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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: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 25 2015, @06:34PM
Without a list of measurable goals, and a set of baseline numbers to compare against, any improvements are just confirmation bias masquerading as progress.
Utter nonsense. "Poke it with a stick and see what happens [wikipedia.org]" is a valid problem solving method.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 25 2015, @07:42PM
> Utter nonsense. "Poke it with a stick and see what happens" is a valid problem solving method.
Why do you think it is valid in this case? Is it utter nonsense to expect an auto mechanic to identify what's wrong with a car before deciding to fiddle with the engine much less knowing how to say if he fixed it? Or as long as it still starts when you turn the ignition then it must be better?
Just because it can be valid in certain limited circumstances does not make it appropriate any time someone just can't be bothered to define the problems they want to solve.