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Today we stand proud, fellow Soylentils. Two stories have been received to explain why:
Slashdot.org switches accounts to Classic-like interface
It now appears that Slashdot has now completely changed its interface to the new "beta" interface - which looks almost the same as the "old" interface. Users can no longer view the non-beta classic site, which is being reported by users all around the site.
The only official news on the matter is in the form of a journal entry.
Does this mean it's time to go after our original mission and let them know we're here?
"Beta" Delenda est!
Remember Slashdot? Remember Beta? This blog post might be tagged "sudden outbreak of common sense," if it wasn't well over a year too late:
...effective today, we've jettisoned the Slashdot Beta platform out the side portal. [...] After heavily experimenting on the Beta platform and splitting traffic between Classic and Beta, we've made some decisions about which platform changes ultimately make sense: starting today, we're unifying users back on our Classic platform.
A raft of minor changes came along with this announcement. Still no comment, though, on whether those users are a "community" or an "audience."
And frankly, that's why soylentnews is better.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday February 27 2015, @01:38PM
We're opensource. You'd think they'd just steal the code to make it doable and safe and use it. They're not redistributing binaries, just running the code, so there'd be no licensing issues. Oh well, their bucket of stupid is our gain.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by TheRaven on Friday February 27 2015, @01:47PM
So why on earth would they want to copy your code and provide a more convoluted UI, when they can use their own and provide a better experience?
sudo mod me up
(Score: 4, Funny) by q.kontinuum on Friday February 27 2015, @01:50PM
+1 Dislike ;-)
Registered IRC nick on chat.soylentnews.org: qkontinuum
(Score: 3, Informative) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday February 27 2015, @02:18PM
Having working unicode has nothing to do with the UI, which is what I was talking about.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by TWX on Friday February 27 2015, @02:25PM
Soylent also doesn't require the use of javascript as far as I can tell.
I'm a new refugee from Slashdot. I tried to change my Slashdot sig to point people to here but I can't find the setting to change it anymore.
IBM had PL/1, with syntax worse than JOSS...
and everywhere the language went, it was a total loss.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by stormreaver on Friday February 27 2015, @02:39PM
I'm a new refugee from Slashdot.
So am I. I have been on Slashdot for about 18 years, and I just can't take the stupid Slashdot managerial decisions anymore. The last straw for me was wanting to post comments to two different stories, but Slashdot said I had to wait for an indeterminately long amount of time before I could post to the second story. My previous posting was three minutes prior to my second. That is just too stupid for words.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Thexalon on Friday February 27 2015, @03:26PM
First off, welcome to both of you! It was definitely a little bit quiet in the early days, but since then I've never looked back from making the move.
Secondly, although I'm not a dev, you'll notice that for most major decisions, we the users are the management. Check out this discussion [soylentnews.org] from just this last week for an example of that in use.
Thirdly, aren't you glad to have a nice low UID? In another 5-10 years, you'll be able to make the "You must be new here" jokes!
Fourthly, consider chipping in some cold hard cash, which is one of the bigger problems facing Soylent right now.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by mrcoolbp on Friday February 27 2015, @04:14PM
The users are the management
It's a lofty and tricky goal, but we try.
(Score:1^½, Radical)
(Score: 5, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 27 2015, @04:40PM
Speaking as a user, I know I'm very trying.
(English, she isn't my language's mother.)
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Friday February 27 2015, @06:11PM
Mods -- this AC needs s +5 funny.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 27 2015, @06:13PM
(Score: 5, Funny) by Leebert on Friday February 27 2015, @04:57PM
Sadly, in my case my /. UID [slashdot.org] is lower than my Soylent UID. :(
(Score: 1) by stormreaver on Friday February 27 2015, @06:23PM
Sadly, in my case my /. UID is lower than my Soylent UID. :(
I lurked on Slashdot for a long time before registering an account, and had to settle for a UID just under 60000. I didn't want to make the same mistake again.
