Slashdot FAQ

This is the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) file for Slashdot. As its name implies, it is intended to address questions that the Slashdot crew are asked repeatedly.

This particular edition is version 1.2.

Email your questions to CmdrTaco, Samzenpus, or Robo. We'll try our best to get you an answer, and if it's a question we've seen before, we'll consider adding it to the FAQ.

The FAQ was originally composed by Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda, and indeed much of the verbiage in it is his. In June of 2000, Joe Merlino was hired by Andover.net to revamp it. Joe updated, edited, and reformatted it, and unified it with a number of other documents. The FAQ went through another general update at the end of 2001 by Samzenpus and Robo. Further, the following people have contributed:

• Loon
• dkh2
• Scuttlemonkey

Slashdot was originally created in September of 1997 by Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda. Today it is owned by Geeknet, Inc..

Slashdot is run primarily by me and a handful of other others, who post stories and wrangle the day-to-day affairs of Slashdot.

Slashcode is wrangled and various other deeds of a technical nature are committed by Slashteam: Jamie McCarthy, Chris "Pudge" Nandor, Wolf, Chris Brown, and Tim Vroom.

Editorial responsibilities are still handled by Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda, along with the rest of the Slashdot Authors: Timothy Lord, Patrick "Scuttlemonkey" McGarry, Jeff "Soulskill" Boehm, Rob "Samzenpus" Rozeboom, and Keith Dawson.

"Slashdot" is a sort of obnoxious parody of a URL. When I originally registered the domain, I wanted to make the URL silly, and unpronounceable. Try reading out the full URL to http://slashdot.org and you'll see what I mean. Of course my cocky little joke has turned around and bit me in the butt because now I am called upon constantly to tell people my URL or email address. I can't tell you how many people respond confused "So do I spell out the 'dot' or is that just a period?"

Yes and no. It's difficult for the reader to grasp exactly how big and complex an operation running Slashdot has become. While we do sometimes experience a little nostalgia for the old days, Slashdot at its present readership level simply couldn't exist without the infrastructure that Geeknet provides. Also, the fact that Geeknet has taken over things like network operations and advertising sales means that we can work on the things that we enjoy, like posting stories and code development.

No.

Marketing. Personally, we (Rob and Jeff) think the Slashdot Cruiser was a really stupid idea, and if they'd asked us about it, we'd have told them so. Usually the marketing department consults with us about promotional ideas, but they're not required to, and in this case they didn't. Given that the reaction to it has been largely negative, we expect they've learned their lesson.

Please see the Suggestions section.

On average, I spend 20-30 hours a week just reading email about Slashdot. I listen, I just don't always do what other people think I should do, and sometimes people get angry and vocal about that. I can't please everyone.

We're not opposed to meta-discussion, but the problem is that we don't have the time to both run Slashdot, and talk about running Slashdot. It's a question of time constraints.

Slashdot typically serves around 40 million pages and 5 million uniques per month. Traffic is a hard thing to quantify today without a lot of quid pro quos due to AJAX, but we still serve quite a bit of traffic even though we are trying to reduce the number of page loads required for a visit to as close to one as possible.

Slashdot is successful for the same reasons anything else is. We provided something that was needed before anyone else did, and we worked (and continue to work) our butts off to make it as good as it could be.

Why is that question so important to every friggin' reporter that wants to bother us? "CmdrTaco" is a reference to a Dave Barry article where he lists places not to take a date. Among them is any place called "The Commander Taco" or something like that. My nickname on my local BBSs was 'Icarus' but unfortunately when I started using the Internet in high school, I found my name already taken.

"Hemos" is a mangling of a plant found on Michigan dunes. I don't get it either. Jeff's a weird guy.

Frankly I'm not quite sure, but here is my theory: In the real world, people have names ("Bob," "George," "Archibald") that they are given at birth. They are as a general rule quite uninteresting.

Reporters need an "angle." They want to make things interesting, and if you interview a guy named "Bob" you can't really ask him about his name ("Yeah, in a past life I was a cork.") because he didn't choose it. But in the geek world, we tend to pick nicknames for ourselves. The reporters think to themselves "Ooo! A name like CmdrTaco must be significant and will allow me to provide a window into this person's soul!"

The irony is that most geeks don't hold huge significance to their nicks. I mean, they are protective of them, and they want them to be unique (there are a zillion Bobs out there, but very few CmdrTacos... well, except on Quake and EverQuest servers where apparently there are people who pretend to be me all the time). Whenever a reporter asks me the question, I think, "Shit, this guy has no clue at all!" It's just such a cliche of a question (along with "How long have you been doing this?" and my personal favorite "What is Slashdot?").

So if you're a reporter, don't bother asking geeks about their nicks. It usually wastes both of our time.

This is a shorthand expression that refers to one of the core debates in the Free Software and Open Source movement. It stems from a shortcoming in the English language: the word "free" has two meanings. The first is "free" as in "free speech." This is the Latin word "Liber." When you see "free speech," the writer is talking about a fundamental human right like freedom of speech.

The other half is easy to understand for cheapskates. Beer costs money. "Free beer" just means that someone doesn't want to pay money for something.

The other aspect to this is the subtle difference between the Open Source Initiative and The Free Software Foundation. OSI believes that software can be developed better if it is done in the open. The FSF believes that it is ethically wrong for software to be closed. This is, of course, an oversimplification, but you get the idea.

The zealots are pretty loud on all of these points, and understanding them is critical to understanding many of the central debates on Slashdot.

If you want to learn more about this issue, you might start by checking out the following websites:

• The Free Software Foundation
• The Open Source Initiative

When Slashdot links a site, often a lot of readers will hit the link to read the story or see the purty pictures. This can easily throw thousands of hits at the site in minutes. Most of the time, large professional websites have no problem with this, but often a site we link will be a smaller site, used to getting only a few thousand hits a day. When all those Slashdot readers start crashing the party, it can saturate the site completely, causing the site to buckle under the strain. When this happens, the site is said to be "Slashdotted."

Recently, the terms "Slashdot Effect" and "Slashdotted" have been used more generally to refer to any short-term traffic jam at a website.

This one.

"There are no active plans to bring Geeks in Space back."

I put 'em there. Use them. Enjoy them.

He's just this guy, ya know?

Big corporations are what they are. They sell us cool stuff with one hand and tighten the screws on our freedoms with the other. We hate them every morning and love them every afternoon, and vice versa. This is part of living in the modern world: you take your yin with your yang and try to figure out how to do what's right the best you can. If you think it has to be all one way or the other, that's cool, share your opinions, but don't expect everyone else to think the same.

Logged in users have a variety of benefits on Slashdot that are unavailable to users who don't bother logging in. Among these benefits are:

• The ability to save user preferences from visit to visit.
• Your own Journal in which to share your innermost feelings.
• The ability to define Friends & Foes to aid in reading discussions.
• A chance to participate in Slashdot's Moderation and Meta Moderation System.
• Posting in Discussions at Score:1 instead of Score:0 means twice as many people will see your comments.

So do it! Log In Already!

You can't. Sorry. It's just too prone to abuse. You can't delete your own comments. You can't change your name. There are no exceptions to this.

Go to the User Info Editing Page while you are logged in and use the form provided there.

You can't. The system needs to keep track of the users, so accounts are permanent. Don't sweat leaving unused accounts hanging around. It doesn't hurt anything.

You should be able to get it from the user login page. Just type in your nickname and hit 'mailpasswd' and your password will be whisked off to your email address. If, however, this doesn't seem to be working, email passwords@slashdot.org for help.

Make sure you have cookies turned on. If you don't, it won't work. Also make sure that the date and time on your computer is correct. In a handful of cases, we've seen problems related to a proxy server; but this is very unlikely. If you've turned cookies on and tried again to log in, and it still doesn't work, email passwords@slashdot.org for help.

Really, though, the system works for tens of thousands of people every day, so the problem is most likely on your end ;)

You can be logged in to Slashdot while you view any of the sections. All you need to do is hit any of the sections, and log in. Logging in to one of them logs you into all. But you need to log in to at least one section seperate from logging in to slashdot.org.

Yeah, we know this is confusing, but we didn't write the RFC for cookies. Sorry for the inconvenience.

A lot of people are paranoid about cookies, and not without reason, but the simple fact is that this is how you create persistence in a stateless protocol. I've heard all the arguments and all the debates on the subject, and this is how we're doing it.

If you don't want to use cookies, you don't have to. You can still post (either anonymously, or by entering your password each time you submit a comment) but you will not be able to use all of the advanced features of Slashdot (story filtering, customized Slashboxes, user preferences etc.). If your paranoia requires you not to use cookies, this is the sacrifice you'll have to make.

There are many accounts in the system that were created for malicious purposes. There are dozens of variations on names like 'CmdrTaco' and 'Hemos' as well as heads of many corporations, writers, etc. We don't tamper with existing accounts though, so there's nothing we can do about it. Over the last few years, numerous restrictions have been placed on accounts to make this difficult (for example the system won't let you create an account named 'CmdrTaco' because there already is one listed) but that doesn't prevent any of the hundreds of existing ninnies from doing what ninnies do.

In most cases, these folks are caught by moderation, and they eventually get karma that is low enough to make it obvious that they are impostors.

You might need to log in to both foo.slashdot.org and slashdot.org. Because of how cookies work, if you log into the latter first, you might find yourself logged out of the former. Or vice versa. Once you log in to both, you'll be fine. Yes, this is annoying. No, we can't fix it. We don't write the RFCs.

Occasionally we ban IPs from which are originating some form of abuse of our servers. If this happens, please read How do I get an IP Unbanned. These bans are relatively rare, but they are necessary in cases where specific Users or IPs intentionally try to disrupt service for other users by crapflooding the forums, gaming the moderation system, or otherwise overburdening our servers.

The moderation system has a variety of limits in it as well, but these bans are temporary and exist more as a rate limiter to make sure that people stay on topic, and that everyone gets a chance to speak. You can learn more about the moderation system by reading Comments and Moderation.

• Perhaps you are running some sort of program that loaded thousands of Slashdot Pages. We have limited resources here and are fairly protective of them. We need to make sure that everyone shares. If your IP loads thousands of pages in a day, you will likely be banned. Please note that many proxy servers load large quantities of pages, but we can usually distinguish between proxy servers being used by humans, and IPs running software that is hammering our servers.
• Your IP might have been used to perform some sort of denial of service attack against Slashdot. These range from simple programs that just load a lot of pages, to programs that attempt to coordinate an avalanche of posts in the forums (often through misconfigured "Open Relay" proxy servers).
• You might be using a proxy server that is also being used by another person who did something from the above list. You should have your proxy server administrator contact us.
• Your IP might have been used to post comments designed to break web browser rendering.

Email banned@slashdot.org. Make sure to include the IP in question, UID, timeframes, and any other pertinent information. If you are connecting through a proxy server, you might need to have your proxy server's admin contact us instead of you.

Due largely to the absolutely ridiculous amount of abuse we get on a daily basis from poorly implemented headline readers, we were forced to institute a much more rigorous automated banning system on RSS/RDF headline reading applications. Our policy is to allow one request every 30 minutes. We'll allow a few more before you will get banned, and we are more flexible still with proxy servers.

