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Slashdot Tweaks 187

Posted by CmdrTaco from the keeping-ya-updated dept.
First and foremost, we've moved the images to a new box. As many of you noticed, it was running temporarily off a non-standard port on the ad server. This was causing havoc for those of you behind firewalls. The new VA box is in place (blatant plug). It's horribly over powered (Dual P2) for the task at hand so to make things interesting (and to get Jesse to stop whining) we're trying out FreeBSD on it. I've also added several minor features to the comments section, as well as fixed a few bugs. Click the link below to read about them.
Reparenting. As many of you noticed, comments that were highly rated often were not being displayed. This was because they were replies to comments that were below your threshold. I've changed it to reparent highly rated comments by defaults. This is an option though so if you liked it the old way, you can Log In and change it.

Its a little confusing at 0 or 1 because you'll get chunks of conversation that seem out of place... well, they are because their parent is missing. But at the higher thresholds its very useful.

Sort Modes I added a few new sort modes (primarily so that jwz would stop pestering me :) that some of you might like. The existing Oldest First/Newest First sort modes still maintained thread structure. I've added new options that blow the threading away for those of you who want to strictly read comments in order.

New Topic Icons if anyone has nice icons that we could use to represent Graphics (A paintbrush?), Education (pencil? those dumb hats?), Media (vomit? a newspaper?), Opinions (a soapbox?) Don't send me crap, but if you have a nice image, I'll make it fit Slashdot. I'm mainly looking for clean photos or illustrations that I can play with.

Moderation I had a few glitches that were causing an unhealthy number of moderation points getting reinsterted into the system. I've tweaked around some numbers and fixed some bugs that should help. A lot of the problems we were having was simply that there were several times the number of points available than I intended. It appears that it is very important to keep the number of points scarce so people take them seriously and don't simply abuse the hell out of their power.

I added an over/underrated option to the drop down list of flags- these options don't change the textual description of the comment, but they do change its value, although they are slightly more limited than the other ratings (You can't "Overrated" a comment down to -1). Hasn't been tested much yet. Trial by fire methinks :)

Misc I've pretty well finished rewriting the Moderator Guidelines at this point so I guess we can consider them out of beta. There are a few minor points that they don't make yet, as well as a few other points they ought to make, but they're pretty solid. Suggestions are welcome.

I put my plan file up on a web link. Since I took finger down (a loooong time ago) nobody really new what I was up to. I don't do a very good job of keeping it up to date.

Ah well, thats all for now. I still need to clean out the quickies bin and then I'm largely caught up... a few Slashboxes need work, a few minor features, a couple major features, and then I can let the dust settle again for a bit. I just got 3 DVDs of South Park and I think I've earned some R&R time. Plus, now that the wireless lan is up and running in the Geek Compound, I can keep an eye on things from my couch. Yum.
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Slashdot Tweaks More

Slashdot Tweaks

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  • Translation of the message: (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Translation for the numerologically and capitally impaired ;-)

    Headline: Fear the elite hacking of Southern Hackers!

    We love to hear about web site updates because you losers want to add new features but will always forget to close secutrity holes. Thats ok, we'll find them for you. Heh.

    Bit Thrasher, Southern Hackers.

    Translation of word "elite", using the "new" Oxford mini-dictionary:

    Elite: #1. Group regarded as superior and favoured. #2. Size of letters in typewriting.

    (Must be number two, this guy writes with a lot of capitals...).

    1 \/\/()/\/7 \/\/()rRY, 5145|-||)()7 r()> 7()() /\/\\/(|-| 2 |3 |-|4(|











    (I won't worry, slashdot rocks to much to be hacked. More than once.)

  • Less mod upping, Default score. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    It seems that moderators have become under active in raising good AC posts to 1... Perhaps they dont want to waste their votes to raise normal posts? Any ideas why?

    On a somewhat related note, I'd like to suggest that logged in users inital score be set zero if their average score over the last week (or whatever time is easy for slashdot) is =.5, 1 if their avg score = [.5-2], or 2 if their avg score is above 2.

    This way, logging is as use wont be adventagious unless you have a okay history. Habitually good posters will be rewarded with an extra high startup.

    People less then N (say 5 per week) posts in the last averaging period should bs assumed to have an avg score of 0.

  • Re:Moderation (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    To tell ya the truth, I was happy before moderators' personal feelings/opinions about comments were added to the page. Feels a bit like the Sun to me (a local, tabliod, newspaper, where the editor replies to letters with caustic comments). Keeping it to a -1 to 5 numeric scale should be enough.

    If a comment isn't obviously enough of a troll/flamebait/etc... that it needs an explanation of why it was demoted to -1, then perhaps it should stick with a 0 anyways...

    jm2c.

