Slash 2.2.0 Released 397
If you meander over to Slashcode, you will notice that Slash 2.2.0 has been released. This is of course the website engine that runs Slashdot. The release has the message system, improved journal functions, new comment filters, and countless bug fixes. And of course a variety of optimizations that continue to make it possible to serve a quantity of pages that no other open source package like this can even touch :) Plus it's way easier to install. Now that we've got the Fry tree out of the way, its off to work on Zoidberg (which will include subscriptions, killfiles, and a few surprises)
Changelog lacks any real value. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Changelog lacks any real value. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Changelog lacks any real value. (Score:3, Interesting)
When I give my indoctrination spiel, uh, er, "training lecture" on CVS to coworkers and lackeys, I usually hand down a list of requirements for log/commit messages and a ChangeLog entry.
Most of the time it's a variation on http://www.gnu.org/software/guile/changelogs/guile -changelogs_toc.html [gnu.org],
or sometimes the rules used for ChangeLogs in the GCC project, which I've found to be of immense value when tracking down changes.
Personally I can't stand changelogs that don't say a thing. It's just enough "open source" to look good, but not open enough to actually invite help.
BWAHAHAHA (Score:5, Funny)
You've obviously never read slashcode.
C-X C-S
Reliability. (Score:2, Troll)
*crickets*
--saint
A nice surprice wuold be: (Score:4, Troll)
Cheers..
Re:A nice surprice wuold be: (Score:5, Insightful)
Another nice suprise would be to have posting at +1 cost a point a karma.
But only if... (Score:2)
Re:A nice surprice wuold be: (Score:2)
Re:Not necessarily... (Score:2)
Re:A nice surprice wuold be: (Score:2)
Re:A nice surprice wuold be: (Score:2)
Re:A nice surprice wuold be: (Score:2)
That whole option should go (Score:2, Insightful)
I believe that allowing posters to "opt out" of their +1 is moronic. The premise behind the bonus is that said poster generally posts good comments, so this one is probably good too. Now this either works or it doesn't. If it doesn't, remove the +1. If it does, grant the +1 and get over it.
Allowing an option to "opt out" of the +1 is like an option that would allow you to "opt out" of being moderated up. The feature is down-right silly. Judging the quality of a post is not the job of the poster. It is the job of the community system and the moderators.
Just remove that option. It makes no sense.
Re:That whole option should go (Score:2)
Actually I like having the option. I look at it this way. I normally try to post good solid comments. But if I'm in the mood and just want to spout off and be an idiot, I post at +1 - that way the worst that can happen is a -2 hit to my karma :) Yeah its only one point. But lose 10 and you lose hte bonus - easy enough to whore and get it back. But seriously - it lets you post subpar comments at +1 instead of +2 where you're more likely to get modded down.
Of course sometimes when I'm being a d**k and posting obnoxious stuff it'll be funny enough to get +5 so go figure :) :)
Re:A nice surprice wuold be: (Score:2)
The parent poster is suggesting that when you use your plus 1 bonus, you lose karma to essential add a bit of self decided moderation to you comment.. I'm not sure how I feel about either. but just for kicks, I'm leaving my +1 bonus on.
---
Re:A nice surprice wuold be: (Score:2)
I don't think that it costs a point of karma. At least I hope not...
So when is /. going to get a facelift? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:So when is /. going to get a facelift? (Score:3, Funny)
How very Microsoft-ian of you.
Re:So when is /. going to get a facelift? (Score:2)
Question... (Score:5, Interesting)
http://slashdot.org/frontpage.pl?commentthresh=
and have it give me slashdot in 'light' format, with comments in the stories as 5 & over only.
The reason for this is that I want to get Slashdot on Avantgo, but obviously I have different viewing requierments on my Palm than I have on my desktop.
Is there any way of doing this with Slash 2.2?
