Forum:Future of Slashdot

Its been awhile since I hopped up on the soapbox, but I guess nows the time. First, a status report: We got about a million hits last week. The new server and connection to UPN held up fine. We saturated the T1 a bit, but the T3 will be in soon. The DNS moved on monday and it seems to be cool. I also wanted to plug Linux-HW who sent us the new 9gig hard drive. Muchos thanks. I also added some links in the 'older stuff' box so you can link directly to previous days stories in the normal homepage format. Much more convenient. Click below to read about Slashdot user accounts and other nifty features that will be coming.

Ok, first the major news- I'm leaving my job at TIG when the new semester starts up. I decided there was no way that I could devote the time that Slashdot needs, go to school, and still work a job. This hopefully means that I'll have time to add some new desperately needed features. I probably won't be able to afford to remain unemployed for longer than a few months though unless I can find a few decent freelance jobs setting up web sites for people.

The next majorish feature that I plan to add will be user accounts. You'll be able to validate your account to hopefully prevent folks from posting as other people (thanks to the children in the audience who abused the system. You've ruined it for everyone). We'll allow anonymous cowards to hide somehow, but things have gone to far on several occasions to let this go on much longer. I'm all for open discussion, but if you post as someone else, well that just isn't cool.

We'll probably implement this fairly simply- you'll enter you email address into a form, and it will send you a password. From then on if you want to post using your name/email, you'll need to enter the password (we'll probably allow it to be saved in a cookie for those of you who haven't fallen for all the cookie paranoia that goes around).

We could use accounts to track other things too- flat/thread mode for example. Perhaps filter the homepage to only display the topics you like. It's wide open and really limited only to how much I have time to code, and how many clock cycles the server has to spare.

If you have ideas about this stuff, post them here, or you can email me, but I probably won't have time to reply. You can subscribe to slash-devel (send 'subscribe' to [e-mail]) if you are interested in helping develop Slash (there are at least a half dozen sites running Slash already, with dozens more under development).

Allright enough typing. Go back to whatever it is that you were doing.