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How about an NNTP news gateway?I'd love to, but there are several problems that complicate this: first is the time to program it. An NNTP gateway is definitely on the TO-DO list, but it's lower on the priority list then many other things. Second is advertising: Slashdot costs a lot to run each month, and our performance is measured in terms of dollars and pages. If we can figure out a way to put advertising (and don't worry, it'd be reasonably minimal) into the NNTP comments cleanly, we'd be all set. Finally, the moderation system really doesn't have a counterpart in NNTP. So you put it all together and you have something that would be
pretty nifty, but it has several problems. It'll happen someday,
but not tomorrow.
Have you considered rewriting Slashdot in C?Since Slashdot is almost entirely database calls to MySQL and text
parsing, Perl is the ideal language for it: the hefty work is handled
by MySQL (which is already written in C++) and string processing is
already Perl's forte. I doubt that we would get a worthwhile enough
performance boost by rewriting the code in C to make it worth the
effort. mod_perl precompiles and caches the Perl scripts anyway, so
the overhead is not really that bad.
Have you considered PHP?I tried PHP briefly but rejected it in favor of Perl. This is in no
way a criticism of PHP, I just knew Perl already and was quite in love
with the language. This was several years ago, and I understand
PHP has grown and matured greatly since I made this decision, so my
guess is that the limitations and awkwardness that made it undesirable
to me back then is largely gone. But at this point, we have a
substantial code base all written in Perl, and the effort involved in
rewriting it would be prohibitive. Besides, Perl is cool.
How about a page for rejected or pending story submissions?This is a frequently requested feature that has several variations that essentially have the same answer: Time and Abuse. Time is a resource that we always lack, so anything that we do that increases the amount of time required to maintain Slashdot has to be weighed carefully. A good example is the existing submission monitoring functionality. The amount of email I got regarding rejected submissions more then doubled when I added notification. I'm afraid that a public forum for pending/rejected stories would simply complicate the life of our authors. Abuse is much worse. We get hundreds of submissions a day: we don't need more submissions, we need better ones. A public forum that gets the kind of traffic we get tends to be abused (like, say, the Slashdot comments for example). We don't want to be deleting "First Posts" and "Natalie Portman" type trolls and spams from the submission bin: we're busy enough as is. Appropriateness From there, we move to the many stories that
are submitted which are very wrong for Slashdot. They are horribly off
topic, or offensive, or just plain scary. Obituaries for people that
aren't dead? Rants about events that never occurred? Random Conspiracy
Theories? Bug reports? Feature requests? I don't want to propagate
this stuff, and I'm afraid that another public forum for them would
only make the problem worse. There is some stuff submitted that would
make for a very interesting page, and maybe someday we'll implement
that. But as it stands, the overhead and the potential for abuse is
so high that we don't want to mess with it.
How about giving us a reason for rejecting submissions?This is a fair request. As it stands, people merely see "Rejected" or "Accepted". The reasons are simply left to their imagination. A simple reason like Offtopic, Boring, Badly Written, Repeat etc would go a long ways towards alleviating that problem. But again, this is more work for our authors: right now we delete 3000 submissions a week. Each takes a half a second to click a button. Even if this adds only 10 seconds of upkeep to each submission, that adds a full day of work each week! So, the answer is "someday". Honestly, I don't think it's a very good idea for another reason too:
the amount of email I got regarding story submissions more then doubled
when we added the note telling people if their story was rejected.
When you have to say 'No' to 500 people a day, it's only logical that
dozens of them will contest your decision. I'm afraid that if they
have more data, they'll email even more ("What do you mean my story was
boring, you bastard!") and my wrists can't handle that ;)
How about allowing readers to directly administer the submissions bin?Slashdot is a very open community; in the user comments our readers are free to say whatever they please. But we feel that the unique nature of Slashdot is largely because the contents of the homepage are determined by a handful of people. I'm sure a very cool website could be developed based on the concept of allowing public voting to determine the content of the homepage, but that website wouldn't be "Slashdot". If we tried to do it "by committee" it would suffer from the same problem that most projects done by committee suffer from: it would get bland. Let me put this another way: in the comments, any pro-Linux or anti-MS comment is probably gonna get rated up. Any time Microsoft does anything even slightly naughty, it gets submitted 50 times. Does that mean that it should be posted to the Slashdot homepage? For me personally, I don't want to read the "Bitch at Microsoft" website, but if ruled by popular consensus, Slashdot would very likely degenerate to this point. Since the days of Chips & Dips and the first days of Slashdot, my first goal has always been to post stories that I thought were interesting. I think a lot of people share my idea of interesting, and that's part of why Slashdot became successful. Slashdot is an eclectic mix of stories maintained by a small group
of people, but contributed to by anyone who wants to. I think that the
personality and character of Slashdot is part of the fun and charm of
the site, and I think it would suck to lose it. That's why the decision
of what ends up on the homepage will continue to be determined by me,
Hemos, and the rest of the guys.
