sllort's Journal: Slashcode Updates

Many of you have noticed that CmdrTaco has changed a few things in Slashcode this week. The three changes I've observed so far are:

1. Karma displayed as an adjective
2. Karma score determines posting limit
3. Client IP addresses placed in readonly mode more easily

None of these are earth-shattering, so I'm going to cover them as a group.

Karma score determines posting limit:
Taco reminds everyone in this (non-archived) post that:
"KARMA DOES NOT MATTER". He goes on to prove this by making karma determine how many times you can post a day. Remember, you shouldn't use all caps, because caps is like being wrong. Here's a summary of how important karma actually is now, and while some of these details may be off, this reflects my best knowledge from reading Slashcode:
Karma: (PPD is posts per day)
26_50 : Post at 2, 25 PPD, Karma = Excellent
12_25 : Post at 1, 10 PPD, Karma = Good
1_12 : Post at 1, 10 PPD, Karma = Positive
Zero : Post at 1, 10 PPD, Karma = Neutral
-9_-1 : Post at 0, 2 PPD, Karma = Bad
-24_-10: Post at -1, 2 PPD, Karma = Terrible

Note that (as Taco points out) these are the default values in Slashcode atm; Slashdot itself may at any time be running with different values. Each IPID/SubnetId is allowed 10 AC posts per day, unless an IP is being 'abused', at which point things get more complicated. So the land of -1 trolling should be moving to threshold Zero, AC. Taco stated on IRC that the rate limiting change was made to prevent scripted crapflooding from -1 Accounts. I'd love to see a link to this crapflooding (I've never seen it) so if any of you have seen it, email me at operation_mongoose 'at' ziplip.com.

Karma adjectives:
Here's CmdrTaco's journal on the subject, and here's the non-archived discussion on the topic. Read it while you can, it will be deleted in two weeks. Taco states that he didn't just enable comments in his journal because he "didn't want people trolling his journal". Additionally, all the comments he made WRT to changes in the Karma system will be deleted. Make of this what you will.

Client IP addresses placed in readonly mode more easily
My details on this aren't very good, but as many have pointed out, the "readonly" error message seems to be popping up more often. The message is "You can't post to this page." and it appears when your IP address has been marked readonly. Basically, readonly mode means you're banned from posting anything, but you can still read the site. I think the only modification was one to the criteria for being placed in readonly mode, but I don't know exactly what the change is, only that pudge mentioned in IRC that he turned it up too high, and that now everything should be "Ok". If you've been placed in readonly mode, feel free to leave a comment and tell us what you did to get there. AFAIK, you can be placed in readonly mode for posting Offtopic comments as AC, or for posting a lot of comments that receive negative moderation as AC (ex: Windows is a pretty good O/S). That's just my experience; fill me in on yours.

That's all for now,
-s.

Slashdot starts sucking even more

[mirabilos]

Since $rtbl it yet sucked - but now it's even getting
worse. A pity no one can keep up with Taco and make
a (probably even not USA-centric) alternative like
our http://www.symlink.ch/ for the German-speaking
European area (600 users, that is).

Also

[sulli]

In taco's journal he has a discussion of possibly getting rid of Over/Underrated (exempt from M2). I tend to agree that they're pretty useless now.

Gotta agree that the -1 posting limit is lame lame. -1 is the funniest thing about slashdot some days. I made Subject Line Troll a Friend for a reason, dammit.

bots...

[jeffy124]

two off the top of my head that I think are crapflooder bots:
pwpbot [slashdot.org]
poopbot [slashdot.org]

I'm sure there's others, as it just seems to be something trolls would want to do.

Re:bots...

[sllort]

You're right, those are probably bots. The random hash appended for uniqueness is a pretty good giveaway.

That's sad.

Now tell me, what's more sad. That, or the fact that a bot can quite easily log in through 100 -1 accounts, and accomplish the exact same thing, posting 200x a day. Or the fact that CmdrTaco didn't think of this.

The only way to ever stop automated posting is a good human-recognition implementation. Jamie already has one. Why they don't use it to protect posting I'll never know. If they made it so everyone could post an unlimited number of times, but everyone with negative karma had to pass a human-recognition test, the bot problem would be over. The current solution is a futile stop-gap (at best) that hinders existing users.

Oh well.

They will never defeat the trolls...

[Lethyos]

I don't care what CmdrTaco does, he will never stop people from trolling Slashdot. Trolls are some of the most inventive and ingenius /. users, stretching the system to the limits. Basically, all CmdrTaco and his pals will accomplish is make Slashdot a significantly less enjoyable experience for everyone else. Posting limits are retarded. There've been days when I was on a good roll, posting comments that got moded up all over the place. Much of that would be defeated today, and I am sure limits will only increase. So if you buy into the subscription service, do you get unlimited posts for day? Or is it directly proportional to how much money you give?

On another note, 25% of the reason I read /. on a daily basis is for the troll content. If trolling is stopped, I will probably significantly reduce my interest in /. and thus the comments I provide. I hope many people stand with me on this. It's quite an interesting phenomenon and it's already kept well enough in check.

On another note, why is CmdrTaco and friends putting so much damned effort into restricting /. when they could spend time making it better!? Comment annotations! Improved filtering! Story moderation! Come on Taco, there's stuff that needs put into Slashcode! This stupid anti-trolling code is an absolute waste of time.

Re:They will never defeat the trolls...

[gmhowell]

You are dead on. Coming up with new anti-troll measures to prevent trolling is/will be as effective as anti-virus software is at preventing new viruses.

Some of the trolls (the PWP'ers especially and as example) are hackers in the true sense of the word. How do things work? How can we break them? Rather than saying "Klerck, thanks for showing us how fucked up our code is", they get all pissy.

In any event, remember that CT has said time and again that posters are essentially a waste of resources. We are a small segment of the community, and we don't matter.

changes = censorship?

[Pave Low]

Is it finally time for the editors to throw out all pretense and claims that this system is not censorship? [slashdot.org]

I think the editors fit the definition of a censor by now. [dictionary.com]

The Karma to Post thing

[Com2Kid]

Connecting Karma to posts allowed daily has really got me confused, it attempts to limit trolls and crap flooders by placing limits one everybody else and just kind of hoping that the trolls do not find a way around it.

Of course scripting the creation of a few gazzillion accounts and then going through the starting posting limit of them one by one would still work just fine, oh well, to be fixed in the next update I guess. ^_^

It's proven that...

[jsse]

a great guy who started a great thing and stayed too long will screw his own work up, eventually.

Bill Gates does that to Microsoft, Lord British does that to Ultima. I think Taco should wake up from his widest dream. some day.

More scripted crapflood

[NaveWeiss]

In Anal Cock's journal [slashdot.org] (or here [slashdot.org], if he erases his journal...)

Btw, sllort, are you the one who wrote the "Dynamic Threaded" and "Dynamic minimal" view modes of Kuro5hin? It's hard to keep track of all [slashdot.org] your [slashdot.org] usernames [slashdot.org]

Re:More scripted crapflood

[sllort]

That is yet another scripted crapflood that I missed. Next time, he'll have to generate more accounts before he can do that.

I did not write any code for scoop, that was Starship Trooper, who is an entirely different person, and a far better CGI coder than I.

Many trolls temporarily trade accounts (for instance, I loaned this one to someone during 9/11 who used it to crapflood - bah!) so don't feel bad for getting mixed up.

I mean, I use a database to track all my accounts and their assosciated proxies, so I don't expect others to keep up. Don't sweat it.