Slashdot Discussion System Updates 345
So D2 now remembers what you have read. This will mostly be useful to readers who use the key bindings to navigate -- we didn't really want to guess if you've read something, but if you use the WASD keys to navigate, moving on from a comment flags it as read. Read comments are slightly faded, and if you re-enter a discussion a few hours later, it should remember what you've read.
We've simplified comment retrieval as well. If you get to the 'End' of a discussion and try to get more comments (either by clicking one of the various 'More' links, or by pressing a keybinding like S or D that tells us to move on to the next comment) a dialog box will show up asking you if you would like to lower your threshold. So if you normally read at Score:4, and read to the end of the Score:4 comments, it will offer to lower your threshold to Score:3 either for all time, or just for this page. This means you don't need to constantly raise and lower your threshold to handle discussions of different sizes. This works really nicely.
Lastly is a user preference in the pref pane labeled 'Collapse Comments After Reading.' I'm actually considering making this one on by default but I'm open to feedback. It does what it says -- after you've navigated off a comment (using the keybindings again), it collapses the comment you just left. This makes it very easy to keep your place in a discussion as it grows. This is especially useful in discussions where you want to leave a tab open for several hours, or else come back later and figure out what's new.
There are undoubtedly bugs: feel free to email me or post them to the bug tracker. Thanks to pudge for hacking all this stuff too. Especially the bugs -- he wrote those first.
AWSD (Score:4, Interesting)
what does awsd do?
IE6 Javascript errors (Score:2, Interesting)
Hi, I unfortunately only have IE6 at my current job site. The new scripts seem to break on IE6. I can't expand comments nor can navigate through them. I've noticed many CSS positioning bugs in IE6. I'm not suggesting you waste time trying to fix them. Perhaps a stripped down CSS file and losing some of the JS may be in order for browsers that do not support the features.
my own follow-up (Score:4, Interesting)
scripts (Score:4, Interesting)
It happens on virtually every page I visit on
The fun thing is, that whether I choose to wait, or terminate the script immediately, it makes no difference to the page.
This is in Firefox 2 on linux BTW. I posted this via ie on WM5, and no issues.
Re:Display bugs (Score:3, Interesting)
Not going to happen.
Slashdot refuses to fix the non-sexy things, in the true spirit of open source. Quite obvious that most of the development work done on ./ is done by people who have never had to actually deliver a product on any sort of timeframe. Yeah, yeah, don't like it, don't read here. Unfortunately the mindshare of both good and terrible bad (ie hilarious) posters is still here with no other tech based discussion forums able to wrest it away, even after all these years.
Hell I'd even consider subscribing if the editors could keep their "witty" comments to themselves or give us an option for viewing submissions without editor comments. Or hey, modify the system to have two types of editor comments, correction (factual updates) and editorial and the ability to turn one or both off.
Insert sarcasm or relevant tags wherever needed above.
Re:Display bugs (Score:4, Interesting)
I couldn't agree more. In general the nesting is not visually clear at all, which is weird because slashdot's comment system is all about nested comments. For example if you collapse a parent with a child open, it's not clear at all that the child belongs to the parent.
In general, I would love to have a continuous tree line where all posts, collapsed or not, are attached to the line. Like a classical tree widget [codepencil.com].
meta-moderation, again (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't think that Slashdot really needs to hand out gold stars for doing a decent job of moderating.
I don't see it as a way of rewarding good moderators as much as a way of watching out for incredibly bad moderators. I guess I expected that the meta-mod system would perhaps have some influence on who would receive moderation points at what frequencies, based on how often they moderate carelessly.
However I see no evidence to support that.
Fix the delay! (Score:4, Interesting)
So you've made it more convenient to read Slashdot. Sincerely, thanks! I was skeptical at first but I've come to appreciate D2 - with one exception. You've made reading Slashdot more efficient, so it's easier to read multiple stories at once, so there are more things I want to comment on. Too bad! I'm still subject to the same broken comment delay that ranges from two-minutes-too-long to we'll-get-back-to-you at random.
Want to make karma actually mean something? Drop the delay from users with an arbitrarily good karma so that they can actually contribute to the site without wanting to choke the programmers.
Re:Display bugs (Score:2, Interesting)
And yet, Open Suse has fixed, as of July 6, almost 3000 bugs from opensuse 10.3 to 11.0. Mostly typos. KDE has been making great strides in updgrades causing less crashes by updating bugs.
Ok; so there's one open source project that addresses bugs. I've submitted probably 3 dozen or more bugs to various open source projects, and I think I can safely say less than 5 of them have even been commented on, much less fixed. Now maybe I have the misfortune of "only" picking crappy open source projects to submit bugs to, but my experience is my experience and your one example isn't doing a lot to counter it.
I actually wrote that page to send a message to the open source projects that ask for people to contribute any way they can, but then completely ignore the contributions.
Frankly, yes, I've had a MUCH better track record getting bugs fixed in closed-source programs.
What has Microsoft done about their bugs? Oh, yea, they get hard coded into production releases.
I was talking about submitting bugs to open source-esque projects, not Microsoft. But I guess it's easy to bash Microsoft when you have no actual argument, huh?
Re:And yet... (Score:5, Interesting)
They'd have to throw the first few weeks' moderations away (admit it, you'd be tempted to go LOL I MOD ZONK DOWN EVERY TIME), but it could be useful later on.
Re:Wake me up when the moderation system is improv (Score:4, Interesting)
Underrated and overrated should be meta-moddable, at least; perhaps the metamod system could show comments modded thus with their moderation and points before the over/under was applied.
