The new article stubs on the front page really work for me, but I'd like to see each new story remain a stub until enough 5-Insightful/Interesting/Informative comments become visible. In other words; everything starts sectional and earns the right to be on the front page based on quality -- not quantity (as others have suggested).

We should also have a new mod category: "Flag".

The Flag mod will indicate that an admin should read the comment because it's important. Typos, spelling, dupe notices etc can all fall under this category, and editors could re-thread the site to see these types of comments first. Reward moderators who correctly flag comments as a system notice with extra mod points. Keep the Flag comments collapsed for regular users, so the meat and potatoes comments all frequent higher.

Working on some new projects... a set of sales tools that might be picked up by a big corporation. Very cool stuff, yet no linkage yet. Does anyone know anything about interpersonal sales tools for retail? I've been studying up on it for this project, which I am in charge of, and it's fascinating me. PK is getting pretty damn spiffy when a n00b can go from being hired to appearing like an expert almost immediately... although there is a level of intelligence for using this kind of tool. Just working out UI issues now, and coming up with ideas.

From the customer perspective, what would you want to be able to do with a salesperson say for COMPUTER SALES, in order to make your sales experience better?

Anyway, hope all is well with you guys and let me know what's going on in your lives! ;-)

There is nothing much going on. Okay, there is lots going on right now in my private life, but I'm not sure I want to share it just yet. Maybe closer to New Years...

How are my friends on Slashdot? Any complaints?

Looks like I can comment again... but I posted something that might be considered funny, so you know I'll be banned again in short stead...

Truth be told, I wasn't sure I was allowed to post yet, so I simply hit submit, expecting the confounded comment-banned IP/Subdomain notice... but it went.

Slashdot's automated comment/karma banning is stupid. My karma is EXCELLENT, but yet I can't comment because of, surprise surprise, my latest comment ban.

I'm sick of this shit. They should shut it off for users with Excellent karma. How many lines of code would that be??? Like ONE???

PUDGE!!!!

OMG just logged in today and CSS /. totally rules. Nice job guys!!!!

Bout frigging time. ;-)

American Refugees Exist! Fact.

Let's not corrupt our language just to save face, or to disseminate PR(opaganda). The word means what it means.

You have them in your country now. Deal with that reality and vote with your hearts -- give with your hearts (but stay off Paypal for Katrina donations).

Mwhahahaha!

There are two plugin updates/releases at phk.ca:

PHk Wordpress Traffic Tracker

and...

PHk Wordpress Plugin: Vars 1.1 Patch

All ye wp bloggers... suggest new plugins!

Some of you will know that I was working on a CMS for a long time. I just don't have the time anymore to keep up with the huge commitment this kind of project requires, so I've shelfed the PHk system for the time being. I'm going to start working on Wordpress plugins now, because I can quickly whip one off and release it into the wild.

Plus they already have their system in order to the point that it won't require that much debugging from me at least.

My first Wordpress plugin is called PHk Big Var Dump v1.0 and what it does is it outputs all the set variable keys and their values in the admin area. If you Wordpress, try it out if you want to start doing plugins.

Other things I'm planning with WP are:

- RSS feed reader to Post Queue (quoted)
- Job finder to crawl employment sites like Craigslist, Monster and HRDC -- and then give you the chance to select the jobs you want to automatically apply to. Quotes Job REF# so that it's SOLICITED email. :-) Just a huge time saver. On a test run last year I was applying to over 300 jobs a day all over Ontario. But a lot of work is needed before this could be released.

I wanted to share a method I use for keeping all my passwords forgotten without wasting too much time.

I am very picky about what I register to:

1. I will register to a blog I visit frequently.
2. I will never register to sites that have IN YOUR FACE advertising.
3. I never register for sites that break their site if you don't register, because that's evil.
4. I don't register to sites that don't let you post anonymously because I like to get to know people before I register.
5. I rarely register to forums of any kind because they are usually pretty terse.

There are things to remember when you are registering to a site: Most sites will have a forgot password link that you can use to retrieve your password. This is a good thing. Most people are using a browser that can remember your password. Most people use one or two machines or they would not use a public computer for anything important because of a fear of keyloggers. There are many free keylogger blockers, but do they work? Who knows.

