posted by
NCommander
on Monday February 23 2015, @12:00PM
from the inqurying-devs-want-to-know dept.
from the inqurying-devs-want-to-know dept.
It's time for everyone's favorite game, poll the community! We're getting ready for one of the largest updates to the site since we went live originally. For those who are semi-familiar with this site, and its history, this trace from our
devtest site should sum everything up on what's coming.
Yes, your eyes do not deceive you. We've finally got the monster to run on mod_perl 2, and are currently working to try and squish any remaining bugs for preparation to deployment. Since this long standing TODO item is finally about to be closed, I'd like to see any feedback from the community on what they feel some of the most pressing fixes or features should be.
Now, I know I've been somewhat quiet for the last few months, mostly due to dealing with personal issues, but I'm hoping I can sit down and get some serious work done on SN in the near future. I would like to thank both the staff and the community for coping with my absence, and let's make 2015 a year to remember.
[Update: Added link to our devtest site. If you find anything of interest, you can: note it as a comment in this story, mention it on our Internet Relay Chat (IRC) #Soylent, or submit a bug on GitHub. And THANKS!]
HTTP/1.1 200 OK Server: Apache/2.2.29 (Unix) DAV/2 mod_apreq2-20090110/2.8.0 mod_perl/2.0.8 Perl/v5.20.1 X-Powered-By: slashcode 15.01 X-Bender: Yes! I got the most! I win X-Mas! Cache-Control: no-cache Pragma: no-cache Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Encoding: gzip Transfer-Encoding: chunked Date: Sat, 21 Feb 2015 21:30:43 GMT X-Varnish: 568804918 Age: 0 Via: 1.1 varnish Connection: keep-alive
Yes, your eyes do not deceive you. We've finally got the monster to run on mod_perl 2, and are currently working to try and squish any remaining bugs for preparation to deployment. Since this long standing TODO item is finally about to be closed, I'd like to see any feedback from the community on what they feel some of the most pressing fixes or features should be.
Now, I know I've been somewhat quiet for the last few months, mostly due to dealing with personal issues, but I'm hoping I can sit down and get some serious work done on SN in the near future. I would like to thank both the staff and the community for coping with my absence, and let's make 2015 a year to remember.
[Update: Added link to our devtest site. If you find anything of interest, you can: note it as a comment in this story, mention it on our Internet Relay Chat (IRC) #Soylent, or submit a bug on GitHub. And THANKS!]
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What Does the Community Want in the Next Release of Slashcode?
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(Score: 5, Insightful) by GungnirSniper on Monday February 23 2015, @12:11PM
Rewrite in PHP!
::ducks::
Where's the list of remaining bugs? The site seems pretty feature complete, although adding a way to reward submitters and accepted submitters may help keep the queue full.
Tips for better submissions to help our site grow. [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 4, Informative) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday February 23 2015, @01:12PM
Here for the Apache 1.x codebase: https://github.com/SoylentNews/slashcode/issues [github.com]
And here for the spankin new 2.x codebase: https://github.com/SoylentNews/SoylentCode/issues [github.com]
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 4, Funny) by bryan on Monday February 23 2015, @09:31PM
Only a crazy person would do such a thing!
(Score: 2) by GungnirSniper on Tuesday February 24 2015, @04:30AM
Or a Texan Maverick.
Tips for better submissions to help our site grow. [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 24 2015, @06:37AM
that weird pipedot guy is almost as crazy as some dude that wrote an irc bot in php :p
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Monday February 23 2015, @12:14PM
I was wondering who had won X-mas, knowing it hadn't been me.... ;)
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. I have always been here. ---Gaaark 2.0 --
(Score: 5, Interesting) by prospectacle on Monday February 23 2015, @12:15PM
..so you have to post often to maintain your current level, or to increase it further to shore it up in case of unexpected time away or bad ratings.
Of course karma seems kind of trivial on the surface, but once you start earning or losing it, it's easy to start thinking of it as a game you're playing, and you want to win.
If you couldn't sit on your pile of karma and sleep, like smaug in his treasure cave, but instead you had to maintain it with regular participation and positive ratings, then I think most people would be more motivated to participate more often. Maybe only a little, but noticeably.
If you could also get higher than 50, (maybe make the ceiling effectively unreachable and so virtually infinite), then you would want to get more and more as a sort of buffer against decay, or bad reviews.
If karma is a game designed to encourage interesting, entertaining and insightful comment, then I think these simple changes to the rules would make the game more effective at that purpose.
By the way it's good to see you back in town, so to speak
If a plan isn't flexible it isn't realistic
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 23 2015, @12:31PM
Karma points should be handed out in larger batches. Reason of Karma (over/underrate and such) should not be tied to Karma points at all. Allow voters (all) to up to 5 points in anyway they wish. All on one message to over 5 messages or any combo adding up to 5.
And stop blocking posters becuase you hate the messages of SN poor choices. It is SN motto to "SoylentNews is people". And the posters are the people. Why we left /. At least /. still allows meaningful conversations with the games of who's browser is it.
Do you get this???
Due to excessive bad posting from this IP or Subnet, anonymous comment posting has temporarily been disabled. You can still login to post. However, if bad posting continues from your IP or Subnet that privilege could be revoked as well. If it's you, consider this a chance to sit in the timeout corner or login and improve your posting. 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 "xxxxxx" and "xxxxx".
(Score: 5, Informative) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday February 23 2015, @12:43PM
Again, for probably the tenth time or so, this is fully automated bit of legacy slashcode activated when ACs get modded Troll too often and is done entirely by your peers in the community. Create an account or troll less and it will stop happening. But, judging by how you repeatedly keep posting this whine after it's been explained to you, you're not going to listen. I think I may just save this reply for copy and paste purposes for next time.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 23 2015, @05:35PM
If SN is broken, then fix it instead of buring it blaming else where.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by janrinok on Monday February 23 2015, @05:58PM
[nostyle RIP 06 May 2025]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 23 2015, @06:06PM
> The solution is in your hands, not dev's.
Beware unintended consequences.
There is more than one solution in his hands.
He could stop posting as a troll.
Or he could pay ~$3/month for a VPN service that gives him access to thousands of IP addresses distributed around the world.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 24 2015, @01:53AM
Actually you a factual wrong.
Posting as an AC, it take 1 person mark something as a troll, not a community. SN does not want to fix something that is broken. If you are marked as SPAM with a -10 penalty, someone reviews that. They will not fix the same system that blocks people for months, trying to rip away the AC badge.
