CmdrTaco's Journal: Back from the Grave

Got nice and sick last week. Very unpleasant. Especially around Day 2 when the tivo had (for the first time in years) that very awesome No Recordings message. Live TV is hell.

Just a few minor notes from the front: We are almost ready to start deploying the beta discussion system to readers besides our subscribers. Tim has been working on an improved control widget which hopefully will make a lot more sense then the terrible UI we kludged together to get things started. We're going to start buy giving access to the system from a random sampling of users. There are bugs in various browsers that will need to be worked out, and the UI will need to be refined, but I think everyone will be happy with how it works. It's definitely becoming very clear where the performance problems in different browsers are. It's a pain.

BackSlash continues to be an interesting experiment meeting with totally unsurprising commentary from readers. Many are angry and missing the points. Others are appreciating it for what it is. But just to raise a few points about it, Backslash currently exists as an experiment to merge automated moderation with traditional "Editing". This serves 2 purposes: one is to create "Original" content for readers unwilling to read public forums. These people are MOST of you. They don't want to read any forum. The end. But there are great things in the forums. So if we can bridge this gap, we can make Slashdot Forums useful to the majority of readers who don't want to wade through them. The second point is that this gives us another data point for training/revising/improving the moderation system. Random data points of good comments from a few trusted sources. We have a lot of Score:5 comments and a lot of Score:1 comments that are quite good too. The new moderation system will give us a lot more flexibility in selecting moderators, and controling the influence that they wield within the system. I'm hoping that the Backslash stories will give us a good data point for seeding that system.

We have one other project that cropped up recently that i'm hoping to deploy this week. It might be fun. It might be stupid. But it's a fun experiment. You'll have a strong opinion either way when you hear it.

Also we'll be hiring another editor before the end of the summer. If you are interested, send me a resume and 10-12 example Slashdot stories that you've written from scratch based on links you've found.