Glasscode Released 152
BBSes, Half-Empty, Glasscode, and my sanity.
Just a bit more than a year ago, me and my good friend Isaac Oates (author of the Eternity BBS software from long ago) sat down and decided to create a website. We were missing the days of BBS yore, where discussion flowed with intellectual posts about all kinds of topics, trolls were sparse, and flames were hearty. We wanted it back. The root of all evil seen in online posting today, Isaac and I decided, was that people were not caring what all of their peers thought of them, and were not in anyway motivated to think through their posts. We also saw alot of the current weblogs out there restricted in what could be posted, and by whom. They were also confusing to the newbie (granted, half-empty is overwhelming right now), and we wanted anyone and everyone with a Internet connection to be able to stop sucking information out and start dumping some back in.
We wanted to create an online community (the kind that Katz has recently been raving about) that would have no limits on discussion and would by its nature make people want to get involved. It would allow the users to get an ongoing rush of content, or eliminate the content down to just being about, say, Birds. It would let the users know what other people thought of them. It would allow for the obvious identification and silencing of blatant trolls. It would be fun to use, and would be addictive.
We started chipping away last January, at the turn of the millenium. Unfortunately, Isaac was sucked away into the depths of UIUC, unable to continue the project. Fortunate or not for myself, this was a project stuck in my head and would not leave me alone until it was finished.. I'm sure most of you can relate. I became addicted to it, adding piece after piece, rethinking the architecture and rating/point system over and over again.. making myself a self-proclaimed psychologist of my users-to-be. "Should points be a reward, or a punishment?" .. "Will they rate stuff down they disagree with?" .. "How much of a focus should be on points, and how much on content?"
I spent most of my second semester freshman year at Cornell (when not doing homework or intoxicating myself) coding this beast. I rebuilt it from the ground up several times, and knew the source code much better than my Chemistry book (and boy, do my grades show this fact..) Summer came and went, and every night after seeing friends I would return home and sit in front of the screen hacking and tweaking away. I saved some cash and got it running on a overclocked Celeron off of e-bay. Half-empty had only one user, one voice, but this would all change soon enough.
I forget the exact day in September, probably the day after we got our cable modem, when I proclaimed to my housemates that we were going to test roadrunner's bandwidth and see what would happen. Knowing that I couldn't afford a real connection, my plan was to open the site, get a gigantic flood of users somehow, and pray that one of them sees what I'm trying to do and decides to help me out. I plugged it in, started it up, set up the DNS, and half-empty.org became live.
Now I needed some users.. I decided the most complicated part of the system (and the most discussable) was the moderation system, which still wasn't perfected. I wanted feedback about both the setup I was doing and the site itself, so I posted a kuro5hin article announcing the site and briefly mentioning the system. I had a steady stream of people checking it out then, the server was stable, and I was happy. A request was made for more information about the specific math involved, so I bit and typed up the in depth explanation linked above. A bunch of "Ideas" (half-empty's content) got posted, and discussion took place with only a few minor bumps.
About 100 people signed up that night. The next day, I was minding my own business when I heard a "Oh shit." from my housemate in the other room.. sure enough, we were about to get semi-Slashdotted (mind you, this was a cable modem) I killed my PC, grabbed the RAM out of it, slapped it into the server, prayed, and surprisingly it survived. I had 500 new users in two hours. The posts were coming in at a pretty crazy rate. (This was the only time that I saw the rate of input that I've envisioned since I started working on the project.)
Within a week or so, roadrunner took notice, and pulled the plug. I thought it was over for a while until I got an e-mail from Tim Wilde of dyndns services.. he had been a member of half-empty during the time it was up, and didn't want to see it fade away. Putting me into their slice of "cool stuff" on their budget (as Tim put it), half-empty would survive. I went into a coding spree for 48 hours, fixing any big bugs I could since the site was going to be dead for a few days. Tim arrived, put the box into the cage and plugged it in, and half-empty was back.