I know there wasn't in the old Slash 1.x
Re:Question... (Score:5, Informative)
In short, no. (Score:3, Interesting)
Reproduced for the terminaly lazy:
In order to make that usable, I'd have to pump my link depth to something like 4 in order to read the stories. Plus, for the first time in months, slashdot.org has stopped serving 403's to sync.avantgo.com, which basically killed it's usefulnes... (It was one of the first sites I tried to sync to my iPaq via AvantGo, and until today, everytime I tried, I'd get access denied errors reading it when I tried to sync.)
Re:Question... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Question... (Score:2)
* I've used light mode for a long time. One of my favorite things about it was that I didn't have to deal with a lot of the extraneous crap that shows up in "regular mode". That seems to be changing, though. Now light mode nags me to metamoderate (which it didn't do before) and now also features that stupid, Mad-Libs-like "this page generated by a <collective-noun> of <adjective> <noun>s for <user>" Not only are those both completely useless, but they take up enough screen space so that I can only see one story. I have no problem with <miniscule font>logged in as "user"</miniscule font>, but the total lack of regard for vertical space in "light mode" is irritating. If these are going to be the norm, please let me disable them in my prefs.
* Why doesn't light mode include link tags? It seems really dense that "putting mad libs and metamod nagging in light mode" was a higher priority than "putting link tags in light mode", especially since most text-mode browsers support link tags.
One last thing (that I realized when previewing this comment): Is it too much to ask to have slashdot convert angle braces to html entities (i.e. lt and rt) when posting in "Plain old Text"?
Re:Question... (Score:3, Informative)
Update the lameness filter! (Score:2)
"A few surprises" (Score:5, Funny)
Re:"A few surprises" (Score:2)
Re:"A few surprises" (Score:2)
What it does is if you hit 'spellcheck', each misspelled word becomes a drop down list of the suggestions. You then pick the proper spelling at each of these (or leave them alone if they are already right) and when you submit, all replacements are made. It's really very slick.
The drawback with the way I wrote it at the moment is the fork to ispell though. I think there is a perl module for ispell which would work better, I just didn't have the time to research it.
Add sub-categories to main page (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Add sub-categories to main page (Score:2)
Kill funny messages (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Kill funny messages (Score:3, Funny)
Dotslash. (Score:3, Funny)
Eeeeevvvvviiiilll Slaaaaaassshhdoooooot!!!
and drum roll please.....
Re:Kill funny messages (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Kill funny messages (Score:3, Insightful)
I find it hilariously ironic that I and many others would have never seen this message if it hadn't been modded +5. By getting people going directly against the author's proposal he get more people to see it.
Re:Kill funny messages (Score:2, Funny)
...Slash code has a... (Score:5, Funny)
For example, the new SlashTag <goatsex>, which saves you the tedium of having to do all that HREF and HTTP:// stuff.
How about an NNTP gateway? I'll gladly subscribe. (Score:5, Insightful)
Think about it, cause there isn't anything else you could offer me that I would pay for.
NNTP is copiable (Score:2)
Maybe that's why.
Anyway has somebody actually done that converter? I remember that when Slash was formally published as usable Open Source there were people saying it was the first thing they'll contribute.
Re:NNTP is copiable (Score:2)
People have been viewing web pages from behind proxy servers like Squid for years. I don't believe that there's a fundamental difference.
Re:NNTP is copiable (Score:2)
Are you implying that you can't store subscription content in a web cache?
No Score +1 Bonus broken (Score:2)
Does post anonymously work? (Score:2)
Re:Mozilla issue (Score:2)
Improvement suggestions: (Score:5, Insightful)
a) doesn't deter trolls but
b) does annoy legitimate posters.
* Separate karma moderation from comment moderation, eg. a plagiarizing post could be moderated interesting, yet the poster's karma could be modded down.
* Kill the CowboyNeal cop-out poll option. It hasn't been funny for, oh I dunno, about a year or so.