What I do when I register to a new site:

1. Open a text document.
2. Type in something really random and take the middle 8 or 10 characters and hit copy.
3. The characters copied will become my new random password.
4. Then I simply paste it in and fill in the registration form and paste in my password.
5. When I get the validation email, I simply copy/paste the link and paste it into a new tab in firefox.
6. If I am logging in on another system or my system is purged/formatted (which I do from time to time), I click the remember password button in Firefox and just copy/paste the pass again.
7. I always use the same username or a variation of it.
8. If I don't remember my own password in my head, I keep all my passwords different.
9. Easy enough.

Looks like the arbitrary date set when I was comment-blocked has been reached. I can't post anon (but I rarely do anyway).

So friends with mod points... this is not really me whining for karma. :-)

Update: 6:19pm : So I post two comments. The one above and this gem that was TOTALLY taken the WRONG way by moderators. The thrust of my argument was that Apple should be embracing Linux on their systems, including iPod, but moderators modded it down to -1 Troll? What gives? Do the animals run the zoo here or what? I guess so. And lessons like these help you learn better system design, so I welcome it to an extent. I will also add that moderators first thing in the morning will mod my posts higher than moderators after 5pm EST. WHY????

June 15 2005: Still bloody well postblocked at Slashdot -- holy crap this is annoying. No sense of humour. Damn funny mod.

From now on, if I have something funny to say, I will put it in my journal, and link the story with a "I was just talking about this today." link in order to get lots of INFORMATIVE karma! :-)

Like I care...

To respond to Chacham's reply to my previous Journal Entry:

        Thanks Chacham! I will write a journal entry when the system is online. I just started rewriting the templating system from scratch today so that I can get some speed improvements and save time for making custom templates.

        Although CSSZengarden has demonstrated that we have the ability to use CSS in order to beautify a site, I would still like to offer the ability for custom web-blocks to be used on articles, comments...etc.

I am posting this to my Slashdot journal so you can read what my thoughts are about moderation on Slashdot and how it's influenced my design decisions on PHk, my new blogging suite that is soon to be released under the GPL, through Sourceforge. Still working on getting some of the major issues out of this closed alpha I'm using at my blog.

This will not come as a surprise to many of you, but I have been working on PHk for the past five years, under another name.

PHk will have lots of features, but perhaps the best feature is the ability to drag and drop PHP code into a folder and have it aliased to a URL right away.

ie:
http://yourdomain.com/sideproject/
http://yourdomain.com/news/stuff/
http://yourdomain.com/abc/

This works because PHk uses .htaccess or optionally can use ?z=/news/stuff/

For everyone reading this who is NOT a developer, and who would just use PHk as a blogging suite... read on to learn about how moderation works in PHk as it's different than any other system I've seen.

Moderation only really works on major technical websites like Slashdot BEACAUSE the level of the playing field is generally much higher than the average blog, complete with PHD folks posting what they think about topic X and trolls posting stuff about Y. Slashdot is huge and caters to a wide audience. For the most part, blogs are more narrow and have a more focussed audience.

On your own blog, you will find people saying mostly either insightful or dull things. You will also have a lot of spambots coming in trying to promote their product or service or scam.

On systems like Wordpress, managing spam has always been a problem. Spam runs up the numbers and keeps Wordpress blogs clogged. Playing whack-a-mole doesn't help either.

PHk handles this spam crap a lot differently. You can ban words from appearing in any type of submission. Careful now -- it's powerful. Someone might want to talk about viagara...

So it's a touchy subject and there is a fine line between censorship and ease-of-use.

PHk has a URL banning capability that will block/prevent certain strings from appearing in URLs. So no more 123330-viagara.com sites if you ban viagara, v1agara... etc. Spammers keep changing how they attack sites, so spam still gets through... but it goes to a queue.

The queue contains comments that are not yet posted but could be if the editor wants them to be. Totally separate table than the user-posted comments.

We're not adding capacha yet. But it might come in if it's needed. Basically I would rather try less obtrusive methods of guiding spam to the trash and guiding users to posting good comments.

The blog owner will want to sort the comments in their own way.

But how? Tags, of course.

Each comment is tagged by ONE EDITOR/MODERATOR ONLY: this saves time and there is a general sense of injustice with multiple moderating systems like in Slash and Scoop. The editors also will have the power to choose to display comments in THREAD or BLOCK mode.