You should still be able to access the rest of the website, just not the .rss, .rdf, and .xml pages.

You have two options. The first is simply to stop beating the crap out of our servers, and just wait. Depending on the severity of the abuse, you should be back in a couple of hours or a couple of days. If, after 72 hours, you are still banned, please email banned@slashdot.org and ask for help. Please include the approximate time of the ban, the srcid hex string that the ban message told you to tell us, and what you think your IP number is.

If you have reason to believe you're connecting through a proxy server, please mention that too — and you might need to have your proxy server's admin contact us instead of you.

This is not a bug. This is a feature! That name is the last user page (besides your own ;) that you have visited. This is useful when you want to hop around between your user info, and someone else's: to compare friends and foes for example. Your account has not been hacked, this is totally by design.

A login session is a glorified cookie. To provide some added security, you can determine the location and time duration for your session. The duration choices are 'Lasts Forever' and 'Closes With Browser' and should be pretty self-explanatory. The former is good if you are the only person using your computer. The latter is nice if you are slightly paranoid, or often log in from remote terminals.

The second decision is your location. The first choice is 'Never Moves' which basically means you have a static IP and you never log out of Slashdot or share your computer. The second choice is 'Moves within Subnet' which is useful if you have a desktop and never log out, but your ISP likes to change your IP on you occasionally. The last choice is 'Follows me Everywhere' which is the choice for machines that move from network to network. This last option is the least secure, but oh-so convenient. It is also the default.

The achievements system was launched on April fools day of 2009 in order to allow for certain joke achievements, but the system itself is a real one. This allows Slashdot users to track accomplishments and milestones (and stroke the epeen, which is what it's all about anyway) as they use the site.

You can view your own accomplishments or view a comparison of your achievements against a friend's by visiting the respective user page (ex: //slashdot.org/~CmdrTaco/achievements).

A few achievements have been listed below, but the full list will only be uncovered with a fair amount of digging on the site, happy hunting.

• The Tagger — tag a story
• The Contradictor — !tag a story
• Days Read in a Row — your largest number of consecutive days reading Slashdot
• Days Metamoderated in a Row — your largest number of consecutive days metamodderating
• Comedian — have a score:5 funny comment when the story gets archived
• Member of the {1,2,3,4,5} Digit UID Club — really? You need an explanation?
• Posted a Comment — posted a positive comment to a story
• Posted a Journal Entry — yes, Slashdot users have journals
• The April Fool — posted in the April fools story
• Spent All My Mod Points — used 'em and didn't lose 'em

Yes! You too can have banner ads at the top of Slashdot. Impress your friends! Terrify your competitors!

Visit the Advertising page to learn how.

AdFu was written in mod_perl by BSI to be a flexible system for serving banner ads for Slashdot and Everything. However, Slashdot isn't using it anymore (See below ).

It's far from perfect, but you're welcome to download the code and try it out for yourself on your own website.

I liked AdFu, but Andover wanted to use a consistent system across their whole network, and they were more comfortable using their own system. Since it isn't my job to administer the ad server, I didn't care. AdFu continues to serve banner ads for several other sites, such as Everything2.

Email Scuttlemonkey and complain. We have a pretty strict set of rules about what is allowed in a Slashdot banner ad, but occasionally an ad slips by unnoticed that breaks these rules. If you see a 50k banner or one that is launching Java or something, let us know and we'll take it down. Our goal is to make our readers happy first and foremost.

You can add a badge or link to your page (or for a blog, to your page template, to get one on every page) to easily allow your readers to submit it to Slashdot for consideration; and once submitted, take them to the discussion.

A Slashdot badge is the easiest and most powerful tool to do this. Add a badge to your web page by including this snippet of HTML:

If your page hasn't yet been submitted, a badge allows your readers to easily do so. Once it has been submitted, the color accent reflects its popularity and the toggle lets them vote on it in our system. The badge itself links to your submitted story and its discussion on Slashdot. Both anonymous and logged-in users can submit, but only logged-in users can vote directly. Anonymous users are taken to the intermediate step of logging in. Logged-in users who have already voted will see the state of their vote in the toggle. For instance, like this:

The Slashdot badge is somewhat customizable by setting some values in JavaScript before you invoke the badge script. For instance, you can suggest a title for the submission by setting slashdot_title or to specify a specific URL instead of the page the browser is currently showing by using slashdot_url. This might look like this:

The examples above show the (default) horizontal style badge. Alternatively, you can have vertical badges by setting slashdot_badge_style:

For security or control reasons, you might wish to use your own image and formatting with a plain HTML link. This snippet builds the appropriate link automatically, you can paste it directly into your page as is:

Or you can construct the URL argument `by hand' for each page, e.g.,

You can add a `favicon'-sized Slashdot icon like so:

 Slashdot It!

View the source if you need to see the exact HTML used to make the link above. You are welcome to download the favicon image to rehost from your own server if you prefer.

These simple links don't have all the power of badges. As with badges, your readers can easily submit a story or follow the link to the already-submitted story and discussion. There they will see its popularity and be able to vote --- things the simple link won't let them do directly from your page. The benefit to you is you can completely control the style, image, and formatting of such links, e.g., with CSS, to fit the rest of the page. It's all up to you.

These are just different ways of displaying what can be a rather long list of comments. Here's the rundown:

Flat mode displays all the comments in one gigantic list, without showing anything in the way of relationships between comments.

Threaded shows a hierarchy of responses, with replies as links to new pages.

Nested displays the same hierarchy of responses, but displays all of the comments. (This can be a bitch of a page to render on weaker platforms and in longer discussions.)

These are both nicknames given to Slashdot's Next Generation ajaxified, buzzword compliant comment system. Our old system was based on the traditional late 90's model of web design: you load pages and follow threads by loading new pages. The new D2 system uses in-line AJAX requests to make it possible for you to follow a discussion with thousands of comments in a single page.

The floating widget contains 2 sliders that allow you to independently control the score threshold at which comments are displayed in Full Text, Abbreviated Text, and Hidden. You can drag and drop them and adjust your preferences to find the balance of score and comment text you want.

Nested mode as an explicit option is gone. You essentially fake it by dragging the 2 sliders together. When you do this, they move as a single unit, and you no longer see abbreviated comments. This is exactly what nested mode did before, but you have the added benefit of being able to do this without reloading the page.

Default discussions will contain a relatively small number of comments. Clicking 'More' will retrieve blocks of additional comments if they are available. So you don't need to continuously load new pages and lose your place. Instead you can follow threads and missing comments will be retrieved as you navigate down the threads.

Right now you have to retrieve comments in smaller blocks. This is to find a balance between performance and bandwidth. Processing huge chunks of XML sucks on slower computers, and can take forever if you are on a slow network connection. Logged-in users can change the number of comments they retrieve with each request. We'll be tweaking the exact sizes based on reader feedback. Subscribers have the ability to download the entire discussion in one massive request, but we are very hesitant to enable that blindly since it can cause slow browsers to a choke.

The balance between huge pages, which take more bandwidth, CPU and memory to load, against small pages which can be retrieved almost instantly is tricky. After all, half of Slashdot readers don't read the discussions at all, so we need to create a default setting that works well for both casual and hard core readers. If you log in you can retrieve more comments in each click... I suspect that this will be 'enough' comments for all but the most obsessive reader.

The upper right hand corner of the floating D2 configuration widget has a little icon that toggles between 3 different 'modes'. They are

1. Floating on the left hand side of the screen in the margin (the default, and I think nicest view)
2. Floating at the top of the screen (some people might like it this way, and on narrower browsers, this will work better.
3. 'Locked' or stuck... in this mode, the floater stays pinned atop the discussion. You can't change your thresholds within the page. You can't load 'More' comments within the middle of a discussion, but for a lot of people, this may provide a cleaner view of discussions that they might like.

You need to log in, click 'Prefs' from the widget, and disable 'Enable Dynamic Discussions'. Alternatively, you could run MSIE6. Since D2 does not work under MSIE6, we disable it for users with that browser!

Currently, D2 is not supported in IE6- since these days only 10% of Slashdot readers use IE6, and that population is shrinking daily, we don't intend to work on compatibility. You should upgrade to MSIE7, or better yet, Firefox.

Slashdot's Discussion2 system is a work in progress, and as such as about a zillion keybindings that are all subject to change. Most of them are documented here.

• Previous/Next Comment (Following Threads) A/D
• Previous/Next Comment Sibling W/S
• Previous/Next Comment (Chronologically) Q/E
• Next Unread Comment: F
• Reply to Current Comment: R
• Parent of Current Comment: P
• Moderation Log of Current Comment: M (close with X)
• Skip to End: V
• Skip to Top: T
• Get More Comments: G
• Raise/Lower Abbreviation Threshold: [/]
• Raise/Lower Hide Threshold: ,/.
• Toggle D2 Floater Widget: /

Note that if you press a 'Next' key when you are at the end of a discussion will attempt to 'G'et more comments. Also, holding down 'Shift' while using the navigation keys will hide the comment you just left. So you can press 'shift-d' and leave the comments you have already read closed behind you as you read on.

This is the 'current' comment for the purpose of key stroke discussion navigation. Pressing the WASD keys allow you to navigate the discussion without your mouse.

• Bug fixing and compatibility fixing.
• More keybindings to improve mouseless navigation
• Comment posting from within the D2 interface

No. We believe that discussions in Slashdot are like discussions in real life- you can't change what you say, you only can attempt to clarify by saying more. In other words, you can't delete a comment that you've posted, you only can post a reply to yourself and attempt to clarify what you've said.

In short, you should think twice before you click that 'Submit' button because once you click it, we aren't going to let you Undo it.

The only time we ever delete comments is if the comment contains malformed HTML that is somehow causing Slashdot to fail to display properly. Comments are not deleted on the basis of content. At this point, however, it shouldn't be a big worry. The comment engine is reasonably bulletproof, and it's pretty tough to post a comment that breaks Netscape.

If you posted a comment and you don't see it now, it may have been moderated down below your threshold (see below). If you set your threshold to -1, you should be able to see it again.

If the system told you that your comment got submitted, it'll show up. Because of the way data gets cached in our system, it could take as much as ten or fifteen minutes (although it doesn't usually take that long).

"First Post" comments are one of those odd little memetic hiccups that come out of nowhere and run amok. Basically, people with altogether far too much spare time sit and reload Slashdot, hoping that they will get the "First Post" in a discussion. This is one of those things that the moderation system was designed to clean up, and for the most part, it works. "First Post" comments usually get moderated down as off-topic almost instantly.

We have a moderation system.

One of the unfortunate side-effects of the increasing popularity of Slashdot is that the number of trolls, flame-warriors and all-around lamers increases as well, and it only takes a relatively small number of them to make a lot of noise. Keeping this noise to a minimum is one of the primary goals of the moderation system (which is explained in detail elsewhere in this FAQ).

Since this system is essentially an experiment in trying to solve the problems inherent in mass communication, one would expect its success to be variable, and indeed, this is the case. Some days it works great, and some days it doesn't.