How about an AvantGo channel or some other PDA interface
There is one if you go to AvantGo, which basically uses the URL
http://slashdot.org/palm/.
This is
also the URL where the Slashdot clipping app gets its content, which
you used to be able to download from
ftp://ftp.slashdot.org/pub/slashdot.pqa
but, sorry, that's not supported anymore.
Getting the slashdot headlines by 'finger @www.slashdot.org' would be nice, don't you think?You can accomplish the same thing by running wget or lynx --source on
the RDF file.
Slashdot should cache pages to prevent the Slashdot Effect!Sure, it's a great idea, but it has a lot of implications. For example, commercial sites rely on their banner ads to generate revenue. If I cache one of their pages, this will mess with their statistics, and mess with their banner ads. In other words, this will piss them off. Of course, most of the time, the commercial sites that actually have income from banner ads easily withstand the Slashdot Effect. So perhaps we could draw the line at sites that don't have ads. They are, after all, much more likely to buckle under the pressure of all those unexpected hits. But what happens if I cache the site, and they update themselves? Once again, I'm transmitting data that I shouldn't be, only this time my cache is out of date! I could try asking permission, but do you want to wait 6 hours for a cool breaking story while we wait for permission to link someone? So the quick answer is: "Sure, caching would be neat." It would make
things a lot easier when servers go down, but it's a complicated issue
that would need to be thought through in great detail before being
implemented.
Is it possible to have META tags that Slashdot looks for in a story link before allowing it to be submitted/posted? Many times a server can't handle the load of a Slashdotting. So can the site have tags to prevent it from being added to a Slashdot story?Not inconceivable, but I don't really think it's worth the work.
Most of the sites that are Slashdotted are prepared for it, and the
sites that get smashed usually are caught completely off guard; they
wouldn't know of this mysterious opt-out meta tag. (See also Caching Slashdot
Stories).
It seems that many moderators, because of the way they read comments, (higher thresholds, older comments first), only see comments that are posted with a bonus, or have already been moderated up. Wouldn't it make more sense to require moderators to read at a threshold of 0 with newest comments first?Yes, it would. This is something we're looking at, and may change.
(Another possibility might be randomizing the order of comments or
threads.) The problem is that we don't want to make moderating too
much of a pain for anyone. This would result in fewer people being
willing to moderate, and moderators not doing their job.
Have you ever thought about hiding comment scores when people are moderating? It might help alleviate "Group Think."Yes, this is another thing we've considered. The problem here is that
moderators are also supposed to keep one another in check. If a
moderator thinks something is rated too high, he or she can bring the
score down. So, the effect it might have on "group think" might actually
be neutralized if moderators aren't able to counter each other.
I have a suggestion for improving moderation.Please read the Comments & Moderation
section before emailing any of us with your suggestion. The vast
majority of suggestions I get are ideas that are already explained
there. Of the remaining suggestions, most are ideas that I probably
should put there. The thing that is typically forgotten is that the
moderation system is a complicated collection of checks and balances
designed to prevent abuse: almost every suggestion that winds up
in my inbox, however well intended, opens up a hole for abuse.
What about other moderation models such as those used by Kuro5hin, everything2, or advogato.org?While it's interesting to see what other sites are doing, these
sites don't have anywhere near the traffic that Slashdot does. In
order to make it work on Slashdot's scale, any moderation system needs
to be efficient enough that we can apply it without grinding our
servers to a halt. The system we have now, while not perfect, is the
best thing we've seen for the scale we're working on. We're always
looking for ways to improve it, and when we find them we'll implement
them, but for now we'll stick with what we've got.
Will some of the subsections spin off as sites in their own right?For example, it would be cool if the YRO section were to hit dead tree form in some way like soon. It's too important to remain outside the radars of 9-5ers in Pleasantville. There are no formal plans at this time, but it's something we're thinking seriously
about. I need information about Slashdot for a paper I'm writing!Believe it or not, a lot of people contact us about this. Sorry, we would love
to help, but we really don't have time. Can I use Slashdot icons freely on my site?Yes, we are fine with you using any icons from Slashdot on your site, provided you ask permission, and you link us back and credit us as the source for the graphics. Of course, some of the icons are copyrighted by other people. So, you'll have
to decide for yourself if you can actually use them under fair use. I have found a bug on Slashdot, Who do I contact?Please visit our fun and exciting SourceForge project page where you can see our list of outstanding bugs and feature requests, as well as submit your own. We're sorry, but you will have to log in to SourceForge to submit a bug.
We tried allowing anonymous bug/feature feedback but as often happens, a few
bad apples ruined it for everyone, or at least created a minor inconvenience
for everyone.
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