Of course, most of the folks who had been there originally had drifted away because of the downtime. The site has managed to addict a handful of people, however, and we've been trudging on ever since. There have been creative stories and plays discussed, politics, coding, and even a dirty joke or three :) It's become apparent that the moderation system, if nothing else, has caused people to read, preview, edit, and post their thoughts. I'm happy with what it's become, and can only hope that the mentality there will remain the same while the userbase gets larger.
So, today I've reached the end of this road, and probably the beginning of another. I've released the source to Glasscode, and (hopefully) have made it straightforward to setup and install. It's a Java-based servlet application, with many of the features seen in slashcode, with additions such as skinning, appending to posts, selective archiving, user tiers, category permissions and overviews, and plenty more. It provides a component based system for adding new types of content, and there is even an skin development kit to aid in the creation of new skins (which when accepted by the central server will be available to all Glasscode based sites.)
Hopefully this hasn't been too drawn out of a story to culminate in a software release.. I'm hoping that you've been entertained by my struggle against the need to code that most of us have learned to accept and embrace. One thing that many hackers need to learn that computers are just tools, tools which will be ultimately used by people. Linux, Gnome, Glasscode, and all software is there to help people do things or think in ways they couldn't before. With this in mind, Happy Hacking :)"
Re:Slashdot should be commended (Score:1)
There seems to be a lot less articles posted by taco these days, and I think that most of the complaints on Slashdot (which are for the MOST part, silly complaints) about it changing since the purchase, are from people feeling the effects of taco withdrawals.
Grow your own dope, plant a man
Re:(somewhat OT) Technical Comment about GlassCode (Score:1)
Can you say SLASH DOTTED.
The pages used to take a while to load (over 33.6) now they take about the same amount of time as
-- TIM
Re:This should be exciting (Score:1)
Re:Slow and... (Score:1)
Re:Good moderation! (Score:1)
1. Here is how you get around the Karma max at 50: create a new account! Hell, I have got three! From experience, it took me a year to get my first account maxed out at 50, and then 3 months to max out the second.
2. Other ways to rack-up Karma: Write something (anything) humourous about Microsoft (carefull, sometimes you get marked down for being a troll). And finding misc. links to similar information is always a good way to get a few points, but it can be time consuming. Here is a great way to get a few extra Karma: Write something that is particularly scathing of Slashdot itself, as long as it is on topic
Re:Good moderation? (Score:1)
Or run rusty's Scoop engine (Score:2)
If you wanted something like that, you could probably hack the slashdot code to do it (IE, open story submissions and moderation).
The Scoop engine [kuro5hin.org] (which powers Kuro5hin [kuro5hin.org]) has story moderation and a comment moderation system that always gives you the points you want.
Like Tetris? Like drugs? Ever try combining them? [pineight.com]
You mean like Advogato? (Score:2)
Users are given a certain number of karma points. They can attach those points as positive or negative values, to other accounts. Once they use up those karma points, they're gone -- but they can re-arrange those points if they want
Think of "attaching karma points to an account" as "certifying that account" and you've just described Advogato [advogato.org]. Too bad Advogato AFAIK doesn't even let you reply to articles without having been certified by a number of other users.
Like Tetris? Like drugs? Ever try combining them? [pineight.com]
Re:Already /.ed (Score:1)
---
Tim Wilde
Gimme 42 daemons!
Slow and... (Score:1)
--
Good moderation? (Score:3)
How many Slashdot readers have been moderated down with a (-1 Off Topic) because the moderator failed to read the (on topic) thread that they had been replying to. This can be real humourous when the original comment in the thread was moderated up.
Or my favorite: A comment gets scored as a (5 Interesting) and yet NOBODY replies to the thread that the (5 Interesting) comment begins. If it were really interesting, don't you think that it would generate SOME sort of response?
The moderation system on Slashdot is simply no longer viable for a community of this size.