In short, yes.

As you might have noticed, Slashdot gets a lot of comments. Thousands a day. Tens of thousands a month. At any given time, the database holds 50,000+ comments. A single story might have a thousand replies- and let's be realistic: Not all of the comments are that great. In fact, some are down right terrible, but others are truly gems.

The moderation system is designed to sort the gems and the crap from the steady stream of information that flows through the pipe. And wherever possible, it tries to make the readers of the site take on the responsibility.

The goal is that each reader will be able to read Slashdot at a level that they find appropriate. The impatient can read nothing at all but the original stories. Some will only want to read the highest rated of comments, some will want to eliminate anonymous posts, and others will want to read every last drip of data, from the First Posts! to the spam. The system we've created here will make that happen. Or at least, it sure will try...

Goals

• Promote quality, discourage crap.
• Make Slashdot as readable as possible for as many people as possible.
• Do not require a huge amount of time from any single moderator.
• Do not allow a single moderator a "reign of terror."

On the whole, we think the moderation system works really well, but often people disagree. Their disagreement usually stems from different expectations. They see a bunch of moderations countering each other. They see a comment moderated blatantly wrong. A 'Troll' flagged 'Off topic' (or vice versa) and feel that the system is flawed.

Of course it is flawed! It's built upon the efforts of diverse human beings volunteering their time to help! Some humans are selfish and destructive. Others work hard and fair. It's my opinion that the sum of all their efforts is pretty damn good.

Read Slashdot at a threshold of 3 and behold the quality of the comments you read. Certainly you aren't reading a wild and freewheeling discussion anymore, but you are reading many valid points from many intelligent people. I am actually pretty amazed.

We've thought about it. We think the ability to post anonymously is important. Sometimes people have important information they want to post, but are afraid to do it if they can be linked to it. Anonymous Coward posting will continue to exist for the foreseeable future.

Yes, and we've got a ton of legal correspondence to prove it. We regard this as a risk of doing what we do.

You're reading Slashdot from behind a web proxy that allows connections from any host. This functionality has been abused. Therefore, comments are not allowed to be posted from this address until the proxy is better secured. Please notify your Proxy Admin.

In order to understand the system, it might help to understand how we got there. It wasn't random, it was trial and error and progression. I'm constantly tweaking and changing, trying to squeeze more out. Trying to make a more efficient, more fair system.

Before Moderation

In the beginning, Slashdot was small. We got dozens of posts each day, and it was good. The signal was high, the noise was low. Moderation was unnecessary because we were nobody. It was a different world then. Each day we grew, adding more and more users, and increasing the number of comments submitted. As this happened, many users discovered new and annoying ways to abuse the system. The authors had but one option: Delete annoying comments. But as the system grew, we knew that we would never be able to keep up. We were outnumbered.

Hand Picked Few

So, I picked people to help. Just a few. 25 or so at the end. They were given the simple ability to add or subtract points to comments. The primary function of these brave souls was to weed out spam and First Post and flame bait. Plus, when they found smart stuff, to bring it out.

The system worked pretty well, but as Slashdot continued to grow, it was obvious that these 25 people wouldn't be enough to keep up with the thousands of posts we were getting each day. It was obvious that we needed more.

400 Lucky Winners

So we picked more the only way we could. Using the actions of the original 25 moderators, we picked 400 more. We picked the 400 people who had posted good comments: comments that had been flagged as the cream of Slashdot. Immediately several dozen of these new moderators had their access revoked for being abusive, but they settled down.

At this time I began to experiment with ways of restricting the power of moderators to prevent abuses. 25 people are easy to keep an eye on, but 400 is another matter. I knew that someday I would have even less control since I intended to eventually give access to even more people. While moderators still added and subtracted points, the number of points they were given dropped from hundreds to dozens.

As time went on, I began working on the next phase: mass moderation. I learned a lot from having so many moderators. I learned that I needed to limit the power of each person to prevent a single rogue from spoiling it for everyone. And then we took the next step.

Today: Most Anyone

Today any regular Slashdot reader is probably eligible to become a moderator. A variety of factors weigh into it, but if you are logged in when you browse Slashdot comments, you might occasionally be granted moderator access. Don't worry about it. Just keep reading this document and learn what to do about it!

Who

It's probably the most difficult part of the process: who is allowed to moderate. On one hand, many people say "Everyone," but I've chosen to avoid that path because the potential for abuse is so great. Instead, I've set up a few simple rules for determining who is eligible to moderate.

• Logged In User If the system can't keep track, it won't work, so you gotta log in. Sorry if you're paranoid, but this system demands a certain level of accountability.
• Regular Slashdot Readers The scripts track average accesses from each logged-in user. It then selects eligible users who read an average number of times. The homepage doesn't count either. It then picks users from the middle of the pack- no obsessive compulsive reloaders, and nobody who just happened to read an article this week.
• Long Time Readers The system throws out the newest few thousand accounts. This prevents people from creating new accounts to simply get moderator access, but more importantly, means that newbies will have to be part of the community for a few months before they gain access to the controls to a system they don't understand.
• Willing to Serve If you don't want to moderate, just visit your user preferences, and set yourself as "Unwilling."
• Positive Contributors Slashdot tracks your "karma." If you have Positive, Good, or Excellent karma, this means you have posted more good comments than bad, and are eligible to moderate. This weeds out spam accounts.

The end result is a pool of eligible users that represent (hopefully) average, positive Slashdot contributors. Occasionally (well, every 30 minutes actually), the system checks the number of comments that have been posted, and gives a proportionate number of eligible users "tokens." When any user acquires a certain number of tokens, he or she becomes a moderator. This means that you'll need to be eligible for many of these slices in order to actually gain access. It all works to make sure that everyone takes turns, and nobody can abuse the system, and that only "regular" readers become moderators (as opposed to some random newbie ;)

When moderators are given access, they are given a number of points of influence to play with. Each comment they moderate deducts a point. When they run out of points, they are done serving until next time it is their turn.

Moderation takes place by selecting an adjective from a drop down list that appears next to comments containing descriptive words like "Flamebait" or "Informative." Bad words will reduce the comment's score by a single point, and good words increase a comment's score by a single point. All comments are scored on an absolute scale from -1 to 5. Logged-in users start at 1 (although this can vary from 0 to 2 based on their karma) and anonymous users start at 0.

Moderators can not participate in the same discussion as both a moderator and a poster. This is to prevent abuses, and while it is one of the more controversial aspects of the system, I'm sticking to it. There are enough lurkers that moderate that, if you want to post, feel free.

Moderation points expire after 3 days if they are left unused. You then go back into the pool and might someday be given access again.

Concentrate more on promoting than on demoting. The real goal here is to find the juicy good stuff and let others read it. Do not promote personal agendas. Do not let your opinions factor in. Try to be impartial about this. Simply disagreeing with a comment is not a valid reason to mark it down. Likewise, agreeing with a comment is not a valid reason to mark it up. The goal here is to share ideas. To sift through the haystack and find needles. And to keep the children who like to spam Slashdot in check.

The Slashdot Editors have unlimited mod points, and we have no problem using them.

Our moderations represent about 3% of all moderation, and according to Meta Moderation, the fairness of these moderations are either statistically indistinguishable from non-admin users, or substantially better. The raw numbers are: 95.1% of non-admin upmods are fair, and 94.7% of admin upmods are fair. 79.1% of non-admin downmods are fair, and 83.6% of admin downmods are fair.

The editors tend to find crapfloods and moderate them down: a single malicious user can post dozens of comments, which would require several users to moderate them down, but a single admin can take care of it in seconds. This tends to remove the obvious garbage from the discussion so that the general population can use their mod points to determine good. Otherwise, a few crapfloods could suck a lot of moderator points out of the system and throw things out of whack.

You can argue that allowing admins unlimited moderation is somehow inherently unfair, but one of the goals of Slashdot is to produce readable content for a variety of readers with a variety of reading habits. I believe this process improves discussions for the vast majority of Slashdot Readers, so it will stay this way.

Your "threshold" is the minimum score that a comment needs to have if it is to be displayed to you. Comments are scored from -1 to 5, and you can set your threshold at any score within that range. So, for example, if you set your threshold at 2, only comments with scores of 2 or above would be displayed. Setting your threshold at -1 will display all comments. 0 is almost all comments. 1 filters out most Anonymous Cowards, and so on. Higher threshold settings reduce the number of comments you see, but (in theory, anyway) the quality of the posts you do see increases.

Your karma is a reference that primarily represents how your comments have been moderated in the past. Karma is structured on the following scale "Terrible, Bad, Neutral, Positive, Good, and Excellent." If a comment you post is moderated up, your karma will rise. Consequently, if you post a comment that has been moderated down, your karma will fall.

In addition to moderation, other things factor into karma as well. You can get some karma by submitting a story that we decide to post. Also, metamoderation can cause your karma to change. This encourages good moderators, and ideally removes moderator access from bad ones.

Note that being moderated Funny doesn't help your karma. You have to be smart, not just a smart-ass.

Karma is the sum of your activity on Slashdot. This means posting, moderation, story submissions. It's just an integer in a database. The tiers are Terrible, Bad, Neutral, Positive, Good, and Excellent.

People like to treat their Slashdot Karma like some sort of video game, with a numeric integer representing their score in the game. People who do this simply are missing the point. The text label is one way we've decided to emphasize the point that karma doesn't matter.

Yes. Karma is now capped at "Excellent" This was done to keep people from running up insane karma scores, and then being immune from moderation. Despite some theories to the contrary, the karma cap applies to every account.

Karma is used to remove risky users from the moderator pool, and to assign a bonus point to users who have contributed positively to Slashdot in the past. It is not your IQ, dick length/cup size, value as a human being, or a score in a video game. It does not determine your worth as a Slashdot reader. It does not cure cancer or grant you a seat on the secret spaceship that will be traveling to Mars when the Krulls return to destroy the planet in 2012. Karma fluctuates dramatically as users post, moderate, and meta-moderate. Don't let it bother you. It's just a number in the database.

This is a shortcoming in the code that we haven't solved yet. Essentially, the system can easily track a submitter of a story and grant them karma, but Quickies and Slashback each operate differently. A dozen or more people might contribute directly to any one of those stories. The system doesn't really have any internal record to handle sorting out the karma distribution. Besides that, we currently grant karma points for an accepted homepage story.

Karma is used to determine who moderates and who doesn't. Extremely bad karma usually indicates a user account that is being used to spam the discussion board.

Secondly, users with better karma are given a bonus point which can sometimes increase your karma level. Logged-in users normally post comments with a score of 1, but the theory is that if a user earns higher karma, they may post with a score of 2. Essentially it's a reward for being a good participant on Slashdot, or a punishment for being a bad one. Users with very low karma might lose the +1 associated with being a logged-in user. Extremely bad users might even be penalized to a -1.

If you've been moderating or posting, your karma will likely fluctuate a little as you are moderated or metamoderate. Don't worry about it; this is normal. Please remember that this is just a number in a database that helps us determine who gets selected as a moderator. It doesn't determine your IQ or your value as a human being. It's simply not a big deal.