What they do not tell you that they already have the ability, by "marking" your browser and IP. That is how they are blocking AC.
My personal profile as 50 karma points already. AC posting is harder. It easy to be knocked down. SN so far makes it permanent, unless you a few spare IPs that is :P
And "big bird" there is the programmer helped take out "overrated", to me that hypocrisy.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 24 2015, @06:58AM
i like posting as AC in political, religious and science flame wars and i get modded down regularly for it (to be expected - why i don't post as myself). i've never hit any kind of limiter (except for the usual gotta wait a minute thing)
how many comments are you posting and how many of them are being downmodded? do you suspect you're being targeted by a specific user or users that share an opposing view on something (for example, are your comments of a certain political bent)? any info or data you can provide surrounding the issue might help work out if there is a need to change the mod system or if there is some other sort of issue. the mod system is in an experimental phase so i don't think anyone assumes it's perfect - see https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=14/12/30/1533217 [soylentnews.org] and https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=14/12/08/2030211 [soylentnews.org].
maybe hop onto http://chat.soylentnews.org/ [soylentnews.org] and work through the issues with the devs. its harder to work through technical problems in the comments here. slash is a big complicated beast, and our devs are volunteers so if you can work with them to nail down any specific issues in realtime i think it would help a lot.
the soylent staff are pretty reasonable, so as long as you approach them courteously and don't try to impose any unreasonable expectations on them you'll more likely resolve any issues you're having. they're also human so if they say something that offends you, let them know but try not to take it personally.
(Score: 2) by mrcoolbp on Tuesday February 24 2015, @08:33AM
What they do not tell you that they already have the ability, by "marking" your browser and IP. That is how they are blocking AC.
It's super-secret! SHHH. Don't tell anyone, m'kay? = )
They're actually called IPIDs, and we've talked about them before. Not trying to hide that. They are simply hashed IPs so the admins don't see your real IP, and they help keep out the real trolls. The only person that I'm aware had this issue completely understood when I explained what was happening, and they apologized for bothering us (wasn't a bother at all). Nice chap actually.
SN does not want to fix something that is broken.
Or it maybe working just fine, other people may not think what you write is contributing, I wouldn't know without seeing them. And based on your use of "spare IPs" to work around the bans (there are always work arounds) I can't see all these amazing posts that were modded into oblivion. The ones I can see don't strike me as +5 insightful to be honest. If you point us to some of your wrongly-modded comments, we can look into it further. Adjusting the way the filter works if it's sub-optimal is not out of the question, but remember, measures like this help keep the signal/noise ratio at a nice level. Anonymity always has its trade-offs. Another method to stay in the shadows would be to use TOR to access the site and utilize a throw-away email address to register. Then you can subscribe with bitcoin = )
(Score:1^½, Radical)
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday February 23 2015, @12:32PM
You ain't just whistling Dixie. Want to be embarrassed about your own coding prowess? Watch NCommander come in and get the dev site ( Currently https://devtest.soylentnews.org/ [soylentnews.org] Feel free to help find the remaining bugs.) running under Apache2/mod_perl2 in a basically a single day. Coding alongside someone like him rocks my stripey socks.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 23 2015, @12:41PM
Don't start instituting the [reddit/slashdot/etc.] popularly contest. The site is fine just were it is. Some folks actually prefer being anons...
(Score: 2) by prospectacle on Monday February 23 2015, @09:51PM
This wouldn't prevent you from posting anonymously. It would just tweak the reward/encouragement system for those who care to play that game.
If a plan isn't flexible it isn't realistic
(Score: 3, Interesting) by martyb on Monday February 23 2015, @01:35PM
I'm in general agreement with the concept. The devil is in the details, of course.
What should the rate-of-decay be? 1 point per week? That'll give a little nudge and be non-onerous to our occasional visitors.
Q: Why do you think there is a 'karma limit' in the first place?
A: On the other site, some folks built up such a stash of karma that they could basically troll with reckless abandon. "So what if I get dinged a few mod points for trolling, I've got *PLENTY*!!1!"
I was there when the cap was instituted and, from my perspective, made a *significant* change for the better.
Wit is intellect, dancing. I'm too old to act my age. Life is too important to take myself seriously.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Monday February 23 2015, @02:03PM
If you do karma decay at all, perhaps use exponential back off on the decay rate? In the 1st week, lose 1 point, 2 weeks to lose the next point, 4 weeks to lose the next, etc. Doesn't have to be double either, could use a Fibonacci sequence, start with 7 and 10 days for the first 2 points.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by martyb on Monday February 23 2015, @04:30PM
Interesting! A non-linear decay rate was not something I'd have thought of. Community++
As I said upthread -- the devil is in the details -- and it's worthwhile to think of the potential consequences and likely outcomes of any changes.
So, a goal would be to *gradually* reduce one's karma 'balance'... someone who pops in once or twice a week (or month) should not be discouraged from commenting and/or submitting stories as any karma they accrue would be consumed anyway. OTOH, don't want to make it too easy for someone to amass troll-abuse powers, either.
That said, with more mod points out and available, I've seen the community rise to the occasion many times now and correct bad downmods with offsetting upmods.
Ok, gotta go. Keep the ideas coming!
Wit is intellect, dancing. I'm too old to act my age. Life is too important to take myself seriously.
(Score: 2) by DECbot on Monday February 23 2015, @05:01PM
//GPL v3.0
//or
//CC BY SA v4.0 International License
void karmaDecay(int days){
if(days < 0) system.exit(2); //you stupid twit.
while(1){ // you remembered to thread this right?
karma--; // karma rot
wait( rand( days ) * 24 /*hours*/ * 60 /*minutes*/ * 60 /*seconds*/ * 1000 /*ms*/ ); // and we wait
} // does not scale well, but it illustrates the principle.
} // I take no responsibility for this code. It's probably better if you never try to run it.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 2) by prospectacle on Monday February 23 2015, @10:03PM
I agree we shouldn't punish occasional/new users. For this reason and others I believe the decay-rate should be proportional to your karma (similar to an actual half-life).
I also agree with the various people who suggested a point below which your karma doesn't decay at all. 10 or 20 would be a good level, i think. If you haven't exceeded this, or you drop back below it, your points remain safe from the ravages of time. Beyond that it could decay faster as your points increased, perhaps organised into ranges to make the programming side of it simpler (20-35 would decay at one rate, 35-50 at another, maybe ranges above 50 too if the limit were increased).
