Slashdot Keybindings, Dynamic Stories 220
We've been working hard on the new dynamic Slashdot project (logged in users can enable this by enabling the beta index in their user preferences). I just wanted to quickly mention that there are keybindings on the index. The WASD and VI movement keys do stuff that we like, and the faq has the complete list. Also, if you are using Firefox or have Index2 beta enabled, you can click 'More' in the footer at the end of the page to load the next block of stories in-line without a page refresh. We're experimenting now with page sizes to balance load times against the likelihood that you'll click. More features will be coming soon, but the main thing on our agenda now is optimization. The beta index2 is sloooow and that's gotta change. We're aiming for 2 major optimizations this week (CSS Sprites, and removing an old YUI library) that I'm hoping will put the beta page render time into the "Sane" time frame (which, in case you are wondering, is several seconds faster than that "Insane" time frame we're currently seeing).
Sane/Insane referring to pages or posts loading? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Sane/Insane referring to pages or posts loading (Score:2, Insightful)
Which is easily translatable to "I'm more interested in speaking than reading what other people might have to say on the issue".
Re:Sane/Insane referring to pages or posts loading (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Sane/Insane referring to pages or posts loading (Score:5, Insightful)
Which is easily further translatable again to: I have a Slashdot account .
To be fair, if the guy has a clue, he would be more interesting in posting than reading, and he would be right to have the preference. For example, take your post. You missed major computing concepts like batch processing and time slices. The guy just wants one big time slice to load large amounts of data, and one small time slice to post small amounts of data. This is called intelligent system design.
How much should he be interested in reading your post? I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader(s).
Re:Sane/Insane referring to pages or posts loading (Score:4, Insightful)
Edit: you vile bastards, you've changed the delay on purpose while I was typing that first paragraph didn't you!?
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Indeed. Why does it take so long for EVERYTHING to load?
My solution is simple: go into your preferences and enable "classic" mode. Aaaah, relief. No more cruft and bloat.
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In my experience, it only takes long for the preview to load the first time. After that, it's instant as expected. My guess is that it has something to do with the ping-back thing I've heard of that checks if your post is coming from a shady place.
Re:Sane/Insane referring to pages or posts loading (Score:5, Informative)
Agreed. WHY does it take so long for my preview to load?
Because they're portscanning the IP you're coming from. Set it to REJECT rather than DROP from Slashdot's IP/range, and you'll find it almost instant. It's pretty annoying though for those of use who've been posting for years (yeah, I know my ID isn't low - I had one that was, but stopped posting for a while, and forgot it :( ).
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Thank you for making a simple "news for nerds" site more and more bloated and dysfunctional with any new release.
as long as they keep the classic mode, there will be no problems. I also use GMail in plain html mode and all the bells and whistles don't bother me a bit.
phew (Score:5, Funny)
lucky the beta index isn't linked in the summary, otherwise it would already be slashdotted
Special button (Score:5, Funny)
Show a counter next to it, it'll be great. It'll be the first virtual button ever to get worn out from overuse.
Re:Special button (Score:4, Interesting)
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Hey, at least blocking kdawson from the front page works again now.
Please share the Zen.
Can I block him from my RSS feed too?
lynx (Score:5, Insightful)
Just don't break Lynx support.
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Slashdot has been looking a lot better on Lynx lately, and it renders well on ELinks as well.
I don't use those browsers much anymore, but in the early '00s I used lynx + zgv to view web comics, images, etc., and it worked quite well indeed. I don't think svgalib is well-supported anymore, though.
Does anyone know of a console-mode image viewer that works on modern systems? It'd be neat to be able to do that again.
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I say go back to the way slashdot was 10 years ago. In my opinion, all of this fancy newfangled stuff makes it harder, not easier, to get what I want from the website. It seems like every month there is some new "feature" which breaks the old proven way of doing things. But I don't want it. I don't want to login, I don't want to muck around with javascript sliders, and I don't want to have to use "preferences" just to make the site work as basic HTML. It's like the whole site has turned into a sign-up trap,
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Re:My lawn (Score:5, Insightful)
Nothing wrong, except where it adds no value. I want a list of articles, grouped by category, that I can browse, then hit either a link to the article, or the comments.
I don't need tags, AJAX, redraws w/o page loads, blah blah blah.
There was nothing wrong with good old 'rn'.
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Yes there was, that's why trn was written.
(Oh I wish I still had a newsfeed... I guess I should try out one of those free newsfeeds some day..)
