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Slashdot Code Update 569

You will likely notice a variety of changes in the comments system if you are logged in. Most of these changes surround the new 'Zoo' system which implements (among other things) a sort of killfile function, and much more. Logged in users have the ability to flag each other as Friends or Foes, and assign bonuses and penalties appropriately. So if a user annoys you, you can easily not read their comments any more. If you notice any bugs, feel free to submit them or let krow or me know.
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Slashdot Code Update

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  • Woohoo. (Score:4, Funny)

    by rakslice ( 90330 ) on Friday January 04, 2002 @02:00AM (#2783763) Homepage Journal
    New code. Coolness. Now where's that remove-double-posts feature? =)
    • Re:Woohoo. (Score:4, Interesting)

      by drsoran ( 979 ) on Friday January 04, 2002 @03:59AM (#2784075)
      Or better yet, a delete/edit function so you can go back and edit your own posts. Everyone has done it. You go and post a message and think of more to add or you just want to delete it entirely. Why not allow deleting/editing your own posts?
      • Re:Woohoo. (Score:5, Insightful)

        by EasyTarget ( 43516 ) on Friday January 04, 2002 @04:28AM (#2784118) Journal
        I don't want editing as such, revisionism is a bad thing.. and would definitely be abused by many of the trolls and lamers that crawl out of the woodwork on /. like forums.

        But an ability to annotate your -own- posts (i.e. an ability to add timestamped, limited length comments to the text of the post so they are visible to everyone viewing the post) would be very cool. Allowing for apologies/corrections/additional info to be placed in the comment by it's author, without despoiling the original comment..
        • Re:Woohoo. (Score:3, Insightful)

          by rosewood ( 99925 )
          The problem with this is making a fairly decent comment (or stealing one from a semi related story) and then going back once it is +5'd and adding some goatse.cx links to it

          I think as is - being able to reply to yourself works about the same ... although not perfect

          Maybe loose all mod points on the post when edited. Id like to be able to delete some posts too if no replys have been posted...
          • Re:Woohoo. (Score:3, Interesting)

            by EasyTarget ( 43516 )
            Here's an idea..

            How about moderation 'inheritance' for a author replying to their own posts..

            So: You post a great comment, and it gets moderated up to (Score:5, Genius). Then you notice a mistake, or want to clarify something, so you post a reply which automatically gets a (Score:5 Inherited) since it is related to a post where you have already had good moderation. But after that it is on it's own, i.e. it can be modded down if it is a troll, or just plain stupid..

            You would need some back-end logic, such as only inheriting on direct reply's (one level below the original post), and not allowing double-inheritance (i.e. moderation can only be inherited by -one- same author reply, this will prevent a troll/lamer hijacking an entire thread). And probably an automatic loss of this feature for people who's -inherited moderation- posts regularly get modded down to zero (they loose the privilige since they are probably abusing it).
      • Re:Woohoo. (Score:3, Offtopic)

        by ymgve ( 457563 )
        I saw an idea mentioned here earlier - that you are able to edit your posts as long as long as they haven't been moderated or replied to. That would prevent somebody from goatse-ing a +5 post or changing arguments in the middle of a discussion while still allowing for some editing if you made a spelling or formatting mistake.
    • Re:Woohoo. (Score:5, Funny)

      by rbeattie ( 43187 ) <russ@russellbeattie.com> on Friday January 04, 2002 @05:38AM (#2784282) Homepage
      Exactly.

      There's so many features in /. that need check boxes.

      • [ ] Automatically remove repeated stories.
      • [ ] Automatically remove "slashdotted" story links.
      • [ ] Automatically remove snide editor comments at the end of story submissions.
      • [ ] Automatically spam editors who don't check links.
      • [ ] Automatically wake editors up at 2 a.m. for rejecting my story submissions.
      • [ ] Automatically give my posts +5 (because I want to think everyone loves me.)

      or maybe not...

      -Russ

      (I'm just joking... jeez.)

  • by Anthony Boyd ( 242971 ) on Friday January 04, 2002 @02:03AM (#2783767) Homepage

    Look out Usenet, here we come!