  • Re:Taking their jobs seriously... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Ok, just logged out.

    The problem started (IMHO) when Rob added those words (you know, Informative, Interesting and so on).

    Now the moderators just read a bit of the post and think "yes, kind of interesting", So it get's +1. Not even cheked what score it already had and if it even deserved a higher one. It was interesting so it got +1.

    Same problem on the other site. Posts that are around 0 and 1 get moderated down to -1 for beeing a bit Offtopic or Redundant (Me Too!). -1 is certainly not the place where those posts should be but it happend a lot in the last few days.
    moderator's guide: Average Comments might be slightly offtopic, but still might be worth reading. They might be redundant. They might be a 'Me Too' article. They might say something painfully obvious. They don't detract from the discussion, but they don't necessarily significantly add to it. They are the comments that require the most attention from the moderators, and they also represent the bulk of the comments. (Score: 0-1)

    So my suggestion is:
    Do away those "names" and give us back the good old -1;0;+1 method. It was a nice idea but it did not work.

    Note: I did generalize a lot. If you are better as a moderator, we are happy to have you, but this is my view from the current state.
    Your anonymous moderator

  • Some usability suggestions (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I really like the thematic tags, but why don't you
    separate them from the points. I mean, there will always
    be some posts that are good but unclassifyable.

    --Anonymous Moderator

    PS: Rob!! here are some features that would really help this site's
    usability [useit.com].

    • HTML validation, link validation, spell checking, and grammar checking.
    • More source releases, especially in the customization areas of the code. Its time to simplify/
      refactor [c2.com] Slashdot's source code.
    • More permanency. Maybe you could archive only highly read and high-scoring posts/articles.

  • The real moderation guidelines (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Oh, you don't know the real guidelines?

    Linux hype: 5, Interesting
    *BSD bashing: 4, Interesting
    Something positve about Linux: 3, Informative
    Something negative about *BSD: 2, Informative
    Something negative about Linux: -1, Troll
    Something positive about *BSD: -1, Flamebait

  • adfu.blockstackers.com slows down Slashdot (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 03, 1999 @10:17AM (#1868020)
    Slashdot pages seem to load quickly and then freezes just before being displayed while adfu.blockstackers.com gets around to tossing an ad banner out. I see also that blockstackers.com is registered to Hemos (real name Jeffery Bates). Since /. and adfu are so closely tied, I see no reason for one server to be so much speedier than the other. A quick fix is to edit your local /etc/hosts file and make requests to adfu.blockstackers.com go to the firewall machine which refuses connections on nearly all ports. The banner load attempt quickly fails and /. works much faster.
  • Virid, come on, dude!
    Rob has released upto pre-.3 plus patches on the slash-help list. the Slash code is in active development, with a news server interface in production, and many other interfaces being developed. I run a Slash based site, and many others do also. Don't be so negative until you know all the facts. Slash .3 will be skipped, and Rob will release .4 w/ moderation as soon as he has a chance. Why don't you join the effort and not just complain that you can't 'tar -zxvf' it and have it work.

    The only thing I could recommend for Rob to do would be to add the slash-help link to the code page.
  • Perhaps he was suggesting the possibility of slashdot contacting tigert about doing icons for them.
  • That's the network. During the morning I can easily get 13Mbps from ftp.cdrom.com (yes, 13Mbps, amost 1/3rd of a T3).
  • Actually, it's two FreeBSD boxes and two Linux servers. Back as you said, it's a gradual, one step at a time adjustment to see for ourselves how they each perform for our needs.
  • What I find ironic is that out of four machines (all VAResearch), two came with Linux metal plates on them and two didn't. The two with the Linux plates run FreeBSD, yet the two without metal plates run Linux. =) We'll have to pry em off and put them on the right boxes.
  • lol! Definitely a different Jesse.
  • The images are now coming off yoda, a nice rackmount box with dual 450mhz PIIIs, 512MB of RAM and 18GB of UW SCSI HD. It's running FreeBSD 3.2 (-STABLE)
  • Not sure if this is possible in Netscape, but in Opera I have it set to "display only cached images," so all the images display (since they're in my cache) but don't take time to load. Periodically I hit the image button to refresh everything in my cache, and all is well.
  • Adfu was slow... yoda seems pretty fast. The add popped right up as if it was local.
  • Posted by Wookie Trainer:

    The images were formally being retrived off the adfu server, flotsam.slashdot.org. They are now hosted off slashdot.org now, i guess.
  • I think there should be two scales, one measuring how on-topic a post is and the other whether it was worth reading. For example, someone who posts a message with a ton of information related to the subject at hand should be scored up because it's useful. Someone who posts something hilarious that may be veering off into off-topic land would be scored down on topicality but could still be scored up if moderators thought it was entertaining.