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There is nothing wrong with AJAX/Web 2.0 stuff, but Slashdot seems to have completely missed the point in its implementation.
But the ability to do that is the main thing that's wrong with AJAX (and JavaScript and ...). What's wrong is that these things allow the web page to override the browser's basic behavior, so the user get surprising (and usually incomprehensible) results when they hit keys. It's especially wrong to break things like the Back button or the space bar or the pg up/dn keys. This effect
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>> What I would really like is a way to block sites from doing this by default and allow a white list of sites that use the ability to use the more powerful aspects of AJAX responsibly. This probably exists and I'm sure could be created if not.
It's called NoScript, and it is a Firefox extension. You can white/black-list any site and allow or deny them from executing JavaScript. When blocked from executing JavaScript altogether, most sites fall back to a plain HTML functional state (Slashdot included
Stop auto-updating? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Works pretty good, actually. According to the faq, I can press G for more stories, but I'm not sure that's the same thing.
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Slashdot looks weird (Score:2)
Hi,
There are a lot of questions I have about slashdot, can anyone answer them?
The tags: in the past if you clicked on one, you got a list of articles with that tag. Now it appears that if you click on one, you tag that article with that tag! Is this the intention?
On one computer, slashdot takes a long time to load a certain script, making the whole browser hang for 10 seconds. It doesn't happen on any other computer I know. What script is this?
On some computers there is, and on some other computers there is
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Re:Slashdot looks weird (Score:5, Interesting)
The story tag is to distinguish stories from submissions and comments.
Among other datatypes. The firehose is our content delivery tool and pretty much any page is just becoming a filter on the firehose to display whatever data you are asking for. This allows us to do a lot of really cool things (both now and in the near future) and get some performance hits back soon.
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I've played with the firehose a lot and still can't figure out how to pick what I want to see. There's just a color range and a text box. Are we going to get some documentation soon? I've simply given up trying.
Re:Slashdot looks weird (Score:5, Informative)
I know it hasn't been easy, but hang in there. Slashteam has some really cool stuff on the way.
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Having been pleased, or at least as pleased as anybody could be with Slashdot, by reading the site in "light" mode for many, many years, I don't care one bit about how much "cool" stuff one can do with the site.
I do care that it's slow as molasses, though. And I care that the insightful and useful comments and commenters are becoming thin on the ground. And I care that many of the stories are dupes.
Re:Slashdot looks weird (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Slashdot looks weird (Score:4, Interesting)
Not to be cynical/snarky, but is there an expected timeline for this?
:)
I mean, it's not that I don't appreciate the work expended, but I'd appreciate the finished product much more
Even a tentative schedule (while probably a bad idea to commit to showing to users) posted somewhere might give us a better idea of where we're heading on slashdot, and why we have to put up with so many strange UI tweaks (like most of us, I prefer to stick with what I know).
Re:Slashdot looks weird (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think the original poster correctly framed the spirit of his question....
Why doesn't the front page filter out the display of the 'story' tag?
(Can't help but stick this in here: Why did the horrendously buggy and unusable new default user page go live? A lot of the stuff on there just seems random. Is the number in the speech bubble at the top the number of total comments in the thread the user last posted in? Why? Why the terrible CSS for the top item? Why are the comment titles formatted differently there than everywhere else? Why the redundant 'comments' slashbox on the right with the same content as the left half of the page? Why remove the menus that are on the right side of every other page on the site?)
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Why does the grey border on the Parent / Reply buttons only render sometimes. In about 20% of stories, these 'buttons' are white text on a white background and I can only see them by selecting the text. Why not just make them buttons?
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On some computers there is, and on some other computers there is not, a flashy green thing on the top right that has the text "green" in it. What is this?
A browser bug? Firefox extension? I don't see these.
Articles get tags. What decides which of the *many* tags that people probably give to it, appear on the front page below the article?
Seems to be the most popular n tags. I have no idea what the value of n is.
Sometimes there are tags that are so strange that I can't imagine multiple people would by chance pick that same tag, how comes it that those get picked by so many people anyway?
Tag spamming. Watch for comments that say "tag this article mrsuffleuffogus". Sometimes others will comply. In addition, some people, like this guy [slashdot.org] have sock puppet accounts. Also, I've seen /.ers collaborating on IRC/Twitter/etc. to get articles tagged a certain way or to attack a particular user.