Re:Slow and... (Score:1)
---
Tim Wilde
Gimme 42 daemons!
I wonder... (Score:1)
I've been trying to pull up that site for 30 minutes now. *grr*
Re:Probably (Score:2)
He wouldn't have to walk into a dev group and rewrite their tree. If they weren't interested, he could (gasp) fork. Amazing these freedoms you get with this open source thingy, isn't it?
The real problem with all these start-from-scratch efforts that are so pervasive nowadays has nothing to do with cooperation -- it's ego, pure and simple. "I made it all by myself!"
Re:I wonder... (Score:1)
---
Tim Wilde
Gimme 42 daemons!
Sheepish tendencies (Score:4)
This is especially apperent on topics based around opinions, such as politics. As someone with a many opinions that do not agree with the far left majority of slashdot, I consistently see perfectly valid points and opinions moderated down, or never moderated up, just because they do not agree.
By only seeing one side of the story it is impossible to get a fair view of the situation, and a now biased personal opinion cannot form. This manifests itself into a closed minded group of people, moving farther and further in one direction, leaving reason and individuality behind.
Re:Give me 1000 flavors!!! (Score:1)
But, sometimes, bizarre stuff happens. For instance, if Jon Katz was a normal user, he'd get shouted down or routinely ignored. As it is, his posts are first page news by default.
When Linux 2.4 was "announced" (Linus posted it, so the developers knew, and waited to see how long it would take the mainstream users and the press to notice), it was done as a story in the Linux subtopic, not the main page. CmdrTaco even commented [slashdot.org] that he had to post it quick, or he'd get a ton of submissions. Well, he probably still got a ton of submissions, since most people assumed it was front page news,and when they didn't see it there, submitted the story. There were 772 comments to that story, which seems like critical mass to make it a front pager. If stories were moderated like comments, this may have gotten pushed to the front page. Of course, the great leader may have been making a selfish choice, to keep the bandwidth pipes open for himself, by limiting the SlashDot effect for a few hours...
Also, some mod to stories may help with commenting problems. I may have the most insightful comment in the world, but if I don't see the story in the first hour, the moderators won't see it. If you look at comment posts, most highly moderated comments are the first few, giving a definite advantage to quick posters, even those who may not think their idea out clearly. It seems like a recipe for trolls.
Anyway, some system that mods comments may help, by keeping a story alive. If there is a lot of activity in a story, it could be kept high on the list, and people would be inclined to read it again. I could imagine a system where stories get points based on activity. New stories could have such a high score that they start at the top, and lose points just for existing, so that all new stories start at the top. Old stories where people are still discussing it would rise to the top, based on story mods and new comments. Moderators would get fresh points to use on a story, when it reaches a certain threshhold.
Yes, it's not fully thought out, but a system where the users have more control over the stories may make for interesting discussions - or at least less knee-jerk posting.
Re:With all the Java Sucks comments... (Score:1)
2. Is JIT on?
3. Use an in-process servlet engine/webserver like Resin (www.caucho.com). Every out-of-process SE that I know of uses a socket to send the request from Apache to the SE.
4. caucho.com also has a mysql driver that they say is faster.
5. Optimize the code, simplify, reduce object allocation, etc. Java is not slow if used properly, but that takes work.
Re:License issues (Score:1)
Re:(somewhat OT) Technical Comment about GlassCode (Score:1)
I honestly have yet to see the Java system that performs as advertised.
Where are these advertisments, for reference?
This should be exciting (Score:1)
Re:Oh please... (Score:1)
as for offtopic conversations, some interesting stuff comes out of that
erwin the gopher (Score:2)
Erwin says that Glasscode should be used by Slashdot so that everyone can moderate the submission queue and get the stories they want to read, not the stories that Slashdot decides you want to read.
Re:This should be exciting (Score:1)
Re:(somewhat OT) Technical Comment about GlassCode (Score:1)
But Java lets you send secure, cross-platform code across a network. The most obvious use of this is web applets, but there are others.