The lowest your karma can go is "Terrible." Check out "What does "Good", "Bad" etc. Karma Mean?" if you want to learn more about how the karma reference are tiered.

Once you get really low, you start posting at -1, and the moderators are less likely to see your posts, so it's hard to lose any more karma.

As a good poster, you earned a bonus: you are allowed to speak slightly "louder" than other people. In most cases, this is because you've earned it. But with that right comes a responsibility - you have to justify that bonus score. The louder you speak, the more likely you are to be moderated down, unless you're sufficiently interesting to prompt the moderators to let you keep your bonus score. This is how the system is designed to work: you can't just rack up karma, and then post nonsense.

You're right.  But please keep in mind that once you are "Excellent", that's as high as you can go. You have your bonus point already.  What more do you want?  Karma by its very nature fluctuates fairly dramatically, and the karma ceiling does tend to cause some ripples in that fluctuation at the top end of the scale... but they are only small ripples, and they are normal.   They really don't matter at all.  Its not punishment, its just the normal flow of things.

Moderate! Read comments (preferably at a low threshold) and when you see comments that are very insightful, or perhaps just plain off topic, select that option from the drop down list. When you are done, hit the 'Moderate' button. That's it!

You either used up your moderator points, or they expired. Moderation is like jury duty. You never know when you're gonna have to do it, and when you get it, you only do it for a little bit. Once those points are gone, you're done.

It's a good question. Moderators' primary complaint is that they are often crippled by the tiny amount of points they have, and the overwhelming amount of comments that need moderation. If a good moderator could moderate all the comments in a given story, certainly that would be a great improvement.

The problem is that a single bad moderator could wreak havoc across those same 5 stories. By limiting the number of moderation points to 5, any single moderator can only do so much damage. Sure they can only do so much *good* too, but that's the trade-off. I'd rather see a hundred comments unmoderated than see a hundred comments moderated badly by some jerk with an axe to grind.

Congratulations! You are in the top 1% of moderators and have been given the gift of 10 points for your good work. It looks like your mom was wrong when she said all those hours on Slashdot wouldn't get you anything.

Most of the time we've found that, for every moderator out there pushing an agenda, there are a dozen good moderators making sure that everyone is getting a fair say. However, to the extent that there may be problems with unfair moderation, we have come up with a system of meta-moderation (moderating the moderation) to address this.

While this may be true in some cases, its limited applicability doesn't justify complicating the moderators' user interface. Also, there's too much potential for abuse.

I don't think so. Nothing is deleted: if you want to read the raw, uncut Slashdot, simply set your threshold to -1 and go crazy! This system is simply a method for us to try to work together to categorize the thousands of comments that are posted each day in such a way that we can benefit from the wisdom contained in the discussions. It's in there! It just takes some work to find it.

What are you smoking? We squashed this bug three years ago!

A good comment says something interesting or insightful. It has a link to a relevant piece of information that will add something to the discussion. It might not be Shakespeare, but it's not Beavis and Butthead. It's not off topic or flamey. It doesn't call someone names. It doesn't personally attack someone because of a disagreement of opinion.

Some of my favorite "bad" or off-topic comments are things like "Slashdot sucks!" and "This isn't news for nerds!" and "Moderate this XXX!" Any of these may be true, but they're probably off topic!

I disagree. The 3 day limit exists to help push the system along. If users were allowed to hang on to their points, they could save them for a discussion within which they wanted to push an agenda. It's all right if points go unused- points are free, and there are always hundreds of users with more points who can fill in.

This is intentional. If you could retrieve your points, you could abuse the system very easily. Here is an example:

1. Naughty Bob moderates 5 comments in a discussion. He uses up his points.
2. Naughty Bob waits 2 days, and then posts a message to that discussion.
3. Naughty Bob gets his 5 moderator points back!
4. GOTO 1

If Naughty Bob was out pushing an agenda, he could keep his 5 points indefinitely, saving them to push discussions around. By taking his points away, he is unable to do that. Now Naughty Bob has to wait until the next time he gets points.

What follows was originally a story submission by dkh3. It seemed to me that it would better serve readers here:

10 Tips for Improving Your Karma:

• Post Intelligently: Interesting, insightful, thought provoking comments are rated higher on a fairly consistent basis.
• Post Calmly: Nobody likes a flame war. In fact, more times than not the flamer gets burned much more than their target."Flame Bait" is hit quickly and consistently with "-1" by moderators. As the bumper sticker says... "Don't be a dick."
• If You Can't Be Deep, Be Funny: If you don't have something truly developing to the topic, some humor is welcome. Humor is lacking in our lives and will continue to be promoted. Remember though, what rips your sides out may be completely inane to somebody else. [This won't help you anymore see above.]
• Post Early: If an article has over a certain number of posts on it already, yours is less likely to be moderated. This is less likely both statistically (there are more to choose from) and due to positioning (as a moderator I have to actually find your post waaay at the end of a long list.)
• Post Often: If you only post once a month you can expect your karma to remain low. Also, lively discussion in an open forum is what makes Slashdot really "Rock the Casbah."
• Stay On Topic: Off topic posts are slapped quickly and consistently with "-1" by moderators.
• Be Original: Avoid being redundant and just repeating what has already been said. Smirk. Yes, being moderated as "redundant" is worth "-1" to your post and your karma. Especially to be avoided are the "what he said" and "me too" posts.
• Read It Before You Post: Does it say what you really want it to say? Check your own spelling and grammar. Occasionally, a perfectly beneficial post is passed over by moderators because of this completely irrelevant-to-content feature. This is also a good approach to checking yourself for what you're really saying. Can't tell you the number of times I've stopped myself from saying the opposite of what I meant by checking my own spelling and grammar.
• Log In As a Registered User: I know, this sounds obvious but, "Anonymous Coward" does not have a karma rating. You can't reap the perceived benefits of your own accidental brilliance if you post anonymously. Have pride in your work and take credit for it.
• Read Slashdot Regularly: You can't possibly contribute to the discussion if you're not in the room. Come to the party and play.

Lots of early posts that "seem" to be informative/insightful and get mod-ed up when they really shouldn't be. If the author sounds confident, people seem to just give him points. By the time an actual informative post makes it in, it's too late to go back. How could you accommodate this in the moderation system?

Moderators are human beings, and human beings make mistakes. Still, moderators should try to be as thorough as they can. If there's a link in the comment, moderators should check it. If there are facts in the comment that a moderator knows to be wrong, he or she should take that into account. If the moderator doesn't know if the facts in a comment are correct or not, maybe the moderator should skip that comment.

A handful of filters have been put into place to try to make sure that people don't abuse the system. The most important is that the same person can't post more than once every 120 seconds. Also, if a single user is moderated down several times in a short time frame, a temporary ban will be imposed on that user... a cooling off period if you will. It lasts for 72 hours, or more for users who have posted a ton.

The vast majority of you will never encounter any of these troll filters. If you do encounter one unfairly, let us know so we can fix it. This stuff is fairly beta code, so there are bound to be problems.

If someone copies text from elsewhere and doesn't mention that it's copied or name the source, it's plagiarism. Moderate it Redundant, or feel free to alert moderators by posting a link (perhaps anonymously).

Why can't you? What are you talking about, you can! Go to the front page and scroll all the way to the bottom. There's your search button. You can search for anything you'd like in the Slashdot database, stories, comments, users, polls, and even journal entries. Filtering is a little tricky, you can filter for authors, topics, or sections, but not filter out authors, topics, or sections. Occasionally our search feature gets bogged down when many users are accessing it. In this case we recommend using Google. Google likes to cache Slashdot stories and is reasonably accurate.

In a story where a user posts a comment, you'll see one of seven images next to the comment defining the poster's relationship to you:

Friend 

Fan 

Neutral 

Foe 

Freak 

Friend of Friend 

Enemy of Friend 

For more information about "Friends" check out Friends and Journals

Comment posting modes are not related to comment viewing modes. Instead, they determine how the text that you enter for a comment is interpreted and thus how it will be displayed to the reader. There are four post modes:

• HTML Formatted: You determine the formatting, using allowed HTML tags and entities.
• Plain Old Text: Same as "HTML Formatted", except that <BR> is automatically inserted for newlines, and other whitespace is converted to non-breaking spaces in a more-or-less intelligent way.
• Extrans: Same as "Plain Old Text", except that & and < and > are converted to entities (no HTML markup allowed).
• Code: Same as "Extrans", but a monospace font is used, and a best attempt is made at performing proper indentation.

To "auto-link" a URL in HTML or Plain modes, enclose it in <URL:http://example.com/>.

The list of approved HTML tags is: <b> <i> <p> <br> <a> <ol> <ul> <li> <dl> <dt> <dd> <em> <strong> <tt> <blockquote> <div>

In addition, there are two extra Slash-specific "tags" you can use. One is called <ecode>. This functions like the "Code" post mode, but may be inlined in "HTML Formatted" and "Plain Old Text" posts, and the entire block is indented. (Getting really fancy: if you wish to use the literal text </ecode> inside the <ecode> tag, you may instead use <ecode end="sometag">...</sometag> instead of <ecode>...</ecode>.)

The other is <quote>. It is used for quoting another comment.

You may set your default post mode on the Comments preferences page.

Your user page displays the comments' "Natural" score. That is the base score that all users share for any given comment. This number includes things like moderations up and down, default posting bonus, and so forth. However, that same comment, when displayed in the context of a discussion, reflects the bonuses or penalties associated with any number of user preferences. These options are all configurable, and include settings like the small comment penalty, the long comment bonus, and any reason modifiers you may have defined.

• Normal -- This is the default setting attached to every comment when you have moderation privileges. Normally, you should not need to actually select this option, but if your mouse slips and you accidentally moderate up or down a comment you didn't mean to, you can undo that mistake by choosing Normal before you hit the "Moderate" button.
• Offtopic -- A comment which has nothing to do with the story it's linked to (song lyrics, obscene ascii art, comments about another topic entirely) is Offtopic.
• Flamebait -- Flamebait refers to comments whose sole purpose is to insult and enrage. If someone is not-so-subtly picking a fight (racial insults are a dead giveaway), it's Flamebait.
• Troll -- A Troll is similar to Flamebait, but slightly more refined. This is a prank comment intended to provoke indignant (or just confused) responses. A Troll might mix up vital facts or otherwise distort reality, to make other readers react with helpful "corrections." Trolling is the online equivalent of intentionally dialing wrong numbers just to waste other people's time.
• Redundant -- Redundant posts are ones which add no new information, but instead take up space with repeating information either in the Slashdot post, the attached links, or lots of previous comments. For instance, some posters cut and paste otherwise legitimate comments in multiple places in the same discussion; the pasted versions are Redundant.
• Insightful -- An Insightful statement makes you think, puts a new spin on a given story (or aspect of a story). An analogy you hadn't thought of, or a telling counterexample, are examples of Insightful comments.
• Interesting -- If you believe a comment to be Interesting (and it's not mostly Redundant, Offtopic, or otherwise lame), it is.
• Informative -- Often comments add new information to explain the circumstances hinted at by a particular story, fill in "The Other Side" of an argument, provide specifications to a product described too vaguely elsewhere, etc. Such comments are Informative.
• Funny -- Think of Funny as being a good moderation choice if you actually think the comment is funny, not just because it seems intended to be. Not every knock-knock joke is Funny.
• Overrated -- Sometimes you'll run into a comment which for whatever reason has been moderated out of proportion -- this probably means several moderators saw it at nearly the same time, thought it was Funny, Insightful etc, and their scores added together exaggerate its relative merit. (A knock-knock joke at +5, Funny) Such a comment is Overrated. It's not knocking the original poster to say so, but it's probably better to spend your mod points on comments which are deserving of being moderated up.
• Underrated -- Likewise, some comments get smashed lower than they perhaps deserve by overzealous moderators. If you moderate a comment as Underrated, you're saying that it deserves to be read by more people than will see it at its current score. As with Overrated, if you can think of a more specific moderation reason, do so -- if a comment has already been moderated with an appropriate label though, and you just want to indicate that it deserves greater visibility, that's what Underrated is for. However, if a comment is labeled with a fitting (negative) label, choosing Underrated isn't such a great idea, because you could end up with contradictions like "+5, Flamebait."

