CmdrTaco's Journal: Screen Savers, Travel, iPods, Moderation

It's been quite awhile since I put words into this TEXTAREA field. Since then I did an appearance on The Screen Savers (which has since all but been cancelled as G4 tries to figure out what to do with the TechTV assets). I have mixed feelings on that whole thing. I've met several of the people who worked on the show and they seem sincere, but at the end of the day, I don't find TSS particularly watchable. I think the real problem is quite simply that I am to far over the other side of the techie bell curve... their audience is the average computer user to the power user and I eat/breath/sleep technology. When I turn on my TV, I'd rather watch CSI or Mythbusters ;)

I spoke at Georgia Tech a few weeks ago too, which was the last of like 5 trips I had in a 4 week period. That went really surprisingly well- it's cool to have a talk when there are several people who really get what Slashdot is. Some people have really drank the kool aid with regards to Slashdot and are simply fans. Others can see beyond that hype and really see Slashdot and objectively see its strengths and weaknesses, and we had a few of those. Those are the talks I actually gain something from. Had a good time with Tammy & Mandrake who I only get to see a couple times a year now that we all don't go to every single Linux Conference that pops up.

My iPod (a 3G 40 gig one, acquired only weeks before the 60 gig iPod Photo was released. Damn you apple!) doesn't seem to work with a USB cable connected to my iMac following 10.3.6. This irritates me because I use it to shuttle large files back and forth between the office. It's not convenient to drag a cable with me.

In Slashdot news, our traffic has continued to rise, and just like every time, nobody is more surprised than me. Our unique IP counts now routinely exceed 500,000/day. We're serving 3.5M pages on most weekdays. Jamie & I have spent a fair bit of time designing the 'Big Picture' for the new moderation system... most of the concepts have already been outlined in previous journal entries, so read backwards if you're curious.

There will most likely be some very controversial changes... we've talked about eliminating the Score:-1 to 5 threshold system. Its confusing, limited, and extremely non scalable. We've also talked about removing the *dozens* of options that only 2% of our readers use and only 1% understand, and instead replacing them both with a few very simple choices... viewing modes or viewing styles or reading preferences or something. User option all really simplify down to options that make the page bigger or longer, and options that focus or unfocus the discussion. Instead of giving users 28 checkboxes and drop downs, we'll give them a handful of big picture options.

Moderation itself will internally change quite a bit. Right now there's a tangled ball of spagetti code wound so tight that it could easily have its own gravity. We need to replace that with a few tables... a table of events (comment moderated 'Informative', meta moderation ruled unfair etc) a table of repurcussions (karma goes up, ac posting disabled etc) so that we can more easily maintain what is an incredibly convoluted set filters that control moderation and posting.

We'll also have the option to revisit our mod labels. The ones we have are problematic. Some are redundant. Others require more discussion context rendering M2 difficult. One cool thing we came up with is that we'll be able to have context sensitive mod labels. This means we could have specific moderation labels that maybe only apply in a Call for Interview Questions... "Good Question"... or even crazy ideas like "Conservative" & "Liberal" for the politics section. The possibility for these options is endless, exciting, and a helluva lot better than a poor moderator being frusterated trying to figure out if a comment is Informative, Insightful, or Interesting. What was I thinking?

The last part will be a rewrite of the threading system so that threads better retain context through moderation. So good replies slide up and hopefully readers still get contextual comments. There's several complicated HTML issues, some UI ones, and a host of technical problems that need solving. If anyone knows of any forums out there that do a really good job presenting the data, I'd love to see them. We're open to any reasonable web technology... I hope to build this all with CSS, which will anger some folks, but I think we're well past the line where CSS is the only fair choice.

As always, you can email me if you have comments.