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.

Re:Testing Quote

[brunascle]

well, they couldve kept the blockquote tag and just added css to it. this is what blockquote was meant for. div is meaningless, and shouldnt be used in place of blockquote.

"restrict the discussions

[wiredog]

to logged in users. This is a nice way to minimize trolling and general crappy behavior in your journal."

Because that's worked so well over at Kuro5hin.

How about ...

[suv4x4]

Some better classification and filters on Slashdot, so we can reduce the noise levels. Give the articles:

a "credibility rating" (from "improbable rumor" to "we guarantee it's correct with our life".. ok pick better named)

an "importance" rating (from "something to read if you're bored with life" to "breaking effin news!!!")

and "time effect" rating (from "it was announced to happen in somewhere the next 100 years" to "it just happened now!")

Because, damn. I'm sick of all the noise on Slashdot. And that's gold I'm giving you here. If you don't use it, I'll be so pissed off, I'll start my own news site just to see it happen :P

Geeks in Space....

[Chanc_Gorkon]

Aww man get my hopes up! Cepstral voice reading me a Slashdot story?? MEH! I would actually ENJOY listening to a new Geeks in Space. Yeah, that's so last century, but I don't care. Geeks in Space was a podcast but with out the RSS! :D

Re:Clogs up in Opera 9

[theantipop]

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

I have this problem as well. It is horridly slow on any popular story to the point where it takes 4-5 seconds for the browser to respond to a PageDwn. Often times expanding a minimized comment will seem to time out. I switched back to FF2 and it's silky smooth.

Re:Buggy IE (7)

[clang_jangle]

You might want to switch to a more standards-compliant browser then...

Re:AIM is Top Dog?

[Hatta]

Indeed, it's pretty lame for an open source site to promote closed source solutions like that. Any decent client can talk to all decent protocols, so there's really no excuse for not using Jabber.

Podcasts

[hansonc]

Hey if you're going to do a podcast (as such) why not bring back Geeks in Space?

Re:How about ...

[kevin_conaway]

an "importance" rating (from "something to read if you're bored with life" to "breaking effin news!!!")

Who decides what is important? I generally avoid hardware stories like the plague but some electrical engineer might consider them gangbusters.

and "time effect" rating (from "it was announced to happen in somewhere the next 100 years" to "it just happened now!")

Most of the time, I think that type of information is irrelevant or only interesting to a minute portion of the users.

Honestly, most of what you want seems to take the place of actually reading TFA and forming opinions on it yourself

Re:Question for other slashdotters

[jeffasselin]

For the way I like to read Slashdot, it's perfect. I tend to read the 3-5 posts, but will often read the parents and replies of such posts even if they're 1-2 because they often progress the conversation starter that got modded up. It's also nice not to have to go back constantly in my browser, everything opens up in the single window, and the moderation is easy to do with the new system, you know exactly how many points you have left as you read on.

Re:AIM is Top Dog?

[drinkypoo]

It's much easier to farm out your email and IM to a service like GMail, where you have a dedicated set of professionals ensuring that you have the latest upgrades, maximum performance, and best spam protection that our eggheads at large have managed to develop.

If you're not worried about privacy, by all means, use google. If you are, don't. It's that simple.

For most of my correspondence, I am not concerned about privacy, and I in fact use gmail, gtalk, etc. But for anything I am, I feel the need to have my own mail server.

Re:AIM is Top Dog?

[spun]

What? What maintenance and time requirements? Setting up in house email and IM took me all of a day. I look at the servers all of five minutes a day. We're talking a simple in-house-only jabber IM server, and a postfix based store and forward only mail server for when the state screws up our statewide servers, but it is neither hard nor time consuming, and for some of us it's fun.

Robot Overlord

[Viking Coder]

I for one would like to welcome our new Slashdot Robot Overlord, but I can't find it, since the link is biffed in the article.

Anyone know where it really is?

Re:"restrict the discussions

[Red Flayer]

Well, a previous responder took care of the deifnition for you... but just a thought on you getting moderated as a troll:

Did you know that your sig states that you're here to offend people?

I dont read /. to RTFA, I read /. to offend people in ignorance.

Reading that, I'm not sure if you mean to offend the ignorant, or if you offend people through your own ignorance. Either way, it seems like you purposely try to offend people, which is likely a very good reason to mod a potentially troll-ish post as a troll.

Re:Testing Quote

[FireFury03]

well, they couldve kept the blockquote tag and just added css to it. this is what blockquote was meant for. div is meaningless, and shouldnt be used in place of blockquote.

Meh, typing "blockquote" or "quote" instead of "i" is effort - they should've just used the "q" tag...

Re:Buggy IE (7)

[Control Group]

Don't worry, it's a problem in IE6, too. The page is completely unreadable. Pieces of interface pop in and out as I scroll up and down the page, I only know about the controls on the left-hand side by rumor; I can't actually see anything helpful over there, comments overlap each other (by which I mean text is actually laid atop other text such that neither block is readable), and it takes comparatively longer to load.

I'm hoping there's an option similar to the old "light" mode for those of us often stuck using IE. I can understand if the nifty bells and whistles don't get made IE-compatible in favor of actual standards, but if I can't read slashdot at all when I'm forced to use IE (like at work, for example), I'm going to be a sad panda.

D2

[krelian]

A feature that I really want: being able to see which comments were added since the last time I loaded the page.

Currently, there is not way to follow discussions you haven't participated. D2 doesn't even have the possibility to temporarily sort comments or threads from newest to oldest without doing it through the preferences page (which you need to access again if you want to change it back when you load a new story). For stories with a large number of comments this means that new comments will barely be read by anyone.

This is not a complaint by someone who is pissed of that no one will read his comments (see diggers and their new discussion system) but by someone who appreciates the overall quality of discussion on slashdot. Let's face it, these days there are better places to get the news, slashdot's quality is in the comments. This is where new features should go to.