And can you imagine how expensive having a kid would be in such a world?

What, you don't just ask the replicator for one?

"works for me"

Love them air quotes. Did it switch you back to Classic view to show you the comment? Because this is what the beta gives me when I go to http://beta.slashdot.org/comme...

8/10 made me reply, troll. Next time try faking up a screenshot so you can pretend beta actually works.

I was kind of hopeful for them. I thought maybe someone would step up and produce The Awesome (this is slashdot, after all) but so far all they've managed to do is set up a wiki and a phpBB forum. As their site says right now:

Yeah, yeah... we're working on it.

Their current project appears to be overlords that manage various features. I think by the end of the month the committee to determine the number of committees required to determine the site features will be issuing their report and work can begin on staffing the committees that will decide how many committees will be necessary to develop the site code.

On the slashdot side of things, the more I see of the beta, the more I'm reminded of the rollout of D2. So many of the problems the beta is having now are exactly like the problems D2 had when it rolled out (tiny comment boxes, inability to see anything when you clicked a comment link, etc) they eventually fixed these, but it's not encouraging to see the exact same mistakes being made again. We even lost some of the great features of D2 like hidden/collapsed/full comments and a nested view that didn't make it impossible to read a conversation that went on for more than a couple of posts.

I was thinking more along the lines of http://everything2.com/title/c... but that works too.

I was interested to see what they'd do and sadly it turns out the pessimism was warranted, they're running phpBB right now.

I think we have legitimate gripes. Not the least of which is that if you're using the new site, clicking these links takes you nowhere.

Simple: they bought the phone before they lost their job and their house, and now they keep it just in case some company decides to take pity on them and hire a homeless bum, so they'll get the call to come in for their interview.

There is only XUL.

all the comments about it that makes the actual comments hard to read.

Haha no, have some screenshots. The first two are in response to a guy claiming that he can see as much in Beta as he sees in Classic, which was 100% bullshit. The third one is an example of how fucked up everything is once you get a few replies into a thread. Note that slashdot appears to be picking random fonts for everyone's posts, that's always a plus for readability. I'm sure Pi/10 horses they asked for their UX research thought it was a great idea!

It's a pump and dump from the inside. Dice wants out so they're trying to pump up the cash value of the site as much as possible, and cash value = advertisers. Who cares if the sucker they unload it onto loses their shirt when they find out the advertisers won't pay for ads on a site nobody uses.

Just for giggles, I loaded up The Consumerist for the first time in years. Years ago it was a respectable community with tens if not hundreds of comments on its posts. Then they went and completely wrecked their comment system. Today? The top post on page one has NINE comments. Out of 18 posts, there are 8 with ZERO comments.

Slashdot: THIS IS YOUR FUTURE. Nobody will click 45% of your stories!

Now true, they're a special case since they don't do advertising, so nobody cares if nobody has a reason to ever click through their story to read the comments, but it's proof that it has happened before and it WILL happen again if Slashdot continues on this path. By destroying the comment system Slashdot won't just decimate their pageviews, they'll obliterate them. The only way they'd be able to try to get people to click through to the story page is if they disabled the original article links in the main page, and that will completely ruin them as a news aggregator.

I'm pretty interested. Knowing the people around here it could either be a fully reverse-engineered slashdot clone with proper unicode support and account migration (post a secret code in a comment to prove you're sliceoflife). Or it could be a 3 version old phpBB knockoff running on a shared host with .25mbit bandwidth allocation that runs for 3 hours before you get an account suspended error page.

but when browsing topics I can practically fit the same amount of content into my window as before

O RLY?

BTW, in classic I can see your post, the AC before you, your parent's post, your previous post, and 11 one line abbreviated posts above that all in one 1280x1024 screen.

In beta, your reply here doesn't even show up. Bush is the last poster in the thread. You don't even exist.

8/10, made me reply. Enjoy a side-by-side comparison while you troll

Hm, I actually hadn't noticed that as a problem

I exaggerated perhaps too much, but there is definitely a weird issue with the font going on. I captured this in a screenshot I had made for another thread: http://imgur.com/YvQjTIf Perhaps it's simply the natural spacing difference between the sans-serif font used on the top comment and the serif font used on the comment on the bottom of the screenshot, but it definitely feels like it takes up much more space either way.

reddit is almost like slashdot except that everyone has infinite modpoints and they all use every last one of them. A slashdot migration there would result in the slashdot hivemind being consumed rapidly by the reddit hegemony.

Hacker News is almost like reddit except way uglier and you can only mod down once your karma is high enough. It's real news for real nerds. It's likely that the residents who have enough karma to mod down would ensure that the slashdot horde would never reach that level of karma. It also looks like they don't have nearly the stomach for humor that this place does. (38 comments and this story about creating progress bars in CSS doesn't have a single "How do I get it to stop at 98%" comment??)

Ars Technica is where a lot of the news slashdot gets is from in the first place. It looks like a great place to get all the NSA/politics stories we'll miss when we leave, but the comments are linear and you have to use blockquotes to figure out who is talking to who. Nested comments are personally a must for me if I'm going to have a conversation with someone.

just keep getting smaller and smaller?

Yep. I took screenshots for another discussion where I was arguing with someone about how it looked great and how I must be looking at some other screen:

http://imgur.com/YaOtcUk
http://imgur.com/YvQjTIf

I had mod points yesterday