(Score: 2) by Leebert on Friday February 27 2015, @08:42PM
Yeah, the only reason I signed up for /. relatively early is because I wanted configurable slashboxes. Oddly enough, by my memory I waited quite a while to do it...
(Score: 2) by el_oscuro on Sunday March 01 2015, @12:57AM
I got into ./ very late and thus had a high UID of about 1M. So when SN started, I jumped all over it and created my account quickly, and hit the jackpot! With the possible exception of 42, there is no geekier number then the hull number of the USS Enterprise.
SoylentNews is Bacon! [nueskes.com]
(Score: 1) by Zanothis on Monday March 02 2015, @08:35PM
I regret to inform you that the USS Enterprise was NCC-1701. You may hand your geek card to the attendant on your way out.
(Score: 2) by zafiro17 on Monday March 02 2015, @09:10PM
Clearly, Zanothis' post is the real tragedy in this chain.
How'd you like to be user number 667? or 31416? Major suckage. I must be a sucker for forums because I've spent the past year on Pipedot and Soylent, contributed financially to both, while mostly preferring the comp.misc group on Usenet and even occasionally dabbling on Slashdot (mostly for the purpose of posting things where my signature provides some visibility to soy, pipe, and comp.misc). Got to say, they've each got their advantages.
Soy's got the best community at this point, though it could still use better comments, and this whole "we are losing money while employing multiple devs and dozens of servers" thing worries me. But I'm currently rocking the VT100 interface, which is pure gloriousness, truly - I love it. Pipe's got a great interface done in PHP that renders well on tablets and smartphones in a way neither Slashdot nor, frankly, Soylent does. But it's a pretty thin community and it's often the last to get the news. That's really a shame. Comp.misc makes sense if you already knew and loved Usenet, and I'm not alone in noticing the world has moved on. But Usenet is awesome in a way that's hard to evoke - it predates HTTP and the WWW and a lot of other stuff, and being able to connect your RSS reader to a script that forwards the post to comp.misc is hella-convenient.
Point is just: I'm on all these sites because I benefit from each of them, and hopefully contribute to each of them, in different ways. It's all good, and I'm not praying for /. to burn to the ground any more than I'm hoping for the destruction of any other site. Just glad to be in places where nerds congregate. Let's keep this party rocking!
Dad always thought laughter was the best medicine, which I guess is why several of us died of tuberculosis - Jack Handey
(Score: 1) by Zanothis on Tuesday March 03 2015, @07:24PM
I guess I got hit by Poe's law. Should've used the sarcasm tags in suggesting the handing in of the geek card. I did realize after the fact that my post was going to come off as dickish, as a result I was expecting to take a hit to my karma. If el_oscuro feels particularly offended by my comment, I'm more than willing to provide an apology.
My point was one of fact checking. Without someone pointing out mistakes I'd still think that "a few" meant two because they rhyme like when I was 8. I'm wrong --frequently-- and I expect to be called on it. I made a correction and tried (and failed, apparently) to inject some humor into the lesson. We're posting on the internet; I had hoped we were grown up enough to be able to take some criticism.
(Score: 5, Funny) by new here on Friday February 27 2015, @05:34PM
No need to wait, I was new here all along.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 27 2015, @03:49PM
> That is just too stupid for words.
It is if the words are posted within three minutes of each other.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 27 2015, @04:08PM
Three minutes? When I don't login, sometimes I'm forced to wait over an hour after posting after posting just a few comments.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 27 2015, @04:18PM
Three minutes? When I don't login, sometimes I'm forced to wait over an hour after posting after posting just a few comments.
As an anonymous poaster, I can tell you the wait time is THREE HOURS if you post something every day. So I don't even bother opening slashdot anymore. Soylent has much better content anyway.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 27 2015, @10:47PM
Thanks!
(Score: 5, Interesting) by n1 on Friday February 27 2015, @02:59PM
Welcome to SoylentNews! I am not a dev so I may be wrong on this but...
The core reason we don't currently have the UI features as described in the comment you replied to: The dev team is doing everything possible to avoid requiring javascript to make the site function. As I understanding, they are working on other methods to enable the functionality the previous comment notes we are lacking.