Arguing for Java on the basis of ease-of-coding (basically saying "I like GC") is a cop-out -- you're trading away a lot of speed because you're too lazy to manage your memory
I disagree. It's not laziness, it's a tradeoff. Rather than spending the time to manage your memory you spend the time on other aspects of your code. You can pretty much always improve software by spending more time on it, and it's not always worth it to spend the time on memory management instead of another area.
Re:Oh please... (Score:2)
There was one here, in 509...
- Jeff A. Campbell
I'm sure it's great code (Score:1)
Generic Slashdot link sourcecode released (Score:1)
/* Slashdot link v0.1.2
* copyright 2001
* released under the terms of the GNU Public
* License v2.0 (see LICENSE.TXT)
*/
if ((link.category != MAJOR_NEWS_ORGANIZATION) || ((number_of_comments < 6) || (number_of_comments > 200))){
return SLASHDOTTED;
}
Re:My Thoughts (Score:1)
Trolls were not sparse back then... There have always been trolls, and there will always be trolls. I will probably never fully understand what makes someone troll though.
--
Re:Slashdot should be commended (Score:4)
Just Kiding. Does appear to be down however
Give me 1000 flavors!!! (Score:3)
Slashdot is where it is because of community. At first, it may have been the editors doing most of the work picking out cool stuff. Nerds of different flavors showed up because it was cool stuff, and started discussion groups. Soon, the editors didn't really need to start looking for cool stuff, the readers started submitting it. It's barely neccessary for me to look at ZDNet, Salon, or the AP wire, since SlashDot seems to always pick up on the best stories in a short amount of time.
Slashdot isn't entirely community driven, however. The editors do take some editorial liscense, deciding what is post worthy, what is front page news, editing submissions, etc. Occasionally, a story will only get posted because of the massive number of submissions, against the editor's tastes, but this is rare. The posters don't know what's going on - they just see a little "reject" flag next to their submission. This is probably one of the most frustrating parts for someone who is just starting that level of participation - no feedback from the editiors, besides a binary responce and a 6-month old FAQ.
This particular project doesn't seem to be "SlashCode, but with X!!!" Instead, he is making an effort to allow the community to decide how things are organized. I think it's a laudible experiment.
Just like voting systems, no post-and-moderate system will make everyone happy. This particular one may not even scale well. But we need the experiementers, and this one seems to have a good start.
Re:Good moderation? (Score:3)
Java did it (Score:1)
Re:Sheepish tendencies (Score:1)
---
Tim Wilde
Gimme 42 daemons!
Re:Good moderation? (Score:1)
I've had this happen, and I laughed out loud when I saw it.
I think moderation should be weighted based on the number of replies a post generates, with the additive value weighted by how many replies are direct and how many are more deeply nested.
Ummm it blowz (Score:1)
Re:Ummm it blowz (Score:3)
Re:License issues (Score:2)
I have already stolen the Glasscode, and would hearby like to announce my clone site for optimists called
-thomas
Re:Good moderation? (Score:1)
So here's why it could be really good to moderate people instead of comments. When moderators mod comments, they end up mainly just looking at whether it's a troll, and whether it's logically self-consistent and interesting, and stuff like that. But that doesn't tell you anything about the story's relationship to the universe outside of Slashdot -- you know, that thing called reality. It would be great if there was a way to tell whether the person posting was a veritable fountain of misinformation, or was a world-wide authority on the subject. It also might be good to make the rating topic-specific. E.g., the same guy who posts in Science saying "First you send out 100 space probes in every direction..." might actually be very knowledgeable about Linux.
BTW, I think Epinions does something like this, although in general I think Epinions is so badly maintained that it's not a model that should be emulated.
