Afternoon Wrapup

Sean McPherson wrote in to say that issue #32 of the Linux Gazette is now out. Several folks wrote in to say that the very geeky/very funny User Friendly comic strip has moved. New domain. New design. And it's funny too. I had a submission about a web site that featured the destruction of Beanie Babies, but whoever sent it in forgot the URL. Someone should definately post it in the comments if they know it. I'm all for destruction of beanie babies. Finally, you should go to this page and click on product information. It's just something funny for those of us who've read far to much badly translated tech stuff. This one takes the cake. sunDevil for sending it in. Apparently I get 72 magic powers if I buy their mobo? I can't tell. Last hit the link below to read a batch of misc. notes from todays Slashdot code changes.

Most of the major bugs are squashed at this point. Here's a sorta non-comprehensive list of what got done today. I'm sure I forgot a bunch of stuff, but this covers most of them that people will notice.

Done

1. Comment Submission code got a serious overhaul. Your user account now determines if you are in plaintext or html mode. Plus you can edit and submit on the preview page. now preview is actually useful.
2. Fixed the bug that caused names to disappear from flat mode.
3. Your user preferences now are used to determine pollBooth comment display mode (flat vs. threaded). Thank god that one is done.
4. Stories now go into YY/MM/DD/ subdirectories. The original articles directory has thousands of files in it, I figured I'd stop that before it got any more dangerous.
5. You can change your password now in user accounts. It's not the most secure method (I just added a password & confirm box to the form) but it'll work. And now people can have passwords that you can remember instead of my uber wacky random ones.
6. I added 'pending' stories. It's not a big deal, it just lets us submit stories, but not have them display. We really don't need it on a site like Slashdot, but other sites using the code will really benefit. I'm working on a site that needed it anyway.
7. If you change your 'Real Email' address in your user account, it will email a notification message to the old email address.
8. Nate wrote some nifty functions for time handling so hopefully all of our cookie woes are now completely gone. I still haven't tested IE, but Lynx & NS seem cool to me.
9. Various other random back end features that won't really affect users, but will make my life a lot easier.
10. Added NOTIFY=NEVER to email messages so the bouncy bouncy mail doesn't end up in [e-mail]'s mailbox.

Todo

1. I'm probably going to hafta figure out an automatic way to stop the First Post Syndrome. It's really getting annoying. FPS posts are off topic people! Please don't bother people with them. Currently the best ideas for stopping them include randomizing the order of the first 5 top level comments or else writing some wacky regex's to filter 'em out.
2. A headline mailer. It'll be integrated with user accounts. Add a checkbox to have Slashdot Headlines mailed at midnight. I'll get that sooner or later.
3. Comment posting sig files? Maybe an 80 char limit. Something small.
4. Bite the bullet and make Slashdot fully GMT instead of this eastern stuff.
5. Several major chunks of the backend code need an overhaul.
6. I was considering allowing a user account option to have replies to your posts emailed to you. Not sure about that one though. Would people really want that? Conversations might go to email instead of getting posted here. Often that would be a wonderful thing, but probably just as often, it makes more sense for the conversation flow to continue online. Anyway, thats a bit off yet.

Well thats about it for now. 8:30 class tomorrow so no beer tonight. Well, maybe some beer. Oooh, and whiskey.