Thread: A title line with a link to the comment.
Block: The whole comment shows up.

By default all comments will be threaded.

Admins will also give each comment a rating from 0.1 to 1.0 and that's it.

Each comment will have a button for editors where they can moderate the comment. Press the button and you are taken to a form to quickly fill out with the full comment and your special powers can take over from there. :-)

I would like to also add a user NUDGE feature. It'll be a button where users can click it to suggest that a comment be modded up, or down. This will help the editors use their time more wisely.

Because each comment can be moderated ONCE, then meta-moderation will take place on all comments rated by someone who is NOT an editor.

I will allow admins to add people to their moderator pool. Every user can meta-moderate posts that are not their own.

The effect of metamoderation will be as follows:

Each moderation will have a simple: FAIR checkbox that will default as checked. Each comment that is unchecked will be considered as an unfair moderation.

Most bloggers won't even use this part of the system, so it will be simple and effective, but not too detailed. If you are a moderator, and your metascore dips down past ZERO, you are taken out of the moderation pool until you're put back in.

The system could optionally pick people at random for a day of metamoderation or something like that.

More to come...

I'm pretty sick and tired of the funny mod. I happen to like making people laugh, and I have a dry humour about myself. But that adds up to big problems with Slashdot's funny moderation. You get karma taken off when they mod you down, but you don't get karma when they mod you up. This leads to what I can only call Karma errosion due to comedic pressence. Therefore I will talk like a computer in all future /. comments and only say funny things on my own blog, where I can't be censored. Everything I will say here will tend towards the insightful moderation only, mostly due to my business philosophy. I will leave the jokes out of Slashdot from now on -- even when they fix the moderation system like they have been promising.

As a result I have been post-locked again. I think I'm not going to post here anymore until they sort this out. I know CMDRTACO wants to do his best to ensure that we all have a good Slashdot experience -- and you can't possibly do that with trolls running around. So I get the need for moderation.

Now I am going to be posting to my blog whenever I feel the need to comment, like I did this morning with the news of low-cost systems beating out Microsoft. // EDIT :: RSL :: May 30, 2005 @ 09:16:48 AM
I wanted to clarify that there are a long list of moderators who mod me down only because I bought this account on Ebay. Whenever they run out of mod points, they like to let people know about this purchase, as if it really has a bearing on how I should be moderated. Personally I think it's novel to have a low UID on Slashdot, and I wanted one for my birthday, so I bought this acct from a Slashdot beta tester named Mike Hughes. I've since used this under the guise of Mordenkainen's Faithful Hound (MFH), so all ye D&D buffs will get that ref... but the fact is -- he didn't want it -- I wanted it -- and that's all there is, really.

Most of my fans now know this fact, and the ones that don't are either no longer on Slashdot, or only recently friended me. But if you find that you have friended me after April 2004, then you likely did so because you like what I had to say.

If you friended me because you thought it was cool to see a low UID post something, you will notice that since I have been posting regularly on this acct, a lot of really low UIDs have come back in full force, so I have really achieved something.

I've seen regular posts from people with < 40 UIDs. And that can't be a bad thing to get these old Slashdotters back into action again, can it?

Do you have no time? Are you tired of being the guy everyone comes to with problems?

Now there is hope.

Send everyone you know who pesters you with questions to this Google Group.

All topics are permitted, as long as they relate to business.

The other thing I ask is that all of us sign up to the group and occasionally post answers as they come in. Kind of like a distributed workload.

The format is:

1. User A has a question about topic X... posts it.
2. People post answers and debate the problem until it's resolved.

What's the Payoff?

The payoff is that this will make your job easier.

For any question, regardless of how complex it is, you can now simply say:

"Try the Google Group for Troubleshooting -- they can answer any business question."

And then you can simply say, "I'm a member there, so I will chime in when you post your question."

Then walk away and smile. The person will appreciate you wanting to take their problem seriously, but they will LOVE the fact that you are bringing a whole team in to help them problem solve.

Open problem solving helps get more minds on the issue and it's one of the fun aspects of Slashdot.

But the drawbacks of Slashdot or any other website for that matter is that they are restricted by topic. I am making the policy that Troubleshooting will answer any question, whether ethical, programming related, technology related -- in an open forum, the way it should be.

Because you can give someone fish, or you can teach them to fish.