This would largely mitigate the problem you mentioned of people becoming invincible trolls after saving up very high karma levels, even if the limit were removed entirely. The higher their savings got, the harder they'd have to work to maintain them, because it would decay faster.
You could see a "high score" alongside your current karma, to remember the great heights you reached, if only briefly.
If a plan isn't flexible it isn't realistic
(Score: 2) by martyb on Monday February 23 2015, @10:59PM
I like the idea of a 'floor' below which one's karma would not be decayed below. Implementing the code for it so that it could be all data-driven might be a bit more, umm, interesting. I'd also like the idea of a karma score below which no decay takes place (e.g. if a user is at or below, say, 20 karma points, they experience a decay rate of 0.)
We need also consider that karma can be artificially boosted by the creation and abuse of 'sockpuppet' accounts.
Underlying it all, karma actually doesn't really mean anything, in and of itself. It is about as useful as a 'gold star' that a primary school teacher put on one of my essays I had to write. It had *meaning* to me, but no real *value*.
I think it helpful to keep that in mind as I we ponder the value and use of any potential changes to the system. That, and let's try and keep it simple, too!
Wit is intellect, dancing. I'm too old to act my age. Life is too important to take myself seriously.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 24 2015, @07:06AM
maybe karma decay could be a function of the rate of posts that are modded down
if you have say 1000 karma and you go on a troll fest, the first troll post might not have a big hit, but the next one might have a slightly higher hit, and if you post multiple troll posts in quick succession that might have a penalty also (so karma decay could be dependent on rate of change of karma)
also, the devs would love implementing almost as much as our illustrious QA orificer will love squashing the bugs
(Score: 2) by martyb on Tuesday February 24 2015, @01:23PM
That assumes, of course, that those were valid and accurate moderations. And that said moderations stick (i.e. are not counter up-moderated to correct incorrect mods). All it takes is a couple of 'stalker' accounts and an axe to grind and things start to get rather (recursively) interesting in computing the moderation amount.
I think it was Nicklaus Wirth who said this, but I could be mistaken. The general gist of it was: "It is possible to make something sufficiently complicated that there are no obvious defects (PL/I) or sufficiently simple that there are obviously no defects (pascal)." In other words: K.I.S.S.
Better to not write the bug in the first place than to have to wait for QA to tell you where you erred.
Wit is intellect, dancing. I'm too old to act my age. Life is too important to take myself seriously.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by q.kontinuum on Monday February 23 2015, @02:47PM
I agree on Karma-decay, but would like to see some thresholds, e.g.
- Karma decreases down to 30 for inactivity, but not lower (No need to lock people in)
- Karma based on different actions: Good post earn a maximum of 50, accepted submissions cat give up to additional 10 points, maybe another 10 points for meta-moderation
Other nice features would be e.g.
- voting on articles in the submission-queue (to give editors some hint, for which articles people are waiting)
- voting for articles on main-page (up-voted articles stay on top longer, but with decay for article-points)
- Muti-dimensional Karma: Max. 20 points for insightful, Max. 20 points for Intersting, 20 for funny, etc.
Registered IRC nick on chat.soylentnews.org: qkontinuum
(Score: 2) by CoolHand on Monday February 23 2015, @02:57PM
Parents ideas all seem like good ones... :)
Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job-Douglas Adams
(Score: 5, Interesting) by mechanicjay on Monday February 23 2015, @04:27PM
You know, I've thought a lot about this myself over the last year or so. I quickly achieved a karma cap. I agree that it was a bit of a game for me at first. I spent a lot of time thinking about what I posted in order to get my karma up. Once I achieved, I backed off for a while because "I won". As such, I've advocated in the past for the bumping the karma cap. The question is, where does it end. The folks who have hit 50, are quickly going to hit 100, or 1000 or whatever we make the cap. These numbers, I think can feel very discouraging for new users coming into the site.
As for karma aging, that's a good idea too, but really only a bandaid. Also, I don't think that's fair to people who are occasional but high-quality posters, or former high-quality posters who have for whatever reason left the site. It sort of feels like a bank who charges a service charge on your checking account. After N months, your account is empty even though you've done nothing. So, I think I'm no longer in favor of karma aging either.
As an alternative, I'm wondering if we can add some context to the karma number. The slash db records all upvotes and downvotes -- Karma is a calculated value from those ups and downs. What if, in addition to the Karma value, which is the primary representation of your reputation on the site, we also display the raw numbers which are used to calculate karma? This may solve a couple of issues:
Like I said, after thinking about this for about a year now, I think it's what I'd like to see.
My VMS box beat up your Windows box.
(Score: 2) by mrcoolbp on Monday February 23 2015, @11:20PM
Mod parent up
(Score:1^½, Radical)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 23 2015, @12:23PM
You don't want to rewrite the whole thing in Haskell?
I must new around here.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by xorsyst on Monday February 23 2015, @12:24PM
On the other site, if you moderate a post your browser just stays there - on this site it reloads the entire page and you lose where you were up to. I'd love that to be fixed, because it stops me moderating.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Gaaark on Monday February 23 2015, @12:40PM
^This, ^this, ^this!
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. I have always been here. ---Gaaark 2.0 --
(Score: 5, Informative) by paulej72 on Monday February 23 2015, @01:07PM
The other site is heavily dependent on Javascript and AJAX. Many people hate this type of dependance on JS and enjoyed the old code that we used to start this site that was not so JS heavy. The good news is I have a few ideas on how to get the same type of output using no JS. It will require that the comments code have a structural overhaul, but the idea is to pass return values to put you back to where you were.
Also we might look into a lightweight JS for doing just moderation as this should be easy to manage. We just don't want the site to go all JS heavy and dependent.
Team Leader for SN Development
(Score: 0, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 23 2015, @01:21PM
We just don't want the site to go all JS heavy and dependent.
^This, ^this, ^this!
(Score: 2) by GeminiDomino on Monday February 23 2015, @02:18PM
Is there an upper limit on the number of anchors a page can handle? If not, giving each message its own anchor (#mNNNNNNN, e.g.) and adding that to the load/redirect when moderating would at least get you in the right neighborhood, and should be a lot less onerous for the devs AND the users.
