something tells me the trolls are rubbing their hands with glee.....

..what ever happened to JonKatz?

...but what time zone are you guys in?

Thanx in adv!

... that this will be a huge troll/slashdot hater fest? The few voices who actually want to talk will probably be drowned out. But good luck anyway.

Some very good questions here. One I would disagree with though is:

8.) Most websites go through a "layout" change every couple of years, the "slashdot style" has been pretty much worn out, especially with not being w3c compliant, any changes in the future?

While W3C compliance would definetely be a good thing, I don't think they should change the layout style just because its a few years old. I hate site that change layouts (CNN, BBC news...). Just as I'm comfortable with one organization of material it changes. For sites I visit often, stable layout is very important.

As the old adage says, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. In general Slashdot's layout is clean and easy to read. By all means make incremental improvements but leave the basic, successful layout alone.

as has been repeated many times, this is not a global site. it's an US site run by people in the US. Hemos and company are from michigan (originally), which is in EST. if they want to use it, their choice.

While I agree that it would have been nice to have utc for those in other countries, I get sick of people bitching at the american websites for thinking in familiar terms. Ever notice how they list stuff in terms of USD? that's cause that's what they have in their piggy bank.

Quit being so fricking politically correct- I hate people that pull that crap. /me apologizes for the flame

oke. I like the /. format. I don't want them to get out an' i don't want to see them go slick journalism. I would like to see more substance on the read more page. I would also like to see changes in the rejected stories system. I like the basic colours and i think that there should be heavier penalties for trolls, overall penalties, not just filter points. I would like to see a mod UP point for statement coherency, as i've seen a lot of arguments that i furiously disagreed with, didn't think were all that insightful, but had to mod up for being well-put-together arguments. For those who think those don't exist on /., I've marked some of them as my friends.

I agree that a lot of posts that are merely disagreement, sometimes with cogent argument behind them, get moderated as flamebait, etc., and this is not corrected nearly often enough in metamod.

I have never dared submit anything conneted to stuff my geekfriends work with here in Boston, because i don't want to see them slashdotted. Fix that, get more off-beat interesting stuff.

I won't be able to attend, so i redundantly request PUHLEEEEZE post the discussion the next day....?

One thing Ive often wondered about regarding the development of HTML was : Why did nobody, not MS, not netscape... nobody ever implement a time tag extension. ie some thing like this

<time timezone="UTC+8">
13:00
</time>

Then the broswer could just translate it into the readers timezone automagically.

And as has been stated many times before, you only think it's not a global site because you live in the US.
A poll a while ago showed that around half of /. readers are actually living outside the US. Showing UTC is not being "politically correct" - it's being helpful to all those people who don't know and don't care what EST is.

I'm not going to be able to make it to this tonight (whenever "tonight" is for the editors, it's going to be really late in the night here), so could someone please bring up the following:

1. Congratulate the editors on finally cutting down on the number of dupes posted - it's been ages since I've seen one.

How has this been acheived: via technology or a more human factor?

2. Ask the editors when they plan to:

i) start checking story submissions for basic spelling and grammar errors;
ii) start checking that the actual stories aren't well-known hoaxes;
iii) start editing the story titles so that they are more easily found via searches (eg, a chess story should have some chess reference in the story title, rather than being called "Man Last Stand vs Machine" or whatever); and
iv) start offering bittorrents straight off the bat when it's relevant (eg, a story on a new movie trailer being made available for download, latest patch for a popular game, new distro launch).

3. Ask the editors to update polls more frequently.

Now that ChrisD's left, polls seem to linger well past their sell-by-dates. Chris said once that he posted new polls after x number of days or y number of votes, whichever came first. If I remember correctly, x was about 3-4 and y was roughly 25,000-30,000, so the recent poll about "Favorite fictitious drink" went on for far too long (7 days, nearly 60,000 votes). I'm sure some sort of automation could be used here.

That's it really.

Quit being so fricking politically correct

Most people know which time zone they're in (as in GMT+/-x, personally I'm in +8), but if you're not an American, have no idea when "8pm Eastern" is.

And I know that you don't care; so we can just leave it at that.

are you sure? We're talking about Americans here - they barely know the time zone in other states.

I have this question, that maybe one of you can answer....if not i may try to ask it tonight.

where on slashdot can people post to each other on topics that are not necessarily current news items? Is there some sort of general discussion forum somewhere on slashdot that I've never found? the community is great, probably one of the best on the Internet, but if you want to ask it a question or discuss something that isn't front page news, you don't really have a place to do it here (without being offtopic/redundant etc). could a forum (ala phpBB) be put up and become an official part of Slashdot? i think this would help the community grow and allow discussion of a better variety of topics.

Honestly I don't know if we need more moderation options. Look at all the idiot moderators who don't understand the difference between Interesting, Insightful, and Informative. If I see one more post mis-moderated as Insightful, I'm going to fucking explode. Seriously, what's the point of different options if the moderators can't understand them? This is why I recommend that we just simplify the whole fucking thing and go to + and -. That's it. Interesting, insightful, informative, funny, whatever gets a mod up. Crapflooding, trolling, flamebait, ignorant, etc, goes down. Simple. Unfortunately the stupidity of the few once again ruins it for the many.