* Add year to (at least some of) the dates. Currently the only way to determine the year in which a given story or a post was made is to look at the URL, which is just plain dumb.
* Improve the search. Finer details of this left as an excersise.
* Add a link to stories that leads to the "daily issue" of Slashdot when the story appeared. Currently the only way to see the full Slashdot for a given day is, if I'm not mistaken, to keep clicking on the "yesterday's issue" link or hack the URL.
* Expand the hall of fame to cover more top stories, say 30 or so, ten is too little.
Other than that I'm pretty happy with Slashdot.
(I like the fact how users who aren't logged in don't see sigs anymore, the ability of the Slashdot crowd to generate good sigs AND UPDATE THEM has always been a bit, um, shitty.)
Re:Improvement suggestions: (Score:2, Informative)
Login.
Go to the homepage preferences.
Choose a time/date format with a 4 digit year.
Voila.
Re:Improvement suggestions: (Score:2, Interesting)
Preferable using a universal understandable date format, which do not leaves you wonder if month or date are written first.
yyyy/MM/dd hh:mm, e.g. 2001/11/07 19:25
or
dd month yyyy hh:mm, e.g. November 7 2001 19:25
Re:Improvement suggestions: (Score:3, Insightful)
The fact of the matter is that most of the filters do not stop trolls, who are willing to attempt to post an obnoxious piece of ascii art multiple times, but do not stop legitimate posters who just want to share a contribution with the community. After all, who here has a job and a life, and time to refine their messages to make the slashdot retardo-filters pass their content along successfully.
I'm so glad to see that somebody else has realized that the slashdot auto-filters are useless, annoying, poorly written pieces of software that merely detract from the slashdot community.
Re:Improvement suggestions: (Score:4, Informative)
It's been eased up a couple of weeks ago and now catches very little except ascii art. It used to catch comments posted in the mode "Code" pretty frequently but that's been fixed as well.
If anyone has good examples of genuine attempted comment text that trips the compression filter, email it to me [mailto] and I'll see about fixing it.
Re:Improvement suggestions: (Score:4, Interesting)
Why the continuing trend to offload debugging onto users who didn't ask for the 'improvement' in the first place? Why keep pushing code onto a hugely popular community site that only serves in Generalissimo Taco's war on trolls, dadaists, and the generally absurd? Why a gzip "filter"?? There are decades of research into fast algorithms for determining statistics on bodies of text -- any one of them, many public domain, would be an intelligent tool against crapflooders. But a 'compress and size check' line instead?? That's the worst kind of lax unfeeling code, that wields a brutal metric without regard for corollary damage. ("Rob code", I've heard it called, but "MS code" is more typifying of that style of program design.)
I generally don't rant. You are running a valuable site at no monetary cost to us. But /. continues to become a place where trenchant technical analysis is unwelcome, master geeks ignore the pablum, and Taco & the trolls continue their little war with the rest of us caught in the minefields that they lay. Every day I feel a greater desire for the /. of 1998. I say, bring back Chips and Dips.
Re:Improvement suggestions: (Score:3, Funny)
It sucks ass to have to type more than one character for a subject?
I log every instance of the compress filter doing its thing. In the last 20,000 comments or so that have been posted to Slashdot, it's blocked exactly two attempts to post because of a too-compressible subject. Both times the poster could easily have added about one character and it would have gone through.
And of the last 20,000 successfully posted comments, there have been exactly 50 blocked attempts because of compression on the text. (Note that two blocked previews followed by a successful post, which is typically what happens, counts for 2 of that 50.) The blocked posts are mostly things like the same link pasted in over and over, or one that was 23K worth of "... testtesttestesttesttestesttesttestest..."
Big chunks of whitespace look too much like ascii art and are frequently caught (where "frequently" means "well under 1%"). The solution is simple: trim out the whitespace. Sooner or later I'll get around to a feature that lets the Slash code trim it out automatically if you ask.
