and adding some goatse.cx links to it

          I think as is - being able to reply to yourself works about the same ... although not perfect

          Maybe loose all mod points on the post when edited. Id like to be able to delete some posts too if no replys have been posted...
      • I saw an idea mentioned here earlier - that you are able to edit your posts as long as long as they haven't been moderated or replied to. That would prevent somebody from goatse-ing a +5 post or changing arguments in the middle of a discussion while still allowing for some editing if you made a spelling or formatting mistake.
    • Re:Woohoo. (Score:5, Funny)

      by rbeattie (43187) <russ@russellbeattie.com> on Friday January 04 2002, @05:38AM (#2784282) Homepage
      Exactly.

      There's so many features in /. that need check boxes.

      • [ ] Automatically remove repeated stories.
      • [ ] Automatically remove "slashdotted" story links.
      • [ ] Automatically remove snide editor comments at the end of story submissions.
      • [ ] Automatically spam editors who don't check links.
      • [ ] Automatically wake editors up at 2 a.m. for rejecting my story submissions.
      • [ ] Automatically give my posts +5 (because I want to think everyone loves me.)

      or maybe not...

      -Russ

      (I'm just joking... jeez.)

  • by Anthony Boyd (242971) on Friday January 04 2002, @02:03AM (#2783767) Homepage

    Look out Usenet, here we come!

  • Hmmmm (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 04 2002, @02:05AM (#2783779)
    Oh fuck, here we go. everyone is going to add me to their killfile! :(

    -AC.

  • by mirko (198274) on Friday January 04 2002, @02:07AM (#2783786) Homepage Journal
    In English : "Better is Good's foe".
    See that grey pearl besides your comment's details ?

    click on it :

    Slashdot Friend/Foe System

    So how do you perceive Cmdr Taco ?
    So how do you perceive cyborg_monkey ?
    So how do you perceive Klerck ?
    So how do you perceive Jon Katz ?
    ...
    Friend
    Neutral
    Foe

    Note: Who you like and dislike is not private; it can and will be used against you.

    Do you mean I may get sacked if I happen to feel some sympathy for some of the trolls ?

    I believe this is a little dangerous unless we have the guarantee that you are trustworthy enough to use this.

    Until then, well... Everybody is my friend.
    • by hawk (1151) <hawk@eyry.org> on Friday January 04 2002, @11:20AM (#2785527) Journal
      >Slashdot Friend/Foe System


      >Note: Who you like and dislike is not private; it
      >can and will be used against you.


      That's nuttin'. Used against you by a snivelling 14 year old? Big deal.


      Slashdot Friend/Foe system is insignifcant compared to an F-14's Interrogate Friend/Foe system. Now *that's* one you don't want used against you.


      hawk

  • Nice... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Henry V .009 (518000) on Friday January 04 2002, @02:07AM (#2783788) Journal

    +2 comment bonus. Karma: 25

    Capping out the system. Karma: 50

    Jon Katz, Foe, -5. Priceless

  • by burtonator (70115) on Friday January 04 2002, @02:08AM (#2783789)
    I wonder if I can killfile Timothy... this way I won't get duplicate articles anymore! :)
  • by Valur (87561) on Friday January 04 2002, @02:09AM (#2783794)
    Want to know someone's friends or foes? Do the following:

    1) Make them your friend
    2) Click on the words 'friends' across from them

    One can easily browse who's friend is whose.
  • TacoTacoTaco (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ashpool7 (18172) on Friday January 04 2002, @02:10AM (#2783797) Homepage Journal
    You've done an outstanding job of making it difficult, if not impossible for the people who are running slashdot "light" to mark a person a friend or foe. Could we have a bit more description of these features please? :)
  • by rfsayre (255559) on Friday January 04 2002, @02:14AM (#2783804) Homepage
    why must there be a pustule popping out of every comment. grey puss, green puss, red puss. Can we turn it off entirely?
  • by weslocke (240386) on Friday January 04 2002, @02:16AM (#2783808)
    Maybe it's just me, but this really seems to go against the basic idea of a forum like /.

    To me this sort of environment is supposed to be a sea of conflicting viewpoints and brash arguments. Trolls tend to already be taken care of to an extent by the current moderation abilities, and to an extent flamewars tend to fall below filter level.

    But with the ability to assign "Friend or Foe" you essentially gain the ability to make the No-Mans-Land of the comments into an area that only reflects your own views and opinions. Granted it might take a while, and will very likely never completely kill dissenting opinion, but a pretty self-supporting environment can still be made.