  • by Anonymous Coward
    Alrighty, now will all of the trolls please post something on this story (non-anonymously) so that we can all mark you as foes?
    Thanks.
  • Hmmmm (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 04, 2002 @02:05AM (#2783779)
    Oh fuck, here we go. everyone is going to add me to their killfile! :(

    -AC.

  • by mirko ( 198274 ) on Friday January 04, 2002 @02:07AM (#2783786) Journal
    In English : "Better is Good's foe".
    See that grey pearl besides your comment's details ?

    click on it :

    Slashdot Friend/Foe System

    So how do you perceive Cmdr Taco ?
    So how do you perceive cyborg_monkey ?
    So how do you perceive Klerck ?
    So how do you perceive Jon Katz ?
    ...
    Friend
    Neutral
    Foe

    Note: Who you like and dislike is not private; it can and will be used against you.

    Do you mean I may get sacked if I happen to feel some sympathy for some of the trolls ?

    I believe this is a little dangerous unless we have the guarantee that you are trustworthy enough to use this.

    Until then, well... Everybody is my friend.

    • It occurs to me that this new feature could potential lead to the desire for two others.

      First, if we can individually mark someone as
      a foe then the next trend might be to create a
      list of individuals that the community regards
      as foes. The individuals could then choose to
      subscribe to this list if they feel they have
      common ground with the list maintainers. Thus
      community blacklisting would arrive on the
      internet (anyone intersted in copyrighting this?).

      Of course today anyone who has a desire to attack
      and defame the thoughts of others is going to post
      as an Anonymous Coward. Thus the second desire could be to make everyone accountable for their
      posts. This would, of course, require a "Forced
      Login" feature.

      I personally doubt that there are many members of
      this online community that would sanction features
      like these. Trends, however, start out as seemingly innocuous and small changes that over
      time turn into something that is bigger and larger
      than their meager beginnnings.

      The question then would be: Are we heading down a path that diverges from the original intent of
      a collaborative forum where there can be a free
      exchange of ideas unencumbered by that hideous
      beast called "censorship"?
    • See that grey pearl besides your comment's details ?

      I'd love to be able to see this pearl in Light Mode

    • by hawk ( 1151 ) <hawk@eyry.org> on Friday January 04, 2002 @11:20AM (#2785527) Journal
      >Slashdot Friend/Foe System


      >Note: Who you like and dislike is not private; it
      >can and will be used against you.


      That's nuttin'. Used against you by a snivelling 14 year old? Big deal.


      Slashdot Friend/Foe system is insignifcant compared to an F-14's Interrogate Friend/Foe system. Now *that's* one you don't want used against you.


      hawk

  • Nice... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Henry V .009 ( 518000 ) on Friday January 04, 2002 @02:07AM (#2783788) Journal

    +2 comment bonus. Karma: 25

    Capping out the system. Karma: 50

    Jon Katz, Foe, -5. Priceless

  • by burtonator ( 70115 ) on Friday January 04, 2002 @02:08AM (#2783789)
    I wonder if I can killfile Timothy... this way I won't get duplicate articles anymore! :)
  • by Valur ( 87561 ) on Friday January 04, 2002 @02:09AM (#2783794)
    Want to know someone's friends or foes? Do the following:

    1) Make them your friend
    2) Click on the words 'friends' across from them

    One can easily browse who's friend is whose.
  • TacoTacoTaco (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ashpool7 ( 18172 ) on Friday January 04, 2002 @02:10AM (#2783797) Homepage Journal
    You've done an outstanding job of making it difficult, if not impossible for the people who are running slashdot "light" to mark a person a friend or foe. Could we have a bit more description of these features please? :)
    • Several people seem to be complaining about this. The answer is "Duh, read the source code". After all, that is the benefit of open source right? What, you can't read Perl fluently?

      Lets see how many OSS zealots mark me as foe now...
  • by rfsayre ( 255559 ) on Friday January 04, 2002 @02:14AM (#2783804) Homepage
    why must there be a pustule popping out of every comment. grey puss, green puss, red puss. Can we turn it off entirely?
  • by weslocke ( 240386 ) on Friday January 04, 2002 @02:16AM (#2783808)
    Maybe it's just me, but this really seems to go against the basic idea of a forum like /.