    This would allow a more complex filtering system (okay, maybe that's not a good thing in your opinion. I happen to like it.) where a more serious user would want to see only on-topic posts while some others (e.g. the people who read everything on /.) would be more interested in entertaining posts.

  • I generally don't bother blocking ads, but I set junkbuster to hit anything that blinks at me; it drives me nuts, and I've seen it bring this k6/200 to it's knees, doing nothing but blinking.

    I'd edit the binary of netscape, but there's the ocasional animation I want to see.
  • On version 4, sort of. Previous versions made it an window-by-window option; 4 and later make it a global option, so all window must act the same. It's one of the reasons I stuck with 3.0 (but i can't on this new freebsd install, becasue archive.netscape.com is no longer open to anonymous access), while the other was the alt- to go back by that number of pages.
  • ahh, thanks. I'm happily running 3 again. First I downloaded it, then told the port to make itself so I could figure out where to stick the tarball, but now FreeBSD is happily downloading from the archives again through a nammed account.

    But I'd probably have not tried again for months without this information.

  • It was briefly (many years ago) a Sparcstation 1, but it's been a FreeBSD box for years. The machine itself is never "slow"; it saturates its 100Mbps link on a 24x7 basis.

  • Re:FreeBSD (Score:3)

    by Fastolfe ( 1470 ) on Thursday June 03, 1999 @10:56AM (#1868037)
    I believe the FreeBSD box he was talking about is the one that's now dedicated to serving up images. Any Slashdot "speed increase" or stability improvements you see (aside from those dealing with the images themselves) can't possibly be attributed to this OS switch.

    ...or are you just being an AC troll?
  • ..just fiddling, ignore me
  • I am on Netscape v 4.51 and this function is still included. What version are you talking about?

  • Don't forget to stick those lovely "Powered by FreeBSD" stickers on the boxes after you get the penguins pried off. It's lovely to see the little smiling daemon keeping an eye on things... ;^)
  • No, you got it backwards! BSD is the *Lite* side of the Source! It says right there in the CVS logs...

  • Re:FreeBSD v.s. other *BSD variants (Score:4)

    by slk ( 2510 ) on Thursday June 03, 1999 @10:18AM (#1868043)
    The main free variants of BSD are FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD. They have different focuses.

    NetBSD aims to be a stable, portable research platform. It runs on more hardware than any of the others, but has the ugliest installation (at least on sparc, 1.4 requires you to computer the block offsets of the cylinders to partition a disk). However, it runs on virtually anything, and is quite stable.

    OpenBSD forked from NetBSD some time ago. Their primary focus is security. It runs on a good portion of the hardware that NetBSD runs on, is probably a bit less stable, and has massive amounts of crypto included in the distribution by default.

    FreeBSD is primarily on Intel, though there is also a port to the Alpha. It has the nicest (by far) userland and installation, and the largest collection of ports. Its primary goals are stability and performance, with a strong security element (though not nearly as paranoid as OpenBSD). I'd say its largest strengths are overall performance and especially network and general I/O performance, and its biggest weakness is that it only runs on x86 and Alpha hardware.

    Right now my personal stuff runs FreeBSD, and a couple of the sparcs at work run NetBSD (mostly a Linux shop).

  • actually, I vote for Roxen Challenger.

    ---
  • It was said above: This happens to me too. Interestingly, a similar freeze effect happened to X Windows (NOT the whole OS) when I was using an early version of Daryll Strauss' X Server for Voodoo Banshee - he later fixed the bug, but windows (YES the whole OS) still crashes. And only on slashdot. I can't tell whether it's the windows banshee drivers suffering from the same bug, or whether it's something nastier (see below). Either way, improper HTML and/or buggy userland gfx should NEVER be able to bring the whole OS to a halt. Windows really is a crap system.

    Interesting, because I have a Banshee too, using their reference drivers. Anyone else see this? I'm using the reference drivers from 3dfx with mine.
  • There's a little link that says code [slashdot.org] on the page somewhere. It leads to Slash 0.2 and 0.3-pre. Please report to the eyedoctor. Oh yeah. Please report to the Slash-help mailing list [asu.edu] too for information.
  • I've brought this up on the slash-help mailing list, and I really hate to put more pressure on, but I can't possibly be the only one with this bug, can I?