I too have been a victim (FSVO) of mods who mark me "overrated" when I haven't received any other moderation.
Re:slashdot editor update: (Score:2, Interesting)
IE is my browser of preference. As far as I'm concerned, if a site doesn't display properly in it, I don't go to that site, since web sites tend to be nicer to IE than Firefox. Thus, I don't use D2, since they haven't seen fit to make it work with IE.
Note I'm not saying that sites shouldn't work in Firefox, either... it's a site developer's responsibility to make their web site work in all browsers in common usage, not just the ones they feel like. Whether a site doesn't work in IE or Firefox or Opera or Safari or... you get the idea, it's just as poor on the part of the site dev.
Re:Display bugs (Score:5, Interesting)
And what kind of bugs are you submitting?
Click the link, they're all listed. Mostly usability bugs, some extremely obvious visual bugs.
Keep in mind big projects get alot of bug sumissions.
Slashdot doesn't; maybe 5-8 on a busy day. Today it'll get a ton, but I've been watching their Sourceforge tracker for awhile.
Did you do the research and see if it's a dupe?
Yes. I used to work in QA, I do know what I'm doing.
Is it a security bug, they'll probably get looked @ first. Then they'll look if it's cosmetic or functioning.
My experience shows that they will not.
You're the one that attacked OSS
I'm not attacking OSS; I'm attacking projects that ask for contributions and then ignore the contributions. It just so happens these projects are usually open source projects.
Commercial products generally don't ask for contributions, and yet I've had much better luck getting bugs fixed in them. I've pointed out bugs to Apple, Blizzard, Microsoft, Adobe, MySQL (on one of their closed-source utilities) all with positive responses. Many of these bugs have been fixed, or will be fixed when the next product revision comes out.
Do you use a Mac? Do you play World of Warcraft? Do you use windowed mode? Did you notice about a year ago that windowed mode started remembering its position on the screen between runs? I submitted that bug, and it was fixed in the next Mac-specific client release. (Sadly, the Windows developers haven't yet implemented the same thing. I should pop off another email.) Blizzard doesn't ask for user contributions; in fact they make it pretty hard to even find what email address to use.
so I figured you're a MS fan boy.
Damn those shades of grey! I only see in black and white, and that's the way I like it, daggummit!
Most open source programs, except for big ones like DEs and distros or office programs, etc, most developers aren't getting paid to make and are writing them in their spare time.
Ok; that's fine. But if they don't have time to look at or fix bug submissions, they shouldn't ask people to submit them. They're just wasting our time and effort.
I don't know what your profession is or what bugs you actually submitted or to what projects, but when submitting a bug, evaluate how important it is, to everyone, not just you, and set your expectations.
I think it's a reasonable expectation that every bug, no matter how trivial, at the very least be assigned to somebody. Over 50% of the bugs I submitted were literally never read. Probably closer to 75%.
If you can code, then submit a patch.
I can code. But I don't have the free time to learn the coding style, build instructions, layout, possibly new programming language required to make the patch. Definitely not enough to make the patch when there's a good chance the patch will be rejected anyway.
The best use of my talent to the open source community is to use my extremely low tolerance of bugs and ability to notice tiny annoyances for QA purposes. Turns out most open source projects don't actually want that.
Two (Score:1, Interesting)
First off, the "idle" section. I can appreciate that you want to have it, but why the hell hasn't anyone bothered to add it to "preferences" yet?
Second, the in-line reply box. Great feature. Almost everything about it works. EXCEPT that the size of the textbox is... bad. Below is a screenshot... the text box seems to be fixed width and so gets worse when replying to child and grandchild posts.
http://img182.imageshack.us/my.php?image=90344635nz9.jpg [imageshack.us]
Oh, and it also might be nice if logged in users with the highest karma level didn't have to "preview" for the in-line reply.
Re:Display bugs (Score:3, Interesting)
Funny. OpenSuse and KDE seem to be two examples, not one.
I submitted a bug to the GNU grep team, and their response was "It's fixed in CVS and it'll be in the next release".
I've submitted bug reports to Mozilla, and they've either been grouped with others as near-dupes or have been fixed eventually (none were show-stoppers).
I've submitted bug reports to many smaller projects, and mostly had to submit patches. This is because smaller projects have fewer resources.
I can't submit a patch to most closed-source projects. Not only is it much more difficult and time consuming to work on the object instead of the source, but most closed-source software companies like to sue people who reverse engineer their stuff.
Re:Display bugs (Score:5, Interesting)
Hell I'd even consider subscribing if the editors could keep their "witty" comments to themselves or give us an option for viewing submissions without editor comments
I've had half a dozen submissions posted (one last night, it was the first one this year) and sometimes submissions are straight from the submitter without even typos corrected, and sometimes they completely rewrite the submitter's summary (like the one I submitted yesterday afternoon so don't blame ME).
Contrary to popular opinion, slashdot editors do edit. They may of may not be good at editing, but they do edit. Or not, as they see fit, I've found.
Re:slashdot editor update: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Display bugs (Score:5, Interesting)
The best system for organizing a forum that I've ever seen is the left-hand pane on Google Groups (You have to enable Tree View to see it).
I'm baffled by the fact that no other comments system seems to use it. I bet Google would donate the code to Slashdot, too.
- Alaska Jack
Re:Require Downmodders to Justify (Score:1, Interesting)
It would be nice to make all moderation pass a CAPTA. This is not a lot of effort for a normal person with five mod points but it is for a karma farmer. Make the bastards work harder.