"We've been attacked by the intelligent, educated segment of our culture"
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday February 23 2015, @02:29PM
Picking the right comment to jump back to during multiple moderations at once would be a little tricky though. The one farthest down the page doesn't necessarily have the highest cid.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by paulej72 on Monday February 23 2015, @02:47PM
That was part of my plan. And to address TMB, I was going to to tie the return to the anchor that goes with the moderate button pushed. It only makes sense that you would want to return to where you just clicked.
Team Leader for SN Development
(Score: 2) by GeminiDomino on Monday February 23 2015, @03:09PM
That's what I was thinking, too. Admittedly, I hadn't considered multiple moderations but tying it to the button sounds like it would sidestep that landmine. :)
"We've been attacked by the intelligent, educated segment of our culture"
(Score: 2) by bart9h on Monday February 23 2015, @06:54PM
Speaking of anchors, they could be used in the "Parent" buttons to jump there, instead of loading a new page.
(Score: 2) by tibman on Monday February 23 2015, @06:23PM
You can do both Non-JS and JS together pretty easily. I hacked an example together for you just now. All CSS and JS is inline. It uses jquery for dom selectors and ajax but obviously not required. I'm just lazy : ) I apologize for code font but it is the only way i know to share html/js.
The code finds and decorates Moderate links with an onclick event. That onclick event makes an AJAX call and not a full page change. The onclick event returns false to prevent the href link from firing. If javascript is disabled then no decoration occurs and the links are normal. Enjoy!
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title></title>
<style>
.SNButtonStyle {
background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% #555;
border-radius: 0.3em;
text-align: center;
font-weight: bold;
padding: 0.3em 0.6em;
color: #FFF !important;
text-decoration: none;
font-family: Verdana,Geneva,"Bitstream Vera Sans","DejaVu Sans",sans-serif;
font-size: 0.75em;
}
</style>
<script src="http://tageverything.org/js/jquery.js"></script>
</head>
<body>
<p>This will work both with and without javascript. JS disabled will use the link as a full page post.
JS on will make an AJAX request.</p>
<a class="SNButtonStyle withJSModerate" href="https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?op=moderate&sid=6232&cid=0&pid=0&reason_148401=10">Moderate Hybrid</a>
<br><br>
<a class="SNButtonStyle" href="https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?op=moderate&sid=6232&cid=0&pid=0&reason_148401=10">Moderate No JS</a>
<br><br>
<a class="SNButtonStyle withJSModerate" href="#">Moderate JS Only</a>
<p>A good way to test this is to click the Hybrid button with JS enabled and then with JS disabled. Both should work.</p>
<script>
$(function(){
var self = this;
self.moderate = function(){
var success = function(){alert('In theory it posted correctly.');};
$.ajax({
type:'POST',
url:'https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?op=moderate&sid=6232&cid=0&pid=0&reason_148401=10',
crossDomain: true,
dataType: 'jsonp'
}).done(success/*will never happen because of XSS and comments.pl response*/).fail(function(jqXHR, textStatus, errorThrown){
if(jqXHR.status == 200)
success();
else
alert('Failed to POST for some reason.');
});
};
var buttons = $('.withJSModerate');
buttons.toArray().forEach(function(button){
button.onclick = function(){self.moderate();return false;};
});
});
</script>
</body>
</html>
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 3, Informative) by mrcoolbp on Monday February 23 2015, @09:12PM
Cool. Actually we are looking into a solution to this problem that is not JavaScript reliant.
(Score:1^½, Radical)
(Score: 2) by tibman on Monday February 23 2015, @10:56PM
If it isn't JS reliant then it will still require a full page reload on every moderation. When the page comes back with all the same comments open there will be a visible delay while the page renders everything again. Not only that but refreshing the page will submit the same moderation again and take you back to the post you moderated. It will work, obviously. But it is not exactly an elegant solution (yet).
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 2) by mrcoolbp on Monday February 23 2015, @11:22PM
It's better said from the dev team: http://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?sid=6232&cid=148419 [soylentnews.org]
(Score:1^½, Radical)
(Score: 2) by tibman on Tuesday February 24 2015, @01:20AM
Yes, exactly what he said. The buttons function with or without javascript, it doesn't matter. Only if JS is enabled you don't get a full page refresh.
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 2) by francois.barbier on Monday February 23 2015, @11:39PM
If it's a POST request, use the following HTTP status code: 303 See Other [w3.org].
So if you refresh, you just perform a GET request again.
Works great.
(Score: 2) by francois.barbier on Monday February 23 2015, @09:35PM
Two downsides:
Anyway if we start with JavaScript, and add unoptimized stuff here and there, SoylentNews will soon turn into the slow loading mess that is any website with 20+ <script> from dozen of domains... (Facebook like button?)
For future reference, JavaScript DOM events "bubble up" and "capture" [quirksmode.org]. You know when you do window.addEventListener('load', myLoad, false);? That false at the end is there to trigger the listener on the event's "bubble up" phase.
So when you submit a mod form on this page, there's actually a "submit" event that bubbles up to the window object and back, even if you don't define any listener! It's actually practical for capturing (uncaught) errors and report back to the server (window.onerror).
Therefore, you add ONE "submit" event listener to the parent container of all forms. It could even be the window object! (Not recommended.)
In this listener, you get back the form currently submitting (hint: it's given with the event object in argument), check that it's a mod form and then proceed to post with AJAX and act upon the response.
Now for the great stuff : if one day comments get loaded with AJAX (dear FSM I hope not) any new mod form automatically uses the listener you already set.
Isn't JavaScript kind of beautiful when you know a little bit about it? One function on a container and it takes care of every case.
But I fear everyone using JQuery miss those technicalities and produces inefficient code.
It's becoming hard to Google solutions to problems in pure JavaScript these days. JQuery everywhere...
Well...</rant>
(Score: 3, Informative) by tibman on Monday February 23 2015, @10:48PM
Thanks! Like i said in the original post, jQuery was only added because i'm lazy. It is not required. Also, i banged that out in under 10 minutes as an example : ) There aren't any forms in my examples and SN uses only one main comments.pl form with every input inside it. Some SN buttons aren't actually form inputs but ahref tags that look like their input counterparts. That is what i used here, three ahref tags that mimic SN form inputs.