    With Slashdot in its normal (with all the tables and colors) display, both IE 4.01SP2 and Netscape 4.6 LOCK SOLID on me under Win98 when I scroll the pages. It doesn't happen under Netscape 4.6 on Linux, and it doesn't happen with "Slashdot Light" (great taste or less filling?). Basically, there's three constants here: my box (Gateway G6-400), Windows 98 (which I've reloaded 6 times and it still does it) and Slashdot (which is the only site this happens on). I'm seriously thinking the HTML making up Slashdot is seriously b0rked (run it through validator.w3.org and you'll see). I think a lot of the rendering problems people complain about would be solved if Slashdot put out correct or near-correct HTML 4. That way if there's problems, it's the fault of the browser and not Slashdot. Does anyone else agree with me?

    I speak with some experience here, as I took Slash 0.2 and made the front page HTML 4.0 with exception to ampersands in URLs (then again, that's mostly out of my control.)
  • That would be interesting, sort of, but since we really can't guarantee that a moderator has more of a clue than anybody else (because anybody else can be a moderator, too), it will fail horribly.
  • You have a good point.

    But it would _really_ help a lot of we could have both the system you suggest _and_ the "check boxes" for what kinds of comments we want to read, so that each use can choose which sorting/filtering method to use.

    As the moderation system is right now, I find it close to useless again, because far too many posts get the top score. I believe that adding more options to the way we view posts will help a lot.

    I'd also LOVE to see some kind of moderation of front page stories.
  • BTW: which version is this? Shoudl I still download pre0.3 or wait until this is released?

    Thanks,
  • With all those bugfixe, it should be time for a new release of Slash my dear Rob. I have a lot of idea for wich I could pilfer some of your code !

    Thanx for your good work !
  • Sorry for the sillyness, playing to see if there is a bug in the system

    It's not playing if you can call it "testing" without your nose growing.
    Christopher A. Bohn
  • This also happens to my Win98 system at home, which just happens to have a Banshee. Anybody see a theme occuring here.
    I don't find it very suprising that a bug in a Kernel level driver can take down the OS. A buggy linux Kernel driver can take down the whole OS as well, it just happens a lot less.

  • Why not a moderator choice of "Wrong!"

    I don't think it's a moderator's job to decide that sort of thing, no matter how well-informed the moderator may be. The idea is that you can't moderate and post in the same discussion; being able to 'disagree' with posts would go against the spirit of this.

    Rebuttals to wrong posts should be in other posts, that explain why something is wrong. You can't just rubber-stamp something 'Wrong' without giving justification and being accountable (moderators are anonymous to ordinary Slashdot readers).

  • Opera on the 16 meg machine will draw the dropdowns. But I left it open and tried to open AIM (hey, I got a friend I wanna talk to, ok?) and it complained of not enough memory again.

    WTF?
  • Oh come on, that answer's too easy. It's not RAM, I've moderated on one of the two Windows boxes a few days ago.

    I'm scanning the systems for viruses here son (gonna take lunch first, I think). The 24 megger on the LAN is going to reboot, not load anything, and try again.

    I'm thinking the change in the code is doing something sloppy to IE specifically, since Opera does draw the box. Interestingly, the machine complained about memory there too.
  • Okay, started out by having IE on the 24 meg LAN machine draw up the article at top that had 22ish comments (TCO/NT/2000/yay Linux, etc).

    It drew the pulldowns and I was able to open another session of IE fine. Now I'm trying yesterday's DSL article with 200+ comments...

    Bingo, that's the problem. So it's not necessarily a problem with Slashdot as a whole, just heavy pages on Slashdot. I'm sure this won't prompt any sort of response (though tightening code is always a good thing and should always be done).

    Yeehaw. Tech support is fun, you learn things like troubleshooting. Glad I narrowed it down. So, who knows, maybe it is memory, I'm sure it'll draw on the 350 at home without trying, but it won't load on the 166 here at work.

    Like I always say, accessibility is the goal. Rob should want Slashdot to work on as many machines as possible. And no, it's not my job to convert my workplace's machine over to Linux.
  • How is my posting off-topic? The subject is Slashdot and tweaks made to it, my post is about Slashdot and (IMO) tweaks that should be made to it.
  • Use the Quake3 drivers for the Banshee in Windows. They fixed the problem for me.

    --
  • This sounds more like a feature than a bug. :)
  • If noticed that the moderation scheme didn't seem to work in the last few threads: Many excellent comments got stuck with score 1 and switching threshold form 1 to 2 cut me down from 80% to as low as 10% of the total no. of messages while formerly this got me the top 20 to 40% which was exactly what I would have prefered.

    No I've learned that this in not a misfuction but actually a feature. Sorry, Rob, but I totally disagree with you on that one: Moderation should be about choice and the more mod-points are around, the finer grained the possible choices will be for the readers.

