Chacham's Journal: Slashdot Features That I'd Like

I use slashdot as a wonderful method for gaining ideas. It gives me a sense of what the technical community feels, what the rabble gets all riled up over, and even teaches me things. It's truly wonderful.

To facilitate reading things of interest, the messaging was started. It lets you know when you are modded, when someone replies to you, and even when a "friend" posts a journal. Neat.

A few points of how to read all this have always bothered me though.

It doesn't let you know when someone else posts a comment to a friends journal.

It doesn't let you know when someone replies to a comment made by another user.

It sort of lets you know when a "friend" posts a comment, since you can associate automatic points to it.

And worst of all, you can't check-off comments that you have already read.

So, I'd like to see something like:

• A checkbox for comments already seen.
• A checkbox to mark a comment "watched".
• A checkbox to mark a journal "watched".
• A message for replies to watched items.

Sounds like

[keesh]

a great way to DoS the server.

Re:Sounds like

[Chacham]

a great way to DoS the server.

Nah, putting DOS on would probably just take it down. :-)

Seriously, do you really think that such efforts would take it down. When CmdrTaco talked about the server pool he mentioned that it was probably overkill. With that in mind, would you really say that it couldn't handle it? How is it any different than meta-modding?

Re:Sounds like

[keesh]

Well, having read Data.pm, I can tell you that any server running Slash must be prepared to execute a hell of a lot of entirely meaningless code every time a comment is posted. But seriously -- script-friending and script-observing everyone would be a hell of a load...