Slashdot Index Code Update 386
One of the most common questions I get is simply "What does the '2 More' mean in the left side menu?" To me it's obvious: it means there are 2 more stories on say, apple.slashdot.org than you have seen on slashdot.org. This is because Slashdot probably already had 15 stories today, and this particular story is only of interest to users who explicitly chose to view Apple stories.
Those little 'N More' snippets clutter up the left hand menu, and confuse people. Our power users know that they can suck all the sectional content into the main page, but very few users actually bother with that kind of customization. And just as important, we have a lot of content that is simply lost because most of you never knew it was there in the first place.
What you'll see now is the interleaving of sectional content with main page content. These articles are displayed in a very abbreviated format, amidst the other stories. This is content we've been posting on Slashdot for years, but most users never knew. I'm pleased with the design of the whole thing. I think it looks really nice and doesn't clutter up the page.
Of course some users will always disagree with me, and for them there are now a plethora of user configurable options. Essentially, each section has a range of options ranging from "All" (Meaning, every story is displayed in full text) to "None" (Meaning I really really really never want to see anything about Apple really no seriously I'm not kidding!)
These options are available on the left hand menu by simply clicking the 'Sections' menu entry. A fancy little window will open with various tools for you do play with allowing you to choose what content on Slashdot you want to read... and perhaps more importantly, to disable the content you don't. The default view of Slashdot has slightly changed today, but you can set your preferences back to make the site look like it did before too.
We are keen on making sure that this works for as many browser platforms as we can. We've tested it on the platforms used by around 96% of you. (that is to say, Internet Explorer, Safari, Firefox, under Windows, Mac, and Linux) and it works on those platforms. However if your platform doesn't work, you can still change the settings from the user preference page (click the word 'Preferences' on the left hand menu if you are logged in. If your browser doesn't support javascript, clicking the 'Sections' menu item on the left hand menu should take you there.).
We fully expect there to be some bugs with this, so please feel free to contact us... preferably by submitting a bug report to our sourceforge project tracker. We hope to have any major kinks worked out of the system in the next few days, so just hang in there.
All in all I am very pleased with this. This solves a number of long standing problems on Slashdot: That is to say sectional content getting "Lost" in the shuffle, the left hand menu being confusing, and the user preferences to twiddle these settings being buried so deep in the UI that nobody would bother changing them.
Best of all, if any of this bugs you, it takes just seconds to disable this stuff. In fact, it would probably take less time to fix it then to post a comment complaining... not that that will stop some of you ;)
update many people have commented on the design of the abbreviated story. Many make great points about how they visually could be interpreted as being "Footnotes" or "Related" somehow to the content above them. Just a reminder, the site is all nicely CSSified now... modifiy the CSS send it our way. If someone creates a design that works better, we'll use it! We're not married to what we have. Personally I wanted the grey curve on the bottom right side, but we thought we'd need an extra DIV to get it right, so this was the compromise.
updated again the reason we don't update the index 'on the fly' is because it is possible for you to get content that we don't actually have yet. We don't have a full ajax engine yet- so if you made an abbreviated article be a full text article, we'd have missing fields. When we have a real dynamic engine for loading the content, doing it on the fly will be trivial. Today I think it would just look crappy.
page filled earlier, more older stuff! (Score:4, Interesting)
Bless the editors (Score:2, Interesting)
Wow! There's so much content that doesn't make the main page. And thank goodness, as I sure wouldn't care to see it. I had no idea that the editors were doing such a good job.
More discussion (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Form, function, blah blah blah (Score:3, Interesting)
What's the problem with that...?
J.
Possible next step...? (Score:5, Interesting)
Disclosure Triangles (Score:2, Interesting)
How about some disclosure triangles next to to the stubs so I could check out the description without having to open up a new tab?
Re:Like it (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm probably in the minority in this second suggestion, but how about allowing the one-liner articles to be expanded using script. That way I don't need to open the entire article in order to get an idea on what its about. There are bandwidth concerns with doing this though. A sizable chunk of your bandwidth would be used for something that a good amount of slashdot readers may never actually expand and read. If I were in your shoes, I probably wouldn't have the feature turned on by default, but I know I certainly would use it.
