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.

Re:Metamoderation

[Anonymous Coward]

I just marked 2 as unfair and karma stayed the same. I never really investigated before - I always sort of assumed the limit was 5; ie 6 unfairs and you lose.

lameness filters

[jesser]

The lameness filters are really getting on my nerves. More than half of my comments over the last few weeks hit some filter or another before I managed to get the comment through.

• Every time I screw up in a comment -- trigger some other lameness filter, forget to put a subject, anything -- I get a "it hasn't been 20 seconds since you hit reply".
• I like to read the entire article before posting to make sure I'm not putting up something redundant with an existing score:3 post, but if I use that strategy and then end up deciding to post two comments, I invariably get "it's been less than two minutes since your last comment post."
• I got a cryptic message about "postersubj compression" when I tried to reply to this comment [slashdot.org]. Changing the subject of my reply made the error message go away, but it took me 5 minutes to figure out how to get aroudn the filter (mostly because of the 20 second rule).

Others have complained about shell scripts being rejected as "junk posts", and having comments rejected as having been posted before slashdot existed. Some of these are just Bugs, but many seem to be intentional. Does the lameness filter serve any purpose that moderation doesn't?

IMO, there should be two filters:

1. No duplicate posts. Not so much to filter out "lameness", but to help people who accidentally hit "Submit" twice or hit it again when slashdot forgets to respond to the first post.
2. No more than five comments from one poster within two minutes.

Re:Is the look ever going to change?

[Villain]

I find it somewhat refreshing to find a site that doesn't feel the need to reinvent itself every few months. We all know exactly where to find everything when it comes down to it, I think most of us would prefer a functional old design over some crappy flash intro or other garbage everyone would just skip over anyway.

Re:Awesome

[Phork]

umm, then this wouldnt be slashdot, this would be k5. It really bothers me when new people demand magor changes to a site, if you dont like a site, go to another site.

Re:Metamoderation

[zerocool^]

dude come on now, what if there are 2 moderations on your meta-moderation page that *are* unfair. That, to me, is the entire purpose of the MM page. You look at a series of comments, most of them are fair, but some are unfair, and with the number of moderators out there, there's bound to be a percentage of alterrior motives at work.

I just tell it like i see it, and if there's a comment that i feel that my personal judgement comes into play too heavily to decide without personal influence, i just leave it neutral. But if its an unfair moderation, i.e. off topic for something that is only slightly off topic (and that's kind of the spirit of slashdot, discussing topics and tangents) then i mod it unfair.

Feature: filter out certain comments?

[occam]

Cmdr, is it possible to filter out "Humor" comments with this new version? For some threads that's about half of the (supposedly) high value comments, but I'd really just like to read info. I've looked through the preferences without finding that feature.

Thanks,

= Joe =

Re:Metamoderation

[bconway]

That was EXACTLY my point. In the old metamoderation system, if you marked two or more moderations as unfair (which was often the case) you would automatically lose a point of karma. That was quite ridiculous for those of us who actually metamoderated fairly.

Re:Feature: filter out certain comments?

[J'raxis]

I'd like to see a full-blown filter system à la Usenet killfiles. Currently we can killfile story authors [slashdot.org], why not users in general? Would probably be more useful than moderation as you make your own decisions as to what's crap and what's not.

Can I have my old nick back?

[Ungrounded Lightning]

Is the limit on nick size still there and still too short for "Ungrounded Lightning Rod"?

I'd like to update my Sig but I don't plan on doing that unless/until I can get the 'ol nick back.

(While we're at it, is the limit on sig size still so small that I have to abbreviate? You didn't shrink it any more did you?)

(We'll see momentarily...)

Re:Is the look ever going to change?

[chuqui]

You're right. they need to update slashdot.

I suggest that the slashdot folks improve the site. At the very minimum, they need to add: a splash page we have to click through before getting to the main page ("welcome to slashdot!)

frames

15K of javascript to make sure the cursor gets to the correct text entry field, since we're incapable of finding it otherwise.

A new Slashdot logo, which will be animated and rendered in Flash. Must be at least 250K in size.

Every time you visit slashdot, it'll send you a 100K sound file of CmdrTaco saying "howdy! welcome to slashdot!"

A new privacy statement which points out they plan to sell everything you say, in 2 point type. Hidden behind a java applet. In swahili. And opt-out.

Yup. We really need to bring slashdot in line with current th current web standards. can't just have something that sits there and works....

Re:A cookie per page

[koreth]

Sounds like a browser deficiency to me -- the "do you want this cookie?" popup should give you the option of suppressing future instances of itself. I know Opera does; there's a button for "make my accept/refuse choice apply to all cookies from this site." I'm sure one of the open-source browsers out there either already does something similar or could be made to do so without Herculean effort.

It's not the site that's putting cookie popups in your face, after all; it's your browser (and your chosen configuration of your browser, at that).

Re:Is the look ever going to change?

[Darth_Burrito]

Slashdot's current interface is pretty damn good. I like the fact that the site is simple, consistent, and reasonably intuitive. Why would you want to change it?

If you would like to see something in particular changed then suggest it. Otherwise there's not much point in a complaint like this. It's kind of sad that after all the work people have put into this, the first comment is a complaint.

Personally, I think it looks great so far.

Re:A cookie per page

[nuhonda]

i'm sorry, i really don't mean to troll,
but c'mon.

asking a user to have a browser that supports cookies at a minimum isn't too much.

if you're that paranoid; that you need to monitor every single cookie that every site uses, i strongly suggest you turn off the 'puter, and walk away slowly. they're already watching you.

give me a break

+1 Filter

[gss]

I wish there was a way in the preferences to ignore the +1 bonus. More often than not the comment that starts at 1 and gets modded up to 2 is far more interesting/informative than the ones at 2 with the bonus. Or a comment starting at 1 with +2 mods is better than a comment starting at 2 with +1 mod (hope that makes sense) There is no way to fiter this out though. I guess this is a key part of the moderation system and probably wont change but it's probably one of the things that bugs me most about slashdot.

That's one of the problems with most sites

[Anonymous Coward]

Sites like Yahoo! are great because they *don't* change too much. Yahoo! looks very much similar to its inception (circa 1994) when it was being served up from http://akebono.stanford.edu. For a very long time AltaVista didn't much around with their look. Happily, it appears that the folks at Google understand this. Even Amazon.com appears to recognize this. If you go look at a book review, it pretty much looks the same as it did 3-4 years ago.

People Who Just Don't Get It(TM) build sites like cnn.com and espn.com and change the interface a couple of times a year, causing regular visitors to get lost. They also try to incorporate a lot of whiz-bang new and *unnecessary* geegaws that often don't work (Java, Javascript, templating). You can still visit Yahoo! with Netscape 3 and use the site effectively.

*Real* web surfers don't care about new looks. They care that A. ) they can efficiently find what is they're seeking, B.) the site retains a reasonable amount of reliability and performance (Yahoo! is pretty much king for availability, reliability, and performance), and C.) the content is relevant and fresh.