    Why is it, that you got the impression that moderators haven't taken their job seriously during the last weeks? From a reader's perspective, I found ./ moderation to have worked better than ever before!
  • IE5 is also having trouble. The IE version of the ads is loaded in an iframe, and when the iframe can't be loaded, it goes to the "page could not be loaded" message (it's HTML-based in IE5). Then, I have to press Back and see the page I was looking for.

    Don't ask why i'm using IE.

    ---
  • newer version of netscape force you to load images? starting when?
  • The main problem is not the machine, but the connection to CRL.

  • Slashdot Light rocks!

    I encourage everyone to use it... it really speeds things up and looks much nicer IMHO.

  • It's probably because they're using tags
    for the ad, Netscape is notoriously crappy for
    it's render speed of funky things like layers and
    CSS.
  • Doh! I thought they'd just do the old (amp)lt; thing!

    That would be the (lt)LAYER(gt) tag.
  • But I don't see any option marked 'leet :)
  • On a related "please fix the HTML" point, I wish you would fix slashdot comments so that they never cause a browser in a reasonably sized window to scroll horizontally. I'm not sure what makes the comment windows so wide, but I suspect it's the green table that contains: title, username, Preferences, Top, n Comments, n Siblings. But I'm not sure. Anyway, horizontal scrolling is the bane of a browser user's existence, and should be avoided. If I want my window 350 pixels or 650 pixels wide, then the comments should wrap in that, no horizontal scrolling. (Perhaps this is a browser problem, but I'm using RH6.0 NS4.51, which should be pretty common around here.)
  • If it helps, I wanted to moderate that down, but I'm out of moderation points. :-(
    Ethan (who deserves more points! ;-)
  • One of the problems with the fact that people can
    add adjectives to moderation is that this causes a lot
    of confusion when an article is moderated more than once.
    For example, suppose I moderate an article (+1, interesting ) ,
    then another moderator applies (+1, insightful ) , then another moderater
    applies ( -1 , flamebait ) . The end result is an article that
    has ( -1 , flamebait ). If these comments are
    to be applied to moderation, they all should be shown.
    eg +2 : +1 insightful,+1 interesting, -1 flamebait

  • FYI RE: OpenBSD

    I've been an OpenBSD user for several years, and have not had any problem with stability (at all). The real issue with OpenBSD is that it is a fairly small and highly technical community, meaning it can (at times) be difficult to get support for new users. This is improving however.

    The comments about OpenBSD being less stable than the others is not deserved. (I will, however, note that FreeBSD is the best performing, mainly due to it's x86 specificity).
  • Yes, I'm a bit curious as to the state of SMP on FreeBSD boxe(n/s). I'm somewhat aware/experienced with OpenBSD's non-SMP kernel and wondered to what level FreeBSD supports SMP.

    --pygster
  • PS: Rob!! here are some features that would really help this site's
    usability. [useit.com]

    Woohoo! I'm not the only one who reads UseIT on here! Jakob Neilsen gives some good, free advice on that site.

    HTML validation, link validation, spell checking, and grammar checking.

    Are you talking about spelling and grammar for comments, or in general? I've seen some scary typos in story titles...

    I wonder how much overhead adding pelling/grammer checking to the "Post a Comment" functions?

    I just switched to iCab [www.icab.de] on my Mac, and it's a great browser that also does HTML checking on pages you're looking at. (Make iCab smile!) It also has a button bar for the new HTML 4.0 attributes (UseIT does a good write-up [useit.com] on it.

    Oh, and ditto on the code release. *grin*

    Jay (=

  • Oh no, not again! This is right up there with the `What's the difference between Red Hat, Debian and SUSI?' question.

    I seem to recall the answer to this being in the BSD FAQ, which used to be at http://cynjut.neonramp.com/index.html [neonramp.com], but that site seems to be down at the moment. I'm sure a web search on this topic would turn up something, though.

    Here's my quick summary:

    • NetBSD is concerned with clean internal architecture and portability, and runs on a lot of platforms.
    • FreeBSD is concerned with optimal performance on the i386, though an Alpha port is in progress. It has the best VM system of the three.
    • OpenBSD split from NetBSD a few years ago, and started with NetBSD's code base. They've done a lot of security work on it, but not much other work, and stopped importing NetBSD's changes a couple of years ago, so they don't have a lot of the new NetBSD stuff (device driver structures, VM system, ports, etc.).

    And if that's not enough, you can check out this link [mx.nsu.ru] for another view of the differences.

    cjs

  • Funny... I did a good-old ftp ftp13.netscape.com MANY a time (as I had to re-install win98 many a time), and it never, ever failed. This was an early Win95 release, too...