I have no disagreements about the UI improvements we need to make, but implementation is perhaps taking a little longer than we'd all like for the above, ideological reason.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by githaron on Friday February 27 2015, @03:57PM
How would they enable those features without Javascript or reloading the page? The best they could hope to do is make some features optional for those that are willing to run Javascript.
(Score: 1) by n1 on Friday February 27 2015, @06:00PM
Paulej72, as lead dev for the site provided some more information on this matter here [soylentnews.org], also can be found a few comments below this one.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Saturday February 28 2015, @03:49AM
*blink* I've never had JS active on slashdot, and it all works. Am I doing something wrong??
I mean, besides still reading slashdot...
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by NCommander on Saturday February 28 2015, @09:56AM
It *mostly* worked with classic, but under beta, if JS was disabled, you couldn't filtered by score, couldn't reply, and a lot of other crud just plain old broke. For the most part, with the exception of the admin screens, SN works fine if JS is disabled.
Still always moving
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Saturday February 28 2015, @02:35PM
Under beta and with JS off, I had to turn CSS off entirely (Prefbar has a setting for that) to be able to read the durn thing, and all I could say about it is... well, at least that degraded into something like Mosaic 0.99 would display. I wasn't real impressed with JS active, either.
[checks SN without CSS]
Hey! SN degrades super-gracefully. About all that really changes are fonts and centering. Good job!
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by NCommander on Saturday March 14 2015, @12:24AM
Bit late to the party, but it is possible to browse and post with Mosiac (esp if you have a version that understands PNG files). Can't log in since most versions of Mosiac don't understand cookies though ...
Still always moving
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Saturday March 14 2015, @01:15AM
http://sillydog.org/narchive/full123.php [sillydog.org]
http://sillydog.org/narchive/fulldata.html#retro [sillydog.org]
Tho I can't for the life of me see a download link for it.
I've used Mosaic 0.9 myself, used to use it as my acid test for website readability. Another good one for testing is Netscape 3.04 -- if the page looks okay and doesn't trigger the old old (and still with us) "too many elements causes a runaway resource leak" bug, then you're golden.
And..... [goes off, tests SN in NS3.04 which I happen to have handy... was only about 3 years ago I stopped using it!] ... looks fine, lets me log in, but when I tried to bring up this page (cuz I thought I'd try replying in NS), I persistently got "Connection Refused", and after that SN wouldn't speak to NS at all. Maybe they don't like sharing initials. ;)
But I don't remember anything that old that grokked PNG files? NS3.04 certainly doesn't.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by NCommander on Saturday March 14 2015, @06:34AM
VMS Mosiac and Mosiac-CK both can handle PNG files.
Still always moving
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Saturday March 14 2015, @02:01PM
Ah. They must be much newer models.
[goes off, looks 'em up]
MUCH newer! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic_%28web_browser%29#End_of_Mosaic [wikipedia.org]
Found a copy here:
ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/openvms/freeware/mosaic/ [hp.com]
Thanks! I'd had no idea there was a more or less modern version.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by NCommander on Sunday March 15 2015, @09:00AM
Despite the name, VMS Mosiac should build on Linux. CK-MOsiac required hitting the makefile with a wrench to get it to build under Ubuntu, but otherwise was easy enough. PNGs load fine, though our site layout sans CSS is a bit awkward.
Still always moving
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Sunday March 15 2015, @01:46PM
Ah, no fun for me then... have yet to find a linux I can love for everyday use. :(
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by NCommander on Sunday March 15 2015, @10:49PM
My guess it would build on BSDs or under Cygwin. What OS do you use?
Still always moving
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Monday March 16 2015, @01:13AM
WinXP. I live in a cave. :)
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by NCommander on Monday March 16 2015, @04:12AM
An unsupported cave :). It might still be possible to get it to build, Mosiac did build for Windows at one point. I remember using it.
