CmdrTaco's Journal: MacHack, Moderation Mails, The Hulk, Comicfolk

I'm speaking at MacHack tomorrow afternoon and I still haven't had a chance to get much in the way of notes down. I have 15-20 minutes of "Speech" sort of worked out in my mind. Since I've been using a Powerbook for going on 9 months now, I'm going to discuss the transition from a Linux laptop to a Mac laptop. It's not really going to be a serious discussion. I'm aiming to make it more joke filled and fun. Also, I'm hoping for Q&A stuff on Slashdot. I'd love a discussion on moderation or something, but usually that doesn't work since such a small percentage of the total Slashdot Audience actually post comments :) I hope folks show up to my talk- I hear attendance is down at MacHack this year due to its close proximity to WWDC, but I'm still looking forward to the show, and to seeing the hacks. They put on a solid show with a real friendly audience. A very different vibe than most of the corporate shows I've attended last year. But anyway, for all you machackers out there, Attendance is Mandatory Dammit!

A user asked me today why we lump moderation emails together. His interpretation of this was the not-so-original "to obfuscate editor mod bombing". Considering the amount of messages posted about "Modbombing", you'd think there were hundreds of authors using thousands of modpoints a day. OR you'd realize that there are in fact a couple of trolls who get pissy that they keep getting moderated down, and would rather believe that it's a conspiracy on the part of the authors instead of simply accepting that they are posting crap, and the thousands of users on the system with mod points are capable of remembering that they post crap. Anyhoo, thats neither here nor there :)

So this user wanted to know why we lump together moderation messages, and we do so for a few reasons. The first is to cut back on navel gazing. If a user gets an email saying he has been moderated, and that moderation is 20 seconds old, there is a very good chance that the user will go to his message, and reply, bitching about the moderation. I consider bitching about moderation to be Offtopic in almost every case... Bitching about how moderation sucks is totally a fair topic, but save it for stories where it is part of the topic at hand! Far to often people forget that moderation is meant to benefit the majority of Slashdot's audience... the majority that never posts, and only reads a few comments a day. These people don't want to read your angry rant about losing a karma point. They want to read insightful opinions on the News for Nerds of the day! So hopefully by delaying notification about moderation, we cut down on the knee jerk reactions.

There is also a performance issue to consider- we try to keep the number of real-time anything on the site kept to a bare minimum. Hey, YOU try serving millions of pages a day and see how easy it is to keep up every time someone wants something generated dynamically! Slash is all about caching as much data as possible just to keep up.

On the other hand, I'll serve the message ASAP if it's beneficial to the discussion.. users should know ASAP that someone replied to their comments. You can activate those messages in your user preferences. It's one of those features that has been around for a long time, but relatively few users know about it. In fact, people occasionally submit feature requests for it. Proof that the Slashdot UI needs fixin'. Like we need more proof of something so obvious :)

Traffic has been rising again the last few weeks. Not sure what the deal is. Probably 2-3% higher in the last month or 2. Comments also have been nudging up, with the number of 10,000 comment days per month on the rise. Thank god we got some important optimizations in place to handle the added burden. Now if we could just fix the flat mode/threaded mode commentlimit bug, we could reclaim a fairly substantial amount of bandwidth. Typically our traffic increases come in spikes surrounding either fall, and the start of college, and the return of students to broadband, or else some major news story that attracts new readers to Slashdot's *ahem* unique style of news. Maybe we're getting linkage related to the SCO story since it is fairly large outside of Slashdot. Not really sure.

Looking forward to The Hulk. Hoping to go see it in a few hours. I'm in the crowd that thinks the CG in the commercials looks a little weak, but I'm holding final judgement until I actually see. Ang Lee apparently took this film very seriously, so I'm not expecting the fluffy spider-man ride, nor the cheesy daredevil ride. Hopefully this will be unique.

Hey, the new Harry Potter comes out next week. Speaking of which I went to the comic shop on Wed. to grab my pulls. CowboyNeal asked me to grab his stuff while I was down there... well the good Cowboy's laster name is Pater, but pronounced Potter. I ask for his pulls and this annoying guy next to me makes some rancid Harry Potter joke. I him one of those fake laughs that you give to someone that means "Go Away, I want to get my pulls and leave". But he actually follows me around the store talking about Harry Potter and making jokes about the name, and explaining to me about people that he knows with strange names like Dick and such. It was really pretty disturbing. I know that there are a lot of stereotypes out there about the folks that frequent comic stores, but it's rare that you see the stereotype before you, and can't bring yourself to tell him to shut up, you're not interested in hearing about this guy he knew in highschool names Jon Hung or something.

La Bomba!

[fm6]

Rob, you'd hear less crap about "modbombing" if you and the other editors simply stopped second-guessing the moderators. Sure, you'd have more bad upmodes, but not that many. If a moderator breaks the rules too often, you can always exclude them from future moderation. But as long as somebody is trusted to moderate, they shouldn't be second-guessed.

Speaking of the moderator black-list: am I on it? I think it's been a year since I got any mod points.