The Assayer [theassayer.org] - free-information book reviews
Qualitative Analysis, not Quantitative... (Score:3)
Moderation systems are normally designed for the purpose of promoting the quality of a forum. It's interesting then, that the most prominent moderation system uses a method that assigns subjective opinion a quantitative value. "Scoring" a post "up" or "down" is inherently flawed in that you are allowing an individuals subjective opinion to 'grade' the post, rather than a more effectively classifying or categorizing a post.
Filtering these forums based on this flawed quantitive value will obviously result in quality posts being ignored. Slashdot does offer some kind of categorization of the post, but it still relies upon scoring to order and filter posts.
Another factor to consider in moderating systems is accountability. Slashdot, and many others, use an anonymous moderation system. kuro5hin [kuro5hin.org] does not follow this poor practice. Everyone can moderate, and everyone is accountable. You can view who has moderated your posts and view the value they selected.
So let's tie this together. We want a system that reflects a true subjective and qualitative analysis without the impedance of scoring. We want a system that is accountable. "Grading" a post becomes "Classifying" a post, and filtering becomes organizing. For example, let's say the categories to classify a post include the following:
If subjective categories such as "interesting" or "boring" are available, so be it. They are simply classifications. Opinion is important, but if we base our filtering on grades that do not accurately reflect content, we loose any advantage we gain through moderation.
So, what would a forum look like with this system? It could be displayed in exactly the same way we see /., but instead of showing a score, we provide a link to show the categories and number of people that moderated the post. For example:
The Ozone needs an fsck!11 Jan 2001, ^chewie [mailto]
Informative(11 [slashdot.org]), Boring(1 [slashdot.org]), Pro(1 [slashdot.org])
The Ozone is in serious need of repair! The US Department of...
...and so on. (Man, I hate mozilla keybindings...*sigh*). Thus, you have the system I propose as a base. Quantitative measurements are possible, but should only reflect actual physical facts about the post, such as size, number of links, number of moderations, etc.
Re:Oh please... (Score:1)
-Davidu
Re:License issues (Score:3)
Dammit. (Score:1)
Whoever modded this Insightful:
You suck. I took a break from modding unjustly -1ed ACs Underrated and gave the parent a Funny just to piss the guy off (and support his point), and you made it disappear within about five seconds.
May your overclocked Celeron disfigure your genitals somehow!
--Cranky Old School Moderator
Glasscode, eh? (Score:1)
"Don't throw stones in Glassco... Err, houses."
Re:This should be exciting (Score:2)
Tell me what makes you so afraid
Of all those people you say you hate
Moderation? (Score:4)
I can trust a moderator to make judgements concerning themselves, but not for the judgement of the community.
Metamoderation is a way to determine if a person can moderate intelligently, hopefully.
I can't agree to your view that a +5 interesting doesn't get comments. A really powerful, interesting, insightful, whatever, comment, doesn't need to be provocative or controversial. It doesn't need to generate comments, though obviously it would be nice if it did; I always enjoy getting comments!
Geek dating! [bunnyhop.com]
Re:(somewhat OT) Technical Comment about GlassCode (Score:1)
Bwahahahaahha! /., being marked a troll is beyond funny :)
Most of my posts make it to 5 (check my karma if you don't believe me). Especially considering how rarely I post to
Ok maybe just immature
Honestly, i don't see why an observation about the performance of GlassCode isn't a valid comment when the code itself is released.
Dude maybe you do know something about coding, and maybe you don't. But apparently you know nothing about hardware. The Celeron (the machine this app is running on) has only 128k of cache. You ever see a server with low cache try to handle high I/O? Ever wonder why server cpu's have up to 8 megs of cache sometimes?
Plus, this guy is sharing bandwidth with someone else. Also as someone so appropriately pointed out earlier, many much larger sites have failed beneath the /. load.
I'll be the first to admit that Java likes lots of memory in the heap, and he's only got 128 megs of ram. I'd be interested to see how slashcode compares to this on the same hardware. Plus, the guy's probably using an non-raid IDE drive. Not the most efficient choice for any server. I'm amazed the dang thing didn't just give up the ghost. It got slow, but didn't die.