Still always moving
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Monday March 16 2015, @04:37AM
Support is overrated ;) Yeah, antique Mosaic was a Win3.1 app. I can't seem to find a copy online right now, but here's an emulator!
http://www.dejavu.org/1994win.htm [dejavu.org]
Heh, SN doesn't look bad at all. Pretty much like an average modern Mobile page, in fact.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 27 2015, @06:09PM
Which is a lot more work because now they must maintain two versions of the site, one with javascript and one without. Unless you're willing to pay and/or spend time writing and maintaining code ...
(Score: 3, Insightful) by NCommander on Friday February 27 2015, @06:48PM
Graceful fallback. If you load SN without JS today, you'll notice the expand topic icons vanish. Is it extra work? Sure.
Do a significant portion of our users care about the site working without JS? Yup.
We may not be perfect, but we do try and listen to what people tell us.
Still always moving
(Score: 2) by tibman on Friday February 27 2015, @07:21PM
As long as each button has an ahref as well as an onclick (with return false) then there will always be a graceful fallback. "Reply to this" could open an inline reply without breaking non-JS users. Ditto for Moderate.
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 1) by tftp on Friday February 27 2015, @10:52PM
Do a significant portion of our users care about the site working without JS? Yup.
I block all JS by default. Rare a site gets it enabled - usually for good reasons, like real-time product selection tables. I wouldn't mind permitting JS at SN, but there is no reason to do so. I wouldn't even ask you and other SN coders to implement those widgets because that's the function of the browser already.
Removal of the gray bar on the left would be handy, but that's just some HTML template. The space is reserved for some boxes... but they are rarely needed, and they are always on top of the page, invisible.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Saturday February 28 2015, @03:53AM
Didn't realise the +/- stuff was there, which is testament to it working well enough without JS. I hadn't even checked SN with JS!! (Thanks for this!)
(Tho I have threshold set to 0 and it's never so wordy here that I care if it's all expanded.)
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 27 2015, @06:48PM
I don't have a link to the comment thread, but they mentioned some pretty good ideas to handle it without JS.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Friday February 27 2015, @06:50PM
Actually, I'm pretty sure you could accomplish all of that with CSS alone these days. As long as the user has a fairly modern browser.
It'd probably be some *horrifying* CSS, but it's possible...
(Score: 2) by mrcoolbp on Saturday February 28 2015, @04:09AM
Yeah, we could use a good CSS expert, know any?
(Score:1^½, Radical)
(Score: 1) by Aichon on Friday February 27 2015, @04:18PM
(Score: 3, Informative) by mrcoolbp on Friday February 27 2015, @04:25PM
Yup, that's the idea, we are actually working on it. We just have to prioritize due to our limited dev resources. This is (finally?) in our current dev plan though so stay tuned.
(Score:1^½, Radical)
(Score: 2) by Aichon on Friday February 27 2015, @04:32PM
(Score: 5, Informative) by paulej72 on Friday February 27 2015, @05:39PM
I would also like to point out than no one on our dev team seems to be enthusiastic about coding JS and the AJAX backend. The code we started with we missing a lot of the JS features that would have made doing in line commenting easy. As such we had to kill them off. The AJAX engine we inherited would probably need a major overhaul to even work properly with the site as we have changed many things on the back end.
We have this on the todo, but given that there are just three of us doing the coding in our spare time, it will not be soon. What we will probably be able to code faster is getting mods and comments to return you to the same place you were at when done. This will benefit non JS users so it seems like a good intermediate step in our progression.
Team Leader for SN Development
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Saturday February 28 2015, @03:57AM
SN works well enough right now that I don't feel a huge loss. Take your time and get it right, I say.
But when you get there, can we please have sane page titles when I save a page, without having to copy/paste from the headline? That feature, I miss. Right now they all want to be "article.pl.htm", which shows an utter lack of imagination. :P~
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by NCommander on Saturday February 28 2015, @09:59AM
This feature is incredibly irritating to code. It should enter the realm of *possible* once we finish migration to MP2 (scheduled for the next site update), but /code hooks directly into Apache to inject rewrite logic so you can't do it with just mod_rewrite rules, and we would still have to fix the underlying code to spit out the new link style. I might try to squeeze it into the next site update though.
