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Postcard From Linuxbierwanderung 2000 51

Posted by timothy from the and-all-I-got-was-this-lousy-rugburn dept.
Martin Ling writes: "The Linuxbierwanderung 2000 , at Coniston in the UK's Lake District, is currently in full swing. There is an ongoing live site with pictures and a diary, including details of our Beowulf projects. And of course, there's a webcam. Events have included talks on SETI & radio astronomy, wearable computing, and a trip to the Sellafield nuclear plant. Oh, and that whole lot in the village hall is running through one 33.6kbps modem .... Emails to this address should get through, and I will print them on the notice board."
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Postcard From Linuxbierwanderung 2000 More

Postcard From Linuxbierwanderung 2000

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  • lets try it again, on text posting
    --
    ive just been wondering..are there ANY worthy posts on slashdot anymore? 3/4th's of the comments are just plain crap..i dont even see why people even bother coming here anymore.

    trolls: do you honestly think that its funny? i mean seriously, what point is there to posting totally STUPID messages.

    users: is this really what OUR slashdot should be like? look at a new linux user taking his first look at slashdot and seeing the CRAP posts here, think he'll get a good impression of the linux community. I like the articles, they are great (most of them :), but the comment system has to be rebuilt to just stop the fucked up trolls from bothering us. Rob, sorry dude but its time to dump AC, it'll hopefully kick some life back into this otherwise quickly dying site.

    ~DJ-Pyro (pirodude)
  • And then the trolls will just create false accounts and troll from them...

    What the site needs is a full time team of moderators that scan the comments of every 'live' article and remove definite trolls.
  • Rob, sorry dude but its time to dump AC, it'll hopefully kick some life back into this otherwise quickly dying site

    I don't think that would help. All it would do is make the people posting noise (it isn't really intelligent enough to be called trolling after all) create accounts. And if they have to, they will create a new account for every post.

    Short of requiring a credit card and charging it $1 for every point of negative karma the user obtains, I don't think there is any solution.
  • credit card to make an account..perfect :) ~DJ-Pyro (pirodude)

  • *Jealous* (Score:4)

    by Duxup ( 72775 ) on Wednesday August 02, 2000 @10:14PM (#883731) Homepage
    Am I the only one who gets a little jealous when we see all these stories about people going to all these Linux conferences? I never hear about them until after or just before they happen. Is there a site that has information on when where and what the focus of each of the Linux conferences are?

    Better yet is there a way we geeks who don't live in cities that don't have these conferences can band together and go in hoards (is that the right term for a group of geeks?) of geeks? Perhaps if we were organized in groups we could save a few $ on airplane and hotel rooms. Someone could probably even make a few $ of they organized these trips and sold them and found some customers.
  • This is offtopic and deserves to me moderated down. I just felt that it needed to be said.

    I am deeply saddened by the increasingly low quality of the trolls and offtopic posts on Slashdot. It seems like an eternity since the golden age of Slashdot trolls. That was the time before Trollmastah had retired and before the lameness filter had been implemented, which pretty much killed off Oog. People try to raise Oog from the dead, but it just ain't happening. I remember when osm was still posting about "Open-sourced copyrighted undistributable Natalie Portman and Drew Barrymore naked and petrified" or some such nonsense, which were actually really funny at the time. I remember the days before osm's fake legal trouble, which pretty much marked the end of his posting on Slashdot, when he would post new, hillarious Natalie Portman fantasies on what seemed like a pretty regular basis. There were others, of course, but my mind is getting weak in my old age.

    These days, though, it seems like we've entered a dark age for those of us who set our thresholds to -1. If one ventures into the nether regions of Slashdot now, what do they see? Shit like the parent post, and "30 Ways To Be Offensive At A Funeral," and (God help us) the Beer Guy, whose idiotic spamming alone provides a good reason to browse at 0 or 1. Where have all the great ones gone?

    There is some hope for the future of trolls on Slashdot, though. People like Anti Porn and osg have recently shown me that trolling is not an entirely lost art. But they alone cannot save Slashdot. Already, the spamming is so bad that it actually requires effort to find the diamonds in the rough. Clearly, a solution must be found soon, or the -1 region of Slashdot will be lost to us forever.
  • [Reply to this message and add your name to the petition! Save Slashdot!]

    Dear Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda,

    As a loyal reader of Slashdot, I am growing more and more irritated with the constant spam that has deluded the site in the past month or so. I like to read at a threshold of -1 to see all the posts with low moderations -- some of them simply went against Slashdot popular opinion, or are humorous, intelligent trolls that are worth

    Most of the spam posts simply regurgitate the same text over and over... for example, the "Napster and Google Sued" and "The Facts" [ZikZak conspiracy] posts show up several times on every story. Given that several "lameness filters" are in any place, it would be easy to institute a filter that simply blocks posts with those message bodies. Alternately, if all of these posts are originally from a certain IP, that IP could simply be banned from Slashdot. Please consider both of these alternatives.

    I realize that censoring users may go against the ideals of Slashdot. However, the intelligent posters and "true" trolls are already being censored -- their voices are being drowned out by the idiot(s) who post the same offtopic posts on every single story. And no one will miss the MDMA guy and his idiot friends.

    A few attention-starved morons should not be allowed to hijack a popular website and drive out all the other readers. Please don't let the spam epidemic overrun Slashdot -- a few simple filters or bans would solve the problem, and it's high time they were instituted.

    Sincerely,

    The loyal /. readership

  • Maybe it's the people at this conference waking up with hangovers and blaming it on linux, and deciding en masse to spam /. , the totem of the Linux community :)
  • Doesn't this sound like a slashdotted site waiting to happen?
  • No, yer not alone. I wish there was more warning about this kind of thing. The event here looks really cool, and I wouldn't mind learning a few things, drinking some fine suds and doing some hiking.

    I don't know too many geeks, and events like this would be great to find out what other people are working on- or what they find interesting. Slashdot had that kind of attraction, but the trolls are ruining it.

    When I went to highschool, the troll types would just get a kick in the head and that would be it. This community will fully mature when we are allowed to not only moderate each other, but POLICE each other. Maybe this is already happening in some online-tribal-gang sort of way...I wouldn't know because I don't hang with that many geeks. For all I know there are clans out there figuring out where this crap is coming from, and taking them down.

    At least going to 'live' linux events you can be pretty sure of hanging with authentic people who love technology and the best operating system in the world.

    -Sleen
  • Why do you do this? Don't you realise that nobody is fooled by your ridiculous goatsecx link? You make me sick. Moderate this down please (mine as well, if you want, for being stupid enough to reply and give the lonely bastard the reaction he was looking for).
  • An idea for the next poll.

    Will you miss the MDMA guy?

    • No
    • Hell no!
    • I browse at +4, who's the MDMA guy?
    • Hemos

    --
  • How about setting it up so that if you recieve too many troll or offtopic points in a specified period of time, you get your ability to post yanked for a period of time. And say maybe that for every comment that gets 2 points, it erases a troll point, if it gets 4 points, it erases 2 troll points.. etc. this would help keep the ratio somewhat in check, allowing the people that have the most interesting comments more leeway on OT and funny stuff. maybe even ban the IP.. that would make it more tricky for them to post as AC too!

    ------------------------------------------
    If God Droppd Acid, Would he see People???
  • I live in Manchester, which is only a short distance from the Lakes. Several of my friends from uni have gone to the fest and from what I'm hearing, the're having a great time with the tech stuff and the beer and not bothering about the hiking.

    However, a far greater quantity of my friends (and myself) have been unable to attend simply due to timing. Being the poor penniless students that we are, we all have summer jobs. Had it been arranged such that the Linuxbierwanderung was at the start of July, or the end of August, we would have had more luck getting there as we wouldn't have been in the middle of our working period. I suspect others up and down the EU are in a similar position.

    Sad, really. It could have been so much bigger.

    --
  • Your post are is meaningless AC. If you had any conviction behind your own toughts, you would post with a real account

    I don't know where you come from, but in my precious Republjka Hrvatska I use to make wine from grapes and drink it. The generations before me did this, even before Muslims & Christians religions were even created for that matter.

    You should know that alchool is actually good for the body. You can read numerous studies on that. You should know that everything can be consumed in moderation. The fact that some people compulsively abuse of almost everything (Cake, McDonalds, Ice Cream, Liquid Nitrogen->See /etc on thesync) does not mean it is not good for your body.

    You need to grow up (mentaly) read philosophy or something, like: Platon, Aristote, Epicure DesCartes, Leibniz, Hegel, Freud, Nietzsche, Marx, Sarte, Foucault, Heidegger or Kieregaard to educate yourself about human behaviour and give yourself a better chance of beign able to reason like the very intelligent people you will find on this forum.