    To me this sort of environment is supposed to be a sea of conflicting viewpoints and brash arguments. Trolls tend to already be taken care of to an extent by the current moderation abilities, and to an extent flamewars tend to fall below filter level.

    But with the ability to assign "Friend or Foe" you essentially gain the ability to make the No-Mans-Land of the comments into an area that only reflects your own views and opinions. Granted it might take a while, and will very likely never completely kill dissenting opinion, but a pretty self-supporting environment can still be made.

    The closest analogy I can think of would be a hardcore conservative listening to 24 hours of Rush Limbaugh (Not sure who would be a good example for a Liberal stance, so I won't list them. ). Sure they can do it, but in doing so they cut themselves off from the other viewpoints and opinions that might provoke some thought in what they believe in.
    • If somebody wants to do this, why should we stop them?

      I think the system is a great idea. I don't care if some moron abuses it such that he can't see any of /.

      I just want to have the option to stop reading some of the more egregious trolls.
    • But with the ability to assign "Friend or Foe" you essentially gain the ability to make the No-Mans-Land of the comments into an area that only reflects your own views and opinions.
      Hmm ... That was the argument Cass Sunstein was making in Republic.com [slashdot.org] I don't think it'll be a problem. Look at it this way: People who don't want to read opposing views, are probably better off not doing so (i.e. less ill-considered replies).

      Now, facilitating friend-or-foe moderation abuse, however, is another matter. Those green and red indicators make dandy "targets".

      Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org) [sethf.com]

    • by Chasuk ( 62477 ) <chasuk@gmail.com> on Friday January 04, 2002 @04:16AM (#2784092)
      To me, this modification allows me the sort of freedom I've always wanted on a forum. If a post isn't insightful, interesting, or informative, I'm not really interested in reading it, at least not on Slashdot. I'll turn on BBC America if I want to be amused, I'll peruse alt.binaries.erotica.* if I want to be aroused - you get the idea.

      I discovered long ago that the friend or foe concept works well in separating the shite from the non. I think the terminology is too confrontational, but the concept works.

      On Amazon.com, for example, if reviewer X gives a film that I loathe 5 stars, I'll generally dislike all of the films that he might recommend. The converse is also true. The same concept also seems to apply to books, music, and ideas.

      No, this isn't limiting. I see too much overlap in tastes and opinion for that to be a problem, and I know of many films I've enjoyed that I would never have watched had they not been recommended to me by a trusted critic/friend. Ditto books, music, interesting philosophies.
      • Yes, the only problem I see with this is that people change, a newbie posting stupid comments today maybe an enlightened being tomorow with interesting new insights...
        I think a timeout for foe could be a good feature for some cases.
    • by Erasmus Darwin ( 183180 ) on Friday January 04, 2002 @09:53AM (#2785043)
      "But with the ability to assign "Friend or Foe" you essentially gain the ability to make the No-Mans-Land of the comments into an area that only reflects your own views and opinions."

      Allow me to offer a few counter-examples:

      A poster insists on including his/her sig in every post as actual post content rather than via the post mechanism. There are some people, myself included, who choose to browse with signatures turned off. However, since the sig's being included as part of the post, it circumvents the signature filter. Marking someone who does this as a foe wouldn't have anything to do with me reinforcing my own opinions on a Slashdot issue. Instead, it would be a purely stylistic concern.

      Another good example was a troll who was pimping his humor site (ridiculopathy.com -- delibrately left unlinked to reduce traffic). At times, he would pass off the site's postings as legitimate articles related to the current Slashdot article. It got old fast, but your average mod was occasionally suckered in. I would've loved to have been able to killfile the guy and be done with it.

      My final example is one of my biggest pet peeves -- anti-DMCA jokes. Now I dislike the DMCA, so on a raw opinion level, I agree with the posters. The problem, however, is the raging stupidity inherent in the jokes. 99% of them are the exact same premise, something similar to "Oh no! I'm violating the DMCA by opening a can of Coke." Besides being painfully repititious, these jokes generally have nothing to do with circumvention of a copy control device. Given the number of legitimate grievances people have against the DMCA, I'm unable to figure out why people insist on diluting their credibility by protesting fictional ones.

      People who disagree with me on an issue, on the other hand, are usually quite interesting. If they're capable of substantiating their point with actual reasoning, it's a valuable post. For example, even though I'm disagreeing with the post that this is in response to, I have no reason to tag the poster as a foe. The poster raises a very interesting question, and the moderation of that post up to a 5 is, in my mind, legitimate.

  • by denzo ( 113290 ) on Friday January 04, 2002 @02:17AM (#2783810)
    FOR IMMEDIATE DISMISSAL -

    Slashdot editors announced today the addition of new, ground-breaking features to their SlashCode system, which is the heart of their article and comment system.

    Among the changes are new features such as:

    • Capture-the-flag style moderating system, where the users compete as teams for titles such as First Poster, Chief Troll, Offtopic Extraordinaire, and the Comic Relief. Other titles such as Informant and Intruiger were immediately done away with as soon as it was determine that they were no fun.
    • A virtual language interpreter, which is used to parse any and all pseudo-code posted by users to prove that they know absolutely nothing about programming (or at least are only good at writing code for typical CS textbooks).
    • Amulets with modifiers that increase a user's skill rating in Zealotry, Fanaticsm, and Smite.
    • A real-time spellchecker that eventually gives up on users who routinely mispell words and filters out their entire message.
    • A close-source server administered by John Carmack, in order to make sure that nobody cheats at any above features.
    • An open-source server administered by JMS, to make sure that all ping statistics are free.
    • A poll that teleports any users who vote for CowboyNeal to Afghanistan (to meet Jon Katz's e-mail friend).
    • An OSDN top, side, bottom, and floating Flash bar that dances around the user's screen. Disabling this in their preferences will cause increased sensitivity in the lameness filter when the user posts a comment.
    • Lameness filter automatically filters out content that includes the worlds "M$", "goatse.xc", "IMO", "INAL", "IRDCWYSBITYAWSIKE" (I really don't care what you say because I think you are wrong since I know everything).
  • Finally... (Score:4, Funny)

    by gnovos ( 447128 ) <gnovos.chipped@net> on Friday January 04, 2002 @02:23AM (#2783833) Homepage Journal
    After years of playing games with my Karma (intentionally tolling a few days just to see how many points I could lose and how long it would take to get them back, etc.), I have finally been growing tired of posting to Slashdot...

    ...and along comes zoos and fan clubs to play with! Woot! My productivity at work has officially flatlined as of now!
  • by idonotexist ( 450877 ) on Friday January 04, 2002 @02:27AM (#2783842)
    I understand the intent of this feature, but really see no need for it with the ability of a user to post anonymous. Of course anonymous posting should stick around imo. But let's say for instance I hate mwmseeksbillgates and add him to my ban list. What stops mwmseeksbillgates from posting as an anonymous user? With mwmseeksbillgates on my ban list, I will continue to view messages from him (maybe he'll use the same signature or post the same type of messages I'll despise... though mwmseeksbillgates is not listed as the user who posted the message; the satanic content remains).
    I don't see the point of this new feature --- too many loopholes exist.
    • To can always filter out anonymous postings by changing you comment threshold to atleast 1.

      And only if mwmseeksbillgates anonymously posts a really good comment then eventually someone will mod him up.
  • In all versions? (Score:2, Informative)

    by bishnu ( 539246 )
    I use the bare bones text version of slashdot, and I haven't noticed any kind of flagging system...then again, it could just be that i'm blind.
  • by Pathos78 ( 398591 ) on Friday January 04, 2002 @02:38AM (#2783885)
    I set all my friends to neutral, and /. told me:

    You are alone in the world.

    I thought I was amoungst my own here!
    I thought I was accepted!
    Loved even!