Still always moving
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Saturday February 28 2015, @02:41PM
Oh. It's been a feature on /. for so long, I had no idea it was such a PITA to achieve. I'm assuming whatever /. did won't just work here, right?
But I will sure appreciate it when it happens! I realise this is just a "nuisance to user" deficiency, but it sure does cause a lot of "where'd I put that damn file?" and "shit! which one did I just overwrite??"
Thanks again for making SN a great place to hang out.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by NCommander on Saturday February 28 2015, @07:22PM
It was coded after slashcode was closed up, else we would already have had it :(
Still always moving
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Saturday February 28 2015, @07:59PM
Oh. I hadn't realised it got closed up. :( That must have been a long time ago!
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by mmcmonster on Friday February 27 2015, @07:03PM
Is there something fundamentally wrong about a small amount of javascript in order to make the viewing experience better?
The ability to roll up comments or reply inline to a comment is a reasonably good use of javascript. Also to moderate while reading and not have to leave the page.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 27 2015, @07:15PM
> Is there something fundamentally wrong about a small amount of javascript in order to make the viewing experience better?
The problem with javascript is that it is all or nothing. If I tell noscript to allow javascript on a website I have to take all of the javascript, including anything malicious that might have made its way in there. Sure 99.999% of the time it is going to be A-OK, but that 0.001% can be catastrophic.
> The ability to roll up comments or reply inline to a comment is a reasonably good use of javascript
That is possible to do with CSS alone. It isn't even very hard, hiding/displaying div elements on mouse-click is pretty simple actually.
> Also to moderate while reading and not have to leave the page.
That one's harder since it requires server interaction to post the moderations. But having the moderate button return you to the same place in the page as when you submitted it is probably about 80% as good and that does not need javascript.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by TWX on Friday February 27 2015, @07:15PM
I've been using the Web almost since it debuted, back when NCSA Mosaic was first starting to feel pressure from this upstart called Netscape. Back then there was no vector to exploit the client web browser as the client web browser rendered static pages only. Since the debut of client-side scripting there has never been a secure web. It gets worked on and it gets improved on, but it's still not perfect, going on 20 years later.
I don't hate Javascript, but like all design methodology, when the most absolute simple method can provide good results then that may well be the best solution. I have a lot of respect for those that can get the job done with as few tools as possible and arguably only the right tools, compared to those that use everything under the Sun and end up with problems that reflect it. This is where loads of sites, including Slashdot, are now.
IBM had PL/1, with syntax worse than JOSS...
and everywhere the language went, it was a total loss.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Saturday February 28 2015, @03:31AM
Neither does Slashdot -- I've never had javascript active there (or here).
Tho I had to enable it on Pipedot.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by NCommander on Saturday February 28 2015, @09:57AM
Assuming they haven't bastardized /code too much, you *should* be able to edit your sig and other stuff here: http://slashdot.org/my/info [slashdot.org]
Haven't tested it though.
Still always moving
(Score: 1) by TWX on Monday March 02 2015, @03:33PM
Thanks! I've changed the sig, let's see how long it's left that way.
IBM had PL/1, with syntax worse than JOSS...
and everywhere the language went, it was a total loss.
(Score: 2) by moondrake on Friday February 27 2015, @02:41PM
I noticed the overlap as well since today (Firefox 35 on linux).
(Score: 1) by skater on Friday February 27 2015, @02:50PM
Oh, now you've done it. I like AJAX, too, when it works correctly, but lots of people don't for whatever reason.
The /. comment on the far left side of the page, though - give me a SMALL border at least; right now it looks (on Chrome) like I'm missing a level of comments that's to the left of my screen. I stopped reading because it was too distracting.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Ethanol-fueled on Friday February 27 2015, @02:58PM
And after Slashdot crammed Beta up your asses despite widespread protest and Timothy just told you all to suck it, you're still dribbling all over his Jew dick.