    I don't mean to be insulting, but getting paranoid in criticizing Microsoft can cause the other criticisms to lose credibility.
  • I guess my hands have been re-trained to type win98 when referring to the consumer windows release...
  • If you use FreeBSD, use it with softupdates (look in /sys/ufs/ffs) - it makes things a LOT faster !!!!
  • How about adding just a few more choices (like "idiotic moron" on the minus side or "hilarious" on the plus side") A sidesplitting comment isn't necessarily insightful or informative. Interesting, perhaps.
  • That's what the moderation system is for. Comments from users with accounts come in at 1. ACs come in at 0. If you don't like ACs, browse above 0. Then the only ACs you read will be comments that were considered good enough by somebody to bump up. And stupid remarks by signed in users are moderated down so you won't have to read those either. If you read the moderation section rob wrote, he lists goals for the moderation system. Basically, for people like you have support for a high s/n ratio at the expense of volume. For others, have the possibility to read everything. The system now, I have to say, does this better than anything I have ever seen before, and I think it is awesome. It's probably the main reason I keep coming back here.

    My remark was a nitpick. By putting up the short list of words moderators choose from, it's like he's saying, "if the comment doesn't exactly fit one of these descriptions, don't moderate it up or down." I submit that, for instance, if an article is side splittingly funny, and/or incredibly witty, that is an excellent reason to promote it. Somethimes it just needs to be kept a little lighter. Set your control to 4 or 5 and you'll probably get a bunch of long-winded essays (like this one if I don't shut up soon) because people seem to think that a good comment is a long comment, and if it is short or humorous it is bad. IT ISN'T BAD! The short and funny ones mixed in (not to be confused with the "me too!"'s and other valid comments that shouldn't be moderated up (and attempts at humor that fall short)) offer the reader a more varied view, keep it lively, and can promote just as much thought as the long ones.
  • Why not a moderator choice of "Wrong!" I've moderated a couple times and often see postings that are simply factually incorrect or uninformed. Sometimes, these even SEEM "informative" to moderators who may not know about the topic being discussed.

    On a lighter note, why not a "Poster needs another beer" option for whiny posts.
    Or a "moderator needs another beer"...

    --Andrew Grossman
    grossdog@dartmouth.edu
  • When I read Katz's articles, I often want to see the comments sorted by lowest score first, so I can read what all the Katz-flamers thought right out, and then get to a moderately well-thought-out discussion later (instead of watching a barely coherent discussion digress into "JonKatz sux && he's a luser && I'm l33t!!!!!"

    Funny how that's the only sort of article I can conceive of needing this option for.

    O well. Necessity is a mother.
  • What I really don't like about the ad banners (besides the speed) is that they are all in Swedish, as I'm working for a Swedish company, in the .se domain, but I'm actually British, working in Britain...

    How can I persuade the banner program that I'm not Swedish?

    Io
  • There a whole bunch of icons at http://themes.org/resources/icons/ [themes.org]. Maybe one of the artists would be willing to let you use one they created.
  • Talking to myself here =)

    So a moderator is floating around, and nudging this comment around already...

    Thanks, whoever you are!


    -AS
  • So it does work...
    I set my threshold to hide comments below 2...

    And the original post, along with it's +3 comment, appears.

    However, the +3 comment appears *twice*, once under the reparented comment, and later below, as a free floating +3 comment...

    I wonder what happens if someone(I guess me) replies to both? I guess they still count as one comment, even if it shows up twice...


    -AS
  • It is a bug...

    *All* +2 comments appear when threshold is set to +2... Reparenting just makes it appear twice, I guess.

    Unless Slashdot wants this to happen?


    -AS
  • Again, thanks to the moderators who made this happen.

    *sob*

    I love you!

    Sorry for the sillyness, playing to see if there is a bug in the system =)


    -AS
  • So there is a reparent checkbox under preferences; with it enabled, I get to see two of every highly rated comment, as well as the reparented original post, despite it being below threshold.

    With the checkbox disabled, the repeats disappeared, but the original comment/post remains visible...

    I guess reparenting causes comments to 'belong' to the main thread if it is higher than the threshold, and if it's parent is below threshold.

    What effect is causing lower than threshold posts to stay visible, when it owns a higher than threshold comment? Is this an intentional feature then?

    I guess I got the term re-parenting mixed up.

    High comments with low parents get 'reparented'

    Low parents with high comments get bumped up to *always* be minimally the same level of visibility as the comments, I guess.


    -AS
  • Sorry, this post appears twice... forgot to log in =)

    I'm a bad test, as I can *always* see my own comments, no matter the threshold...

    Though I do know reparenting works great, anyone want to change their threshold levels and respond?

    Specifically, when I saw the page as an AC, slashdot didn't seem to know how to order/rank the messages, and I got a list of 2, 3, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2... everything else was below threshold =)

    I guess it's unimportant, really.

