Slashdot: Podcasts, IM, Improved Discussions

We have a number of Slashdot features that we've added in recent months that I've neglected to mention so I wanted to take a moment to share them with everyone today. I'd like to start by reminding all logged in users to try playing with our new experimental Discussion2 system. It's very nearly complete at this point. You can activate it with a checkbox on any article page (provided you actually have logged in). Read on to learn about Podcasts, IM, improved quoting in discussions, new subscriber options and more.

Recently we added the ability to receive AIM instant messages to notify you when stories are posted, when someone posts a comment to your journal, or when one of your friends post a journal. You can turn it on from the messaging preference page. You might need to set up slashdotomatic as a friend or buddy or whatever in your IM client to make it work, but this is a good way to get fast notification of Slashdot stuffs. We hopefully will add other popular instant messaging clients in the future but for now AIM is the top dog so we started there. The code is of course all in CVS if you want to add new platforms... there's room to easily add Jabber, MSN, Yahoo or anything else really. We've talked about SMS as well, so if there's a demand for it we'll work on it.

Everyone who knows me knows what I think about the vast majority of podcasts on the internet. The Slashdot podcast currently isn't at all like that. We call it the the Slashdot Robot Overlord. All it does is use Cepstral Voices to read you Slashdot stories aloud. So if you want to listen to Slashdot stories in your car or on your phone or something, here's an easy way to do it.

Subscribers have a new option in their journals: they can restrict the discussions to logged in users. This is a nice way to minimize trolling and general crappy behavior in your journal. Of course, there's nothing to stop the ambitious jerk from creating a user account, but this will at least slow them down for a few seconds. It's worth noting that when you post a journal, you are given the option to submit your journal to Slashdot... if your journal is selected, you sacrifice that option.

Speaking of comment posting, we've added a new <quote> tag useful in comments. If you choose to encapsulate a quote in said tag, that quote is expandable and contractible via user preferences. Properly quoting comments will allow your fellow readers to have better control over their display than simply blocking a huge chunk of words in italics.

A little bit more information about the Discussion2 system before we wrap up: It's currently tested mostly under Firefox (as is all of our javascript). It also works fine under Safari (2 and 3). We have some UI improvements coming soon as well, but it already is a vast improvement over the old system. One of the next steps is to make D2 degrade cleanly to a non-javascript browser so we can maintain one code base for development. When we get to that point, we can switch over the default/anonymous view to the new system.

We have a bunch of other stuff coming after the holiday. But in the mean time, please test this stuff out and let me know if you see any glaring bugs. The address is the same as always.

Buggy IE (7)

[duerra]

I realize that this doesn't matter to a lot of the Slashdot crowd, but Discussion2 is still buggy in IE (IE7, specifically). There are JS errors on the page, the weird gray and white floating box that sits on the page which is apparently there to tell you how many posts there are in the discussion overruns the left-side navigation bar (and overall who's purpose seems a bit pointless to me in general), and its rendering is completely messed up in IE. Also, I have to use FF just to disable Discussion2 on my account, because it doesn't work in IE7.

You may want to get those issues cleared up before you consider Discussion2 complete.

Clogs up in Opera 9

[Constantine XVI]

Ive' noticed that Discussion2 tends to make Opera 9 chug on large comment pages (usally past 200

Re:Testing Quote

[Qzukk]

So the difference is a preference the user can set?

My guess is that it's a preference I can set to decide how I want to see your post.

That's my guess anyway, since apparently when I signed up for the University of Michigan testing stuff it clobbered my account profile with whatever was going on at the time and now none of this "discussion2" stuff works. I don't even get this "checkbox on any article page". I can turn on and off the Michigan stuff in my profile, but the majority of the time it wouldn't work in FF or IE, and I ended up leaving it disabled.

Re:AIM is Top Dog?

[GiMP]

Or how about XMPP in general? Thats IM for nerds, IM that matters.