    The closest analogy I can think of would be a hardcore conservative listening to 24 hours of Rush Limbaugh (Not sure who would be a good example for a Liberal stance, so I won't list them. ). Sure they can do it, but in doing so they cut themselves off from the other viewpoints and opinions that might provoke some thought in what they believe in.
    • by Chasuk (62477) <chasuk@gmail.com> on Friday January 04 2002, @04:16AM (#2784092)
      To me, this modification allows me the sort of freedom I've always wanted on a forum. If a post isn't insightful, interesting, or informative, I'm not really interested in reading it, at least not on Slashdot. I'll turn on BBC America if I want to be amused, I'll peruse alt.binaries.erotica.* if I want to be aroused - you get the idea.

      I discovered long ago that the friend or foe concept works well in separating the shite from the non. I think the terminology is too confrontational, but the concept works.

      On Amazon.com, for example, if reviewer X gives a film that I loathe 5 stars, I'll generally dislike all of the films that he might recommend. The converse is also true. The same concept also seems to apply to books, music, and ideas.

      No, this isn't limiting. I see too much overlap in tastes and opinion for that to be a problem, and I know of many films I've enjoyed that I would never have watched had they not been recommended to me by a trusted critic/friend. Ditto books, music, interesting philosophies.
      • Yes, the only problem I see with this is that people change, a newbie posting stupid comments today maybe an enlightened being tomorow with interesting new insights...
        I think a timeout for foe could be a good feature for some cases.
    • by Erasmus Darwin (183180) on Friday January 04 2002, @09:53AM (#2785043)
      "But with the ability to assign "Friend or Foe" you essentially gain the ability to make the No-Mans-Land of the comments into an area that only reflects your own views and opinions."

      Allow me to offer a few counter-examples:

      A poster insists on including his/her sig in every post as actual post content rather than via the post mechanism. There are some people, myself included, who choose to browse with signatures turned off. However, since the sig's being included as part of the post, it circumvents the signature filter. Marking someone who does this as a foe wouldn't have anything to do with me reinforcing my own opinions on a Slashdot issue. Instead, it would be a purely stylistic concern.

      Another good example was a troll who was pimping his humor site (ridiculopathy.com -- delibrately left unlinked to reduce traffic). At times, he would pass off the site's postings as legitimate articles related to the current Slashdot article. It got old fast, but your average mod was occasionally suckered in. I would've loved to have been able to killfile the guy and be done with it.

      My final example is one of my biggest pet peeves -- anti-DMCA jokes. Now I dislike the DMCA, so on a raw opinion level, I agree with the posters. The problem, however, is the raging stupidity inherent in the jokes. 99% of them are the exact same premise, something similar to "Oh no! I'm violating the DMCA by opening a can of Coke." Besides being painfully repititious, these jokes generally have nothing to do with circumvention of a copy control device. Given the number of legitimate grievances people have against the DMCA, I'm unable to figure out why people insist on diluting their credibility by protesting fictional ones.

      People who disagree with me on an issue, on the other hand, are usually quite interesting. If they're capable of substantiating their point with actual reasoning, it's a valuable post. For example, even though I'm disagreeing with the post that this is in response to, I have no reason to tag the poster as a foe. The poster raises a very interesting question, and the moderation of that post up to a 5 is, in my mind, legitimate.

  • by denzo (113290) on Friday January 04 2002, @02:17AM (#2783810)
    FOR IMMEDIATE DISMISSAL -

    Slashdot editors announced today the addition of new, ground-breaking features to their SlashCode system, which is the heart of their article and comment system.

    Among the changes are new features such as:

    • Capture-the-flag style moderating system, where the users compete as teams for titles such as First Poster, Chief Troll, Offtopic Extraordinaire, and the Comic Relief. Other titles such as Informant and Intruiger were immediately done away with as soon as it was determine that they were no fun.
    • A virtual language interpreter, which is used to parse any and all pseudo-code posted by users to prove that they know absolutely nothing about programming (or at least are only good at writing code for typical CS textbooks).
    • Amulets with modifiers that increase a user's skill rating in Zealotry, Fanaticsm, and Smite.
    • A real-time spellchecker that eventually gives up on users who routinely mispell words and filters out their entire message.
    • A close-source server administered by John Carmack, in order to make sure that nobody cheats at any above features.
    • An open-source server administered by JMS, to make sure that all ping statistics are free.
    • A poll that teleports any users who vote for CowboyNeal to Afghanistan (to meet Jon Katz's e-mail friend).
    • An OSDN top, side, bottom, and floating Flash bar that dances around the user's screen. Disabling this in their preferences will cause increased sensitivity in the lameness filter when the user posts a comment.
    • Lameness filter automatically filters out content that includes the worlds "M$", "goatse.xc", "IMO", "INAL", "IRDCWYSBITYAWSIKE" (I really don't care what you say because I think you are wrong since I know everything).
  • Finally... (Score:4, Funny)