    It seems as if, for the AC, that the original post doesn't stay visible, no matter how high the comment attached to it... Though the comments do become visible...

    For me, when I'm logged on, my original posts are visible, but I suspect that's because my posts will *always* be visible to me...


    -AS
  • If you turn off, under your preferences, re-parenting, then you won't get those dangly floating replies...

    You still get the 'feature' that crappy posts are as visible as their highest reply.


    -AS

  • Bug in the setup? (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Shepherd ( 17338 ) on Thursday June 03, 1999 @10:24AM (#1868093) Homepage
    So I made a comment with the intention of getting it moved down, and a reply with the intention of it getting moved up, to see reparenting in action...

    Hopefully this comment doesn't get moved down as well =)

    Anyway, the reparenting works, but the reply appears twice now, as the child of the reparented comment, and as it's own free floating comment, though still below the reparented comment.

    Is this intentional? A bug? Anyone else see it?

    Set threshold to 2, and you should see it =)


    -AS

  • Test comment, any moderators? (Score:4)

    by Anonymous Shepherd ( 17338 ) on Thursday June 03, 1999 @10:11AM (#1868094) Homepage
    So this is a default +2 comment, if a moderator is willing to demonstrate this reparenting... make it a +3 comment, while making the parent 0 or -1, I guess?

    I guess it's a waste of points though. =)


    -AS
  • Depending on your version of IE5, turning off friendly error messages doesn't work. I grabbed it first from ZDNet because none of Microsoft's servers worked from Australia. The ZDNet version of IE5 always gives you the 'friendly' error messages that take the whole page, no matter what your setting.

    Since then I've installed the one that came on the APCMag cover disk and no worries.
  • >With Slashdot in its normal (with all the tables and colors) display, both IE 4.01SP2 and Netscape 4.6 LOCK SOLID on me under Win98 when I scroll the pages

    This happens to me too. Interestingly, a similar freeze effect happened to X Windows (NOT the whole OS) when I was using an early version of Daryll Strauss' X Server for Voodoo Banshee - he later fixed the bug, but windows (YES the whole OS) still crashes. And only on slashdot. I can't tell whether it's the windows banshee drivers suffering from the same bug, or whether it's something nastier (see below). Either way, improper HTML and/or buggy userland gfx should NEVER be able to bring the whole OS to a halt. Windows really is a crap system.

    Alternatively, it could be Microsoft putting in their usual "break websites we don't like at TCP stack level" code. Have you ever tried to ftp to netscape with the command-prompt ftp client included in an early Win95 release? I have encountered "interesting" intermittent failures.

    Of course, that ftp client is just a recompilation of the BSD client, copyright acknowledgement and all. That's why we use the GPL, folks - MS can legally take BSD-style licensed source and corrupt it to their own ends, and release it, binary only, with whatever little extra "features" they see fit.
  • I mean the X Window System, of course ...
    (Doh! so tired... 11 3rd Yr end-of-semester exams :-( )
  • Well, that's a good solution in the technical sense but it's not good for slashdot. Slashdot needs a little money to keep going.
  • Win 95B on a P166 with 24 megs RAM
    Win 95A on a P166 with 16 megs RAM

    Well, first guess is your memory. Running Win95 with anything less than 32 megs of memory just isn't a good idea. That's old news. Beyond that, there could be misconfigurations all over the place, with Windows, with your connection, with the individual programs...
  • It would also be nice if the timezone feature in the user preferences worked. If it must be one timezone fits all, then a better choice would be UT.
  • Why don't people CHECK before going hyper? Communicator 4.6, the most recent I know of, has the same "Automatically load images" option, as always, that _still_ can be disabled, in both the Linux and Winblows versions. Edit/Preferences/Advanced. Sheesh.
  • Hmm, I'm guessing that his main proof is the "sloooow" crappy ass, no good, bad performing ftp.cdrom.com ;)
  • Hehe ok, didn't know that. But did it run Linux before?
  • Title says it all-- the new batch of changes are great, the page loads MUCH faster, even without "light" mode, but with "light" mode it's a real breeze (I use a graphical browser BTW). Only problem is that it's tough to see the seperation between comments/stories this way. Any chance of adding an (HR) tag between each comment and story?

    Keep up the good work!
  • This picture illustrates most of the BSD family tree (except OpenBSD, which forked from NetBSD): Link [netbsd.org].
  • I've seen some overzelousness recently. Moderately bad, or slightly off-topic, posts have been given inordinately low scores. Mildly good, but not *great* posts have been getting fives (although this is not necessarily such a bad thing). So instead of getting a nice gradient, we get most posts at one pole or the other. (At least in my experience.)
  • Oh, there goes somone's anger for M$, venting off into the evening air. I would respect your answer, but the who reason that I put the question here was so that i could get other people's opinions. I do compare them myself, but I am only one person, and one person alone should not be so quick to draw conclusions.