Perhaps Slashdot would have never come to that realization had people not become pissed off enough to start (inferior, in your opinion) alternatives and put their money where their mouths are?
I just browsed Slashdot and was met with this, [google.com] even with no script blocking. Not very technically superior, even Soylent News doesn't have bugs that look that shitty.
And that's not even reminding anybody of their extensive censorship mechanism and shit comment and story quality. Flagging comments? Permabans for people who don't toe the groupthink line?
Yeah, no. Fuck Slashdot.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by buswolley on Friday February 27 2015, @04:01PM
Dude
Layoff the racism
subicular junctures
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Ethanol-fueled on Friday February 27 2015, @04:09PM
The word "Jew" is not racism. The phrase, "You are a cracka-ass Wonderbread honkie" just might be, though.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 27 2015, @09:57PM
When you feel the need to include a person's race outside of a context in which it is required or helpful information, it is racist, you cock-munching son of a donkey.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Ethanol-fueled on Friday February 27 2015, @04:01PM
Placeholder for glorious gloat reply, the first (and likely the last) since I left Slashdot for Soylent News:
Link. [slashdot.org]
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Friday February 27 2015, @07:20PM
I can't understand it - you were modded down to -1.
I thought it was quite restrained for you.... ;-)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 27 2015, @05:26PM
You do realize that Einstein was Jewish, don't you?
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Friday February 27 2015, @05:29PM
So are Ron Jeremy and The Minion. Your point?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 27 2015, @03:12PM
The stuff you mentioned are all totally good ideas and are exactly the sort of thing that the devs should be focused on instead of tail-chasing changes to karma and moderation.
I think slashdot does use javascript for many of them, but I think a smart CSS developer could do much of it without javascript.
> The now use the entire width of my browser window for comments. Soylent has a grey bar down the left side under the navigation bars
> (which don't extend into the comments section, so it's pure wasted space).
FWIW, I killed that on both slash and soy long ago using the Stylish add-on [mozilla.org] with the following:
@namespace url(http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml);
@-moz-document domain("soylentnews.org") {
#links{display:none}
#contents{margin-left: 0}
}
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Common Joe on Friday February 27 2015, @03:46PM
Disagree.
Should the devs be looking at some of those improvements you're talking about? Sure. In a year, this site has come a very long way, but there are still improvements to be made. I'm not sure if you were here at the very beginning, but this place is heads and tails better than when we first launched. Quite frankly, I'm amazed by how far it's come in such a short amount of time.
As for the karma and moderation, I think they're on the right track with wanting to experiment and see how things go. And there's no reason why they can't work on both karma / moderation and the other stuff at the same time. Yes, a lot of effort has gone into karma and moderation, but I'm happy that they are working on it so that we don't our comments into slop like Slashdot encourages.
I don't know how others feel, but as a user, I kind of like the changes they recently made with the point system.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 27 2015, @03:52PM
> but this place is heads and tails better than when we first launched
Right because that work was about site functionality, just like Raven was talking about. You are argureeing with me.
> As for the karma and moderation, I think they're on the right track with wanting to experiment and see how things go.
I don't. There has never been even a remotely substantiated case that there is a problem that needs fixing. Just a couple of loud-mouths and some agreeable responses because some people will always complain especially when complaining is zero-cost.
> And there's no reason why they can't work on both karma / moderation and the other stuff at the same time.
Dev resources are finite.
(Score: 3, Informative) by mrcoolbp on Friday February 27 2015, @04:09PM
I'm not a dev either, but I'll throw my opinion in the ring. I am pushing my devs to work on the new subscription options and reducing our server costs right now. Once that's taken care of, I would really like to see them spend some time on some of the basic nice-to-have commenting functionality that is being discussed above.
(Score:1^½, Radical)
(Score: 2) by cmn32480 on Saturday February 28 2015, @04:14PM
Glad to hear this. It smells suspiciously like long term thinking. You are working on reducing costs, keep things functional, and find ways to help our community raise more money to cover costs all at once? Excellent.