So either point out possible improvements or shut the hell up and write your own.
Go Cornell!!! (Score:1)
Cornell Student Linux Users Group @ http://cslug.cornell.edu [cornell.edu]
Re:Give me 1000 flavors!!! (Score:1)
Smaller projects like half-empty can afford to innovate because they have less to lose. And if they find some new principle to apply to online communities, maybe slashdot will implement the idea after it's been proven.
Wah, wonderful idea! (Score:2)
But I might want it on a per user basis, and not as a community wide thing. Or a blend of the two. I don't like raw mob rule.
So I can assign points to people, akin to handicaps. To use a popular example, Sig11 automatically gets -3, -2, -1, 0, or +1, because I like his posts.
This gets modified by the moderation system, which is a per discussion ranking, and then is also modified by a global karma; Sig11 tends to have high Karma because a lot of people like him, respond to him, mod him up, or assign bonuses to him; a general -1, 0, or +1.
This may devolve into a popularity contest, unfortunately.
But if this is configurable (ignore global ranking, double global ranking, ignore local ranking, etc), it should be okay.
I for one don't want to listen to '-' no matter that sometimes he's a real treat, and sometimes he's a real pain. I just don't want to deal with it.
I dunno, maybe it's a bad idea...
Geek dating! [bunnyhop.com]
Re:Sheepish tendencies (Score:1)
On my site () I wrote up a piece on using micropayments to enable people to set themselves up as "editors" of a data stream, specifically in this case USENET (but it's applicable to any data stream, actually, including the entire net). People with less time can then 'subscribe' to these editors, who get some kind of funding based on how well they help turn data into information by pointing to useful stuff.
A similar setup could work on
If there are people who's opinions you respect, you naturally give them more weight than people who you dislike. you could build a moderation system that allows for that -- technically it's not too difficult, although it's going to be computationally somewhat expensive. But CPU is cheap. Wetware cycles aren't....
I think the idea of everyone being able to build a customized "editorial staff" to customize
Seems to me that's what computers are about -- we're letting the computer do the hard work of sifting all this, by teaching them what to look for -- and doing that by using clues other people are willing to give us. (then add in some form of micropayment system, even if it's a shareware-type thing, and the editors, if they're good enough, can turn it into a revenue stream. The better they are at leading audiences to what they want, the easier it is to pay the rent off of the data mining. If guys can make a living building castles in Ultima for a living, why can't we find ways to make a living in other parts of cyberspace where it might make a real difference?)
Re:Sheepish tendencies (Score:1)
On my site () I wrote up a piece on using micropayments to enable people to set themselves up as "editors" of a data stream, specifically in this case USENET (but it's applicable to any data stream, actually, including the entire net). People with less time can then 'subscribe' to these editors, who get some kind of funding based on how well they help turn data into information by pointing to useful stuff.
A similar setup could work on
If there are people who's opinions you respect, you naturally give them more weight than people who you dislike. you could build a moderation system that allows for that -- technically it's not too difficult, although it's going to be computationally somewhat expensive. But CPU is cheap. Wetware cycles aren't....
I think the idea of everyone being able to build a customized "editorial staff" to customize
Seems to me that's what computers are about -- we're letting the computer do the hard work of sifting all this, by teaching them what to look for -- and doing that by using clues other people are willing to give us. (then add in some form of micropayment system, even if it's a shareware-type thing, and the editors, if they're good enough, can turn it into a revenue stream. The better they are at leading audiences to what they want, the easier it is to pay the rent off of the data mining. If guys can make a living building castles in Ultima for a living, why can't we find ways to make a living in other parts of cyberspace where it might make a real difference?)