The Beta Index is horrible (Score:5, Informative)
Re:The Beta Index is horrible (Score:5, Insightful)
I hate loading content without refresh. This is becoming standard on too many websites. IT BREAKS THE BEHAVIOR OF THE BACK BUTTON. Such use of JavaScript should be reserved for minor interface interactions, like saving settings or opening a login prompt.
It's getting really annoying how, after decades of desktop API development and interface conventions, the web has come along and not only required everyone to reinvent APIs for every website, but custom interface behaviors as well. It's like we're back to MS-DOS programs when it was every man for himself.
There's my cranky rant for the day.
UI plea (Score:4, Insightful)
Would you hire a great UI designer and make a brand new layout or skin that is easier to read and navigate?
I have my preferences pared back to skeletal for readability - but makes the site look painfully ugly
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Well, who stops you from submitting a Greasemonkey script that replaces the CSS files to userscripts.org?
It's actually very very easy to do. (As long as you know how to use a CSS editor, the CSS docs and maybe a bit of JS.)
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It's not the UI, it's the whole UX. Slashdot has gotten harder to use, slower to load and no better for all the effort.
What was so wrong with the primarily HTML version that you had to bork it like this?
At a time the world is moving to mobile, you guys are sending down half a meg of front page and making the interaction entirely too tricky and cute to "just plain work" everywhere.
I'm reading Slashdot less and less.
WASD customization (Score:5, Funny)
What about people on non-QWERTY keyboards? Can you create a user option for what key does what?
Re:WASD customization (Score:5, Funny)
Why is this modded funny? I use Dvorak, and I'm sure there are plenty of other /.ers who do, too.
Then there are the people using foreign language layout - AZERTY, etc.
Re:WASD customization (Score:5, Funny)
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Exactly. I use the German NEO 2.0 layout [neo-layout.org]. Which is much much better than Dvorak. With 6 shift levels. (Seriously!) And my QWERTY-line goes XVLCWK.
Feature request -- (Score:5, Insightful)
Please fix the user pages. The new way of doing it where our comments are buried several clicks in is irritating. The only reason most of us go to our own user pages is to see if anyone's replied to our comment.
Re:Feature request -- (Score:5, Interesting)
I emailed Malda about this when it was first implemented, here's
what he said:
Doesn't make any sense to me though. I've always considered my user page to be for my own benefit, not others. Slashdot isn't myspace. I never read anyone else's user page, and I doubt anyone reads mine. But there you have it. His solution for people like us? Bookmark slashdot.org/~username/comments.
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Well. We can always create the "F.U. Malda, this is my web, and I will have it my way" Greasemonkey/Firefox extension. ^^
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Why stop there? Slashdot is open source, let's fork it!
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I never read anyone else's user page, and I doubt anyone reads mine.
I read other people's user pages, but mostly to see their comments on other stories.
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Exactly. When someone posts something really good I check to see whether they consistently make good posts, and if so I add them to my friends list.
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The reasoning behind the change probably doesn't match what the user base believes.
They could just make the comments page the default when you click on your own name.
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Are they could, know you, make it a user preference setting as to where it goes.
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I also use my user page to find comments I've made, but I'm annoyed by it, too, but I can kind of see his point: on almost every single other internet site ever, your user/profile page is there to inform others, not yourself. On most sites I never visit a page about myself.
However, I'm usually only interested in my most recent comments, so I don't see why Malda can't go halfway where you get the brief bio, then the most recent comments, then the whole feed action thing (which I feel is useless for anyone,
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Firefox is smart. It now knows that if I hit ^T s (or Alt-D s) that I want to see my slashdot comments, 'cause that's how I do.
Re:Feature request -- (Score:4, Informative)
http://slashdot.org/users.pl
http://slashdot.org/users.pl?nick=harry666t
http://slashdot.org/users.pl?uid=1337
Dear
please don't take the good old users.pl away.
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I never read anyone else's user page, and I doubt anyone reads mine.
I do read other people's user pages when I want to look at their... that's right, comment history.
I certainly don't care about what stories they've tagged. Why should I?
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My question is, how long until we have the capability to post pics on slashdot?
How long until we have the capability to post UTF-8 text to slashdot? I've had several comments recently where I've wanted to include a bit of Russian or Chinese or Japanese text, because it was relevant and would eliminate the need to talk around a direct quote that would help people who could read the other language (or feed it to babblefish ;-). But we're still stuck back in the day of ASCII text, with maybe a few diacritica
Re:Feature request -- (Score:5, Interesting)
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Why not just set it to send you a message when someone replies to one of your comments?
