Welcome to Slashdot 2.2

Welcome to Slashdot, now running Slashcode 2.2. Since we never upgraded Slashdot to 2.0, this is a huge deal. The changes are numerous, but non-obvious unless you happen to be a fairly frequent user who actually hits most of the functionality on the site. Read on for an executive summary of major features and random props to folks that made it happen.

Ok, lets start with a minor vanity thing that I love. Krow set it up so you can hit unix style homepages to get fellow user info pages. Its just nicer to look at and easier to remember. I love it.

Messaging is in place. If you're logged in, hit your user preferences page and you'll see the option to configure it. You'll see notification on the homepage when you have messages. There are a variety of message types, like notification of replies to your comments, or moderations done to you. You can choose from a couple of different delivery mechanisms currently, right now email and web. Eventually we'll offer other options, but if people submit patches from CVS, "Eventually" will be sooner. Jabber is definitely planned. Inter-User messaging should happen soon too. Also note that the messaging replaces the old headline-mailer. I think you'll enjoy some of the other stuff you see there. All this messaging is the 0th child of Pudge.

Journals are a long awaited feature that people on Slashcode.com really like, so we brought it over here. Everyone contributed bits and pieces to this sucker, and its fairly complex so don't be surprised if there are some bugs. Users can enable or disable comments. Journals also features Friends Lists. This will be extended in the future, but for now you can use it to track a quick list of journals you want to scan regularly. Eventually friends will be bigger, but we'll worry about that after 2.2 settles down.

Discussions can now be created to house your own little chats without bugging us. This replaces the old hidden sids which were bugs to some, and features to others.

There are rss feeds scattered throughout the site now that will need to be documented so people can find them. The user help stuff will be updated soon.

There are several new user options for comment display. I'll let you poke around them yourself and see how they work. Some you'll like, some you won't. You'll notice that the old 'Fake Email Address' is now gone. We decided that it simply was to easy to abuse, so instead we offer auto spam proofing of your real email address. Of course this is purely optional for you paranoid spam-free types. This is Jamie's, as was the new domain linking stuff, and countless other usability features.

Meta Moderation received an overall at the maniacal hands of Cliff. Under previous versions of Slashcode, meta moderations were single autonomous events, and therefore fairly easy to manipulate by malicious users. Now M2's are tallied and when a consensus is reached, judgement is made (and karma is adjusted appropriately).

The 1% of submissions that are accepted will show up on User Info pages now. So now the 99% of you who have your submissions rejected will have something else to complain about to me an average of 15 times a day.

Forgotten passwords can be resent even if you don't remember your nickname. I can't fathom how so many people could forget their nicks, but you sure did. CowboyNeal is dancing in the streets with Mic Jagger and David Bowie knowing that he will have to respond to half as many people who can't figure out how to login. Also, plain text passwords aren't sent in emails any more, so while we're still not pretending Slashdot is secure, its more secure then it was.

A huge new deal is the fact that all the old articles have been re-imported back into the database. 2 million of them. Old discussions will continue to be closed out as they age, but users will still be able to adjust order and threshold when they view them. This was a really nasty task for Cliff since he had to import nearly 4 years of HTML back into the database... including a dozen different comment formats that evolved over that time. A huge task, but one that he managed to pull off by the deadline. And I think any users who read older stories will appreciate it.

CaptTofu fixed tons of security issues and greatly improved a lot of the security stuff that most of you will never notice. But believe me it makes dealing with bots and denial of service attacks a lot easier now (for example, if a robot is hitting us as they so often do, we can ban them without restart httpd). Tofu also had to "Manage" the team, which makes cat herding seem like a party.

We have some new hardware too. Replacing our 6 600mhz web servers are 5 shiny new dual ghz boxes. OSDNs Netops staff mercilessly beat these things into submission. Thanks to Yazz, Kurt, Toad and Trish. And also props go out to Uriah on the West Si-eed for helping with some raid bios problems that messed with our database stuff and really though us for a loop.

We also gotta thank the guys at SourceForge for having a functional bug tracking system that we (and the trolls *sigh*) could use. We love you all, and we shouldn't let little things like a language barrier stand between us. Lets both port to ML. Its like switzerland for web pages!

I also wanna thank Hemos for being our man on the inside, and Richard French, OSDN boss-man for giving us the room to put this all together.

I know I forgot to thank someone, and I apologize, but its past midnight and I've been going for 16 hours today.

Allright this is only scratching the surface. There are so many more little things that you'll notice, and either submit thinking they are bugs, or hate, or love, or whatever. But we're not fooling ourselves by thinking that we're out of the woods yet. There are still several dozen significant bugs that need fixing so we're gonna keep going. And then we have to update the FAQ with all new FAQs and corrections to the old FAQs! The real test will be when loads pick up. We expect that there will continue to be brief periods of trouble for the next couple days, but it shouldn't be significant since we did a lot of load testing, and managed to get the new setup to handle 2x Slashdot's normal peak load. We think things will be all right, but thanks to you all for having patience.

Now holy shit, I'm gonna sleep.

Thanks for the hard work

[EvlG]

Just want to say thanks so much for all the hard work you guys have done to make Slashdot the community it is today. Looking forward to using all the new features and speed improvements!

What the...?

[J'raxis]

Two-millionth post!!! (nice bug!) :)

Can I still use journals

[Hairy_Potter]

if I'm stuck with a non-journaling file system,like Win 98?

Did you upgrade cowboyneal?

[defence budget]

Which version of cowboyneal is /. currently using?

Re:What the...?

[floodle]

I think that they should keep this bug. Think about it. No more 'first post' losers popping up! By the time anyone could type in:

w00h00! I g0t th3 two b1ll10n, 0ne-hund3rd s3cond, thr33 hundred f0rty 3ight thou5and, s3ven hundr3d and f1r5t p0st!!!!

there would already be twenty or thirty posts. They'd stop trying after a while. Problem solved!

Re:Is the look ever going to change?

[localman]

Aw man! One of the reasons I love Slashdot is that it has stuck by it's guns and remained one of the gawd awfulest looking sites on the web!

Seriously, though, I'm sick of website (and application) appearance makeovers. 9 times out of 10 they decrease functionality and increase the level of annoyance.

However, I've been happy with the same woman for ten years now so I guess I'm not the average guy.

Overall?

[goldfndr]

Meta Moderation received an overall at the maniacal hands of Cliff.

Yeah, I thought it was getting too big for its britches.

Re:ooh, look

[Anonymous Pancake]

wow.. how did you make it appear to be goat.cx linked when it wasn't?

Local man?

[ajf]

Duh, The Onion writes about Area Man, not Local Man.

Re:Kudos on a Good Job

[Anonymous Coward]

first psot! now proove me wrong!

And in other news

[JediTrainer]

Meta Moderation received an overall at the maniacal hands of Cliff.

User Info pages were handed a pair of old jeans with patches over the holes in the knees, and the 2-million-odd old articles were collectively given a large flowery muumuu.

Security gets a brand-new pair of underwear with an attached padlock.

Re:Is the look ever going to change?

[sharkey]

And, as a plus, the new messaging could be jazzed a little. When one of your comments is moderated as a troll, the notification should automatically redirect you to The Amish Rake Fight [amishrakefight.org], just to let you know the general feeling about you.

Re:Can I still use journals

[sharkey]

No, it's a door-stop, but it still doesn't journal.

AC?

[jbarnett]

Check this out (don't login and look at user.pl):

Karma 1972 (mostly the sum of moderation done to users comments)

Anonymous Coward has posted 325291 comments. Below are the most recent 24 comments.

I first panic and though dammit I don't remember posting 325,291 comments last night in my drunken state. Then it hit me after the coffee started hitting my brain.