The way I read the last discussion on karma and moderation seemed to be mostly "leave it alone, it ain't really broken". Perhaps I am incorrect.
It behooves us to be thinking more along the lines of what you are saying above rather than tinkering.
"It's a dog eat dog world, and I'm wearing Milkbone underwear" - Norm Peterson
(Score: 2) by mrcoolbp on Saturday February 28 2015, @04:24PM
Although, I stay informed of their work as much as possible, I'm not on the dev team so I can't speak for them. Further, as I understand it, having (a) talented CSS and/or JS (and CSS?) person(s) familiar with perl that was willing to dive into SoylentCode would make this a much more attainable goal in the near future.
(Score:1^½, Radical)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 27 2015, @03:16PM
I use a plugin to zoom the fonts, so I can see them. Soylent, and most other sites work find. Slashdot used to. Now the poll and other stuff on the right cover up the text of the summaries unless I reduce font size to something I cannot read. Completely unusable for me.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Saturday February 28 2015, @10:04AM
Doesn't Ctrl-[Numeric]+ do that in your browser? Or is that something peculiar to Linux or whatever?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 27 2015, @03:46PM
To me, the top criteria for judging one of these sites are:
1. The quality and variety of forum discussion, including informative and funny posts
2. Regular turnover of stories
3. Having enough comments for most of the stories to make things interesting
4. Good choices of stories, mostly focused on tech/science (although occasional mainstream news items are OK), good summaries
The quality of UX is way down on the list, although if it's sufficiently annoying it could deter people from submitting and commenting.
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Friday February 27 2015, @06:58PM
Slashdot has a huge margin on the right hand side for me, SN on the left hand side. I don't really care. I would not want the text to traverse the entire screen because side-scrolling, even if only with your eyes, is annoying. With a narrow enough column, there is some side to side eye movement, but not a ridiculous left to right scan like you'd see in an Adams Family portrait with living eyes.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Saturday February 28 2015, @03:29AM
Whereas I preferred NOT having the comment be the full width of the browser window, because long lines are harder to read. That would be a nice style option, actually.
You make some good points about other stuff, tho. I'd add:
--Slashdot doesn't make me hunt for where I was on the page after I click Moderate
--When I save a Slashdot page, I don't have to rename it; it comes with a unique name from the headline. But SeaMonkey thinks SN's pages are all named "article.pl.htm".
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Saturday February 28 2015, @12:56PM
Whereas I preferred NOT having the comment be the full width of the browser window, because long lines are harder to read. That would be a nice style option, actually.
I never understand this argument. Long lines are difficult to read, but that's an argument for not making your browser window the width of your screen if you have a large screen. If you have a browser window that is full of large borders around the text, then that's wasted screen real-estate that could have another window in it. When I'm on a mobile device, I don't have spare screen space and I want the text to cover the entire screen. When I'm on a machine with a bigger screen, I want to have multiple windows open and don't want a site claiming space and then not using it.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Saturday February 28 2015, @02:52PM
The problem is, what's wide enough for one site is not wide enough for the next, and too wide for the next, so like a lot of people I keep my browser window width set at a compromise where all sites will display properly (since anymore a lot of 'em assume width and don't squeeze gracefully -- this is getting worse as screens get wider and sites try to use all of that), and where not too many sites are a PITA to read.
For long lines, I'd have to make my browser window half its current width, and that's fine IF that's the only tab open in that window. But I usually have a bunch of tabs open (sometimes in a couple windows if I need to sort 'em out, but it's so much nicer to just pick the visible tab I want rather than have to switch windows first) and SN is not the only site that's currently up in that window. I'd have to resize the window every time I changed tabs, and that's a serious PITA (especially as one who does RTFAs and links in comments). I'm sure I'm not alone in thinking this.
Okay, so having tabs in the browser rather than having to alt-tab among windows has kinda spoiled us... :)
'Course, ability to set individual tab display widths (or even for two tabs to share the screen) might not be a bad browser feature, either. Especially if remembered per site.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.