Other than the fact that the feature doesn't work? No reason.
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I seem to get a message every time someone replies to one of my comments. I also seem to get a message any time one of my comments is moderated, any time a friend updates a journal, or any time a relationship which involves me is made or broken. Am I hallucinating?
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I would define not working as using Firefox 3.0.7, going into help and preferences off the main page, and under "your preferences" - "user info" - selecting "messages", then setting "comment reply" to "web"... and then having absolutely no change or popup or anything on any page I view. I'm at a loss for even knowing where "web messages" go. The feature isn't exactly documented. Slashdot mirrors linux documentation in that regard -- six thousand different program options and defaults, and about 3 sentences
Amen to that. What about total number of comments? (Score:2)
Is there any way to see a user's total number of comments? The old comment page would display the last 24 of X, where X was the total number of comments from that user account.
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Couldn't agree more!
GreaseMonkey hack to fix user pages (Score:3, Interesting)
A while back I wrote a GreaseMonkey script [neilmcallister.com] to switch the User page back to the old behavior. With this script installed, when you click on your username you go immediately to the comments list, like how it used to work. Try it out and send me feedback if it works/doesn't work for you.
BTW, IMHO this whole effort to "modernize Slashdot" has been a total disaster. I have all the new Indexes turned off, but the UI is still much worse than it was before they started playing around with it. The old layout plus th
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Seconded.
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And if you're on an iPhone, it sucks even worse. [slashdot.org] The CSS is totally borked--the right column is a fixed width and overlaps your comment scores so you can't see them at all. [pixelcity.com] But thank God for cruft! You can still go to http://slashdot.org/users.pl?nick=YourNameHere [slashdot.org] and see the old version.
Speaking of code and the iPhone, it's be nice if there were a good version of Slashdot for the iPhone and iPod touch (and Palm Pre, and Blackberry Storm, and Android), like every single other major site out there. (Even Wik
javascript (Score:3, Insightful)
Bring back meta! (Score:4, Insightful)
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Turning it off. (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not fond of the new beta index or the new user page system. Can they be turned off?
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I tried the new index a while ago and then went back to the old one.
I'm not sure if the option to go back to the old one is still available and
I won't enable the new index to find out, in case I get stuck there.
The option should be available on the help page under Index or
Index Beta Settings (Use Beta Index checkbox):
http://slashdot.org/help [slashdot.org]
The old user page is here:
http://slashdot.org/users.pl [slashdot.org]
C-X C-preview (Score:4, Funny)
worksforme (Score:3, Interesting)
D2 and the beta index are working great for me, aside from the hiccup with the comments pane a couple of days ago.
I would like to see meta-moderation revisited, as this is the only way to mitigate coordinated group mods. Since the old mm system was dropped, I've seen an uptick in bizarre moderation.
I know my karma is going to take a hit for this, but I had to say it. Taco, you're doing a fine job. KDawson, I don't hate you. We understand why you have to do Idle. All in all, Slashdot is pretty great.
Actually making things worse in Thunderbird! (Score:2)
I think keyboard bindings and some useful dynamics are nice. But there still are many ways to read the site without any JavaScript.
One of them is the RSS reader included in Thunderbird. The whole "I want to have the highest rated comment on the top, and the rest cascading (not flat)" is not working anymore since that crappy new system. Even on links from Thunderbird that open in Firefox. I still get old input boxes in old styles.
When will you finally create a way to detect what comments are on the same dept
Keybindings (Score:2)
No Hidden modes (Score:2)
Fantastic! (Score:2)
Now, when are you going to get around to doing something with the /palm (mobile) portion of the website?
You're only about 6 years behind in development on it.
Even FOX NEWS (http://foxnews.proteus.com/) completely blows /. away in mobile web page functionality. /palm is a joke and should be retired.
I like where this is going (Score:2)
I find a lot of these new features interesting, I like how stories seem to pop onto the page in near-realtime. Hopefully this will develop into the future of news sites. I can't wait until comments pop into threads in near-realtime as well.
Just wish these enhancements were implemented as user-selectable "themes", though. A lot of these tweaks obviously break distiller scripts and user interface habits.
Is there a version of slashdot for mobile users (other than the rss feed?). I think AvantSlash has stop
IE8 (Score:2)
How about updating the front-page to work with IE8 now it's all standards compliant? It clearly doesn't think the page is standards-compliant so offers the "compatibility view"; both produce JavaScript errors and neither renders correctly.