Re:Sheepish tendencies (Score:1)
Re:Sheepish tendencies (Score:1)
Everyone would start at the origin. When the first user in your system mods a comment, it would establish the first relation. If they agreed with each other, they would both move to 1 Each user would come to have a polar coordinate assigned to them as they moded other users up and other users down. Say you really agree with someone's post? You would add their vector * 10 to yours. Say you kind of agreed? Their vector * 5. If you disagreed, negative values would be used.
I'm not sure whether you moderating their comment should change their vector as well. I'm inclined to say no. Just because you agree with them doesn't mean they would agree with you...
The only complexity I see to this problem is when things get started. Say you have four users (A,B,C, & D). A mods B and C mods D, establishing two relationships. However, we can't compare these two relationships until somebody from the one group mods somebody from the other. It would be tricky but doable.
So finally, you just set your threshold by setting an angle and maybe a magnitude and seeing who is close by.
I'm not exactly sure where trolls would fall into this... and maybe it would be cool if you used 3D vectors instead. You could print a globe of your user set!
The moral here, BTW, is to define a system that doesn't use landmarks, but, rather, one that allows you to look at the map when you are done a see the landmarks that establish themselves.
Me thinks I might go find my 3D Calc book and write a moderation system of my own.
Re:Probably (Score:2)
Besides, I couldn't fork a Perl/PHP project like slash/scoop and use Java, now could I?
Give Glasscode a Break (Score:1)
Their submission was relative, technically related, and most definitely "News for Nerds." That's what /. is all about, besides, these stories need some sort of site to provide more information with and who better to benefit from the /. onslaught than projects like Glasscode.
It's not as if /. posted a story from Betty Crocker because of a new cookie (cookie = edible food | cookie = internet term) product they're putting out.
Re:Good moderation? (Score:1)
Unless everyone who read it was just in awe of the post that they're wiping the drool from their mouth instead of replying to it ;)
Haha nebby is back... (Score:1)
Re:Sheepish tendencies (Score:2)
Slashdot? (Score:2)
Allegedly, the electoral college system in the US voting scheme is supposed to allow for that;
Gaining the majority vote is not enough to win, you need to get the majority vote in several geographic areas, and thus force yourself to appeal to several demographics, and not just general mob rule.
Can something like that occur here?
Something like that happens, in the sense that supposedly anyone can moderate. If an even distribution of moderators exist, then the statistical model should represent the views of slashdot. Supposedly.
But then there are other problems; even I sometimes don't read at -1 or 0, because I want to avoid the trolls. I try to avoid modding up +2 or +3, unless they are *really* good, and concentrate on modding the +1s and the responses to +2 or +3, that provide good counterarguments.
Is that appropriate? I dunno, is there a moderator's training page to provide good behavior? That's the best I can do, for now.
Geek dating! [bunnyhop.com]
Re:This should be exciting (Score:1)
I think it was quite underhanded (Score:1)
Re:License issues (Score:1)
Re:Note to DynDNS (Score:1)
---
Tim Wilde
Gimme 42 daemons!
Re:Note to DynDNS (Score:1)
Re:This should be exciting (Score:1)
---
Tim Wilde
Gimme 42 daemons!
Good moderation! (Score:1)
My experience with Slashdot moderation has been grrrreat! No, I don't think I've ever been moderated down unfairly. I got hooked on the whole game of being a karma whore, and once I understood a little about how the site's culture worked, I found it was really easy to rack up karma. F'rinstance, I realized that a really good way to get some karma was to look up links with more detailed information on some of the science articles being discussed, which were often short fluff pieces from Wired, etc. Oops! You know what? It may have been karma-whoring, but it was also kind of, er, informative...
My only criticism of the moderation system is that now that I've maxed out at 50 karma, it's kind of boring. Makes me want to goat-sex myself back down to zero and start over.