Missing Sections (Score:3, Interesting)
Digg Dotted (Score:3, Interesting)
Wow. Digg really has you guys shook up. That's great. That's what competition's all about. This is the exact kind of action Microsoft, the recording industry and the Baby Bells would be forced to make if there were really competition in their worlds.
kudos!
MjM
Suggested feature (Score:5, Interesting)
Here's one suggestion for an improvement: How about automatically "promoting" abbreviated stories to full stories if a certain number of comments are posted on it. In other words if, say 200 comments are posted on one of these abbreviated stories, it becomes one of the main page stories and it's full summary is displayed.
The reason behind this is that if a "sectional" story is particularly popular, it probably deserves the same treatment as the major stories. I am more likely to take interest in a story if a large number of comments have been posted to it. Assuming that a good default is chosen for number of comments before an article is upgraded, this shouldn't affect your 15 stories a day rule much. Of course, registered users should be allowed to select their own minimum comment count.
In effect this would probably be a type of crude article moderation. The sectional stories are moderated up by way of user comments.
Of course, if you have more ambitious changes to story selection in mind, this wouldn't be of much relevance.
Un-relating the other stories (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:MAKE IT related (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Like it (Score:3, Interesting)
Hmmm, I don't know. I was only thinking about how verbose the story references were.
Personally I'd prefer not to have stories sort by popularity, but only by time as it is done now. That might be a per-user preferences selection. I can see that kind of sorting being a real problem, as one story could explode and dominate the attention of users and moderators, artificially aided by the sorting system.
Part of the implemenation also has to guard against trolls. You could score each story based on the sum of each comment's mod points times its age, or some similar formula. That might be slow :-).
Re:Suggested feature (Score:4, Interesting)
Of course that would slow down it turning up on the main page as people would have to first post and then be moderated.
Although I still generally just read the RSS and go from that as to which stories I want to read but it's nice to see people are still trying to improve
Re:Form, function, blah blah blah (Score:5, Interesting)
How about this [cox.net] ?
Re:Very nice - but has some rough edges currently (Score:3, Interesting)
I think the fastest solution to the "looks like a part of the previous article" is to just use a grey bar with all square corners. The rounded bottom curve looks like it matches with the rounded upper curve on the previous article.
I like the "In other news..." idea someone else posted though. If there are 4 or 5 articles or something, maybe they can be collected together into a fake "article" looking thing with that as the article title? This would probably mess with any ajax used to expand the article content though...
Re:This will make Slashdot worse (Score:3, Interesting)
The problem with Slashdot is that the signal to noise ratio of comments has been getting worse and worse.
Well, who is submitting the noise and the signals? The best part about slashdot that I like is the 'slashdot effect' which punishes websites for publishing something of interest to the trolls. I don't think that is going to change. Besides, Slashdot's engine needs some upgrading soon so that stories are submitted faster and news arrives at a higher frequency, eventually the trolls will distribute their efforts uniformly and it won't be so bad.
I personally feel that the FreeBSD section has a better S/N ratio simply because people interested in FreeBSD are few and often more mature that trolls under other no-brainer sections, but that is just my opinion.
Can you imagine, why out of a couple of million news sites only a few stories make it to slashot everyday? Some stories are rejected outright without any reason. What we need in slashdot is some sort of advanced DIGG-like feature where a good story simply bubbles up and bad ones go down.
Re:Form, function, blah blah blah (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Un-relating the other stories (Score:3, Interesting)
Love it. Maybe Group small stories at bottom? (Score:2, Interesting)
I would like to suggest that maybe the small, headline only stories would look better (and look much more like the old slashdot) if they were grouped at the bottom of the page, instead of mixed in between the larger stories. Is the order which those stories were posted with respect to the main stories really that important? The only real difference is to create an impression of 2 seperate sets of stories which are "scrolling" by as they are posted / expire, instead of just one set of stories. (did that make any sense?)
Anyway, the site looks great as it is. And I think we all know that the real strength of Slashdot is the deep, intellectual discussion from its user base
Re:How about a "Dupes Only" Option (Score:1, Interesting)
So if you don't like the new look (or didn't like old one), try this one instead.