SlashNET Forum (And Important Comments Note)

Last minute reminder that your chance to throw virtual pies or virtual beers at my head is today at 6pm (My time:EST) on irc.slashdot.org in #Forum. I'll answer questions about Slashdot or whatever people are interested in. It'll be fun. Next note that I made a significant change to the comments display system last night. This change isn't necessarily permanent, and is definately open to alteration. Some of you have noticed and emailed already about it. Click the link below to read my description and explanation. I'm going to give it a few days, and put it to a poll.

Ok, first lets get our terms straight. The old comment display code is called Latch Key Kid mode (LKKM) and the new code is called Un-wed Mother Mode (UWMM). Those names will change to something appropriate later *grin*. Also, when I say a "Full" comment, I mean the full text, and when I say a "Header" comment, I mean the single line that you normally see in a thread list.

Ok, first how LKKM. This basically displays all siblings and full mode, and all descendants as headers. This is how things have worked here so far. The positive side is that it makes reading all comments at the same depth very easy. The downside (and this is a doozy) is that when the conversations get long, this page can swell to 300k or more. A several minute download on a modem connection. This takes readers longer than it should, and ties httpd forks up excessively.

The new UWMM is slightly different. When you click on a comment, rather then displaying the siblings, it displays the comment you clicked on, and its descendant. Children are displayed in full mode, descendants are displayed as headers. Links from the Mother comment are provided to the Mother's siblings. This means smaller pages, but for discussions that exceed 100 comments, its leaps and bounds quicker to download.

So thats the gist. This is all up for debate. Many of you will hate change (if there is one thing I've learned running Slashdot, its that there is a group of people for whom any change is evil, and I'm satan for implementing it) and I hope you'll just give it a chance. I'm open to suggestions on how we can clean it up or tweak it. I'll keep tweaking things until we get it right. And then we'll put it to a poll. So hang in there.

So no flames. No bitching. Lets see how this works and resolve the issues with it. I want this new mode to work if at all possible because it will solve many of our performance issues for both clients and the server.

Also note that there are many things on my TODO list right now, including NNTP back ends, Mirroring, Squid Chaching, limiting comment pages to X comments at a time with next and previous links, DNS Round Robinning etc etc etc. I appreciate everyone suggesting these ideas, and many of them will be implemented as I have time or new hardware when it is required. But please understand that hundreds of people have suggested each of these (and dozens of other good) ideas before. So lets deal with this issue now, and those later, please? thanks

Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda