Seriously, you guys either need to stop posting his spam as stories or just give him the keys to the store and get out of the way. Why is this even considered for a Slashdot story? There's no News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters angle AT ALL. And that's typical of the spam from Hugh Pickens. You ban other spammers, now do the same for him.

I'd love to understand the mechanism. Obviously, some of these ads are legitimate companies that probably don't know the techniques used to advertise their services (like an auto detailing place.) How does it go from them, to some crazy spam company, to slashdot? What are they telling their clients, what are they promising them, which then turns into slashdot spam? I agree, it's obvious they have no idea how slashdot works.

Do you guys know where this comes from? I'm fascinated by the crazy stuff that gets submitted. Is it some sort of automated posting system? Why would anyone post foreign language cricket articles to slashdot? I tried contacting some of the less obvious spam stuff to see if the business were duped by spammers, but never heard back.

What happened to "we listened" over the slashdot tv blowback? Why is this retarded piece of garbage on the front page at all? If it has a place *at all*, it should be in idle, or just in the TV section, where I can safely ignore it.

The editors seemed earnest enough last time they posted a lame video that blew up in their faces. Did you guys just hand the keys to some marketing morons and give up? It just seems so ridiculous to take all that heat, answer back with promises of improvements, then shoot *another* of these dumb things, and post it on the front page instead of where it belongs!

STOP WITH THE IDIOTIC VIDEO STUFF! If you must create videos, put them on youtube where they belong. YOU ARE NOT REPORTERS. You are editors, and if you're wasting your time creating (bad) videos, then you're not spending the time you need to effectively manage the submissions and post News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters.

I blame the editors for not doing their jobs. I watch the submission queue, and I'm always amazed at the things people submit. While it's pretty easy to weed out the obvious spam off-topic spam, the editors should definitely be eyeing every submission through the "News for nerds, Stuff that matters" filter and simply rejecting stuff that doesn't reach that bar, regardless of the ratings on the firehose.

No, they weren't journal entries (allowing automatic submission of journal entries as stories is an idiotic idea, frankly.) Of the 3 things I submitted, on was a legitimate story which I thought was interesting and had a tech angle that was frankly better than the stuff we're getting now. The other 2 were complaints about the site, and apparently submitting them is the only way to get any attention, as the "editors" seem to be completely uncommunicative and unresponsive to most direct queries.

I can bitch about bad stories because I've been around long enough to recognize bad ones. I don't post submissions because that's not my primary interest. I was iffy on the PS2 forgeries, and since it wasn't accepted, I took that as a lesson learned.

Nice try with the Poisoning the well attack, though.

I want Slashdot back!

Lose the gimmicks. Slashdot was great because it focused on hard tech news, and tended to post things that the Slashdot community were interested in. Now, it seems to be at the whims of a few submitters (MrSeb, Hugh Pickens) with the editors asleep at the switch and posting stuff that's not even remotely tech news, typically biased political propaganda.

Stop creating your own vanity projects. You need to stop fantasizing that you're a news *source* and get back to being a tech news *aggregator*. We don't want you to create custom content, and especially not tripe like device destruction porn, reviews, reports from conventions (is there any bigger waste of video than a "from the convention floor" type report?) You're such a late entry to this space that it'll take years to get even remotely good at it, if ever. Find the great content out there, and post stories and links. That's it!

It's just absurd to think that these recent missteps were simple errors in judgement. The claim that the infamous hoodie video was intended (per Soulskill) as "a quick, silly, completely non-serious video" is suspect. Why would something *intended* as a silly video even be on the front page and not in Idle? How out of touch do you need to be to think that the readers wouldn't be offended and instantly assume an ad masquerading as a story?

And in spite of the massive negative feedback (which must have been massive indeed to rouse the editors from their slumber to actually acknowledge the problem), you *still* ran that atrocious Plantronics tripe, and pretended to be surprised that people hated it.

Honestly, the recent changes stink of you trying to pad your resumes.

Ugh, let me get my votes on record in opposition to each of these ideas. If you want to do this sort of thing, then the slashdot team can create a "slashdotlite.org" site and post all this sort of stuff there, but it simply doesn't have a place on slashdot proper.

You still haven't provided any clear reason as to WHY you want to do this. Why do you think this is such a great idea, when the readers seem pretty firmly against it?

Just....don't. If you want to do this, just create a slashdot video channel on youtube. That sort of junk just doesn't belong here.

OK, fair enough. I'm going to take you at your word on this. However, it points out an interesting problem where I feel that the slashdot editors have failed, and that's in presenting stories that *seem* like advertisements, due to simply posting submissions as written without using editorial discretion to moderate the tone of the submission.

What that means is you, as editors, need to take a look at the submissions from the viewpoint of your readership, and say "Does this look like an ad?" If the answer is yes, then either fix the submission, create a new article on your own that presents a more neutral view of the item in question, or just don't post it.

Regarding "let's make a video about [X]" or "Let's send timothy to a convention", WHO CARES? You want to make videos? Fine, but either create a new site, or put them on yuotube! Frankly, I'm not interested in your opinions about gadgets or tech or anything, or what conventions you go to, or any of that stuff. You guys have one job, and that's to sort the news posts and try to make sure that they reflect the historical perspective of Slashdot: News for nerds, Stuff that matters. You already have farmed out a lot of that through the firehose, it's just insulting when you ignore the downvotes and post stuff anyway because you like it personally.

In addition, you're over-featuring a few prolific posters, and posting a lot of non-tech news. The guy who wants to put "astronaut" for his application on a ballot? That's not even worthy of being "idle". The flood of articles from Hugh Pickens is just awful, as he seems to think that anything with even the remotest whiff of a tech angle is deserving of submission, and even worse, you editors just go along with it.

I'm glad you guys at least acknowledge (finally!) the UI bugs and are working to fix. Whatever happened to slashcode? Does it even reflect the current slashdot codebase?