    by gnovos (447128) <gnovosNO@SPAMchipped.net> on Friday January 04 2002, @02:23AM (#2783833) Homepage Journal
    After years of playing games with my Karma (intentionally tolling a few days just to see how many points I could lose and how long it would take to get them back, etc.), I have finally been growing tired of posting to Slashdot...

    ...and along comes zoos and fan clubs to play with! Woot! My productivity at work has officially flatlined as of now!
  • by idonotexist (450877) on Friday January 04 2002, @02:27AM (#2783842)
    I understand the intent of this feature, but really see no need for it with the ability of a user to post anonymous. Of course anonymous posting should stick around imo. But let's say for instance I hate mwmseeksbillgates and add him to my ban list. What stops mwmseeksbillgates from posting as an anonymous user? With mwmseeksbillgates on my ban list, I will continue to view messages from him (maybe he'll use the same signature or post the same type of messages I'll despise... though mwmseeksbillgates is not listed as the user who posted the message; the satanic content remains).
    I don't see the point of this new feature --- too many loopholes exist.
  • by Pathos78 (398591) on Friday January 04 2002, @02:38AM (#2783885)
    I set all my friends to neutral, and /. told me:

    You are alone in the world.

    I thought I was amoungst my own here!
    I thought I was accepted!
    Loved even!

    Will no one be my friend?
  • Same Code as Slash? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Baldrson (78598) on Friday January 04 2002, @02:44AM (#2783916) Homepage Journal
    From the Slash FAQ [slashcode.com]:

    Is this the same code that runs Slashdot?

    Yes. Slashdot and Slashcode are usually running the latest development code from CVS, within a week or so.

    If this is business as usual then we can expect to see a new release file announced at slashcode [slashcode.org] within a week or so. So the obvious question is, "Is this business as usual?"

    • by michael (4716) on Friday January 04 2002, @08:49AM (#2784730) Homepage
      Slash 2.2.2 was just released (actually, the friend/foe stuff has been live for some time, though hidden because the icons weren't on comments). Slash 2.3 is likely to be released before Linuxworld (end of January).
  • by iomud (241310) on Friday January 04 2002, @02:46AM (#2783922) Homepage Journal
    Slash is starting to turn into a game of d&d. Before you know it I'll have a 'character alignment' based on how people percieve me.
  • Usenet Gateway (Score:5, Interesting)

    by dead_penguin (31325) on Friday January 04 2002, @02:55AM (#2783948)
    Forget this web-board with limited filtering business, I want a Slashdot-to-Usenet gateway. Just think, all you'd have to do is point your favourite news reader (i.e. tin) at nntp.slashdot.org and post away. The bandwidth savings over this heavyweight html+graphics crap would alone be worth it, while the ability to choose your own client program with its own interface and filtering rules would be even better.

    The scary thing is that this could probably be done in a reasonable way. Articles could map to newsgroups on the server (with new ones appearing daily and old ones disappearing). Since comments are threaded anyways, this should transfer across directly. And as long as the slashdot username and password are required for accessing the NNTP server, there shouldn't be any real problems with unauthorized usage by spammers and such.

    Oh well. Too bad most of the crowd here is too young to remember what usenet even is...
    • by Per Abrahamsen (1397) on Friday January 04 2002, @04:44AM (#2784155) Homepage
      which makes each /. article appear as a newsgroup, with the comments being the messages in the group.

      Unfortunately, one has to run the CVS version of Gnus for this to work, since it does it by parsing the html, and need to be updated each time /. changes format.
  • all this code... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by nickm (1468) on Friday January 04 2002, @02:57AM (#2783955) Homepage
    ...and you STILL can't say "show me only messages I haven't already read".

    YEssirree, kids, we're still DECADES behind Usenet.
    • Impossible.

      Seriously, think about it. There are about 3 million registered users on slashdot (shocking to think that you and I have user id's below 2000!). There are probably 20 new stories a day. Each story gets on average about 150 posts. So for each post you need to store one entry in a database per user.

      That's 9 billion new rows a day.

      Of course you could do some compression or bit-twiddling to reduce that, but not by a significant enough amount.

      The best you can do is what LinuxToday does - mark stories as "new" since you last refreshed the page.

      Usenet doesn't have this problem because all the "What I've read" stuff is stored client-side, and there's not enough room in cookies to do that.
      • Well, you could have this "mode" only display new comments since last time you refreshed the page.

        ie. You load the page and see 50 comments, when you've finished you hit refresh and see only the 5 posted while you were reading.

        To do this you'd only for each person need to keep track of the last message id they've seen for each story. Still a fair bit of data, but a lot less.

        You could maybe only keep track for stories that are on the front page and purge from the db after that?
  • by zcat_NZ (267672) <zcat@wired.net.nz> on Friday January 04 2002, @02:59AM (#2783959) Homepage
    What happens when we've all marked "egg troll" as a foe, for example, and nobody's replying or modding him down.

    People without a login will come here and see his MSFUD comments at '0', with no opposing comments, and assume that they might therefore have some validity? god help us..!

    • First of all, editors, who do a considerable amount of troll/offtopic moderation, perhaps will not opt for such a thing. At least that was the reason given for infinite mod points to them, eliminating negative posts so that normal users can moderate positively, but as it is not transparent noone can be sure. If they do mark someone as foe, it would beat the purpose of giving them infinite mod points.

      Second is there are people like reading trolls, I for one read at -1 often enough. If I ever make someone my foe, that would be users pretending to know everything but don't know shit, or just can't discuss without flames; not delibrate trolls. Trolling is an art.

  • by Compact Dick (518888) on Friday January 04 2002, @03:11AM (#2783977) Homepage
    • A Secure login option

      Most of us here on /. are quite security-conscious, if not downright paranoid.
      I find it downright ludicrous that to date, Slashdot has NO SECURE LOGIN.
      [if you have one, then it's too well-hidden].

      Make no mistake - I do not want my login password sent as cleartext.
      It makes life too miserable.

      For those with no HTTPS support, an unsecured login option should be provided,
      but the secure one should be the default [or prominently displayed].
    • Strict HTML 4.01/XHTML 1.1 + CSS

      Much of Slashdot's pages teems with TABLE tags and other assorted formatting crap.
      This drastically increases download and rendering times, and our ISP is only too happy
      to charge us for it [money saved == more pr0n!].

      Most users' browsers do not need this backward-compatibility kludge anymore,
      as they use IE [what fools these mortals be!], Mozilla, Konqueror, Opera or NS6.x.

      Use browser sniffing, then send pure, strict XHTML + CSS for formatting,
      thus encouraging the luddites to switch to Mozilla! :-)

      [Good part is, the pages will still render well on text browsers like Lynx, Links etc.
      Or they could be served the TABLE'd pages that NS 4.x & < should be served.]


    That's all for now, folks. Any more suggestions? Feel free to tack them on.

    set thread_growable TRUE
    • wishlist. (Score:3, Interesting)

      Well in the moderation system some things are to be improved:
      -Seperate setting for doing moderations. I'd like my treshold lower when moderating to scan for AC gems. (or to search for trolls that are not trolls, but are meant funny)
      -Some (don't know how) system to mod up late good posters. The problem with the current system is early on topic posters get modded up, but a 4 hour late gem has a very slim change to be modded up.
      -Some filters for capitals in subject "RIGHT NOW" 8-)
  • by Tsar (536185) on Friday January 04 2002, @03:27AM (#2783999) Homepage Journal
    If this feature takes off, I'd like to see a "distributed affinity" system implemented, similar to Google's PageRank system [google.com]. If I call a particular poster a friend, then anyone whom they call a friend gets an X% boost in my ranking, anyone they call a friend gets an X/100 boost, and so on.

    That way, after I've picked a certain number of people (100/X, actually) as friends, and they all like another poster I've never noticed before, he'll automagically have the same status with me that they all do.

    Foe rankings would work the same way, but is the foe of my friend necessarily my foe, and is the foe of my foe necessarily my friend? Automatically assigning points based on those assumptions would probably not be useful.
  • This would be cool: (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Pathwalker (103) <hotgrits@yourpants.net> on Friday January 04 2002, @03:33AM (#2784013) Homepage Journal
    What you should do now is to let people's friend/foe lists build up for a while; once they've gotten complex enough, make a digraph of the friend/foe relationships, and sell posters.