As I say, the code changed a couple of weeks ago, becoming much better. I am always very interested to hear about its failures, please, submit bug reports and let me know exactly what legitimate comment you were stopped from posting. But be precise. I have the debug logs, so vague anecdotes aren't convincing. And in this case, you're complaining about stuff that has already been addressed. Get with the times :)
Re:Improvement suggestions: (Score:2)
If you really, really want to get people to pay, you could also allow only subscribers to filter Katz (you know, I used to be a supporter of that poser?). That seems a little mean, though.
Lameness filter (Score:2)
nntp (Score:5, Insightful)
Wow. In just a few short years they'll have implemented....usenet!
Just kidding, I know there are differences. Still, an nntp gateway would allow people to use their own clients, and those killfiles.
Re:nntp (Score:3, Informative)
There already is a Gnus client for Slashdot. It allows you to use Gnus scorefiles and everything. Sometimes I wonder if Emacs hackers belong to a totally different species.
Security? (Score:2, Insightful)
I remember that these were pending problems from a while ago.
My biggest wish (Score:3, Interesting)
How about comment editing capability??? There's nothing worse than posting a comment, even using preview, and realize you screwed it up somehow.
It might even be interesting to add a "previous version" capability. Just stick the message in some other dump table and have a different screen to dump them out.
The journals have editing capability, so I don't see why normal messages can't do the same.
Re:My biggest wish (Score:2)
If comment editing is put in place, at least make it so that you can only edit the comment if it has not been moderated yet. This will allow people to make quick corrections right after they post, but hopefully avoid the abusive implications of an edit feature.
Re:My biggest wish (Score:2)
The problem with this is if you could change your comment after it was moderated.
Hm; this gives rise to another idea: What if you could edit it only until it was moderated or comments were added to it?
Re:My biggest wish (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:My biggest wish (Score:3, Interesting)
OR even simpler. Any comment at -1 or 0 could be edited at its current moderation - who cares? Any comment at +1 or higher will automatically get set to +1 when edited to start over. Easy enough and hard to abuse.
So for the word problem challenged:
sub edit_submit { if current_moderation > 1 { moderation = 1 } }
Easy enough!
Re:My biggest wish (Score:5, Insightful)
-sam
Re:My biggest wish (Score:2)
I have to admit, that this is a great point. Being able to edit the posts would be open to huge abuse.
Even appending comments would be pretty open game -- as another poster pointed out, the trolls could put up a normal post, and then just add "Oh! by the way, I forgot this link (which is goatse.cx).
Annoying. I think you're probably right that we're better off the way it is now.
Four suggestions.. (Score:4, Interesting)
Four suggestions -- three of which should be easy and the fourth is harder:
Re:Four suggestions.. (Score:4, Interesting)
The abuse for "modified" comments would be immense (ie - whore to +5 quickly to be on top of the comments, then change all your links to goatse). Deletion isn't, though. I like that idea (although what happens to mods and replied?).
Moderation by editors should be noted as such. This would reduce (or confirm) a lot of the conspiracy theories around here
Yeah, like michael would agree to that (I'm teasin michael... don't mod me down!)
I don't think editors should have mod points at all! Unlimited mod points *DESTROY* the moderation system by definition. They should trust in the system they designed!!
I'll also agree that the +1 bonus should be off by default.
I think majority will rule, and this one come in effect quickly.
How about a lameness filter against HTML posts where more than 30% of the displayed text is formatted? This would help out people who forget to close a tag and don't bother to preview, and reduce readability problems caused by people who want to use all bold. (In a related vein, does the Code option for post formatting do anything but generate unreadable posts? If people want to post code, let them use HTML.)
How about killing the lameness filter altogether?
We all hate it, and it doesn't stop the trolling. Plus, isn't it a form of *censoring* (gasp!)??