Good criticism on the forEach : ) When dropping JS here in the future i'll use getElementById instead of a jQuery selector. But pure JS ajax is a pain because i haven't memorized it yet : /
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 2) by francois.barbier on Monday February 23 2015, @11:42PM
Thank you! That's some strange way to handle forms ;-)
Anyway, the method still works with links too!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by cmn32480 on Monday February 23 2015, @01:10PM
I third this!
It'd be nice to be able to moderate as I go instead of putting it in, and reading the rest of the comments (moderating along the way) then clicking Moderate at the bottom of the page.
"It's a dog eat dog world, and I'm wearing Milkbone underwear" - Norm Peterson
(Score: 2) by cmn32480 on Monday February 23 2015, @01:12PM
And welcome home NCommander.
I hope that all your personal things have sorted themselves out to a happy (or at least satisfactory) end.
"It's a dog eat dog world, and I'm wearing Milkbone underwear" - Norm Peterson
(Score: 3, Informative) by francois.barbier on Monday February 23 2015, @01:34PM
You may want to try HTTP 304 No Content
http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec10.html#sec10.2.5 [w3.org]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by paulej72 on Monday February 23 2015, @02:49PM
I was not aware of that code, and I believe that our new system will handle that code. I will need to edit our redirect sub as it is hard coded to do 301s and 302s.
Thanks for the input.
Team Leader for SN Development
(Score: 3, Interesting) by sudo rm -rf on Monday February 23 2015, @03:14PM
I think you mean 204 (that's where your quote is from and the link is pointing to).
Anyway, when there's no message body, it would be hard to update the remaining mod-point counter and the moderating result (as found in the comment header) client-side. Unless of course I'm confused (which is most likely)
(Score: 2) by francois.barbier on Monday February 23 2015, @10:05PM
Yup, you are right, I meant 204. Thanks for noticing. That's why it's better to always document with good references :)
About your second point, you are correct again. But if you start implementing server functionality on the client-side (which this problem is all about), you have to go from start to finish in replicating it. Therefore, you would need JavaScript to update the page accordingly and reflect every change like it was server-side.
It's called progressive enhancement [wikipedia.org].
You start with the back-end and produce plain HTML. Every functionality of your website must work.
Then you go on to the CSS and make your HTML pretty.
Finally, you use unobtrusive JavaScript [wikipedia.org] to enhance the user experience. Example in another post [soylentnews.org]
I could give you and example of a kind of webshop I programmed back in 2007 based on this principle.
The shopping basket works without JavaScript (but requires a page reload), and with JavaScript (without a page reload). There's no AJAX though.
PM me if you are interested in the link, it's kind of a private business website...
(Score: 2) by sudo rm -rf on Tuesday February 24 2015, @09:51AM
Thanks for your offer, I totally agree with you. At my job I inherited two projects, one is a webshop that follows the principle of progressive enhancement, it has its own problems - it started in 2001 and is written in PHP, which has come a long way since then -, but is fun to play around with. The other project is heavily JS-dependent, that kind of JS that is dynamically built server-side, e.g.
$script = "var si=$i;\n";
$script.= "function ".$widgetid."_newFoo()\n";
$script.= "{\n";
$script.= " var bar= 'list_".$id."_'+si+'_div';\n";
...
In other words, impossible to debug...
(Score: 2) by francois.barbier on Tuesday February 24 2015, @12:46PM
Oh my!
It brings back the nightmares I had when I worked at my first job...
Now, you username makes a lot more sense :-D
(Score: 1) by Squidious on Monday February 23 2015, @05:20PM
An additional issue - if you change your threshold / breakthrough for that story and then moderate then your threshold / breakthrough for that story gets reset to your profile default. Thus I end up moderating, scroll down, see the threshold / breakthrough has changed, scroll back up, change it back, scroll back down, oye vey.
The terrorists have won, game, set, match. They've scared the people into electing authoritarian regimes.
(Score: 3, Informative) by paulej72 on Tuesday February 24 2015, @03:39AM
Team Leader for SN Development
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 23 2015, @12:31PM
Isn't it rich, aren't we a pair?
Me here at last on the ground
You in mid-air
Send in the trolls
Isn't it bliss, don't you approve?
One who keeps tearing around
One who can't move
Where are the trolls? Send in the trolls
Just when I stopped opening doors
Finally knowing the one that I wanted was yours
Making my entrance again with my usual flair
Sure of my lines no one is there
Don't you love farce? My fault I hear
I thought that you'd want what I want
Sorry my dear but where are the trolls?
There ought to be trolls, quick send in the trolls
What a surprise, who could foresee?
I've come to feel about you what you felt about me
Why only now when I see that you've drifted away
What a surprise, what a cliche?
Isn't it rich, isn't it queer?
Losing my timing this late in my career
And where are the trolls? Quick send in the trolls
Don't bother they're here
(Score: 5, Funny) by MrNemesis on Monday February 23 2015, @01:09PM
Here's some of the new features I'd like to see:
* Full AJAX support - no need to have any of that crap in the URL when you can just have a #
* Proper animation support - moderation menus don't even "whoosh" out when you open them. Even better if this could be combined with a sound effect so you really know when you've opened a menu, this'll make it easier to post and moderate with your eyes closed
* Proper touchscreen-friendly icons, with some more whooshing
* In addition to touchscreen-friendly icons, some canned replies that can be posted at the touch of a button so people don't have to type
* Randomly change the CSS of the site as if you were slowly bringing in a much-loathed beta version, but only do it in dribs and drabs so that it looks like either the users' DNS or browser is broken. The ensure anyone who posts "WTF is going on with the CSS?!" is consigned to -1 offtopic immediately. In fact just automatically -1 any post that contains the string "css".
* Take advantage of the fact that everyone has at least a perfectly reliable 100Mb/s internet connection these days and load some more images and JS libraries. At the moment pages load so quickly it feels like its coming straight out of cache and I think I therefore must have lost my 100% reliable internet connection.
* systemd integration and removal of old HTTP functionality. Ideally the site won't load properly without systemd installed, or at least won't allow users to log in
* Following on from that, user messages should be in a binary format that becomes unreadable if the SN servers unexpectedly reboot
* More webkit-specific features, site looks practically the same in any browser at present which isn't how the web is meant to work
* More interesting headlines [usvsth3m.com]. Take this page for instance; wouldn't it sound better if it were "10 Things You Won't Believe We're Considering for the Next Slashcode Release" or "Soylent News Wants to Improve Itself; First You'll Be Shocked and then You'll Be Inspired"
* Seriously, just put in some more whooshing. Everyone loves whooshing.
