Please also review our SoylentNews Moderation Guidelines.
As always, we are willing to make changes to the system, but please post examples *with* links to any cases of suspected mod abuse. It's a lot easier to justify changing the system when evidence is in black and white. I also recommend that users make serious proposals on changes we can make. I'm not going to color the discussion with my own opinions, but as always, I will respond inline with comments when this goes live, and post a follow up article a few days after this one
(Score: 5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 20 2015, @10:23AM
If you see unfairly modded post, mod it.
If you see AC whine about moderation, remember these:
http://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?sid=4502&cid=109163 [soylentnews.org]
http://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?sid=7195&cid=175480 [soylentnews.org]
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(Score: 2) by kaszz on Wednesday May 20 2015, @10:35AM
Which means Anonymous Coward may have something interesting to say but on messing around the big club should be used right away. Kind of like whack-a-mole for the bad AC posts.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 20 2015, @10:39AM
Thanks for the memories! Those are some hilarious comments. And only half of them are mine!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 22 2015, @12:44PM
there was some awesome comments in that list. some people either don't have a sense of humor or don't get sarcastic irony
(Score: 5, Informative) by Marand on Wednesday May 20 2015, @12:16PM
Know what's more important than futzing with the moderation system more? Fixing the busted-ass "read more" feature.
AC posted a 142 line comment and it got truncated at 140 lines, but then added "Read the rest of this comment..." for a net savings of one line. About the only way it could be more useless is if it made the post longer than it started.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 20 2015, @01:28PM
I fully agree. I think there should be two values: A minimum amount of text always shown, and a minimum amount of additional text before the "read more" mechanism kicks in. Both could be user configurable, but need sane defaults.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Wednesday May 20 2015, @04:52PM
Alternatively after the "read more" text tell me how much more text there is in the comment. If I see a value that is really low I can assume there is nothing more of value.
(Score: 2) by TK on Wednesday May 20 2015, @04:55PM
Since you're already at +5 I'm just going to reply to show my agreement.
Something like: do not truncate 141-150 lines; truncate 151 lines to 140.
That at in-page expansion of comments, but I think I remember the devs talking about that being a fairly complicated feature to implement (or with, gasp! javascript).
The fleas have smaller fleas, upon their backs to bite them, and those fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 20 2015, @05:01PM
I would also like to see the "read the rest of this comment" line include the number of additional lines to help me decide if I really want to click it. For example, "read the rest of this comment (50 more lines)"
(Score: 5, Informative) by paulej72 on Wednesday May 20 2015, @05:58PM
I tried to fix this once, and I could not figure out how the code worked. There is some serious voodoo code at work with this system. Even more so than the typical slash code. If anyone wants to figure it out and post a fix, I am willing to merge it in.
I figured it would be a few lines of code to make the read more only come up if the end would be long enough to justify it, but my code tracing skills were not up to the task of finding out where the truncation was happening.
Team Leader for SN Development
(Score: 3, Interesting) by NCommander on Wednesday May 20 2015, @10:34PM
I took a stab at this myself, and my mind melted. My best guess it was dependent on a behavior in old MySQL versions that changed. When we first setup the site, excessive edits were required since the codebase assumed it was running on a version of MySQL from 2008 (MySQL 3.xx something). I need to take a second look at it and try and fix it now that I've gotten more familiar with the code internals.
Still always moving
(Score: 2) by Marand on Thursday May 21 2015, @09:01AM
There is some serious voodoo code at work with this system. Even more so than the typical slash code.
You're definitely right about that. I took a cursory glance and it's...um...something. I don't know the codebase so I was just searching around, and I saw that it's checking a database value for length and max length (which defaults to 4096 in the sql schema), which seemed like a good start, but that lead dead-ended when I tried actually figuring out where the truncation actually happens. Or is supposed to be happening.
Seems like it'd be easy to set up new truncation rules if you could actually figure out where the magic is happening, but goddamn. Some useful fucking comments would have been great, but the original authors were too pro for that shit I guess. You have my condolences for having to deal with this stuff, it looks like a nightmare. Too much "look at me, I'm clever!" and not enough "# this is what my clever code does".
(Score: 2) by paulej72 on Sunday May 24 2015, @04:14PM
Well with some help from FatPhil, I tracked down the error. The code already had some fuzzy logic for the end, but there was a bug in saving the data to Memcache. The full text version was getting saved to the truncated version location, when ever the full text of the comment was loaded. So after the first time the full text was loaded all users would see the full text instead of the truncated version.
This code has been added to the new rehash code, which should be going live soonish.
Team Leader for SN Development