    Will no one be my friend?
  • Actual Intention (Score:2, Interesting)

    by akiaki007 ( 148804 )
    I do believe that the actual intention for this is that you will tend to like certain people's comments more than others'. This way if you like something that you read, you can mark it good. And next time they have a comment in a thread you are reading, you will notice it and read it (meaning you will also spend more time here...hehe, as if you don't do that already). Also, this will help you ignore all those goat posts, grin. It basically will show everything, I assume, with a +1, -1 (or more if you can vote someone friend more than once?).

    I like the idea, but I don't really understand how this is not kept private. Because me making all the "FP'ers" foe's will come back to haunt me? My opinion is made public when I make a comment, not when I read another's. I don't understand why that is so just yet, but I'm sure there is some reason for it.
  • Come on... You know you want to let us kill all the AC's out there at the click of a button. =)

    -Jayde
  • Questions (Score:2, Offtopic)

    I have a question that I couldn't find in the FAQ - I hope this is an okay place to ask:

    When/how do you get moderator points? I've been on slashdot for months, my karma is currently 48, but I've never been able to moderate. The "willing to moderate" button is checked in my preferences.

    Can someone please enlighten me as to how this works? I feel kinda dumb for asking this - if someone can point me to the docs I missed, I'd appreciate it.
    • Re:Questions (Score:2, Informative)

      by ASCIIMan ( 47627 )
      It's in the faq. [slashdot.org] Which you should have read already. And you probably shouldn't be posting comments like this with your +1 bonus.
    • Re:Questions (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      http://slashdot.org/faq/com-mod.shtml#cm520
      hmm, I moderated this story so I can't post logged in - I haven't added any positive or negitave karma for months, but I get to moderate quite often - I guess it's because my /. browsing habits are close to average
  • Same Code as Slash? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Baldrson ( 78598 ) on Friday January 04, 2002 @02:44AM (#2783916) Homepage Journal
    From the Slash FAQ [slashcode.com]:

    Is this the same code that runs Slashdot?

    Yes. Slashdot and Slashcode are usually running the latest development code from CVS, within a week or so.

    If this is business as usual then we can expect to see a new release file announced at slashcode [slashcode.org] within a week or so. So the obvious question is, "Is this business as usual?"

  • by iomud ( 241310 ) on Friday January 04, 2002 @02:46AM (#2783922) Homepage Journal
    Slash is starting to turn into a game of d&d. Before you know it I'll have a 'character alignment' based on how people percieve me.
    • Slash is starting to turn into a game of d&d. Before you know it I'll have a 'character alignment' based on how people percieve me.

      How would you guys describe the character alignments of our esteemed editors?
  • Usenet Gateway (Score:5, Interesting)

    by dead_penguin ( 31325 ) on Friday January 04, 2002 @02:55AM (#2783948)
    Forget this web-board with limited filtering business, I want a Slashdot-to-Usenet gateway. Just think, all you'd have to do is point your favourite news reader (i.e. tin) at nntp.slashdot.org and post away. The bandwidth savings over this heavyweight html+graphics crap would alone be worth it, while the ability to choose your own client program with its own interface and filtering rules would be even better.

    The scary thing is that this could probably be done in a reasonable way. Articles could map to newsgroups on the server (with new ones appearing daily and old ones disappearing). Since comments are threaded anyways, this should transfer across directly. And as long as the slashdot username and password are required for accessing the NNTP server, there shouldn't be any real problems with unauthorized usage by spammers and such.

    Oh well. Too bad most of the crowd here is too young to remember what usenet even is...
  • all this code... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by nickm ( 1468 ) on Friday January 04, 2002 @02:57AM (#2783955) Homepage
    ...and you STILL can't say "show me only messages I haven't already read".

    YEssirree, kids, we're still DECADES behind Usenet.
    • Re:all this code... (Score:3, Informative)

      by Matts ( 1628 )
      Impossible.

      Seriously, think about it. There are about 3 million registered users on slashdot (shocking to think that you and I have user id's below 2000!). There are probably 20 new stories a day. Each story gets on average about 150 posts. So for each post you need to store one entry in a database per user.

      That's 9 billion new rows a day.

      Of course you could do some compression or bit-twiddling to reduce that, but not by a significant enough amount.