In all seriousness I have few issues with the site at present but I'll echo xorcyst's comment [soylentnews.org] about position within the page, but extend it to also when I, say, open a new tab to view a conversation that's below my threshold. Think the code should use a #comment block or something so that a) summary is still visible at the top of the page if you'd care to scroll up and b) first thing in view was the comment you were looking to view/moderate on. Otherwise you'll often view a tab a few mins later, think "haven't I already read this summary"? and perhaps close it if you forgot that you loaded it to follow another conversation. Probably heavily dependant on browsing style, this one.
One thing I wasn't sure about was a users home ~ because I find the sidebar on the left confusing. Most of the time I want to visit my home page to see what moderation/replies I've got (the non-tabulated version at http://soylentnews.org/~FunkyNickname/comments [soylentnews.org] is much harder to read), and the link for that is named "Info". However the link below that is called "Preferences" but actually links to the ~sgfbg/my/info page. Unless I'm missing something I'd recommend renaming the ~username link to /home or just ~ or something similar. If a link is named "preferences" I'd expect its short form to be something akin to ~/my/prefs.
I want to pay you some money into your fund (anonymously if possible - personally I'm not a fan of badges hovering next to my username saying "I paid money" as they strike me as ostentatious; no disrespect intended to people who have the subscribers badge of course, just don't like them myself) but from the UK at least the only options seems to be a) bitcoin (sorry, nope, never in a million years) or b) paypal. These belong firmly in my "bunch of deplorable cunts who I wouldn't piss on if their brains were on fire" bucket; are they really the only option for international money transfer? No option for direct EMT?
One thing (that perhaps isn't so important now that I have mod points coming out of my ears but...) I would have dearly loved when mod points had a half life of 3 picoseconds would have been the ability to flag a post for me wanting to return to it at a later date.
A return of -1 Overrated. Removing it hasn't stopped mod abuse but is has meant you can no longer accurately moderate overrated posts. Even better, make application of overrated and/or disagree a non-modifier by default and a -1 if the mod writes a rebuttal comment.
...which of course brings us on to metamod. Are we big and karma-whorey enough to consider this yet?
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Monday February 23 2015, @02:32PM
In terms of software, I think the site is doing quite nicely - thanks to the hard work of a small and talented bunch of people on the team - and the KISS principle with the regards to look-and-feel works well for me. However, if I take a liberty and broaden your question a little, I do have an idea that might help the site in general.
I, too, would like to anonymously pay into the fund - but I understand the problem that SN has with the legalities of taxes, the risk of appearing to be carrying out money laundering, and the type of organisation that we are. And whereas some of us prefer the 'old style' look and feel of this site, some of us equally do not wish to use bitcoin/paypal for much the same sort of reason. My bank has served me well for many years - I do not see the need to change it for a different system in which I honestly do not have complete faith. (Recall the missing millions of bitcoin, or Paypal freezing accounts with no explanation?) Someone earlier in this thread suggested 'rewarding' those who support the site by way of submissions and intelligent commenting. So my idea is this: If I were to anonymously donate a small sum of money to Soylent, could that be used to pay for the subscription of a member/members of your choosing without breaking the law? Although it would not help swell the coffers, it might provide another incentive for submitters and commentators alike; would this be useful?
[nostyle RIP 06 May 2025]
(Score: 3, Informative) by paulej72 on Monday February 23 2015, @02:57PM
You have the option of turning off the subscriber badges once you subscribe, so no one will know you are a subscriber. Also there will be a story about Subscription changes later today with upcoming changes.
Also with regard to the Home and Info and Prefs, when I coded these changes, I did not have a good grasp of how Slash did its uri rewrites. I do now and I can change the names of these urls to be more inline with what is going on in the page. I still have an open ticket to finish up making the Prefs section easier to use than the current version, and to kill off the stuff we don't use.
Team Leader for SN Development
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 23 2015, @07:24PM
Give gift subscriptions to users that make good contributions (and possibly guilt-trip them into doing the same for others). This is my plan when I am not broke.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 23 2015, @01:21PM
Probably not a Slashcode thing, maybe someone can make an HTTPS Everywhere extension, but shouldn't we have this option?
BBCode in comments would be nice as well.
Signatures that allow pictures of a fixed size.
A Slashdot 1.0 theme, how the site used to look from 1998 to 2005 or so.
The ability to upvote/downvote articles. Some of these articles are outright trollish.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday February 23 2015, @01:29PM
Pretty sure we'd get in IP trouble for using their green theme. I just don't see Dice being cool about that.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Popeidol on Monday February 23 2015, @02:14PM
Is that one of the default themes built into slashcode? Way outside my area of expertise, but if someone releases an open-source product including themes they've created can they later force you to stop using them?
I'm guessing the answer is either 'yes because trademarks' or 'no but they can keep throwing lawyers at you till you give up', it's just something I haven't really considered before.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday February 23 2015, @02:26PM
Actually, I have no idea. If it was then they implicitly forfeited their trademark. That said, one bargain basement lawyer could financially sink us at the moment, right or wrong.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 5, Informative) by NCommander on Monday February 23 2015, @02:50PM
The red theme we're using is the default as shipped by Slashcode, there is no green theme out of the box.
Still always moving
(Score: 4, Insightful) by pkrasimirov on Monday February 23 2015, @01:53PM
> Probably not a Slashcode thing, maybe someone can make an HTTPS Everywhere extension, but shouldn't we have this option?
What is that? I think the "HTTPS Everywhere" extension just redirects you to HTTPS if you open Soylent via HTTP. What needs to be implemented?
> BBCode in comments would be nice as well.
There's already a code -- HTML. Mixing one more will be bad UX IMO.
> Signatures that allow pictures of a fixed size.
Oh, God, please no. Even ads would be less annoying than myriad of random GIFs all over the place.
> A Slashdot 1.0 theme, how the site used to look from 1998 to 2005 or so.
Better yet touchscreen-friendly UI. Not that I will switch from the current theme anyway.
> The ability to upvote/downvote articles. Some of these articles are outright trollish.
The number of comments already serve this purpose. Bad articles are laughstock and the comments are hilarious. The value has always been in the comments.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 23 2015, @02:02PM
HTTPS everywhere works via a whitelist. What I meant to say was, add SoylentNews to this whitelist.