    It probably would look cooler than those internet map posters I see Thinkgeek advertise from time to time - plus there would be the added fun of trying to find your node in the graph!
  • by Per Abrahamsen (1397) on Friday January 04 2002, @03:37AM (#2784025) Homepage
    One can respect a foe, and look forward to reading his or her messages.

    The people I want to score down are the Fools and the Trolls, whom I don't want to honor with the label "Foe".
  • Jon Katz (Score:3, Offtopic)

    by Alsee (515537) on Friday January 04 2002, @04:50AM (#2784173) Homepage
    I decided to check the listing for Jon Katz.
    I don't read /. for movie reviews, so I'm not particularly familiar with him myself, but it's hard to miss all the comments maligning him all over the place.

    As of the moment he has 6 fans (people how list him as a friend) and 10 PAGES (at 1024x768) of freaks [slashdot.org] (people who list him as a foe).

    -
  • President George W. Bush Marks Osama bin Laden as Foe, bin Laden Suddenly Disappears

    WASHINGTON, DC -- Today, President George W. Bush, taking a cue from the New and Improved (C)(TM)(R) Slashcode at slashdot.org, promptly identified Osama bin Laden as a personal "Foe" (despite warnings that his decision to do so "can and will be used against him"), a rating that carries with it an invincible -6 moderation. Osama bin Laden then proceeded to immediately disappear off the face of the Earth, never to be heard from again.
  • New option (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Alsee (515537) on Friday January 04 2002, @06:53AM (#2784408) Homepage
    I'd like an option to post at any lower score. The option to decline my +1 bonus is useful, but occasionally being able to post at zero (without having to go Anonymous) or even -1 could be handy.

    Why? Five minutes ago I responded to an AC at score zero. I felt it required a rebuttal, but I didn't feel my response should waste the time of anyone who never saw the post I was responding to. I really didn't want to post anonymously, but it was the only way to get my score to zero. There is no way to post at -1 (if you want to respond to a -1 scored comment).

    Choosing to post at a lower score is a form of courtesy to other readers.

    Oh yeah, and how bad would the server load be for a spellcheck option in the comment preview? :)

    -
  • by rnd() (118781) on Friday January 04 2002, @11:28AM (#2785604) Homepage
    Being able to flag users as "friend" or "foe" is a great intermediate step toward the kind of collaborative filtering-based moderation system that I imagine for Slashdot.

    Imagine the following:

    Slashdot 'notices' that a bunch of other users who share a lot of 'friends' with you have modded up a posting by someone who is not on your 'friends' list. Slashdot notifies you of the posting, you read it, submit a comment, and add the user to your 'friends' list. You have thus discovered a worthwhile posting that you may have missed had you been filtering out low-scoring comments.

    If Slashdot created a true collaborative filtering-based moderation system, then moderation as we know it would cease to exist, and in its place hundreds of closely intertwined 'communities' of like-minded readers would emerge, and the quality of discussion on slashdot (as perceived by its readers) would grow enormously.

    To satisfy new readers or those who had not taken the time to express their preferences, comments could be 'scored' according to aggregate moderation across communities. The key of CF would be that everyone would be a moderator all of the time, and everyone's moderations would effect whose comments they themselves saw in the future.
    • Re:make CT a foe! (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anthony Boyd (242971) on Friday January 04 2002, @02:09AM (#2783792) Homepage

      And that's the first bug with this system, I think. People will be able to make links to Slashdot that appear visually to be links to other stories or something innocent, but instead these links might actually mass-blacklist a victim if a lot of Slashdotters are fooled into clicking the links. I think these links should be flagged or not allowed in the body of messages.

    • my bug report (Score:5, Interesting)

      by acm (107375) <andrew...martin@@@gmail...com> on Friday January 04 2002, @02:45AM (#2783917) Homepage
      after playing with the reason modifer for a couple minutes, I noticed this bug (yes I already sent out an email):

      I altered the "reason modifier" in my user preferences such that Funny comments got rated -1. The modifer is being applied correctly to "Funny" comments, but the comments are not being sorted correctly. That is, a +4 Funny shows up above a +5 Interesting. It seems to me the comments are being sorted and *then* the modifier is being applied, but I would think it should be done the other way around.

      My comment viewing settings are:

      Threshold = 2, nested, and highest score first.