Slashdot Notes

I've got several misc. comments to babble about related to Slash, Slashdot, and whatever else I think of before my ISP times me out (this will also answer the mystery of the (score:x) thing that several of you have emailed about), so click the link below to read it if you're interested.

First, the changes to Slash ended up being much more significant than I originally intented. Basically I went ahead and implemented about a third of my TODO list for v0.4 instead of just releasing v0.3. Among the list of features worth nothing i are

1. moderation (of course- read on for notes about that)
2. section isolation (not done yet, but this will allow Taco Hell to be 100% isolated from Ask Slashdot. This way you could theoretically run several Slash sites off the same server without wasting resources. Still needs a fair amount of work)
3. Section flexibility is almost done. Most of the index generator, article generator and comment generator has been rewritten. Slash sites will half pretty darn close to total control over each of these things by simply editing the configuration stuff.
4. Thresholds - this is kinda a strange one. With moderation, each comment will have a score associated with it. Users will be able to filter their view of Slashdot to only see what they want. Non-Anonymous posts are granted 1 point, so if you want to read Slashdot but filter the ACs, you can set your thresh to be 1. Moderators could theoretically still give points to ACs as well, so if you do that, you'll see hopefully read the good stuff.
5. I rewrote how user account data is stored internally to use hashes instead of some arrays. Now I can add new user preferences with much less effort. After I tar up this version, I'm going to take some time off of the perl hacking, and when I'm ready to attack it again, I plan to start adding whatever makes sense in the preferences sections (new modes? definable page sizes? Filterable homepages?)

So when is it going up? parts of it already have, but I've run into a really strange bug. Several folks have also seen it- basically Apache or mod_perl seems to hiccup and send the wrong page to people occasionally. It's odd, you'll be running foo.pl, and see a perfectly legitimate bar.pl output. If anyone know anything about this, or has encountered it (nate has the same problem in Everything2 which is currently under pretty heavy development) please let me know. When I sort that out, I'll be able to copy over the devel stuff to take advantage of this stuff.

Also please don't bother emailing and asking for moderator access. I've sort of unofficially decided that anyone who asks will be denied simply to be fair. We've selected a few people, and plan to select a few more until we're sure the code is solid. Then new moderators will be selected based on the scores of their comments. So if ya wanna moderate, I guess just post good/interesting/ontopic/wellwritten /insightful comments.

I've got a truckload of photography homework to get done, along with the normal middle of the semester hell. Except that since ALS is next week, I need to get it all out of the way. So I may be somewhat unresponsive to email until the homework is caught up.