(Score: 3, Informative) by pkrasimirov on Monday February 23 2015, @02:49PM
Thanks, I didn't know this. Here's the HOWTO: https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere/rulesets [eff.org] And from the FAQ [eff.org]:
(Score: 3, Interesting) by NCommander on Monday February 23 2015, @11:18PM
If anyone does this and gets it included with HTTPS Everywhere out of the box, I'll give them a free subscription.
Still always moving
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 23 2015, @06:22PM
>> BBCode in comments would be nice as well.
> There's already a code -- HTML. Mixing one more will be bad UX IMO.
The problem is that for people who post on both kinds of sites it is easy to type the wrong kinds of codes and then accidentally post it before realizing their error.
I would like to see a bbcode detector that intercepts posts with bbcode and then asks the user if they really want to post it verbatim and then offers to automagically convert it to html tags for them. That preserves the HTML codes as the standard but fixes the problem of posters being more focused on the words than on the mechanics. Some care would need to go into the design of the interception page - not busy but helpful and informative to anyone who got there by accident and doesn't know what bbcode is.
>> Signatures that allow pictures of a fixed size.
> Oh, God, please no. Even ads would be less annoying than myriad of random GIFs all over the place.
I tend to agree. But I would be OK with a little 10x10 gif right next to the posters name in the "by" line, like a favicon. No animation though and hosted on soylent, no cross-site includes. I think a small icon like that would make it easier to identify an author without enabling the tacky crap you are worried about.
(Score: 2) by WizardFusion on Monday February 23 2015, @02:29PM
Hell no. It would make the comments page twice as long.
Imagine someone posts a simple one liner comment, but has a signature that is 5 or 6 lines high. No thanks.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by paulej72 on Monday February 23 2015, @03:01PM
There are a lot of hard coded links in slash that need to be fixed to git rid of the http vs https dependency. This is very high on our todo list and now that I have worked out some better methods to do redirects, this should be coming soon.
Team Leader for SN Development
(Score: 2) by francois.barbier on Tuesday February 24 2015, @04:12PM
By the way, if you use HTTPS, you will notice a mixed-content warning.
I think the image at http://stats.soylentnews.org/piwik/piwik.php?idsite=1 [soylentnews.org] is the culprit.
Cheers!
(Score: 2) by paulej72 on Tuesday February 24 2015, @07:34PM
Team Leader for SN Development
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Monday February 23 2015, @01:55PM
A couple times I've had mod points over the past few weeks, I've found myself wanting to mod something "Helpful" because the post provided links or information that was useful. Neither "Informative," "Interesting," nor "Insightful" felt quite right.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Ryuugami on Monday February 23 2015, @02:14PM
the post provided links or information that was useful.
Sounds like "Informative" to me.
If a shit storm's on the horizon, it's good to know far enough ahead you can at least bring along an umbrella. - D.Weber
(Score: 2) by CoolHand on Monday February 23 2015, @03:04PM
I'd agree with that.. helpful seems a bit redundant to informative.
Information is "helping" to inform...
Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job-Douglas Adams
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday February 24 2015, @05:00PM
There is a difference between "informative" and "helpful." Someone who tells me J. Edgar Hoover was secretly a cross-dresser, which I had previously not known, would be "informative," as in, my reaction would be, "Huh, who'd have thunk?" That is, it tells me something I didn't know but nothing that has much practical value. That's versus, say, telling me how to tweak my setup to get a 20% performance gain, which is more than "informative" because it actually helps me out, ie. it has useful, practical benefit to me for having read it that goes beyond mere trivia.
So, I can mod a post "informative" that tells me something about cryonics I didn't know before, which is a sort of thing that happens a lot on SN, but once in a while I come across something that's more than simply "informative," and think having a "helpful" or "useful" or "this has real, tangible, practical value" option would be good to have.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by CoolHand on Tuesday February 24 2015, @05:22PM
so, you equate helpful with "extra-informative"..
Do you think it should have a +2 modifier instead of a +1? If not, then why have the separate category? But again, if it is really extra-informative, then it will be mod'ed up to +5 more quickly than a "normal" informative. So, why clutter things up? I'm not convinced..
Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job-Douglas Adams
(Score: 4, Insightful) by pkrasimirov on Monday February 23 2015, @01:55PM
> Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
How about Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8?
(Score: 2) by francois.barbier on Monday February 23 2015, @02:25PM
Yup.
Pick one or the other. By the way, in HTML5 it's:
At least it's not sent as XHTML, with the XHTML doctype, and invalid XHTML code with text/html in the meta! ;-)
(Score: 4, Interesting) by NCommander on Monday February 23 2015, @02:25PM
Regression in the APache2 thing, the Context-Type is set by a variable in slash, and the install scripts were never updated to change that to utf-8.
Still always moving
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 23 2015, @02:01PM
We can improve the quality of the story submissions by promoting more NON-American owned categories.
Perhaps news from other countries like Venezuela, North Korea or Ukraine and Poland to name a few.
Will look into some sources.
Anyone else have this desire?
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday February 23 2015, @02:18PM
Venezuela and North Korea don't have news, they have propaganda. We're powered by you lot's subs though, so sub whatever you think is relevant from wherever on the net you find it.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 24 2015, @12:26AM
I see that you're still referencing Lamestream Media's "facts".
Imperialist Bullshit in NYT Needs Fact-Checkers That Don't Suck [googleusercontent.com] (orig) [commondreams.org]
N.B. That originally appeared at Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (fair.org).
There's nothing to keep Venezuelans from being well informed.
-- gewg_
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday February 24 2015, @12:39AM
You mean besides the state say stopping the showing of empty shelves in markets and drugstores? Yeah, you're probably right. A totalitarian, socialist nation would never do things like interfere with the press.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by n1 on Monday February 23 2015, @04:01PM
Editorially SoylentNews is not US focused, I can say this with a degree of certainty as half the editorial team currently active are not American.
However, we do have to work with the submissions we get. I will be more than happy to see a more international focus on the site, but we need the submissions to make it happen.
(Score: 1) by idetuxs on Monday February 23 2015, @09:45PM
This is interesting, as I restricted myself from submitting news that I thought wouldn't be relevant. May be because the story was exclusively political, even though it has a lot of international coverage.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by n1 on Monday February 23 2015, @11:05PM
Soylent News ...is people!
Please do submit the stories you think deserve attention, we are in a connected world where science and technology has an impact on nearly all of it.
