AnalogBoy's Journal: My letter to hemos..

I looked through the FAQ but didn't find the answer.. I was wondering if you had any plans to create a slashdot general forum? The slashdot community has grown by leaps and bounds, and like a newsgroup, it has become a community of extraordinary proportions. It would be good to have a place to pick the brains of others, en masse, and just have random discussions, as opposed to moderated and closed-focus story threads.

In the past, when slashdot was smaller, and its focus not so broad, I could understand not wanting to add such a section - but now, with people using their journals for private conversations, It may be the appropriate time to add general fora.

In order to keep the flame/troll threads to a minimum/etc, keep the moderation system, but remove "offtopic", "redundant" and "Flamebait" since offtopic wouldn't apply to a nontopical forum. Only trolls [Klerck.. BTW, I used to be on an IRC channel with him. He's difficult to get rid of, I can certainly sympathize.. he wasn't always as bad is he is now.] would be moderated down in the ideal system. Alternately, make a general forum and a forum for each of the individual topics you normally post on.

Rotate the boards on a daily-or-weekly basis or rotate inactive threads out of the board once a week. IRC is dying, Newsgroups aren't as broad as they used to be (and the forever December is still in effect), and I feel that at least some of slashdot would fall behind me in requesting this. At least consider the idea.

general forums ...

[SirSlud]

The net is littered with them :) I'm pretty sure it's not high up on the priority list at /. for this very reason. Certainly, many of the communities here bleed into other communities/sites that have forums. I know, for myself as a web author for a popular site, the boards do bring some value, but then tend to end up as more of a place for people too prove that they're hard core fans of the site rather than a place to actually have though-provoking discussion.

That's not to say it's a bad idea! Just maybe, a little too orthodox and 'been there'. I like /. because they pioneered, to some degree, the archtype /. community. I think to provide forums, you might take eyeballs away from the original purpose of the site, which is to keep abreast of the latest tidbits that concern /. types.

Actually

[mwalker]

Rob has spoken about this in the past. The comment is here [slashdot.org] and is pretty much required reading. His opinion is that Slashdot was not designed as a forum to discuss Slashdot, because of it's nature, but if you would like to discuss Slashdot you can email the developer's mailing list. Having taken his advice and subscribed to the mailing list, I've come to the conclusion that this is... well, this is bullshit, basically, because the developers talk about features, not about content. As Rob said "Policy questions are sorta offtopic, but I'll answer them". In short even if you use the place he's asked you to use to discuss Slashdot, you're Offtopic. And they never talk about user features, i.e. Moderation. You could of course, bring it up, but you would be... out of place. You can also email rob directly and he'll often write you back, but usually extremely briefly as he's had to answer the same question 1000's of times, usually.

For example, I once asked him why you couldn't Metamod "Redundant", "Overrated", and "Underrated". He wrote me back with the reply "no context". When I pestered him, he explained that in M2, you couldn't tell if at the time the post was actually Overrated, because you didn't know where it was in that discussion.

This, again, is bullshit, because you could of course store for each moderation event the score it was at when it was moderated. There is no "can't". What he meant was that this would be too much work to justify. Now, 2 years later, EVERYONE uses Overrated/Underrated because otherwise you get Metamoderated. Go figure.

Basically, though, I think the level of bitching, bile, and general attackmanship [slashdot.org] has basically exceeded their collective threshold and they don't want to deal with user input about it. You can make of that what you like.

To me the funny part is that while the Slashdot audience is often loosed on random targets like Microsoft, Adobe, CueCat, or the government of Belgium, Taco is afraid to loose us on... himself. Any time he posts a story about "Slashdot Updates" the entire thing goes way Offtopic as everyone takes the chance to vent their pent up bile/ideas and generally ignore whatever changes he's actually made. 250,000 opinionated nerds is a scary, scary thing.

Mind you, I don't blame him. Not at all. I do my best to ignore the majority of the audience here too.