D2 Updates, Text Message Notifcation 164
A few quick notes on some recent code updates. The smaller function is that we've added text messaging stuff for phones. If you visit the messages page (you must be logged in) you can define your cell phone's email address, and get notifications sent to it. The more interesting update is for Discussion2 users (turn it on on any article page). There is an option now to restrict page sizes and you will retrieve comments by score. This means you can configure your Slashdot to return smaller, more bandwidth friendly pages that you can expand without loading fresh pages. Anyone still running D1 is a sucker.
Texting in US is Ripoff (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Texting in US is Ripoff (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm sure there's a simple solution to this somewhere which I'm overlooking, but having an aspect of a person's billing completely outside their control seems rather bizarre.
Re:Texting in US is Ripoff (Score:4, Informative)
AFAIK, if there is a consistent pattern of abuse, you can call your carrier and they might make concessions. Similarly, the FCC and your state attorney general will be interested in text message spamming. I don't see how this would stop someone from outside the US from simply spamming the crap out of us. Similarly, I can just use the SMS option on most modern IM clients these days.
Yeah, the state of cell phone usage in general in the US is shit.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Who are you people that pay for incoming messages? (Score:2, Interesting)
Really? What carrier does this?
Re:Who are you people that pay for incoming messag (Score:2)
Re:Who are you people that pay for incoming messag (Score:2)
Verizon has text messaging plans that give you a couple hundred messages in or out a month for a few dollars (varies greatly depending on when you signed up for it), but without those plans, they definitely charge you for incoming.
Re:Texting in US is Ripoff (Score:5, Informative)
(So I know who not to change to next time)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
So, in other w
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Texting in US is Ripoff (Score:5, Funny)
Just for mentioning the phrases "American", "phone call", "pay the price", "bomb someone", "protect themselves", and "outside their control", you have been added to the Department of Fatherland Security watchlists. All of your finances, foreign or otherwise, will be monitored closely (in San Francisco) for any corroborating tendrils of threatening intent on your part.
Re: (Score:2)
Hopefully, things are better today. But I'm still cheap, and I don't use SMS. My carrier actually increased prices recently.
The future is now... in Korea anyway.
Re: (Score:2)
However, if you (customer) log into their website and go the area that lets you
Re: (Score:2)
I used to work for a company in Redmond *cough* that provides instant messaging and alerts via SMS, siphoning some of the carrier revenue that this generates.
To avoid large amounts of *unexpected* SPAM over a newly created gateway from their IM clients or alert triggers to a cell phone subscriber, they require a new customer to accept (by responding to an initial SMS message) that they are willing to receive them.
Re: (Score:2)
Wireless telegraph? I'm starting to get a mental image of some spoiled teenage girl sending this to her boyfriend, tapping maniacally on her phone in Morse code:
"Sucker!" (Score:4, Insightful)
Ah yes, insulting your readership. I see that Slashdot's grasp of the finer points of customer relations remains as firm as ever...
Re:"Sucker!" (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I have that ticked, it works on the traditional interface, and now that I've posted that complaint it seems to be working on this discussion. But on other discussions I see things like:
Score 3Score 2
Score 4
Score 3
Score 4
So I'd assumed that it didn't apply to the new discussion system. Maybe what I'm seeing is a bug, but still, am I a "sucker" for not using an obviously buggy new comment system that is clearly marked as a test?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, I agree with you. I have my display set to show comments +3 and above; because with karma bonuses and bad moderation, comments 2 and below are often a waste of breath. I want to read *all* the comments that have actually been moderated at least once upwards.
Can't do that with the new system. You can say "highest ranked comments get priority showing up on my screen", but that's not what I want. if a story has 40 +5 comments, I don't want to set it to only show me +5's inadvertently by switching to
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I actually just saw that today. Might fiddle with it. But, still, if I set karmabonus:off and show me +2 and above comments, I'm going to get a lot of crap that's posted at +1 and moderated up once.
I dunno, it's worth playing with.
Re:"Sucker!" (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Ah yes, insulting your readership. I see that Slashdot's grasp of the finer points of customer relations remains as firm as ever...
