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.
Answered by: CmdrTaco
Last Modified: 6/14/00
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.
Answered by: CmdrTaco
Last Modified: 6/14/00
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.
Answered by: CmdrTaco
Last Modified: 6/14/00
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.
Answered by: CmdrTaco
Last Modified: 6/21/00
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 ;)
Answered by: CmdrTaco
Last Modified: 6/14/00
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.
Answered by: CmdrTaco
Last Modified: 6/14/00
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.
Answered by: Jamie
Last Modified: 10/24/03
If you visit Slashdot at http://slashdot.org/slashdot.wml with a WAP compliant browser, you should get a stripped down view of Slashdot designed for WAP. I wanted it to work on my 12x4 Qualcomm though, so it's pretty stripped down: no comments. Just headlines and stories.
Answered by: CmdrTaco
Last Modified: 2/13/02
You can accomplish the same thing by running wget or lynx --source on the RDF file.
Answered by: CmdrTaco
Last Modified: 10/28/00
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.
Answered by: CmdrTaco
Last Modified: 6/14/00
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).
Answered by: CmdrTaco
Last Modified: 10/28/00
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.
Answered by: CmdrTaco
Last Modified: 10/19/00
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.
Answered by: CmdrTaco
Last Modified: 10/19/00
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.
Answered by: CmdrTaco
Last Modified: 6/14/00
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.
Answered by: CmdrTaco
Last Modified: 10/19/00
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.
Answered by: CmdrTaco
Last Modified: 10/28/00
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.
Answered by: Robo
Last Modified: 03/04/02
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.
Answered by: CmdrTaco
Last Modified: 04/14/02
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Answered by: CmdrTaco
Last Modified: 06/18/03
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