FortKnox's Journal: Your sigs have delimiters

You'll notice everyone has a "<BR>--<BR><BR>" prepended to their sigs. And those of us that have already added something similar, well now we have two.

I checked the preferences thinking the last update to slashcode turned it on by default (it used to be a preference IIRC), but didn't find any. The only sig preference is to turn them off, outright. So I wrote up a bug report. Taco replied that the option confused people so they removed the option and turned it on for everyone. So if you have something to delimit your comment from your sig, you should take it out cause they are doing it for you (whether you like it or not).

I like being able to have a few more characters to my sig, personally... cause we don't get many characters for our sigs as it is...

It's a sign

[StalinsNotDead]

Taco replied that the option confused people so they removed the option and turned it on for everyone.

That kind of illustrates the overall decline in the quality of the slashdot community, eh?

I suspect

[the_mad_poster]

That it's another issue with Slash's overall poor scalability. Checking 1000 user preferences to see how they want sigs handled or if they even want to see them just adds more overhead, and that takes away from truly useful features like built-in port scanners to keep the riff raff such as whistleblowers and the Chinese out.

Re:I suspect

[dead sun]

You know, I'm almost curious as to how much of the server load would even be spent on figuring out what sigs to place where and when even in a really tight bit of code. Now it's at least a join between the post, the delimiter and the sig, or just the post if there's no sig. Before would have been worse. Even now, how many comments are loaded per second given the immense load of Slashdot?

Ideally I guess one would just append the sig at the time the comment is made, but because the moderation system is so hos

Re:I suspect

[the_mad_poster]

"tight bit of code"?

You, sir, have obviously never opened up Slash....

These are the people who created a psuedo-port scanner that requests slashdot.org/ok.txt at the last IP on incoming post requests to see if people are posting via open proxy.

Re:I suspect

[dead sun]

No, I haven't opened up Slash. Given the general rumor that it's hideous I think I'd try a clean slate implementation before trying to weed out hideous bits of retardation.

My question was more that given the tremendous amount of activity on this site, and the fact that mere links off of it can kill lesser connected sites, how much cpu time would be used up just doing the sig part, if it were tight code? My guess is a lot, and cutting corners would be a good idea. Not that doing weirdness like you describe w

Re:I suspect

[ces]

Take a look at the code for Scoop(running on DailyKos, Kuro5hin, and others) or Livejournal. Both are much cleaner than Slash.

Don't know about LJ, but Rusty is much more open to community contributions to Scoop than taco is to contributions to Slash.

If I were going to throw up a blog site, I'd probably use Scoop. Though I'd give LiveJournal a good hard look, especially if I was creating a user journal driven site.

Scoop does have user jounals called "diaries" but they aren't nearly as spiffy as the slashd

Thanks

[wheany]

Actually, I just had a <br>, but thanks anyway.

About time...

[arb]

Slash should have been automatically adding .sig delimiters from day one.

Woulda been nice of Taco and co to actually let everyone know about the change though, but I guess it is asking too much for a supposed "News for Nerds" site to actually post news about the site itself...

But...

[LordBodak]

The old option wasn't for your sig, it was for any sigs you saw when reading.