* - With the notable exception of subscribers.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:"Sucker!" (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Ah yes, insulting your readership. I see that Slashdot's grasp of the finer points of customer relations remains as firm as ever...
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
But then I notice in the source code for this very compose message screen:
<!--[if IE]><link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="screen, projection" href="//images.slashdot.org/iestyles.css?T_2_5_0_1 70"><![endif]-->
The perfect opportunity to make all the hacks they need (or better yet, not apply those hacks to IE7)
Re: (Score:2)
sucker? (Score:4, Insightful)
Not an exclusive or, of course (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Not an exclusive or, of course (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
What do you mean, incompatible?
I seem to be running D2, and I have Slashdotter enabled...
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:sucker? (Score:4, Interesting)
The ability to colapse a whole thread appeared on this slashdot 2.0 ajax interface thing for a while. It didn't seem to be the best implementation (IIRC), but it kinda worked.
Did you used to be a usenetter by any chance? Thats where I picked up a desire to be able to kill a whole thread. Laugh all you like, but I used to like Netscape 4's news reader, and like a lot of usenet clients it could ignore threads. If a thread turned into a flame fest (that you've seen before), or just wasn't interesting, OT etc., you could just ignore the whole thread, and new messages in that thread would be marked as read.
The ability to ignore a whole thread, or from a point downwards would be nice on slashdot. Once you've been here for a while you start to notice that a lot of discussions are very similar: they follow the same patterns of posts and ideas that have been talked about a million times. If whole threads could be ignored more easily by /. users, it might mean that mod points get used more towards the end of discussions (which often have insightful gems of comments that get overlooked because either a mod has run out of points by the time they get to the end of the page, or they've moved on to a newer article).
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Come to think of it, some nice icons in the text box would be nice.
Re: (Score:2)
Things I don't like (Score:3, Insightful)
- the floating widget floats over other things. I want to put it in the left margin and it must not float up above the menu, but stay below the Services entries.
- there still is no way to "close" a thread or to easily skip to the next top-level thread. when someone (usually an early poster) posts some flamebait comment it is very difficult to find the next top-level comment. There should be a [+] entry in the title bar of each comment where one can close all replies to that comment.
Closing a thread (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Now I understand (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
D2 is teh suck.
Mobile Browsing (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
that works on my old blackberry (Score:2)
an updated version based on what is mentioned in the story above would be better
Re: (Score:2)
Plenty of other URLs (Score:4, Funny)
Someday soon (Score:5, Funny)
"Hallo Wurld"
as it still won't have spellcheck.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Interesting assertion (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure am. Only a sucker would give in to the man, and not replace IE with Firefox on his company laptop. What a sucker.
I haven't complained about D2's not working in IE, because I recognize that it's IE's fault. I also recognize that IE will never change as long as everyone panders to its broken-ness, so I can even respect Slashdot's decision to not do so. I'll even continue to subscribe, despite not being able to use the New Shiny most of the time, because I think Slashdot's worth supporting.
But some of us aren't in a position where it's feasible to change our client, and cheap shots at our expense aren't particularly appreciated. If you don't want to put in the time and effort to make D2 work in IE because you don't want to perpetuate the use of broken standards on the client, that's great. But I'd really appreciate not being mocked in the process.
Thanks.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
However, more generally, I would agree with the admins that anyone in the
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
You should have provided more clues [instead of leaving it for the reader to assume].
Re: (Score:2)
Does that mean we're allowed to consider common usage when we consider what you meant earlier? I'm still not sure when we are or aren't allowed to interpret what people meant instead of just "taking them at their word" (which I assume to mean "interpreting everything literally"). Or, to put it more directly--handwaving over language issues won't make them go away.
Re: (Score:2)
Opera all the way on Windows, frankly.
Re: (Score:2)
TBH that's pretty much my thoughts (I just phrased them slightly less elegantly...) It's a nice idea but it needs a bit of work. On a family Windows box it's even slower than Firefox, whereas here on this Mac the reverse is true.
Re: (Score:2)
If you've used Firefox and haven't noticed any advantages, then you're apparently not its target audience. But then that raises this question: why are you reading the nerdiest website in the world if you aren't interested in such nerdy things as fine-tuning and customizing your software?
Re: (Score:2)
It does, but I'm always looking to improve.