Ahhh....
You hear that?
That was the sound of a thousand geeks exploding in rage at once.
*dons flameproof jacket and awaits IE rage*
Please restore small right column! (Score:2, Insightful)
What I strongly dislike is the disproportionally wide right slashboxes column. I guess that's so you can display big-image ads without breaking the layout, right? It's a shame that Slashdopt goes to such a low to make BAD DESIGN DESICIONS in order to just display slightly different ads (it's not that the there are no other ads which worked just fine on the homepage without breaking the layout).
The big right column takes away to much from what it the one thing I visit slashdot for: The stories. The differenc
Rainbow wtf? (Score:5, Insightful)
What's with the rainbow colours? Each story has a little flash of colour on it, and then top right there's a dropdown with some colours on it, and if I choose a colour the stories all seem to dance about a bit and shuffle around. What. The. Flip? And then on the top left there's an 'Edit' box which has - amongst it's other unexplained options - another colour selector. Which does what? I have no idea. Is it some kind of quality thing? I don't have a map of quality to colour in my head. This is meaningless. And don't try and explain what it all means - I'm trying to read the news here, I don't want to have to read a manual. I'll go elsewhere.
And what do colour-blind people think? At least if you are playing with colour be smart and use Color Brewer palettes.
Honestly, I think slashdot looked pretty good enough in 2002:
http://web.archive.org/web/20020806091841/slashdot.org/ [archive.org]
- go back to that, change the fonts and colours a bit, perfect.
Another recent example of a design-gone-bad - www.freshmeat.net - is the current new implementation:
http://www.freshmeat.net/ [freshmeat.net]
really better in terms of ease of use than 2002?
http://web.archive.org/web/20020603034258/http://freshmeat.net/ [archive.org]
Raaaaage!
B
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Yeah, at least some friggin' tooltips on buttons/images etc would be helpful. And for the love of pete, wtf is "daddypants"?
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Is that a vocal majority, the majority of users with mod points, or the actual majority?
Mark Stories as read? (Score:4, Insightful)
Sometimes, I won't read /. for a couple of days. Then I'll bring up the site and start reading through stories. After I've read (or scanned over) several stories, I might need to go do something else, and so I close the page.
Now a few hours later, I come back. There are a few new stories I haven't seen, followed by a big chunk I have seen, followed by another chunk I haven't seen, going back to whatever story I read last two days ago. Trying to figure out my place is a pain.
I'd love to see a personalized index in which I check off stories as read, and they disappear. If I close the page and come back later, only those stories not marked as read would be listed.
I know you can do something like this with an RSS reader, such as Google Reader. But I really prefer to read stories directly on Slashdot.
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For that matter, wouldn't it be more in line with the spirit of the site to use HJKL for navigation?
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C-b, C-f, C-p, C-n. There is no editor but emacs, and RMS is its prophet.
Of course these bindings would probably conflict with all sorts of things that the browser itself responds to. :-)
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I've no hard evidence whatsoever for this, but I suspect the convention started with "Doom".
They wanted the function-keys to used for operations (run, map etc) which, if they were to lie under the pinky, would make WASD the most naturally accessible replication of the classic arrow-key layout for the remaining three fingers. And, as everyone knows, id-software set the benchmark for FPS for years.
Personally I don't have any problem with it. I can't conceive of any arrangement on a QWERTY keyboard that's si
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What's the history behind the silly WASD choice?
From Wikipedia: [wikipedia.org]
The first game to use WASD was the 1992 first person role playing game Ultima Underworld, which used the elaborate WASDX2 default control setup (with X as backpedal and 2 as run), but the scheme wasn't popularized until John Romero implemented it in 1996 for Quake.[citation needed] This has led to the nickname "Romero Key Controls".
Mod parent up - this is slashdot. (Score:3, Interesting)
This is "news for nerds", not "I can't believe it's not gmail".
I had set my Slashdot options tuned down until I had a nice clean low-graphics high-content interface with a minimum of surprising keystroke stealing. Every update to Slashdot has made it mankier and flakier. How about a Slashdot lite classic mode that backs things up to about 2002 or so?
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Indeed, not using UTF-8 is one of the things that annoy me the most about Slashdot. For a website that's supposed to be run by nerds, it's just shameful.
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I'd actually like to see a decent survey done. Nationality, languages spoken, where currently living.