Re:Perfect Chance

[trip11]

If you have accumulated a large amount of karma (your posts are regularly moderated up, no down), then your posts will start with a rating of 2, not 1. You can choose to not apply that bonus if you don't think you want it (for instance if you think your comment will just get moderated down). It's all in the FAQ too. Spelled out much clearer. http://slashdot.org/faq/com-mod.shtml#cm800 [slashdot.org]

Re:Clogs up in Opera 9

[john83]

Ive' noticed that Discussion2 tends to make Opera 9 chug on large comment pages (usally past 200

I'm running Firefox 2.0.0.4 and get the same problem.

Re:Top-level-replies on new Discussion system

[josecanuc]

The "Reply" link is on the floating control on the left side of the page.

Re:Clogs up in Opera 9

[Ilgaz]

Ive' noticed that Discussion2 tends to make Opera 9 chug on large comment pages (usally past 200

It _is_ Opera bug which people like me spent very huge time to report to Opera ASA.

I even included OS X "sample of application", my logs, my system profile just to make them interested a bit. While guys start the day by checking Slashdot there, they don't fix the freaking bug.

Unbelievable, no less.

I hate to give ammo to Opera haters but this is it, I am saying this public. That is a Opera bug which exists since first 9.x versions and lives up to date despite numerous kind of bug reports even posted to their forums.

Original Slasdot bug report (not mine)
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=deta il&aid=1541019&group_id=4421&atid=104421 [sourceforge.net]

By risking CmdrTaco getting mad at me :) I added comment to closed bug even to help Opera people if they ever check one of World's popular Tech sites bug database.

Re:Testing Quote

[kebes]

It appears that there are many of us experiencing this "University of Michigan Testing" bug. By having agreed to test that system, now we can't see/use the Discussion2 system.

I suppose it's possible that the two systems are the same thing, but based on the few screenshots I've been able to find of Discussion2, it doesn't look like they are. Moreover the University of Michigan system is very slow and buggy--I have trouble believing this is the same interface everyone else is testing. (Maybe a precursor to it, though.)

This is obviously a bug, and it would be nice if someone would mod up one of these comments so that the coders are aware of the problem. (In addition to the bug report that we should file...)

Re:Testing Quote

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

This is a blockquote.

This is a blockquote with italics.

This is a quote.

This is a quote with italics.

Hey, they've fixed at least one bug! :-)

Re:Testing Quote

[kebes]

In addition to the bug report that we should file...

A bug report is now filed in the Sourceforge bug-tracker. [sourceforge.net] Hopefully this is a simple, quick fix... I'd love to be able to experience this "Discussion2" thing that everyone is talking about!

Re:Podcasting before it was cool

[nullbort]

http://audio.textfiles.com/shows/geeksinspace/ [textfiles.com]

Re:Robot Overlord

[Alizarin Erythrosin]

It shows up for me on the front page, at the top... sometimes it gets replaced with the "metamod" thing, but a quick refresh will bring it back up most of the time.

Slashdot stories can be listened to in audio form via an RSS feed, as read by our own robotic overlord [feedburner.com].

Re:Testing Quote

[mkraft]

I found a way to enable Discussions2 if you previously signed up for the Univ of Michigan testing, but it isn't straight forward.

There are two ways to do it.

1. If you are using Firefox, you can install the Firebug [getfirebug.com] Addon and then go to the comments preference page and click on the firebug icon in the status bar. Then click "Inspect" Firebug button and click on the "University of Michigan Testing" button and click on the HTML tab in Firebug. Change the value from "uofm" to "slashdot". Then make sure the "University of Michigan Testing" is selected and submit the page.

2. If you can't or won't use Firebug, you can do it manually by going to the comment page and saving the page on to your computer and editing the HTML to change the "uofm" value to "slashdot" and then change the submit URL from "/users.pl" to "http://slashdot.org/users.pl". Then open this page in your browser and select the "University of Michigan Testing" style option and submit the page.

Either way, if you did it correctly, then neither option under "Discussion Style" will be checked and you will be using the new Discussion2 style. You can then use the Discussion2 style without having to wait for a fix.