Others have found that the extensibility and robustness of Firefox are useful, especially when combined with the fact that most malware is written for IE.
At the moment, you are correct, there is more malware for IE, however, with the extensibility and robustness of Firefox, I expect this to change.
why are you reading the nerdiest website in the world if you aren't interested in such nerdy things as fine-tuning
Re: (Score:2)
These are the other add-ons I'm using:
ColorfulTabs - Colors tabs differently based on
Re: (Score:2)
That, and unapproved apps are generally forbidden by your average corporate IT policy whether they need be installed or not.
Re: (Score:2)
D2?! (Score:4, Insightful)
No thanks. Call me a luddite, but I like my pages nice and static if you please. If I need to read a subcomment, I open it in a new tab.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Nested, -1 threshold. The only way to fly.
Re: (Score:2)
Ah, the old vertical D2! (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Tried it (Score:2)
D2 is great (Score:3, Insightful)
Just wanted to be the odd person who actually comments when they like something, instead of only posting when it's broken.
You know what would be kewl is (Score:2)
More for IE? (Score:3)
Even so, I ask that a bone be thrown to us IE users- give an option so that our use of D1/D2 is based on our browser. At home I am strictly FireFox except for the smallest subset of sites, so D2 works fine and I use it all the time. At work I am forced into a vanilla IE6 install[1]; reading comments is fine, but if I want to make a comment myself or mod a post I have to log in and deal with the IE-broken D2. I have three options:
1) Log in, do what I want, log out to continue reading (like I'm doing now)
2) Set my profile to not use D2 when at work and turn it on again at home
3) Create an alternate log in to use only while at work (this would require syncing with this account)
All of these are rather annoying and I'd prefer not to deal with them. I imagine I'm not the only one with this problem. The idea I have is that you have three options in your account: no D2, always D2, and D2 based on Browser. For the final option, a quick check is done prior to loading to see if the browser is IE or not, then choose which discussion method to use based on that.
I'm not familiar with Slashcode, so I don't know how trivial it would be to implement, but it's a feature I could really use. It would also be a benefit for those who use other legacy browsers for whatever reason.
[1] Yes, I've tried stuff like Portable Firefox. I made the mistake of showing a page to supervisor while using it, and now they're constantly checking to see if I'm using it. Policies are very strict around here.
The death knell for D1 for sure (Score:5, Funny)
To paraphrase: "D1. No chat. Uses more bandwidth than D2. Lame."
Looks like shit (Score:2, Flamebait)
Sorry, I write web code all day long, requirements are that it has to support IE6, IE7, and Firefox. It's a pain, but it's not actually hard. D2 is a piece of crap still.
And Slashcode is still written in PERL? RUfuckingKiddingMe?
D2.Visible=false;
Re: (Score:2)
I can't believe it either. Perl is 20 years old! Sheesh, that's like letting your Grandma plan your birthday party. Let's get some of these young, hip, languages in on things. According to this list [wikipedia.org] on Wikipedia, F# is the youngest, hippest language. It's already 2 years old, so we've got to work fast. Hurry before the next language shows up.
d2 ignores sort prefs? (Score:2)
Or they like their sort pref to be respected? I must be missing the obvious. D2 ignores my preference to have highest rated comments first. How do I get D2 to change the sort order?
Re: (Score:2)
Hi. I'm strredwolf, and I'm a D1 user.
Hi RedWolf!
I'm still with D1, because D2 hasn't sucked less yet.
A-men!
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
OK, then, perhaps we should say this: D2 appears to ignore the sort preference from the user preference sheet.
Correct.
If this is not what the programmers intend, it is a bug. If it is what the programmers intend, it is a misfeature.
Once D2 allows for threaded sort by score, I (and others) will switch over. (I really like it, otherwise.)
I'm glad you like it apart from that. The point is, however, that with all the additional features of D2 that sorting by score isn't necessary. Those sort orders and thread modes were all ways to get around difficulties that are being solved through the dynamic features of D2.
...
Of course, to each is own: some people just like things a certain way. I speak from experience myself
Strange bug when page is viewed for a long time (Score:2)
Oh, and I like the x-Bender quotes... too bad
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:who cares...? (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)