GargamelSpaceman's Journal: Slashdot: Please stop improving!

I've been reading slashdot less frequently than I did of old. Mostly because of all the javascript 'improvements'.

When I do read slashdot it's for the stories, and the community. Ideally slashdot would be much like a usenet newsgroup except for some editorial control over the stories posted. In fact, I wish the slashdot community would move to some other place like a usenet group with that sort of interface.

Now I hate the improvements when using firefox, but I mostly use w3m or lynx to view slashdot, which has insulated me from some of the worst of it I'm sure, but sometimes it makes a feature unusable for me.

For instance, I thought I'd use a couple of my 15 moderator points ( why does slashdot give 15 points instead of 5? my guess is others like me have almost completely stopped moderating because the improvements have made moderating such a hassle, so they think that by giving more points, more moderation will be done. It's a hassle. You want people saying: Oh that's so good I'll moderate that comment instead of posting one of my own. And you want moderators to look at the low ranked comments and mod them up which is a hassle because they are hidden requiring multiple clicks to read. It's difficult to scan a bunch of low ranked comments deep down in threads because of the hiding. I don't bother.

Except today I did bother, but found it very difficult because I could no longer use w3m to moderate as there is no Moderate button. It seems that the dropdown box uses Javascript to submit the change when you make the selection and there is no Moderate button to allow one to do this manually.

Having a way to operate the site without javascript ought to be a fundamental requirement of any site for general consumption.