You may have noticed user IDs with an asterisk after them, like: John Doe (12345) *. The asterisk means that this user is a subscriber to Slashdot. They have shelled out some coin to help keep Slashdot running. They get assorted extra features for helping support the site, including the asterisk and the glorious bragging rights that go along with it. If you are logged in, you can use this information to assign a bonus or penalty to their default comment score. Or disable it outright. It's really up to you.

You might have noticed that the karma bonus seems to disappear from comments that are heavily moderated. To be more accurate, when a comment that was posted with the karma bonus has been moderated down twice, the karma bonus is removed from the score's total.

There are two major reasons for this. The first is more technical: using the default settings for the Karma Bonus, a post moderated down twice would be at score:0. If this post is in fact a bad post, moderators will now continue to moderate down this score:0 post, but the Karma Bonus will prevent the comment from ever falling to negative one. The bonus is not intended to prevent bad comments from being moderated to -1.

The second major reason is more social. The karma bonus is designed to accelerate the moderation system. The bonus is given to trusted users who have a history of positive contribution. Essentially, the karma bonus lets the user moderate their own comment, nudging it from Score:1 to 2. Normal moderation has the balance of meta moderation, but since the karma bonus is not subject to normal M2, we decided 2 moderators could counteract the bonus.

Please note that when the karma bonus is removed, no karma penalty is assessed to the poster. This has been in the code since early 2003 and has been working quite well.

You can submit a story by using the Submissions Bin. When you submit a story, please remember to include appropriate links. Also, you'll have a better chance of getting our attention if you use a clear and specific subject line.

Before you submit a story, please take a minute to make sure it's not a duplicate of a story we've posted already. Check the main Slashdot page and make sure it hasn't already been posted. If it's not breaking news, you might also run a search to see if it's something that might have been posted on a previous day. Roughly ten percent of all our story submissions are duplicates of stories we've already posted.

You can add a small badge like this to your site to allow readers to automatically submit your page as a story to Slashdot for story consideration.

We've added a complete Badges How-To to the FAQ.

The best way to submit followups is just as if you were submitting any other news item to Slashdot: please use the web submission form (rather than email). However, if your story ties closely to a specific story that's already run (for instance, if you have an update about a situation which has changed since the last time it was mentioned on Slashdot), please include a link to the previous story to which you're referring, rather than merely alluding to it.

Slashdot will certainly review press releases from anyone who chooses to submit them through our standard submission form. However, please be aware that your product/service/tradeshow might not be as interesting to us as it is to you, and we are relatively unlikely to select press releases to be posted to the Slashdot main page. You're welcome to try, but please use the form as our email boxes are already bursting at the seams with unwanted press releases that if printed, could easily wallpaper a large portion of the Pyramids at Giza.

In short, no. Any story submission emailed directly to any Slashdot author will almost certainly be deleted and immediately forgotten. You will get no feedback whatsoever.

Please understand that there are a half a dozen people who deal with Slashdot story submissions during any given week. If you email one of us directly, the others won't see your great submission. You might email someone who is on vacation, sleeping, or has a downed network connection. And even if they are around, you're just going to irritate them for not using the correct channels for your submission. Yeah, maybe we should be more patient, but after reading tens of thousands of submissions, you just want them to be in the right place.

It's also worth noting that when you submit a story using the form, you have the option to be alerted when your story is accepted or rejected. You also can be certain that the correct name and URL will be included with your submission. Nobody who emails a story directly to us remembers to tell us what URL they want their name linked to!

So to wrap up, if you submit your story to The Submissions Bin then the appropriate person will certainly evaluate your story, and accept or reject it in a timely manner. If you email it, it will be ignored.

Yes. And furthermore, anonymous submission will not increase or decrease the chances that we'll select it. (We do, however, reserve the right to refer to you as an Anonymous Coward, and mock you mercilessly.)

Ask Slashdot is maintained by the editorial staff. We prefer that you submit questions through the submissions form, selecting the section "Ask Slashdot" so we know to route the question appropriately.

This is a tough one.

Slashdot gets hundreds of submissions every day. Every day our authors go through these submissions, and try to select the most interesting, timely, and relevant ones to post to the homepage. There are probably as many reasons for stories to get rejected as there are stories, but here are some of the more common ones:

• Badly worded subjects
• Broken or missing URLs
• Confusing or hysterical sounding writeup
• It might be an old story
• It might just be a busy day and we've already posted enough stories
• Someone already submitted your story
• Your story just might not be interesting!

This last one requires a little explanation: if you submit a story, and we don't select it because we think it's not particularly interesting, we're not making a judgment about you as a human being. Deciding the interest level of a story is a very subjective thing, and we have to take into account not only the intrinsic interest of the story itself, but what else is happening that day. On a day when lots of things are happening, we reject some very good stories. But on a day when nothing interesting is happening, we may post something not really as cool.

The bottom line is that we have to select stories with an eye towards whatever is going to make Slashdot be what it is for that particular day. (If you want a slightly fuller explanation of this idea, read about The Omelette.)

Usually stories are examined within a few hours of their submission. Sometimes, however (and usually with stories that are submitted as Ask Slashdot or chosen as potential quickies), it might be weeks before it closes. Usually these things aren't time dependent... the answer won't change if the question is posed tomorrow or in a week, and since Ask Slashdot gets 5x more submissions then we use, there's some delay there. So be patient.

Slashdot has too many submissions to post them all, but many submissions are worth posting for folks specifically interested in them. We post many stories in the sub sections that don't appear on the homepage. Examples are Ask Slashdot, Your Rights Online, and Apache. Each of these sections has a smaller, more devoted group of readers with a more specific interest in these subjects.

These sections are listed on the left hand side of Slashdot, along with the date they were last updated, and the number of stories that appeared within that section on that day.

Usually it's because of this, but sometimes you just need to be patient. Many stories are accepted, but not posted for a few hours (for a variety of reasons: to give existing stories some time to be read and commented on, or to have a second author give a second opinion on some detail).

These are just mistakes on the part of the staff. They happen. We have posted over ten thousand stories in our history. The occasional duplicate is inevitable.

If you see a duplicate, you can mail the story's author. If the story is still quiet, we may pull it down. However, once the comments are rolling in, we often leave the story up so that the discussion can continue.

Some people have suggested that there might be a software solution to this problem. If you think you've got one, visit the Slashcode site and submit a diff. As long as it isn't a performance hit, I'd consider using it. (Be aware however that the trick of searching for duplicate URLs isn't as helpful as you might think, since the same story can appear in multiple locations.)

A lot of times, we don't use a particular story on a particular day, but at some later point, someone else submits it, and it ends up getting used. We have 4 to 6 guys working together to post things on Slashdot. What one of us finds stupid, the others might find interesting. Or it just might be the rest of the stuff that's going on that day. There are a variety of factors: the personality of the post, the quality of the submission, or even the quantity of stories already posted when your submission entered the queue.

As a whole we think we do a good job, but sometimes we make mistakes. We're always sorry when we do, but considering the thousands of weekly submissions, we think we're definitely coming out ahead.

Before you get carried away, mail me a synopsis of your idea (put the text 'Proposed Feature' in the subject). That way I can tell you if it is something we would consider posting before you bother to write the whole thing.

And, hey - even if we're not interested in it, there's always a chance someone else will be. If we say "no thanks," you might want to query some of the other websites before you drop the idea.

Make sure the book hasn't been reviewed before, or at least anytime lately. Also, be sure to read our book review guidelines so you know what we're looking for. When you're ready to submit it, you can do so on our submissions page. When submitting your book review, you can help us out by marking it for the "Book Reviews" section, so that it gets sorted into the proper channels. (and increases the chances of it getting posted) Any questions about the process? You can email timothy with them, and he'll help you out.

We're more interested in getting the stories out quickly than we are in making sure every post passes the white glove test. These days we have a copy editor who catches most of the spelling and grammar mistakes, but things do sometimes slip through.

If you see a mistake in a story, email the author. We'll get it fixed pronto.

Slashdot is many things to many people. Some people think it's a Linux site. To others, it's a geek hangout. I've always worked very hard to make sure that Slashdot matches up with my interests and the interests of my authors. We think we're pretty typical Slashdot readers... but that does mean that occasionally one of us might post something that you think is inappropriate. You might be interested in my Omelette rant.

Personally, I have a pet peeve when people post comments saying things like "That's not News For Nerds!" and "That's not Stuff that Matters!" Slashdot has been running for almost 5 years, and over that time, I have always been the final decision maker on what ends up on the homepage. It turns out that a lot of people agree with me: Linux, Legos, Penguins, Sci (both real and fiction). If you've been reading Slashdot, you know what the subjects commonly are, but we might deviate occasionally. It's just more fun that way. Variety Is The Spice Of Life and all that, right? We've been running Slashdot for a long time, and if we occasionally want to post something that someone doesn't think is right for Slashdot, well, we're the ones who get to make the call. It's the mix of stories that makes Slashdot the fun place that it is.

We don't. You do. :) If something seems outrageous, we might look for some corroboration, but as a rule, we regard this as the responsibility of the submitter and the audience. This is why it's important to read comments. You might find something that refutes, or supports, the story in the main.

Slashdot is U.S.-centric. We readily admit this, and really don't see it as a problem. Slashdot is run by Americans, after all, and the vast majority of our readership is in the U.S. We're certainly not opposed to doing more international stories, but we don't have any formal plans for making that happen. All we can really tell you is that if you're outside the U.S. and you have news, submit it, and if it looks interesting, we'll post it.

It is worth noting that there is a Japanese Slashdot run by VA Japan. While we helped them a little in their early days, they essentially run their own content without any real involvement from us... none of us can read Kanji! There are currently no plans to do other language or nation specific Slashdot sites.

There are some sites like this already. For example, there's a Spanish site, and a Portuguese one. These sites aren't run by us, however. We have discussed the possibility of international mirrors, but we haven't made any decisions yet.

Let me try to give you an analogy for Slashdot's homepage. It's like an omelette: it's a combination of sausage and ham and tomatoes and eggs and more. Over the years, we've figured out what ingredients are best on Slashdot. The ultimate goal is, of course, to create an omelette that I enjoy eating: by 8pm, I want to see a dozen interesting stories on Slashdot. I hope you enjoy them too. I believe that we've grown in size because we share a lot of common interests with our readers. But that doesn't mean that I'm gonna mix an omelette with all sausages, or someday throw away the tomatoes because the green peppers are really fresh.

There are many components to the Slashdot Omelette. Stories about Linux. Tech stories. Science. Legos. Book Reviews. Yes, even Jon Katz. By mixing and matching these things each and every day, we bring you what I call Slashdot. On some days it definitely is better than others, but overall we think it's a tasty little treat and we hope you enjoy eating as much as we enjoy cooking it.

Stories on Slashdot can appear on the main page (the one you see when you go to slashdot.org, or in the site's various subsections such as Science and Ask Slashdot. If you're wondering what each of those section names really means, we hope this page will clear things up. Some sections have specific editors associated with them. Feel free to directly contact those editors with specific questions about the section.

Index

This is Slashdot's catch-all category. If your submission doesn't fit better into one of the sections described below, you can always choose "Index." Most submissions should go in this section, but if there is a more appropriate section, choosing it will get it into the hands of the right person more quickly.

Apache

The Apache section is for anything about the Apache web server.

Apple

For all things Mac, or otherwise related to Apple computers and OS X.

Ask Slashdot

If you're seeking advice from the Slashdot readership about jobs, computer hardware, software glitches, philosophical problems, etc, select the Ask Slashdot section. Regarding Legal Advice: When seeking advice on topics that touch on legal aspects, please remember that you should always be prepared to consult professional legal representation. It doesn't hurt to Ask Slashdot for pointers, and suggestions to save you some time, but Ask Slashdot should not be used in place of professional legal representation.

Book Reviews

This section is for your original book reviews on (not necessarily) tech books, the more recent the better. If you're interested in submitting book reviews to slashdot, make sure you've read through the book review guidelines, too.

Editor samzenpus

BSD

The BSD section hosts news about the various modern UNIXes derived from Berkeley's distribution (like Free, Open and NetBSD).

Developers

News about the software, or anything that directly affects the practice of programming. A new programming language? A useful technique? Licensing snafus? Use "Developers."

Features

For your original feature-length articles.

Games

If it beeps, scores points, and robs you from time at work, odds are good you should be choosing Games.

Editors games@slashdot.org

Geeks in Space

We've disabled this section for submissions (Geeks in Space is a web audio broadcast featuring several of the editors of Slashdot, which you may have forgotten since it hasn't had fresh episodes recently).

Interviews

This is a good place to suggest possible Slashdot interviewees (with contact information, if possible, and background material for un-informed editors).

IT

Anything that people with "Information Technology" in their job description might be interested to know.

Linux

The Linux section is for news specific to every penguin's favorite OS.

Politics

This section is for news relevant to United States government politics. It was created primarily to cover the 2004 US Presidential Election, but today exists for occasional stories that fit the bill.

Polls

Submit your most thought-provoking poll questions here. Suggestion: provide 4-6 potential answers of no more than 12 words each, and phrase your poll answers in the form of a list.

Science

This is the place for science articles. Cool technology, space telescope observations, interesting medical research ... all perfect for the Science section.

Your Rights Online

News affecting your ability to live as a free, responsible person online belongs in the Your Rights Online (YRO) section. Spam, invasions of privacy, onerous licenses -- they all go here.

The syndication feed for the Slashdot front page is available in RSS 0.9, RSS 1.0, and Atom 1.0 formats. Please do not request feeds more than once every 30 minutes.

On most pages, if there is feed content available, it will be noted in the <HEAD> of the page.

Wherever you see rss below, you can also substitute with atom to get an Atom 1.0 feed, such as content_type=atom and journal/atom, or append atom to the end of the rss.slashdot.org URLs, like slashdotGamesatom (although some feeds, like Zoo and some search results, need some more work for Atom).

Where you see $username below, substitute the URI-encoded username of the user in question (such as Clifton+Wood).

Where you see $logtoken, you must include a token so the server knows you are you, in lieu of a cookie, as most newsreaders can't handle cookies well (you can find it in the <HEAD> of the page, if you are a logged in, and a subscriber). NOTE: your logtoken is subject to change when you log out or change your login preferences. See the Accounts FAQ for more information.

• Append the section name to the index link for individual section feeds. For example:
  • http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdotGames
  • http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdotAskSlashdot
  • http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdotYourRightsOnline
  • http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdotApple
  • http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdotHardware
  • http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdotIT
  • http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdotScience
  • http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdotPolitics
  • http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdotLinux
  • http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdotInterviews
  • http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdotDevelopers
• http://slashdot.org/index.pl?content_type=rss&logtoken=$logtoken
  • (this special subscriber version will respect your user homepage prefs; including which stories appear from which sections; to get only a specific section, replace the hostname, such as "apple.slashdot.org")
• Journals (add "/$logtoken" if you are a subscriber, to get full HTML in the feed)
  • http://slashdot.org/~$username/journal/rss
  • http://slashdot.org/~$username/journal/friends/rss
• Messages
  • http://slashdot.org/my/inbox/rss/$logtoken
• Search Results
  • Merely add &content_type=rss to the query string

Use the filter field to sort for whatever type of content you like. On the section menu, you'll se an "untitled" section, which you can use to save those settings. Once that's done, hitting the edit button again will bring up an an RSS icon which you can use to subscribe to the custom feed. You can also grab feeds off of the tabs at the top of the page, which are modifiable as well.

The Firehose is a collection of all the content that appears anywhere on Slashdot. Everything from comments and journal entries to RSS feeds and story submissions go into the firehose, and you can filter and interact with them in a number of ways. The plus/minus box on the left side of firehose entry lets you vote on that particular piece of content; plus if you like it, minus if you don't. A small context menu will appear when you select one, giving you the option of appending one of a few common, more descriptive tags. You can also expand the submission and use the tag box if you'd like to add a specific tag of your choice, such as "awesome" or "typo." Voting and tagging is useful and helpful; it shows other firehose users what the interesting submissions are, and helps the editors decide which ones make it to the front page.

The text field in the top right corner is where you enter filter terms. You can sort for any particular type of entry by entering its type into the field and hitting enter. For example, doing "journal" would sort for journal entries. You can also sort for story, comment, feed, bookmark, and submission. Putting a "-" in front of a type will exclude that type. For example: "-feed" would exclude all RSS feeds. You can also sort for things like "linux", "openbsd" or "riaa" to see stories with those tags or comments and submissions that mention them. You can set it to display particular users or editors if you'd like to see just the things they've contributed by doing "user:CmdrTaco".

We realize this is a lot to take in, so we've given you several easy ways to see what readers are usually most interested in. The left side menu lets you sort by topic; hitting the Games link will show you entries related to games. Once you've used a term in the filter field, you'll notice a new entry in the section menu called "untitled," which has an edit icon next to it. You can click on that to create and save custom filters. Afterward they'll appear in that side menu for easy access. You can also use the tabs near the top to see several common views: Stories brings up a list of the recent front page items, while Recent and Popular show submissions fitting those descriptions. Using the edit button on the tab lets you modify them and save the new settings. You can also subscribe to an RSS feed for a particular tab or section.

The colors serve as a rough quality rating for entries in the firehose. You can sort for colors by using the color-picker next to the filter field. Red is the most popular, black is the least popular, and story submissions enter the firehose at blue. Your nods and nixes affect this, so the more often you vote, the more useful color sorting becomes. The lower your color threshold, the more content you'll see. Once you get down to violet and black, you'll have a ton of feeds and comments, and filter terms will really help to focus in on the content you want to see.

Slashdot is user-driven, but it's still up to the editors to maintain some basic content standards that fit the theme of the site. A submission may be very interesting, but also very off-topic. Political submissions often fall into this category. Another common reason is because the submission is a dupe. For every dupe that makes it to the front page, there are dozens that get weeded out by the editors. Some of them get voted up very high; after all, it was interesting enough to be run the first time. But, if you'd like to rely solely on user selections, you're certainly welcome to do so -- just filter to -story.

Well first of all, we're happy to use good ideas when we see them. Countless websites have knocked off our cool ideas, just like we joyously took ideas from those that came before us. But ultimately the idea here is not to imitate any other social network news site. We feel that the editorial layer that exists on top of Slashdot is important. But we also think that having many eyeballs will help us more efficiently sort through the ever increasing volume of content on this here internet of ours. That's why we'll aim to strike a balance. Slashdot stories will continue to be posted by our editors. We will use the advice given to us by our readers. Sometimes we will agree, and other times we won't. You are welcome to read more or less editor content depending on your tastes.

At the end of the day, striking a balance between the wisdom of crowds and the tyranny of mobs is a difficult one. It's also a personal one: some people might regard it as having a moral component. Others may just want to read a bunch of good stories no matter what the methodology. We're hoping that we can strike a balance that will work for everyone. Your feedback can only improve the system for everyone.

Currently we work great under Firefox 1.5, 2.0, and 3.0 as well as Safari. IE7 and IE8 are functional but has glitches that we are working to fix. The iPhone functions as well with a number of optimizations for small screens (although the bandwidth requirements are still fairly steep so you are probably better off on a WiFi connection for now).

IE6 is known to be broken. Other browsers might work, but we haven't really tested them. We're keeping an eye on Chrome and Opera, and fixing bugs when we have time.

Your journal can be found at http://slashdot.org/my/journal.

What can't you use your journal for? You can use it for whatever you'd like, we don't care.

Nope

Anyone can read your journal.

Yes, this also means that you can read anyone else's journal.

Nope. Sorry.

To find other users journals, go to your friends list. There it will show the latest journals of your friends. To search and find a strangers journal use the Slashdot search feature.

http://slashdot.org/my/friends

http://slashdot.org/my/foes

Sure. It's similar to checking your own friends or foes list (http://slashdot.org/my/friends) except, replace the "/my/friends" with "/~username/friends" Same pattern for checking other users foes list.

When you select someone as a friend, it makes you that users fan. To see people who have chosen you as a friend (your fans): http://slashdot.org/my/fans. To see other users fans replace "/my/fans" with "/~username/fans".

Freaks work similar to fans, except they are people who have chosen you as their foes. Users who have chosen you as a foe are listed in your freaks list: http://slashdot.org/my/freaks.

Comment modifiers are an easy way to filter comments in a story. There are many comment modifier options. In the case of the Friends / Foes system, you can attach a comment modifier to a friend, foe, fan, freak, friend of friend, or foe of friend. With comment modifiers, you can increase or decrease the comment score 6 points.

The reason this is cool: let's say you want to be able to read all your freinds comments. But, many of their comments lie at the threshold of 1, and you read at a threshold of 2. If you go to your comment preferences, you can make all of your friends comments appear at a score of 5.

The Friends of Friends system is pretty self explanitory. But, just in case you're confused, I'll go through an example: I, Robo, added CmdrTaco as one of my friends. CmdrTaco added chrisd as one of his friends. Therefore, chrisd is a friend of a friend. To see your friends of friends, see http://slashdot.org/my/friends/friends.

Foes of Friends works the same way as Friends of Friends. If one of your friends adds someone as their foe, their foe becomes one of your foes of friends.

If you want to see what the friends of friends / foes of friends icons look like, check out these icons.

The easiest way to add a user: search for the user. Click . Add the user as your friend or foe.

You'll find those symbols on users' comments as well, and elsewhere on the site. Basically, anywhere you see the following symbol you can decide to add a user as friend or foe.

To remove a friend or foe, click on their friend/foe symbol and change them back to Neutral.

You can ask as many questions as you'd like!

But please, only ask one question per submitted comment.

You can ask a compound (multi-part) question, but if you make your question so complicated that no one's sure what you're asking, it's less likely to be moderated up. If you have several burning questions, take a minute to organize your thoughts and separate them into multiple comments.

We typically get 30 or 40 questions moderated +5, and since we only send 10 to our interview guests, not all highly-moderated questions will get asked.

Usually a number of highly-moderated questions either ask the same thing in different words or overlap so much that we send only one per topic. If yours is the one Slashdot editors believe represents that "group" of questions best, it's the one that gets picked. We tend to pick questions that have meaningful subject lines ("A Question" is not a meaningful subject line), and we prefer questions that are short and pithy to long, wandering ones. Spelling and grammar count, too. (Make sure, especially, that you spell the interview guest's name right.)

The editor who makes the final selection isn't required to select questions based solely upon their score. We use those scores as a guideline, but not a set-in-stone rule. The editor may want to ask a question of their own, or be curious about an answer, or just think that the question is particularly poignant. Besides, what fun is being an editor if you can't bend the rules to your own will once in awhile?

If you want to see better questions, submit better questions. Or, if you're moderating instead of asking, be extra-careful with your moderation. Remember, Slashdot readers — that's you — do both the asking and the moderating.

It's hard to predict how interviewees will approach the questions asked of them. Some are quite dry and technical, some write long and detailed answers, some tell funny stories. Often, time is the biggest factor- everyone has a schedule, but since personalities vary, so do interview responses. We love long answers, but pithy ones work too.

The best way is to submit your recommendation though the Slashdot submission bin. Please make sure you include the best possible contact information for the proposed guest. In the case of celebrities or well-known politicians who are deluged with interview requests, we appreciate a personal introduction of some sort. Believe it or not, there are people in the world who have not heard of Slashdot!

Note that we like variety in our interview guests. If we interviewed the CEO of a network security appliance company last week, for example, it is probably going to be a while before we're interested in interviewing another security company CEO.

We're open to all kinds of interview guests, from leading programmers to authors to cartoonists to politicians to celebrities to academics to businessmen. They ideally should be people who are either known to a substantial percentage of Slashdot readers or do work that touches Slashdot readers' lives in some way.

M1 and M2 are Slashdot shorthand for "moderation" and "metamoderation," respectively. We also use these with suffixes For example, if you see the term "M2ed," it means "metamoderated." Likewise, the term "M1er" means "Moderator."

Metamoderation is a second layer of moderation. It seeks to address the issue of unfair moderators by letting "metamoderators" (any logged-in Slashdotter) "rate the rating" of ten randomly selected comment posts. The metamoderator decides if the moderator's rating was fair, unfair, or neither.

Metamoderation began as an experiment to see if the primary moderation system (M1) was actually working. Now, it helps us to remove bad moderators from the M1 eligibility pool and reward good moderators with more delicious mod points.

In order to be a metamoderator, your account has to be one of the oldest 92.5% of accounts on the system. This means that once you've created your account, you'll have to wait for several months, depending on the rate at which new accounts are being created.

If you're eligible, and you're logged in, you can meta-moderate. You will occasionally see a link at the top of the main page that says "Have you Meta Moderated Recently?" Click that link, and you should be taken to the M2 page.

Several times per day (we adjust this slightly sometimes, to keep M1 and M2 in balance).

This is a fairly complicated thing. Depending on some randomness, the moderator's karma and a couple of other factors, a particular instance of meta-moderation may or may not change a moderator's karma score.

(We realize that's not much of an answer. If you're really, really interested, read the code.)

Five times when the system is humming smoothly, which it usually is. If we get more M1 or more M2 than normal, which happens rarely, we might temporarily go to three or seven.

Remember, M2 rates the moderations, not the comments. If the same comment was moderated more than once, it may appear several times to a meta-moderator in order to rate the different moderations that have been applied to it.

For starters, you have to be logged in, and you have to have spent some time on the site (months) to really get what it's all about, first -- see above. Your karma must be Neutral or better. And if you unchecked the Willing To Moderate checkbox, we also assume you're not willing to M2.

This comes under the general category of "don't sweat the small stuff." "Interesting" and "Insightful" will have the same effect on the comment, and the difference between the two is basically just a judgment call. Rate the moderation "Fair," and move on.

Yes. The posting restriction only applies to M1.

Maybe. If you have relatively little karma, there is a possibility of getting some karma for your efforts. However you won't be able to get enough karma to get the +1 karma bonus. That can only be earned by posting comments and getting moderated up. This is to encourage people to M2, but not let them abuse it.

Read CmdrTaco's story to learn why Slashdot implemented a subscription system.

Log In and go to the subscriptions page. Click on the paypal or credit-card link, and follow the instructions.

If you don't have an account to log in to, you'll have to create one.

Yes, Slashdot has added a gift subscription option to allow you to do just that. When you go to purchase a subscription choose the "Buy Gift Subscription for UID" option and then enter the appropriate UID.

You will also be given a text field to say who the subscription is from. This determines who is listed as the gift purchaser in the e-mail sent to the gift recipient. If you wish to remain anonymous, put "Your Secret Friend" or something similar there. Otherwise put your real name, username or anything else you deem appropriate. If you leave this field blank the message will default to containing your Slashdot username.

Currently Slashdot is offering 1000 ad free pages for $5. As it stands, you have some flexibility as to where you want to spend your ad free pages. You can decide to use them on comments, articles, or the homepage.

It's a simple solution and a lot of Slashdot users already have Paypal accounts. If you prefer to use a credit card, go right ahead.

"We are doing our best to learn from the mistakes made by other sites that have started charging for subscriptions. We won't create subscriber only features that cost more to maintain than they generate." — CmdrTaco

Check out the suggestions page.

Of course not. Subscriptions are voluntary. Right now, subscriptions serve one purpose: getting rid of ads. If you don't care about seeing ads, don't subscribe.

Logged in, go back to the subscription page. It should show you how many pages you have paid for and how many pages you have used.

We're glad you're posting, and we're spending a lot of effort to make this the best discussion forum around.

When you subscribe, the default setting is for posting comments (as well as reading just comments) to not count as part of your subscription. You can change this if you want, but we recognize that most frequent readers, including our prolific comment posters, will prefer to see ads on those pages and keep them cost-free.

When you drop a few bucks in our guitar case, we hope one of the main benefits you get is the warm fuzzy feeling from helping to keep us writing open-source code and maintaining the site.

Normally, you should be taken to your subscription page a few seconds after completing payment, and should see a confirmation of how many pages you bought and the options you can change.

In rare cases, a server glitch may prevent Slashdot from knowing about your payment for a little while. If your subscription page doesn't seem to know that you're a subscriber yet, please allow at least twenty minutes for our servers to retry their connections. After that, if there's still a problem, email subscriptions@slashdot.org.

Please, don't freak out.

Here are a few common reasons why you are seeing ads after you've have paid for them:

• Make sure you're logged in!!
• You may have exceeded the daily amount of ads you've set to suppress. See How can I control how many ads I suppress daily?
• Check the subscriptions page and make sure that you have "No Ads" turned on where you don't want ads to show up.
• Slashdot pages that are static, like the faq, always serve ads.
• If you're looking at a subsection of Slashdot like apple.slashdot.org, make sure that you log in. If you want subsections of slashdot to remember you, you'll have to initially log in to one of the subsections.
• We could be experiencing technical difficulties and we've turned on a static front page.

If you are a subscriber and saw an ad, it will not count against your subscription. If you are sure that pages on which you are seeing ads are incrementing your "used up" count on subscribe.pl, that's a serious bug — please let us know immediately (Category: Other, Group: Slashdot).

Subscribers will get access to new features as we think them up. Currently the only advantage they have is access to Slashdot without banner ads. We will not be removing features from non-subscribers. Things you have on Slashdot now will not be taken away from you. But there will eventually be new and exciting rewards for subscribers.

You are given the option to count comments or not. The choice is yours.

There are currently three types of pages that Slashdot generates for subscribers.

• Static: The FAQ / code / about / hof / and so on. These pages are plain old text. There is no smarts in them to decide if you get an ad or not. This is for performance reasons. It just doesn't make sense to run scripts on those pages. So you'll see banner ads on them, but they won't affect your subscription.
• The Main Pages: The homepage, articles, and comments. These pages are configured in your subscription settings. You can choose which page types to see ads on. By default, a subscriber has ads suppressed on the index and article pages, but comments are left with ads on. This is because it's really easy to casually load dozens of comments pages.
• The lesser pages: There are a variety of other pages on Slashdot that are dynamic, but are less loaded than The Main Pages. For example, Users (for example editing your preferences) Submissions (Submitting a story) Journals (I think you can figure that out yourself) and Subscriptions (Well, Duh!). If you are a subscriber, and are set to suppress ads on one of the Main Pages, then we suppress ads on these pages without decrementing your page bank. In other words, buy the ads on the homepage or articles, and you get Journals, Submissions, Users, and so forth for free.

Edit your subscription preferences. Currently, subscribers default ad suppression is 10 ads per day. You can increase or decrease your ad suppression to fit your needs. Just remember, the higher your ad suppression, the faster you'll go through your subscription.

To suppress all ads, set your limit to 0 and remember to make sure that you have "No Ads" selected for all three options.

We're adding some "plums" for subscribers, yes. Please be warned that this list is subject to change as necessary. Here's the official list:

• You can see each story 10-20 minutes before it goes "live." (Assuming we posted it that far in advance, which usually we do.) Look for the red titlebar and a timestamp from "The Mysterious Future." More information is available in this story.
• You can get a message sent to you when people change their relationship to you (friend or foe). Go to your message prefs page and edit the "Relationship Change" setting. Don't worry, you'll get at most one message per day, summarizing that day's changes.
• When writing a journal entry, your choices for comments are not just "Comments Disabled" and "Comments Enabled." You can also limit commenting to just your friends; just your friends and their friends; to exclude just your foes; or to exclude your foes and your friends' foes.
• You get a "More Comments" link on your user page and on other users' pages. Going through comment history might be a bit DB-intensive but we trust subscribers not to abuse the privilege. (But just to be clear — robots will be banned, regardless of whether they subscribe or not!)
• You can add up to 400 friends and foes, instead of being limited to 200.
• You get an asterisk appended to your user ID for all comments you post while you're a subscriber. Other users can adjust those comments' scores up, if they want... or down, if they're prejudiced against subscribers for some reason. If you're bashful, you can switch this off (check the "No Subscriber Bonus" checkbox while posting).
• Your personal index feed, linked from the bottom of the homepage, will be customized for your homepage preferences. If you have sections set up to always appear on your homepage, they will be in your custom RSS feed too — and the same holds for sections or authors you have excluded.
• Full HTML in your index and journal feeds.

Note that several of these "plums" require that you pick "No Ads" on at least one type of page, and that your limit of the maximum number of ads suppressed per day not be decreased (below the default value of 10). If you don't seem to be able to take advantage of the features listed above, go to your Edit Subscription page, and doublecheck your settings.

If you have any questions, please email subscriptions@slashdot.org.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 ;)

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.

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.

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.

You can accomplish the same thing by running wget or lynx --source on the RDF file.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. Thanks to Artua for helping us with the latest batch of icons.

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. Some of the general icons are provided via Glyphish and you need to buy a license. Social media icons provided via Icondock

Please visit our fun and exciting SourceForge.net 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.net 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.

Slashdot is currently experimenting with tagging articles. You are encouraged to use this feature to submit a handful of tags: brief labels that you think best describe this article. You might choose to say that this is an article about "security" and "mozilla".

If you do add your own tags, be aware:

• Your tags are public. Everyone will be able to see them!
• Individual tags should not include spaces: a space is used to enter multiple tags. Use "bigbrother", not "big brother".
• For the opposite of a tag, prefix it with "!", e.g. "!funny" means "not funny."
• Keep your tags brief. No full sentences. Tags are not comments.
• We provide a few example tags for you. Use them if you like.
• Don't forget to click 'Tag' to save your tags.
• After you save, your current list of tags is put back into the text field for you. If you clear it and re-click Tag, your old tags are undone. To add more tags, just add them to your list and re-click Tag.
• Clicking Tag multiple times with the same tag does not increase its weight.
• Tags must be all-lowercase, no punctuation. Numbers can appear but can't be first. Smoosh them up: for "Web 2.0", tag "web20". Max 64 chars.
• Avoid plurals when possible: "harddrive", not "harddrives". But sometimes singular would be silly: "starwars".

Other tagging systems let users make up any tags they want, and punt on the issue of objective meaning. So the tag "foo" means for each user whatever they want it to mean, and to the system it means nothing at all, it's just an identifier.

We're building the next generation of moderation on top of tags. That means we're going to poach your namespace. Some tags will have a substantive effect on the system right from the start. Our article tagger knows about tags like "dupe" or "typo". When we roll out tagging on comments, we will teach it "troll" and "informative". These tags can have a meaning in the system. And when you come up with ways of using tags that we haven't anticipated, we will bring them into the system.

But your tags do not belong to you, they belong to everyone. We reserve the right to make changes that we think are necessary. This could mean one day we consolidate and change all "canine" to "dog" tags. It could mean we define some system tag and usurp another tag. This is the nature of a system in active development. Don't say we didn't warn you!

Tags elsewhere are your own personal playground and nobody cares if you mess around. On Slashdot, abusive uses of tags have negative consequences: they can reduce the effect your future tags have on the system.

The deal is: tag in good faith, and if there's abuse, we'll deal with it in good faith.

Use dupe only when a Slashdot story is an actual duplicate of a previous Slashdot story, offering no new information.

(Misusing the dupe or !dupe tag, by the way, is a great way to ensure your user account has reduced effect on our system in the years to come. Using it accurately and quickly will do the opposite.)

Use typo when a Slashdot story writeup has spelling or grammatical errors, or bad HTML like a malformed link. Do not tag the story with the misspelled word in question.

These tags will alert us to problems immediately, which we love! But they won't show up on the top tags list. Trying to get around this with similarly spelled (but system-meaningless) tags like "dupitydupe" is discouraged.

At http://slashdot.org/tags you can see some of the most popular tags. Each tag shows something about readers' thoughts on stories and bookmarks. Categorizational tags often work like a mini-search (web20, google, globalwarming, diebold, bush, rumor, xbox), and commentary tags give a glimpse into Slashdotters' opinions (itsatrap, fud, snakeoil, cool, finally, whocares, and the Jeopardy-style answers yes and no).

You can see your own tags by visiting /my/tags, or any user's tags at /~CmdrTaco/tags.

We'll be doing the usual improvements — RSS feeds, tag clouds, nicer formatting — a little while down the road.

Slashdot is running on 18 web servers, each with an 8-core Xeon, 8GB of RAM, and two 250GB SATA drives in a RAID1. Two more servers of the same config run Slashd. There are five database servers, each containing quad-core xeons and 8 15k RPM SAS drives in a RAID5.

This could happen for a couple of reasons. If you're using an old, outdated browser (IE6 I'm looking at you), we're only really worried about major display bugs. If you have Javascript turned off, many things simply won't work. Other than that, we develop for the browsers most of our readers use; Firefox first and foremost, with an eye toward Safari and later versions of IE. If you're having a problem in any reasonably up-to-date browser, let us know. There may be a bug we're not aware of, and we'll fix it as soon as it's feasible. We add new functionality to the site every week (or clean up/optimize existing functionality), and we test extensively, but nothing quite compares to a hundred thousand readers hitting pages. The sooner and more descriptively you let us know about a problem, the sooner we'll fix it.

We log the usual stuff (IP, page, time, user, page views, moderation, and comment posting, mainly). A few other odds and ends too, but mostly the data is used to make moderation possible. We keep the logs for 48 hours.

The poll scripts are included with the Slashdot source code.

Sure, be our guest. Please read 'Importing of Slashdot Headlines' before you begin.

The source code is called Slash and it has been released under the GPL. It contains pretty much everything that you see on Slashdot, but cleaned up a bit for general purpose use. You can use it to create your own weblog. With features like an online story editor, mass moderation, customizable user preferences and oh-so-much more. It's a fun little adventure. However it's not for the faint of heart either; it's got bugs.

To learn more about Slash check out Slashdot's 'code' page, or go directly to slashcode.com.

Perl.

Go for it.

It was hard. People were mean about it. Attacked me personally. Insulted my code. I don't regret it, but a big company wouldn't take it. They'd say, "Forget this GPL thing." These guys are ungrateful jerks. I'm still involved, but less so. I still direct where the code goes and control the features that go in.

Yes. Both of these. Also, it's just cool when people submit patches.

That's our new image server.

By scrolling down to the bottom of the page, you'll trigger the auto-more function, which will dynamically add stories to your page. It will do this twice, after which the page gets pretty big, so you can choose "Many more" to keep adding stories, or pick a particular day to see that day's stories.

Slashboxes are the rectangular fields on the right hand side of the index that contain things like polls, a recent tag list, and a place to log in. They're dynamic, and you can click and drag the title bar to move them up and down. The X in the top right corner closes them. Reloading the page will bring back closed Slashboxes.

The policy for Slashboxes is as follows:

1. The remote site gives us permission.
2. The remote site provides an RSS feed URL.
3. We decide that it belongs on Slashdot.

Currently the Slashbox contact address is help@slashdot.org. Email us your feed URL, as well as a technical contact, and we'll consider your addition to the roster.

Each Slashdot story goes into one or more sections, determined by the tags and topics selected for that story. Clicking on a section will show you only stories related to that topic. You've also probably noticed that for some stories on the front page, only the titles are visible. These stories are only displayed in full if you're looking at that particular section, or if you click on the headline. We use this when we think the content is too specialized for the front page, but still think it's interesting enough to warrant a post. If a sectional story receives enough comments in a short period of time, it will be automatically promoted to the front page. Each of the section buttons has an edit icon, which you can use to change how they're displayed. You can change the active tab in which they're sorted (for example, changing Stories to Popular would give you the more interesting submissions that weren't posted), and you can add filter terms. Entering terms into the filter field also allows you to save custom sections, and you can subscribe to RSS feeds for any section.

Now you can use keyboard shortcuts to navigate Slashdot discussions as well as the index / firehose.. Mostly these have been designed for those of you who spend every waking moment on the site, but occasionally we get questions from people who rolled their head around on the keyboard and wondered why their page did silly things. Here's a cheat-sheet, so you can get Slashdot's shortcuts into your muscle memory.

The keyboard shortcuts for the firehose are:

• Next firehose item: W/A/H/K
• Previous firehose item: S/D/L/J
• "Nod" (vote up) current item: +/=
• "Nix" (vote down) current item: -
• Open tagging box for current item: I/T
• Unfocus tag field: esc
• Toggle (open/collapse): Q/A/D
• Get more items: G

The keyboard shortcuts for the discussion system are:

• Previous/Next Comment (Following Threads) A/D
• Previous/Next Comment Sibling W/S
• Previous/Next Comment (Chronologically) Q/E
• Next Unread Comment: F
• Reply to Current Comment: R
• Parent of Current Comment: P
• Moderation Log of Current Comment: M (close with X)
• Skip to End: V
• Skip to Top: T
• Get More Comments: G
• Raise/Lower Abbreviation Threshold: [/]
• Raise/Lower Hide Threshold: ,/.
• Toggle D2 Floater Widget: /

Note that if you press a 'Next' key when you are at the end of a discussion will attempt to 'G'et more comments. Also, holding down 'Shift' while using the navigation keys will hide the comment you just left. So you can press 'shift-d' and leave the comments you have already read closed behind you as you read on.

What you see on Slashdot are summaries of interesting articles in various places on the web. Sometimes, there's just too much information to summarize while keeping individual stories reasonably short. In these cases, you'll see "Read X More Bytes..." Clicking on it will take you to the rest of the summary. Other times, we'll have original content, such as book reviews, game reviews, or freelance articles. These fall under the same category, and we usually try to mention that there's more to read. If it doesn't say there are "X More Bytes," then that just means the summary you see is complete. Clicking Read More will take you to the same place clicking the headline will -- a page where you can read user comments.

At the top right, there are a handful of commonly used links. Clicking your username takes you to your personal page, where you can see recent comments and submissions you've made, as well as change your friend and foe settings. Subscribe takes you to where you can sign up for ad-free pages, and Journal goes to its own interface. Submit Story, Help, and Log Out are self-explanatory

On the bar below that (the one with the tabs), you'll see |< and >| on the sides of the page, which are buttons that will hide the section menu and slashboxes, respectively. This lets you expand the stories to take up more real estate in your browser window. On the right side of the page, you'll also have a preferences icon to alter your firehose settings, and there is a play/pause button which governs whether or not your page will update dynamically.

Welcome to the now, man!

Some elements of Slashdot's UI require the use of Javascript. In most cases we've provided backwards compatibility for the more paranoid folks in our crowd that are fearful of executing unknown code within their browsers, but sometimes it's just not practical to maintain a second UI for this. Right now this includes the customizable section menus, tagging, and a great number of user interface customization options. We know it's a potential security hazard, but sometimes you just have to jump out of the airplane to get that adrenaline rush. Try it sometime. Pack your own chute tho.

Obviously, whitelisting slashdot.org is necessary for all the fancy parts of the site to function. However, you'll need to whitelist fsdn.com too. That's our CDN, and if you block it, many things may break.