      The best you can do is what LinuxToday does - mark stories as "new" since you last refreshed the page.

      Usenet doesn't have this problem because all the "What I've read" stuff is stored client-side, and there's not enough room in cookies to do that.
      • by Yakman ( 22964 )
        Well, you could have this "mode" only display new comments since last time you refreshed the page.

        ie. You load the page and see 50 comments, when you've finished you hit refresh and see only the 5 posted while you were reading.

        To do this you'd only for each person need to keep track of the last message id they've seen for each story. Still a fair bit of data, but a lot less.

        You could maybe only keep track for stories that are on the front page and purge from the db after that?
  • by zcat_NZ ( 267672 ) <zcat@wired.net.nz> on Friday January 04, 2002 @02:59AM (#2783959) Homepage
    What happens when we've all marked "egg troll" as a foe, for example, and nobody's replying or modding him down.

    People without a login will come here and see his MSFUD comments at '0', with no opposing comments, and assume that they might therefore have some validity? god help us..!

    • First of all, editors, who do a considerable amount of troll/offtopic moderation, perhaps will not opt for such a thing. At least that was the reason given for infinite mod points to them, eliminating negative posts so that normal users can moderate positively, but as it is not transparent noone can be sure. If they do mark someone as foe, it would beat the purpose of giving them infinite mod points.

      Second is there are people like reading trolls, I for one read at -1 often enough. If I ever make someone my foe, that would be users pretending to know everything but don't know shit, or just can't discuss without flames; not delibrate trolls. Trolling is an art.

  • So if I see a comment posted by someone and I think to myself "Asshole!" Then I click on the *gumdrop* in the header of the message to mark him forever as such?

    Why a gum drop? Or is it a robot nipple? Whatever it is, it looks lickable. Its not blue, like Apple's Aqua interface, but it does look like the platinum "theme" in Mac OS X.

    Perhaps we can find a more meaningful button? Maybe a text link would work well.
  • Can I set Anon Cowards to foe?? :-)
    • Re:AC? (Score:3, Informative)

      by Calle Ballz ( 238584 )
      In your options you are able to automatically set AC posts to -1, and as long as your threshold is 0 or above, you won't see AC posts anymore.
  • by Compact Dick ( 518888 ) on Friday January 04, 2002 @03:11AM (#2783977) Homepage
    • A Secure login option

      Most of us here on /. are quite security-conscious, if not downright paranoid.
      I find it downright ludicrous that to date, Slashdot has NO SECURE LOGIN.
      [if you have one, then it's too well-hidden].

      Make no mistake - I do not want my login password sent as cleartext.
      It makes life too miserable.

      For those with no HTTPS support, an unsecured login option should be provided,
      but the secure one should be the default [or prominently displayed].
    • Strict HTML 4.01/XHTML 1.1 + CSS

      Much of Slashdot's pages teems with TABLE tags and other assorted formatting crap.
      This drastically increases download and rendering times, and our ISP is only too happy
      to charge us for it [money saved == more pr0n!].

      Most users' browsers do not need this backward-compatibility kludge anymore,
      as they use IE [what fools these mortals be!], Mozilla, Konqueror, Opera or NS6.x.

      Use browser sniffing, then send pure, strict XHTML + CSS for formatting,
      thus encouraging the luddites to switch to Mozilla! :-)

      [Good part is, the pages will still render well on text browsers like Lynx, Links etc.
      Or they could be served the TABLE'd pages that NS 4.x & < should be served.]


    That's all for now, folks. Any more suggestions? Feel free to tack them on.

    set thread_growable TRUE
    • wishlist. (Score:3, Interesting)

      by leuk_he ( 194174 )
      Well in the moderation system some things are to be improved:
      -Seperate setting for doing moderations. I'd like my treshold lower when moderating to scan for AC gems. (or to search for trolls that are not trolls, but are meant funny)
      -Some (don't know how) system to mod up late good posters. The problem with the current system is early on topic posters get modded up, but a 4 hour late gem has a very slim change to be modded up.
      -Some filters for capitals in subject "RIGHT NOW" 8-)
    • Secure login - we're thinking about that. Expect to see it sooner or later.

