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Slightly later than planned (due mostly to the holiday season and people's lives away from SN being hectic) the next bunch of updates for the site is ready to go. It's a bumper crop!
We have some further changes to the moderation system. As before, this is certainly not the end of changes in this area, rather another step along the road of improvement. We will be watching how the changes affect moderation usage with a view to further improvements.
There's also a number of more general improvements and bug fixes.
All being well these changes should go live around 03:00 26th January UTC. So no need for alarm if there's some minor site disruption at that point. Changes went live at approximately 22:00 31st January UTC.
As always, feedback will be welcome once this deployed.
A major thanks to TheMightyBuzzard for the bulk of the work, paulej72 for sanity checking and martyb for testing/QA.
More details after the break....
Admin Note: it looks like we found a late breaking bug that is a blocker for this update. Spam mods are not showing up to the admins with the proper unmodding options. We will update when we find the issue. Hopefully this will be fixed in the next day or so.
Moderation Changes
- Every account older than one month and set willing to moderate gets points every day.
- You can moderate and post in the same discussion in any order, except your own comments of course.
- The most common mod reason now shows as the mod reason.
- Added a new +0 Disagree mod.
- Added a new +1 Touche mod for especially good rejoinders.
- Removed Overrated.
- Added a new -1 Spam mod (inflicts -10 to the karma of the spammer).
- Added a link to appropriate comments for all editors and admins to undo Spam moderations and temporarily ban the moderator from moderating again if the Spam moderation is considered unwarranted.
First ban length is one month, subsequent ones are six months.
General Changes
- Major changes to user input processing filters.
Things in input boxes should stay exactly the same when you hit preview now, among other things. - Added user referencing with @user: or @#uid:.
This only links to their info page for the moment. - Added sup, sub, sarc/sarcasm, strike, and abbr tags to the allowed tags list for comments and stories.
- RSS/Atom feeds should no longer display html-encoded entities as entities in most viewers.
- RSS/Atom feeds now use https links exclusively.
- Added support for international domain names and links that otherwise contain unicode as well as warning when one does.
- Added an option to "Show link domains in comments and stories" here.
Gives the same [soylentnews.org] behavior to links in stories as in comments. - Added two new site themes.
- Several minor to moderate bug fixes that you likely never noticed a need for.
An honourable mention...
New functionality that didn't quite make it into the final cut for this update, but is available for testing on our dev environment.
- Adding a pre-alpha of a soylentnews API. Currently only supports anonymous calls. Usage details here.
As always, feedback will be welcome once this deployed.
(Score: -1, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 26 2015, @12:07PM
Yup, you are right. New will be worst since we are not allowed to even veiw the process until after they screw up!.
"As always, feedback will be welcome once this deployed. " - We can only talk about the process after they deploy it. Great design!
YUP one site:
"Due to excessive bad posting from this IP or Subnet, comment posting has temporarily been disabled. If it's you, consider this a chance to sit in the timeout corner. If it's someone else, this is a chance to hunt them down. If you think this is unfair, please email admin@soylentnews.org with your MD5'd IPID and SubnetID, which are "xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx" and "xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx". "
They cannot take people disagreeing with them. And tracking us anyway. Already using their new broken "SPAM" blocking, for non-spam.
(Score: 3, Informative) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday January 26 2015, @02:13PM
You're funny. How would we do that when the deployment was halted for a non-bug caused by a slight difference between the dev server and production server? That message has nothing to do with the Spam mod and everything to do with an automatic response to your ipid* being modded Troll one time too many. That was behavior baked into slashcode when we got it, we just haven't done anything about it because pretty much nobody has complained about it and we have limited time.
* Our code doesn't store ip or subnet addresses, only a one-way hash of them called ipid and subnetid. So, we could , and the code does, tell one AC from another but not any actual useful information about them. Now we do occasionally get an ip address in the apache log but i haven't seen any for anything but 404s by bots trying automated hacks, mostly php exploits.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 01 2015, @01:42PM
SPAM processing is SPAM processing.
Blocking users, any users from posting is black listing which is SPAM processing.
Saying a user has posted to many negative post and block their post is SPAM processing.
Because you hate negative posts for negative post sake, maybe you show move one an do thinks that are good for the SN not yourself.
PS: Still being block a week later... SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM
SN is the GODS play ground!
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday February 01 2015, @02:09PM
Newp, that's still troll processing and I'm not going to cancel my relocation leave to remove that bit of code so some troll can shit-talk me more easily. Your fellow users are the ones who marked you troll so many times that you found something no other troll has found to my knowledge; take it up with them.
tl;dr Try civility if you want someone to put extra time and effort in on your behalf.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.