    You blast junk post with your own retoric which is even more pathetic. get a life or start posting at http://www.failiure.com, because that whre you belong.

    Your mindless kind brainwashed by religion make me wanna puke.

    wiZd0m

  • I'm jealous as well, and its about two hours from where I live. I should have gone myself.

    I'm getting bored at the moment and need others for inspiration. The newsgroups are getting full of clueless posters - even uk.comp.os.linux. Most of these posters can't think for themselves or be bothered to read documentation.

    Work isn't helping - all Microsofties and badly configured Solaris systems. (The latter not under my control - whoever arranged the partitioning should be shot! And where's the backup device??). I'm wasting away here, spending most of my time twiddling my thumbs. Noone I talk to regarding technical issues knows what I'm on about. (Bus-mastered IDE, wassat? SSH - nah, use telnet and rlogin, its secure enough. Arggh!!)

    There is a local LUG which meets once a month, but I've never managed to make it due to work comittments. Maybe this time. Who knows what opportunities could be there!

    The boredom will be allieviated shortly - the football season starts in 9 days time.

  • Yeah, it would be cool to hang with some other geeks. I like where I work and all, however I'm pretty much the only linux geek of sorts really. The local LUG is nice but somewhat h8x0r 133t, if you know what I mean. It would be cool to mingle and with people with different ideas and such.

    As for the trolls:
    Fortunately trolls can be threatened physically in person and I don't think they would be much of a problem at such events. Then again you never know, there might be people running around interjecting comments about Ms. Portman into conversations for all I know.
  • I'd suggest hop on your local LUG's mailling list. In my experence LUGs can be nice, or really bad. I recently moved and my local LUG is "h8x0r 133t" if you know what I mean. They're quick to flame and at least three or four times a week preach to one another about how great linux is. Outside of that, not much else happens with them.
  • That's Free as in *speech*, dammit. Quit bringing free beer into it.

  • go in hoards (is that the right term for a group of geeks?)

    I believe it's a 'gaggle' of geeks.

    -

  • Heh... you must be kidding. This is a joke. Or maybe...

    Beer is good. Drinking beer (or other alcoholic beverages) does not meen you automatically become an alcoholic. Just as little as smoking some pot now and then makes you a heroin addict.

    Although I respect other people's views on drug/alcohol matters, I cannot stand such ignorance towards other opinions and facts.
  • How about http://www.linuxworldexpo.com thats where I registered to go to the Montreal conference for free! You'll get infos on places to stay and stuff too.
  • do beer and penguins mix? do you really want a drunk penguin running your computer? # ls ERROR - glug glug glug *burrrrrp* huh? oh sorry... # %&$%^&@#$(& Warning - Do not swear at the drunk penguin
  • ...Liquid Nitrogen...

    I thin you mean nitrous oxide. Anyone who abuses liquid nitrogen is going to end up missing a few appendages ;)

  • Although osm has been quiet recently, but it's not because we've given up. It's just that thanks to morons spamming every story in sight we've all got user accounts how, with which we whore for the +1 bonus and then troll with.

    On this story [slashdot.org] I can spot two troll accounts, you just need to look a bit harder...

    But yeah, all of these spamming pricks need to be shot.

    -- spiralx

    ---
    Jon E. Erikson

  • Actually, it was the result of spamming and DoS.
  • I've subscribed to all of their lists. No traffic as of yet.

    Their next meeting is just over a week away. No special talks, just a general chat and drinking session. Only problem is getting home afterwards - I don't want to miss the last bus home.

  • I would have to agree with you on this one. I used to find interesting information in Slashdot news threads. Now I just come to Slashdot to find out what it is still happening in the world. There is a big difference between the two. I can get the news from a number of places. It is difficult to find a majority of people with something interesting to say on the internet. I guess a few bad apples spoils the bunch. But I'll stick around. I've just taken to setting my threshold a bit higher... I commend you for your efforts though.
  • There are in fact a significant number of checks in place to slow down abuses (notice I did not say "prevent abuses"). While it's certainly possible to continue adding more and more, it's equally possible to continue creating spam scripts that get around whatever checks are in place. (If "zikzak conspiracy" is banned, it will just be something else next week.)

    Probably the only solution which would actually work in the long run is banning non-logged-in posting entirely, and making it difficult to get a new account. Note that this change would significantly change the way the site operates.