      Browser sniffing - not likely.
  • by Tsar ( 536185 ) on Friday January 04, 2002 @03:27AM (#2783999) Homepage Journal
    If this feature takes off, I'd like to see a "distributed affinity" system implemented, similar to Google's PageRank system [google.com]. If I call a particular poster a friend, then anyone whom they call a friend gets an X% boost in my ranking, anyone they call a friend gets an X/100 boost, and so on.

    That way, after I've picked a certain number of people (100/X, actually) as friends, and they all like another poster I've never noticed before, he'll automagically have the same status with me that they all do.

    Foe rankings would work the same way, but is the foe of my friend necessarily my foe, and is the foe of my foe necessarily my friend? Automatically assigning points based on those assumptions would probably not be useful.
  • This would be cool: (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Pathwalker ( 103 ) <hotgrits@yourpants.net> on Friday January 04, 2002 @03:33AM (#2784013) Homepage Journal
    What you should do now is to let people's friend/foe lists build up for a while; once they've gotten complex enough, make a digraph of the friend/foe relationships, and sell posters.

    It probably would look cooler than those internet map posters I see Thinkgeek advertise from time to time - plus there would be the added fun of trying to find your node in the graph!
  • by Hollinger ( 16202 )
    Hey, this is neat, and may prove useful. For the moment, however, I'd like to turn off the gumdrops, no matter how cute they are.

    Maybe an option somewhere in my Comments Preferences should let me turn off the friend / foe system, just like that OSDN Navbar.
  • by Per Abrahamsen ( 1397 ) on Friday January 04, 2002 @03:37AM (#2784025) Homepage
    One can respect a foe, and look forward to reading his or her messages.

    The people I want to score down are the Fools and the Trolls, whom I don't want to honor with the label "Foe".
    • Indeed.

      I suggest replacing the simple Friend and Foe with:

      Buddy: People who may or may not speak bollocks but you want to read it all anyway because your buddies with them within and/or outwith /.

      Twat: People who only talk bollocks that you just wish would go away (currently foe)

      LOTP: Leader of the Opposition. Someone that tends towards an opposite view from your own, but whom doesn't talk bollocks. You can see their points - you just disagree with them.

      OMS: On my side. Someone who tends to agree with your views - doesn't talk bollocks... is worth reading.

  • Note: Who you like and dislike is not private; it can and will be used against you.


    Sheesh! It's amazing what too much of IANAL stuff can do to you ;-)
  • This is apparently unrelated, but I guess since it showed up just now, it probably is. Until a few hours ago, I had the following bit of info on my User Info page [slashdot.org]:
    Tsar has submitted 1 stories.

    Toshiba Latest Casualty of DRAM Price Wars [slashdot.org] on Wed Dec 19, '01 03:22 AM

    And now it's gone. Did anyone else experience this with their pages?
  • Ideas (Score:2, Interesting)

    by AnimeFreak ( 223792 )

    I came up with these a while back...

    • Possible meta-moderation of rejected stories. Let a certain amount of users (controlled in the same fashion as moderators) decide if a certain story is worthy of a second look. If it gets accepted and rejected for a second time, it will not get meta-moderated again.
    • Let those who end up getting their story rejected moved to their journal if they're a registered user. Make that an option in their preferences or in the submit story submission page.
    • Allow users to ignore posts made by Anonymous Cowards. In some cases, these people are just idiotic trolls who just waste time posting their crap here, but there are the odd times that the Anon. Coward is actually posting something useful or something not moronic. If that coward gets moderated up, then that ignore feature can be defeated.
    That is all I got to say. :)
  • Jon Katz (Score:3, Offtopic)

    by Alsee ( 515537 ) on Friday January 04, 2002 @04:50AM (#2784173) Homepage
    I decided to check the listing for Jon Katz.
    I don't read /. for movie reviews, so I'm not particularly familiar with him myself, but it's hard to miss all the comments maligning him all over the place.