The thing that AMAZES me is that Anonymous Coward not only has POSTIVE karma, that account has ALOT of karma (1972)... I guess someone with a lot of mod points *cough*CmdrTaco*cough* really likes what AC has to say *cough*goatcx*cough*

Who would of thought?

Link Viewer

[jjeffries]

Ugh, the "feature" of printing out the destination domain of a link is really [fuckingannoying]

(gee I hope that worked)

A tribute to the greatness that was Slashdot

[duffbeer703]

A long, long time ago
I can still remember
How the trollers used to make me smile

And I knew if I had to boast
That I could try to get first post
And maybe I'd be happy for a while

But moderators made me shiver
With every minus they'd deliver

DoS scripts couldn't stop it
They scored them all "Offtopic"

I know that it's cheap crack they smoke
And meta-moderation's broke
At first I thought it was a joke
The day that trolltalk died

-- Chorus --
Bye, bye, MEEPTy, OOG, and Grits guy
Drove the Cruiser like some loser who starts posts with a *sigh*
Those Steve Woston posts that we all knew were a lie
Wonder what became of girls petrified?
What became of girls petrified?
--

Did you write a bunch of Perl?
And did it make you want to hurl
Feces at the Wall?

Can you believe these lame-ass polls?
Do you post big stretched-out assholes?
Can you make the goatse.cx link not show?

Well I know you think that Siggy sucked
Will the real Bruce Perens please stand up?

The bots don't have a clue.
Man, I dig those trolls from Shoe!

I was a rabid Free Speech advocate
With a Red Hat T-shirt and a Free Beer gut
Bought my Sony laptop working Pizza Hut
The day that trolltalk died

-- Chorus --

It's been two years since the IPO
And LNUX sinks to all-time lows
But that's not how it used to be

When Spiral showed how it was done
Trolling as Jon Erikson
Who worked for NPO Technologies

Oh and while they tried to filter posts
Somebody rooted Slashdot's host

"Crack Slashdot? That's absurd!"
Better go change your password

While JonKatz wrote a Hellmouth book
By using posts he simply took
And we flamed him till he was cooked
The day that trolltalk died

And we were singin....

-- Chorus --

10 grams. Inchfan. Didn't log out. Goddamn
The mods will find the sid real soon, man
You can't hide if you aren't AC

Your bud (George here) tried BSD
A dead Streetlawyer's tips were free
And WIPO helped letsriot turn Nazi

70 made his percents up
While 80md warned "liberals suck"

The moon does not exist
It's just a liberal myth

Oh and as Taco tried to take a nap
We forced him to invoke bitchslaps
Do you recall the flood of crap
The day that trolltalk died?

We started singin....

-- Chorus --

Oh and then we were wearing out "All your base"
And started posting monospace
The better for our penis birds

So come on, be a zealot, be a dick
You don't think Anne Marie's a chick?
Because lying's all we do about HURD

So go and push for BSD
And say GPL isn't free

Slow down, cowboy! The limit
Is one post every minute

Now tell the right wing facist slime
Infringing on Your Rights Online
That they can't censor all the time
The day that trolltalk died

-- Chorus --

I met a troll they called The Rev
And asked him if CD BREAK HEAD
He said, "That's old. Get over it."

And with all the courage I could muster
"Imagine what a Beowulf cluster...."
But it wasn't worth the trouble to submit

The karma caps are just plain jive
And everyone's moved to K5

The steelcage has grown rusted
And Geekizoid is busted

The three sites I don't see for weeks
Segfault, kernel, Comp-u-geek
Code is not art. This ain't Freshmeat
The day that trolltalk died

-- Chorus

Re:Can I still use journals

[sharkey]

I can only give you a ballpark, but my 486DX2-100, running MS-DOS 6.2 + Win3.1, my P5-166 MMX running RedHat 6.2 and my P5-200MMX running Win9x all perform at about the same level when it comes to holding open doors.