Honestly, my only suggestion (both for comments AND articles) is to have the terminator of every type of valid HTML tag forced at the end (already done on comments). This will prevent bleeding of comments (and no more "Close you italics flag!" comments).
Re:Four suggestions.. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Four suggestions.. (Score:2)
Spell Checker? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Spell Checker? (Score:2, Insightful)
I can read past misspellings anyways, 99% of the time. I am not like the grammer trolls who feel it is their duty to give everyone a language lesson, I just say give it a break... no one is perfect and not everyone has a degree in literature.
Re:Spell Checker? (Score:3, Funny)
grammar
Re:Spell Checker? (Score:2)
http://freefall.homeip.net/stuff/spellcheck/ [homeip.net]
Be warned that this is VERY SIMPLE. You CAN hurt yourself if there is, something bad in the stuff you are spell checking (although unless there is a " before it, you are probably safe).
Re:Spell Checker? (Score:2)
Here's a link [clarkson.edu] to OmniWeb [omnigroup.com]
on Mac OS X checking the speeling of a post as it's typed.
I implemented a spell checker for free! (Score:2)
Joseph Elwell.
I want more room (Score:2)
I need more room in my Slashbox. This way I can log into
My wish for meta-moderation (Score:5, Insightful)
A slightly interesting post at +3 shouldn't be awarded yet another point, so in that case an 'interesting' moderation would be unfair.
Currently you only see the comment and think 'hey, interesting' and you'd M2 it as fair.
And please dump the over/underrated moderations. They're only used to dodge M2.
Re:My wish for meta-moderation (Score:2)
Are slow readers to be penalized for their "late" moderations?
No they aren't. And just this makes it very hard to implement it. It would require slashcode to remember the scores it presents to a moderator until moderation is done (you offcourse cannot let the webbrowser of the moderator remember them, to avoid abuse). Implementing this would be very, very not trivial I think.
Still, for me as a user it would be nice ;-)
20 Second Timer (Score:2)
And under certain browsers (*cringe*IE5.5*cringe), when you hit the back button, you've lost what you typed if you blow the 20 second filter.
I also think that adding a new story type "Poll" along the lines of Ask Slashdot would be nice (for user suggested polls).
Surprises... (Score:2, Funny)
The rest of the world calls these surprises "bugs". Except Microsoft, who calls them "features".
Will I pay for Slashdot? (Score:3, Interesting)
In favor: I've used and enjoyed Slashdot for a very long time. I'm not concerned about privacy issues involving my email address, so that's not a worry for me. I know that a lot of hard work has been done to keep this service running for me to enjoy, and I know that the upkeep costs a lot. I know that the reality of the web is different now than it was.
Convincing, but against: I, and all the other posters, experts, flamers, trolls and etc. are what make Slashdot even basically interesting. The stories alone I can get anywhere -- it's the posts that are semi-interesting. When I pay for a subscription to Salon, I'm paying to get content I enjoy. If I were to pay for Slashdot, even just to get ride of ads, I feel like I'd be paying for something I help make happen.
All that said: I'll pay for Slashdot. The reason is that, all philosophical problems aside, I know that economic realities are forcing this thing in. I'll miss the free Slashdot, but even a subscriber-friendly Slashdot is better than no Slashdot at all (what would I *do* with my days?).
In return, I'd really, really like to see a more intelligent basis for story selection. I *miss* that Slashdot from three years ago where the stories were mostly tech-oriented and not just another excuse to flame Katz or diss Microsoft. I want to see real efforts to improve the signal to noise ratio without stomping on unpopular views (like moderation tends to). Maybe it's not possible to go back to that, but I'd like to see some effort made to try.
More useless suggestions (Score:4, Insightful)
Enable me to have separate comment viewing prefs for when I'm a moderator. Changing them back and forth is annoying. Plus then they could be set automatically to more socially responsible defaults.
If a comment below my threshold has a child which is above my threshold, I think that should be clearer; ideally, in between the visible grandparent and the visible child should be a link to the invisible parent.