    As of the moment he has 6 fans (people how list him as a friend) and 10 PAGES (at 1024x768) of freaks [slashdot.org] (people who list him as a foe).

    -
  • by Colin Bayer ( 313849 ) <vogon@REDHATicculus.org minus distro> on Friday January 04, 2002 @06:32AM (#2784367) Homepage
    President George W. Bush Marks Osama bin Laden as Foe, bin Laden Suddenly Disappears

    WASHINGTON, DC -- Today, President George W. Bush, taking a cue from the New and Improved (C)(TM)(R) Slashcode at slashdot.org, promptly identified Osama bin Laden as a personal "Foe" (despite warnings that his decision to do so "can and will be used against him"), a rating that carries with it an invincible -6 moderation. Osama bin Laden then proceeded to immediately disappear off the face of the Earth, never to be heard from again.
  • New option (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Alsee ( 515537 ) on Friday January 04, 2002 @06:53AM (#2784408) Homepage
    I'd like an option to post at any lower score. The option to decline my +1 bonus is useful, but occasionally being able to post at zero (without having to go Anonymous) or even -1 could be handy.

    Why? Five minutes ago I responded to an AC at score zero. I felt it required a rebuttal, but I didn't feel my response should waste the time of anyone who never saw the post I was responding to. I really didn't want to post anonymously, but it was the only way to get my score to zero. There is no way to post at -1 (if you want to respond to a -1 scored comment).

    Choosing to post at a lower score is a form of courtesy to other readers.

    Oh yeah, and how bad would the server load be for a spellcheck option in the comment preview? :)

    -
  • by Artifex ( 18308 ) on Friday January 04, 2002 @09:50AM (#2785031) Journal

    I'm just wondering... does the system disable itself when we get moderation points, so we can do our jobs looking at the entire available pool of posts, or does it continue to block out people we don't like?

    My first thought, when seeing this new ability, was of course to add Anonymous Coward as a foe. But that's silly - just because some people troll is no reason to deny myself the ability to read some possibly insightful comments by others who can't or won't log in. If any named user is consistently trolling, he ought to simply be banned.

    Now I'm thinking - okay, so marking people down is pointless, but marking them up can be quite useful, especially if we can start sorting article comments so high-rated friends go first... in essence, this is pretty much the exact same approach that I take when I moderate. I don't waste points downvoting, I use my votes to call attention to the good stuff. And so I shall do, with the friend system - if I like comments by people consistently, I want to be told when they have new stuff they've written.

  • by rnd() ( 118781 ) on Friday January 04, 2002 @11:28AM (#2785604) Homepage
    Being able to flag users as "friend" or "foe" is a great intermediate step toward the kind of collaborative filtering-based moderation system that I imagine for Slashdot.

    Imagine the following:

    Slashdot 'notices' that a bunch of other users who share a lot of 'friends' with you have modded up a posting by someone who is not on your 'friends' list. Slashdot notifies you of the posting, you read it, submit a comment, and add the user to your 'friends' list. You have thus discovered a worthwhile posting that you may have missed had you been filtering out low-scoring comments.

    If Slashdot created a true collaborative filtering-based moderation system, then moderation as we know it would cease to exist, and in its place hundreds of closely intertwined 'communities' of like-minded readers would emerge, and the quality of discussion on slashdot (as perceived by its readers) would grow enormously.

    To satisfy new readers or those who had not taken the time to express their preferences, comments could be 'scored' according to aggregate moderation across communities. The key of CF would be that everyone would be a moderator all of the time, and everyone's moderations would effect whose comments they themselves saw in the future.
  • by sulli ( 195030 ) on Friday January 04, 2002 @02:45PM (#2787179) Journal
    I doubt that this will be implemented, but here it is anyway: Friend/Foe should be disabled while moderating. Comments should be moderated based on their quality, not whether you're someone's freak.

    Also, in that vein: there should be one-button view preferences (-1, Nested, Newest First) for moderation. Too often the +3s get modded to +5 while the interesting, new AC comments are ignored.

It was kinda like stuffing the wrong card in a computer, when you're stickin' those artificial stimulants in your arm. -- Dion, noted computer scientist

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