  • I have used FreeBSD for a while now, and its stable. I like it. I have toyed with Linux. Its stable, I like it. However, I have yet to see a decent comparison of the two, and how they rack up, not just in networking, but an even comparison on all topics. Anyone have one? Or Rob, you wanna let us know how yoda is holding up? Opinions, anyone?
  • I think you're the only one that can see this.

    I'm not sure, but I suspect that you can see your own comments no matter what score they're at. Since you started the thread and then replied to it, you see it twice when it's reparented.

    It's still a bug, I guess, but a relatively minor one...
  • I am not sure, but I think Lucent technologies's proxy server may work with https and ftp when used through a browser . The for the main page is www.lpwa.com or http://lpwa.com:8000

    --Tiburon
  • If a comment has been reparented, it would be really nice to have a button that would jump you to the original parent (even if it is beneath your threshold). It would make it much easier to figure out what's going on in high-volume threads at a 2+ threshold.
  • What might be fun is allowing the *poster* to select a category for a message. For example :

    Clarification
    Disagreement
    Flame
    Humour
    etc

    That would be a good way of preventing people from misreading the intent of a message, and could be used to provide filters for (say) humourless gits who don't want to see any facetious replies to their serious minded pontifications.

    Given the number of flame wars that turn out to be misunderstandings I think this could really improve the S/N ratio.
  • Yes!!! Thank you, thank you, thank you! I too am behind a very strangely configured and strict firewall, and can now see the icons and other images! I just thought it was because our IM guys don't know what they're doing. They really don't know what they are doing, but at least I can now enjoy /. to it's full extent.

  • Rob, come on, dude! When are you gonna release a new version? I understand you not wanting to make tarballs of your code all the time but its been practically forever since you release SLASH v0.1(?). Can you please release more code?

    Oh yeah, one more thing can you also please update the SlashNET link? For drdink's sake? Everyone come irc on irc.slashnet.org, and visit slashnet.org [slashnet.org] =).

  • Moderation (Score:5)

    by timothy ( 36799 ) on Thursday June 03, 1999 @12:18PM (#1868132) Journal
    I think the moderation scheme worked pretty well already, but these new tweaks are welcome.

    Since I've only had moderator power once (and I'm trying to not let the sense of absolute power corrupt me absolutely), I am not an expert at the system really, but one thing I'd like to see in future updates to moderation would be a greater range of optional adjectival choices coupled with the filering scheme.

    In other words, moderators could have the ability to choose not just "normal," "flamebait," "informative" and the handful of others, but instead could choose more descriptive ones (maybe on a sort of emotional / descriptive matrix with informative / uninformative as one axis and (what else) on the other. There are a lot of great adjective which fit certain types of posts very well ...

    If there were choices like

    - "vitriolic / negative / bilious" (just random mean-spitired spew)

    - "contankerous" (good question or point, but with a bitter-old-man tone)

    - indignant ("how can you say that's confusing, you cretin?! It's buried right there in plain sight 90 percent of the down the 10-page FAQ! Can't you even read?!)

    - "intriguing" (someone suggests a wholly new way of looking at something that makes you realize "Hey, it's a face and a couple of cups!" or maybe just "Hey, that's a neat idea, we could do it X-way ..."

    - "honest question" (I have lots of dumb questions, and they're not trolls ...)

    A reader could go through a list of adjectives and select the type he'd like to read, and when logged in would remain blissfully ignorant of some hot flame wars or off-topic nonsense until he unchecked the boxes again ...

    This is not terribly different from the way it is now, and I know the current system is already sort of complex, so please don't take this as criticism so much as suggestion. I just think a richer adjective selection would trim the fat from people's reading, let them get the posts they'd like in a much shorter time and avoid the frustration of reading yet another harshly-worded diatribe in response to yet-another ... etc. Especially since a matrix of adjectives would let people sort based on how each of those adjectives matters to *them* instead of assigning a single digit + or - to broad categories. There's even some flamebait, or possibly off-topic material that I'd like to see, if it is Intriguing or Laugh-Till-Snot Funny.

    And it might improve the avg. Slashdotters vocabulary (already good! already good!) by forcing them to understand some obscure adjectives.

    Thanks for the work, Rob and pals! Enjoy the Southpark shows!

    timothy

    p.s. Moderator ability is like jury duty, but less onerous.
  • Interesting, undoubtedly if I posted these exact words but switched FreeBSD and Linux around, I would undoubtedly recieve a (-1, Troll) rating, and deservedly so. Perhaps the moderation problems have nothing to do with points...

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