Re:More useless suggestions (Score:2)
Try putting your Threshold to zero, your Highlight Threshold to +3 (or whatever) and your Spill to something like 1. Works for me...
Subscriptions? (Score:2, Interesting)
My small wish (Score:2)
An easy way on the main page to scroll back through previous stories.
This could be as simple as an "Older stories..." link or as "complicated" as separators between days and something like a "Monday's stories" link.
If I miss a day or two, I always have to fiddle with the slashboxes to scroll back through the stories. This is a simple UI fix and would greatly increase usability.
Stylesheets (Score:5, Interesting)
This could potentially reduce serverload quite a bit -- not only would you be spitting out far less bandwidth per page, but things like score filtering could be done on the clientside instead of requiring another roundtrip to the server.
You could even invent your own killfile, highlighting, light-mode, and score biasing schemes. Slashdot could use a default stylesheet, and then host user-submitted ones. Removing all the presentation goop would probably make NNTP/Gopher/whatever gateways easier to implement too. This would also have the positive aspect of pushing off most of the minor bitches back onto the userbase.
As long as we're on the subject of wishlists... (Score:3, Insightful)
No open-source package can touch it, eh? (Score:2)
I am insulted, chagrined, annoyed, disturbed, perturbed, dismayed, aghast, and perhaps even indignant at this shocking act of arrogance, Mr. Taco! Shame on you, sir. Shame shame shame!
Re:No open-source package can touch it, eh? (Score:2, Interesting)
Open to contributions? (Score:5, Insightful)
Slashcode seems to fall into the second camp. There doesn't seem to be a wide variety of people who have contributed, rather the credit is purely to CmdrTaco and friends.
Instead of doing all the work yourselves, why not have a todo list and let others make contributions to the project, rather than just implementing suggestions?
Update lameness filter behavior! (Score:2)
Instead of adding a space to the middle of long words, why not just add a <wbr> tag so that the browser can decide whether or not it needs to actually break the word at that spot?
There are too many times when someone posts a URL in a comment, and I can't simply cut & paste because the lame filter has put a space in the middle of it!
Warning! (Score:2, Funny)
Slashcode may not be the most scalable open source (Score:2, Insightful)
I am not an expert on improving the scalability of web applications (especially those written in Perl, as is Slashcode), but, from what I read, I understand that Java generally scales much better, especially when it has been tweaked for that purpose. Recently, an open source discussion board (written in Java) appeared that its creators say is one of the most scalable on the planet: Jive [jivesoftware.com]. Even in Jive's old, version 1.24 form, it was so scalable that Sun Microsystems decided to use it as its main web discussion software, replacing discussion software that they had written themselves (in Java). Sun employee Eric Larson [sun.com] wrote (in article's [sun.com] last paragraph) that
Jive's developers swear that it can serve a million page views per day without a problem. On the other hand, Jive doesn't support the posting of news items in a manner similar to Slashcode. Maybe that's what Taco meant when he wrote "like this" (above). Of course, the open source developers at Meinds [sourceforge.net] may decide to alter the Jive source to permit the posting of news items. Then Slashcode might have been bested in terms of features as well as scalability.
Re:Karma Kap (Score:2)
Re:Karma Kap (Score:3, Interesting)
That would piss me off too.
Re:Karma Kap (Score:2)
Just the same, what real difference does it make if you have 50 karma or 500 karma. After the +1 bonus at 20 something, the rest is meaningless, so why do you care?
Re:Karma Kap (Score:2)
Re:Karma Kap (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Karma Kap (Score:2)
E.
Re:First Post (Score:5, Funny)
Yes, I hear that Taco plans to introduce the following snippet into Slash:
if(comment.number() == 1)
{
post.abort();
}
ie. anybody trying to post a first comment to a story will be rejected, only the second, third etc. posts will be allowed.
HTH.