(Score: 2) by mrcoolbp on Saturday February 28 2015, @03:59PM
Yes, what n1 said (he's on editorial). I'd say we still run around 80-90% of the stories submitted so feel free to submit whatever you think is of interest to the community.
(Score:1^½, Radical)
(Score: 5, Interesting) by WizardFusion on Monday February 23 2015, @02:27PM
As someone mentioned ages ago, can we have logged in users that want to post anonymous, come up as "Logged In User" instead of "Anonymous Coward".
This would help identify the trolls that don't want to sign up, with the people that have signed up, but want to remain anonymous.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Monday February 23 2015, @03:08PM
I think that this is a brilliant idea. I'll let the coders have their say first though...
[nostyle RIP 06 May 2025]
(Score: 2) by paulej72 on Tuesday February 24 2015, @03:49AM
Team Leader for SN Development
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 23 2015, @03:32PM
I mean it's hard to say what story this link points to without clicking http://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=15/01/30/146240 [soylentnews.org]
(It's just a random link, I don't know what it points to but that's irrelevant.)
What the urls should be like is sn.org/man_bites_dog or even sn.org/2012/man_bites_dog or something readable that makes sense.
I realize this might be a hard thing to do and perhaps not a realistic thing for the next release but perhaps somewhere further down the line.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 23 2015, @10:00PM
> I mean it's hard to say what story this link points to without clicking http://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=15/01/30/146240 [soylentnews.org]
> What the urls should be like is sn.org/man_bites_dog or even sn.org/2012/man_bites_dog or something readable that makes sense.
How about http://soylentnews.org/a/150130146240/Microsoft_may_Embrace_Android_and_Invest_Heavily_in_Cyanogen [soylentnews.org]
In other words, just squish down the sid and make the title of the story an optional but default trailer. Kind of like the way amazon does with their URLs.
Maybe turn the SID into a hex number so it is even shorter.
(Score: 3, Informative) by bryan on Wednesday February 25 2015, @12:50AM
Some more thoughts:
Example clean URL: http://pipedot.org/story/2015-02-20/lenovo-apologizes-for-pre-loaded-insecure-adware-superfish [pipedot.org] and http://pipedot.org/3GD2 [pipedot.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 24 2015, @12:45AM
The other site has URLs that include the date (with an article-specific number) AND the topic as the default.
That URL with the topic removed will also get you the page.
I agree with your basic point.
I don't object to long URLs if they are informative.
-- gewg_
(Score: 5, Insightful) by kbahey on Monday February 23 2015, @03:33PM
I am really amazed at what Open Source, drive, and motivation can achieve.
Think about the perennial gripes on Slashcode that we had for more a decade on Slashdot. Unicode being the biggest one. We have a bunch of motivated people here, and poof, the problem is fixed. Not only that, but they also improve functionality, with the article appearing at the top of any link to an individual comment. Slashdot with corporate backing would not fix any of that. And instead of listening to their community, they plow ahead with changes that most of the community hate!
So, thanks you to all who work on this site. You can slow down on the code changes, and focus on increasing readership (and therefore participation).
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning [2bits.com].
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 23 2015, @03:42PM
For a second I thought "Oh look, Slashdot is upping its game now SoylentNews is growing"..
..then I realised I was reading SoylentNews.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 23 2015, @04:07PM
A feature request:
When composing a comment, I would like to have the option to set a subtle contrasting background color overlay on code blocks and inline text spans, as is done at StackOverflow. I suppose this would require new markdown elements to be created for the SoylentNews comment reply code.
See here for more info: http://stackoverflow.com/help/formatting
Have a look at this page too: http://www.blooberry.com/indexdot/html/topics/indent.htm (I am not passing judgement on the lo-fi quality of the page design; I am just focusing on one aspect namely text overlayed with color)
(Score: 3, Disagree) by DeathMonkey on Monday February 23 2015, @05:53PM
I really dislike the "Disagree" mod. A score of 5:Disagree makes no sense. Mods should reflect post quality and not modder's opinions.
Also, I think there could be slightly too many mod points in circulation. Maybe reduce it to every other day or something.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 23 2015, @06:29PM
> I really dislike the "Disagree" mod. A score of 5:Disagree makes no sense. Mods should reflect post quality and not modder's opinions.
Disagree is a zero-effect moderation - it does not change the score of the post. There might be others, I'm not sure.
If we are going to have zero-effect moderations, they ought to go into a completely separate field which gets displayed next to the moderation score in the subject line, there is plenty of unused space there. If something got +2 insightful but 5 disagrees, that is information that should be easily visible, not buried behind an obscure link.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Monday February 23 2015, @07:40PM
Yeah, a seperate Agree/Disagree axis would work if we really want to capture that kind of info. I don't really want to be told Agree/Disagree before I read the post, though. Seems prejudicial.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 23 2015, @10:07PM
> I don't really want to be told Agree/Disagree before I read the post, though. Seems prejudicial.
Maybe stick the agree score at the bottom of the post, next to the "reply to" button, there is lots of whitespace down there too. Do it like ars with just thumbs-up and thumbs-down icons next to the scores so it is unobtrusive.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday February 23 2015, @11:20PM
Right there with you on having an Agree/Disagree score. I don't particularly care if anyone agrees or disagrees with me except that it leads to a lively conversation. Some people insist on using downmods as -1 Disagree though so I threw in a +0 Disagree about half joking. Mind you it hasn't really kept me or anyone else from being downmodded when people disagree with us but it appears to have amused a few people and the extra mod points seem to be enough to let the community self-correct. For the most part anyway.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Monday February 23 2015, @07:41PM
Ha! Score:3, Disagree. Almost there mods!
(Score: 1) by islisis on Monday February 23 2015, @07:09PM
just on a small visual note, the threading controls are one of the best additions made to the code imho, but being bitmaps can clash with themes like VT100, custom browser colours and page magnification. if there was a way to simplify them into text that would be great, and another step towards making the site look as slick as the other one =]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by paulej72 on Tuesday February 24 2015, @03:58AM
Team Leader for SN Development
(Score: 2) by bootsy on Tuesday February 24 2015, @05:31PM
How about unicode ⊕ ? In a bigger font obviously
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 23 2015, @07:35PM
remove &from=rss from RSS URLS
(Score: 2) by paulej72 on Tuesday February 24 2015, @04:00AM
Team Leader for SN Development