    I'm not saying whether I'm for or against such a thing. I don't think there is anything of quality posted anonymously - hasn't been for a long time. For that matter, I find that anything posted by what is obviously a "new" user (currently user numbers around 216,000 or so) is almost certainly junk - a handful of people have gone through hundreds of user IDs to post spam. But, and this is a big "but", I'm still somewhat hesitant to advocate anything which would reduce the freedom of the site.

    Perhaps another solution would be for the general slashdot readership to a) avoid feeding the trolls and spammers and b) moderate freely. It's not ideal, but nothing is.

    --
    Michael Sims-michael at slashdot.org
  • Piss off. No-one wants to hear your crap, it's not funny. Why don't you put it on your own web-site and see how many people read it because they want to. I'd be suprised if it was more than 1.
  • So, release your s/w with whatever licence you like, dipshit. I'm sure everyone else will do the same. Oh sorry, I forgot, you don't do anything else apart from post the same damn message to Slashdot continuously. Knob-rot.
  • Piss Off you idiot. Have you nothing better to do?
  • There was a warning, I remember submitting an article about this when it was announced (Here [slashdot.org])

    :)

    troc

  • I fully agree with you. Why doesn't the slashdot crew do this? The social experiment is over. It didn't work.
  • You been thinking that one up for hours? And that's the best you could come up with? You are truely lame.

  • There are in fact a significant number of checks in place to slow down abuses (notice I did not say "prevent abuses"). While it's certainly possible to continue adding more and more, it's equally possible to continue creating spam scripts that get around whatever checks are in place.

    Until we get real AI, then things like the "lameness filter" will never work. And the worse thing is, they even encourage the spammers to get around them - I remember there being a spate of spam shortly after the lameness filter was introduced in the first place. It's just asking for trouble really.

    Oh, and you might want to tell Rob to pick better names for these things - "lameness filter" and "bitchslapping" are both the sort of name that gets people wound up even more than the thing itself.

    Probably the only solution which would actually work in the long run is banning non-logged-in posting entirely, and making it difficult to get a new account. Note that this change would significantly change the way the site operates.

    Yeah, it wouldn't be /. then... that's a tough one to answer. The other alternative is to completely change moderation/Karma etc. - there's an interesting proposal at scoop.kuro5hin. org [kuro5hin.org] about a "mojo" system of moderation which might actually cut down on spam. Whether it'd work with a site of /.'s size is another question though.

    I don't think there is anything of quality posted anonymously - hasn't been for a long time.

    Not entirely true, it's just buried under a lot of crap and nobody sees it. Some of the more intelligent AC posters moved to k5 before it died.

    Perhaps another solution would be for the general slashdot readership to a) avoid feeding the trolls and spammers and b) moderate freely. It's not ideal, but nothing is.

    I don't think a) is something policy can change... :) But b) might help, as long as the problem of "revenge" metamoderation is solved - a lot of people don't moderate anymore thanks to people constantly metamodding them as "unfair".

    Anyway, just some of my thoughts...

  • I agree. Just imagine what irc would be like if you couldn't /ban idiots from a channel.

  • credit card to make an account..perfect

    What if I don't have a credit card? or am joe newbie that doesn't want to use a credit card on the internet (esp. if I'm not buying anything)

    Will people get fined for bad posts instead of just losing karma?

    I guess that would be a way of up-ing the IQ level :)
    __

  • >Sad, really. It could have been so much bigger.

    Not on a v90 modem on a pulse exchange (last time I was there) with the nearest kilostream switch 20 miles away it wouldn't have......

    Tim (who used to live near Coniston and now lives in London - (sigh....)

  • Keep in mind that old-timers sometimes lose their passwords, etc. and get new accounts... Slashdot provides the +1 bonus so that the "old-timers" and other worthwhile posters will get through the noise, but that's certainly easy to abuse.
  • A Sadness of Geeks

  • And I live about an hour or two away! Guess I wouldn't be worthy to go anyway (I sometimes use Windows as well as Linux so I'd probably be lynched on sight)

  • Re:Petition to Ban the Spammers (Score:3)

    by cje ( 33931 ) on Thursday August 03, 2000 @05:16AM (#883770) Homepage
    a) avoid feeding the trolls and spammers

    Note, however, that the spammers don't particularly care if they're fed. They just wait for a new story to be posted and let loose. If people reply to their posts, they don't care. If people don't reply, they don't care. It's not possible to "feed" the "penis bird guy" or the "magenta syringe" guy because they're not paying attention anyway.

    I don't think there is anything of quality posted anonymously - hasn't been for a long time.

    <COSTANZA>Ah-HAA!</COSTANZA>

    But how can you tell?

    Seriously .. if Slashdot were to run a story about rumors of Fooblatz Corporation beating its workers with aluminum bats if they fall behind in production, and if some employee were to post anonymously confirming the rumor, who would see it if it were bracketed on each side by 20 "And today's topic is: MDMA" posts?

    I've seen plenty of AC posts in the recent past moderated up for being interesting, insightful, and (most prevalent) funny. Just because most ACs have nothing of importance to say doesn't mean that they all do. AFAIK, the ability for people to post information without fear of being identified or tracked down is one of the primary things keeping Rob from doing away with (or crippling) the AC system.

    I find that anything posted by what is obviously a "new" user (currently user numbers around 216,000 or so) is almost certainly junk ..

    This is a bit of a stretch. Sure, there are a lot of people who have obtained accounts for no purpose other than to post crap. But to suggest that everybody on the Internet that can meaningfully contribute to Slashdot already has an account here is, well, probably wrong. :-)

  • Flame me if you must for this, but I disagree.

    Some of the trolls aren't all bad, like the ones that, while off topic at times, still add some humor to the site. For example, OOG. And whatever happend to TrollMastah? He did some funny stuff.

    The Penis birds, and people reposting the same off topic comment to every thread are annoying, as are the first posts. But the Hiakus, redone theme songs in honor of slashdot, etc. Those can be funny.

  • My mom's vacationing there right now. Not that this is of interest to anyone. I just thought it to be an interesting coincidence.
  • Episode 3: Fun with Liquid Nitrogen

    http://www.thesync.com/etc/archivesframe.html

    Yes, I know that, but this guy makes himself Ice cream with alchool and Liquid Nitrogen

    wiZD0m

  • There's still a bunch of us planning on an April Linux bike trip from Versailles to Chinon to Bordeaux, with Wine, Women, CyberCafes, and Linux. Pricing folding bikes and checking with friends who have contacts in France so we can do the CyberCafe tour.

  • No, I was talking about Open Source Girl, who I recently saw post an osm-like story about that girl who played Rogue in the X-Men movie.
  • I'm just replying to my own post to create a sort of "for the record" in case anyone ever comes back and reviews this thread. Check the timestamps to see the posting sequence here.

    There are currently three replies by logged-in posters, and 8 anonymous replies. Of the three logged-in posters, one of them is one of the slashdot trolls (although he wasn't trolling this time). Of the 8 anonymous replies, 4 of them are spam postings and one of them is a reply to a spam posting. The spam postings were generated by a script.

    It doesn't look like there are any down-moderations on any of the posts. Probably out of the 11, five of them should have been knocked down to -1.

    One of the comments (which started at 2) has been modded up to 3. It is interesting to note that the post which started out the highest got modded up, which might confirm what comment #142 in this thread mentioned about moderators browsing at +2.

    When I moderate, I usually do so at 0. I try to knock down posts at 0 to -1. My goal there is to try to keep the 0 level readable, because I think the AC posting ability could be a useful thing. Is there a flaw in my moderation procedures? Sure - there could be an insightful AC post which was knocked down to -1, and I won't see it to rescue it from oblivion. Well, I'm sorry, but I don't have enough time in the day to read every post at -1.

    The two links to Scoop discussions of moderation are informative. I've been thinking for a while about how moderation should be done, and it may be worthwhile to note that the system I was thinking about satisfies most of kmself's attributes of a moderation system.

    The people on Scoop are trying to solve two separate problems: signal-to-noise and DOS. I don't care much about the DOS aspect, only the S-N ratio.

    I should probably note for the record that no, I don't run slashdot. Rob Malda and Jeff Bates do. They don't speak for me. I don't speak for them. 'Nuff said.

    --
    Michael Sims-michael at slashdot.org
  • . Of the three logged-in posters, one of them is one of the slashdot trolls (although he wasn't trolling this time).

    No, the "spiralx" brand never trolls. You're thinking of Jon Erikson [slashdot.org], who would been in no real position to complain about being bitchslapped.

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