The Assayer [theassayer.org] - free-information book reviews
Comment removed (Score:4)
Re:You code fast! (Score:2)
YES! (Score:1)
The problem with the systems we have in place now (on and offline) are exactly the one-dimensionality you describe. There is certainly a "goodness" we can all agree on at the extremes (love good, murder bad), but outside of those extremes our own personalities and freewill make simple value judgements a detriment, be they restrictive or merely descriptive.
I'm going to save a copy of your post for later re-hashing and possible implementation. I'll try to give what credit I can.
Re:Big problems that havn't been addressed (Score:2)
We have databases for a reason. They allow you to manipulate, store, and access data faster than text files.
Lack of useful features? Uhm. Ok.
Try the "Text-only" skin.. it's not perfect but it looks decent in Lynx.
One size doesn't fit all (Score:4)
Slashcode may not be the best model in many other cases. For instance, I run a slash-ish site [theassayer.org] for book reviews, focusing on reviews of free books. The selectivity-about-topics part of Slashdot is obviously completely inappropriate for this kind of site, since the equivalent of a Slashdot article is a book, and there's no reason to exclude books. Also, a particular book is likely to be discussed only sporadically, not in a Slashdot-style feeding frenzy, so I didn't need Slashdot's mechanisms for getting rid of first-post trolls, but I did have to implement a system for people to ask to receive e-mail notifications when discussion is posted about a book they're interested in.
A lot of things are a matter of taste and culture, and one size does not fit all. A lot of Slashdotters are paranoid types who have filled the margins of their copy of Cryptonomicon with conspiracy theories. So it makes sense that Slashdot allows anonymous posts. However, for most discussion sites, the single simplest thing that can be done to get rid of trolls is simply to disallow anonymous posting -- make people at least put their nick on their posts, if not their real name and e-mail. For book reviewing, it's particularly important to have some idea of who the reviewer is and what his qualifications are.
BTW, this last issue -- does the person posting know their posterior from a cavity in the earth? -- is, in my opinion, the place where Slashdot is the most deficient. It's fine when you're reading discussion on a computer topic, since most Slashdotters are computer nerds, and mistakes get pointed out really quickly. But it's a big problem in the science section. A lot of the people posting there got their ideas about science from Star Wars. You get ridiculous stuff like people saying that asteroid mining can be accomplished by "dropping" asteroids into the Earth's atmosphere, where air drag will slow them down and let them crash to the surface. So this is an example of how one design doesn't necessarily work for everything that even one discussion site tries to do.
The Assayer [theassayer.org] - free-information book reviews
Re:License issues (Score:2)
Ironically enough, your selfish behavior was a large factor in helping me decide to release it initally as non-commercial, to protect myself from people like you.
As for my "community building" being a facade.. look at the team of people (including myself) that bring you half-empty. We're not the most selfish of types. You can't make money from a site like half-empty, anyway. I took a lot of crap on k5 about the fact the site had banner ads. What nobody realized is that banner ads does not equal revenue for myself. It goes to dyndns.org's bandwidth bill.
I told you to call me (and gave you my phone number) if you had any guts to talk to me in person about what your problem was. You never did.
Re:Sheepish tendencies (Score:2)
On K5, the latest front page story has 60 comments. Some statistics:
50 are topical, 10 are editorial.
of the 50 topical, 35 have been rated.
of the 35 rated, only 8 were rated by just one user. the other 27 were rated by multiples users.
On
K5 lets any user rate any comment at any time. As you can see, it means that a significant portion of posts *do* get rated. Yeah, K5's way is probably more intensive on the server, but it seems that more comments getting ratings can only mean good things for readers.
--Robert
Does Glasscode... (Score:3)
...have a filter to prevent excessive whitespace in a post? Come on, Cowboy, time to update the lameness filter. How hard is it to check for an excessive number of consecutive <br>s?
Re:Sheepish tendencies (Score:2)
I think perhaps the slashdot source people need to maybe redo or rethink moderation. I can count on one hand (2 times) the number of times I have been able to moderate. Maybe a good compromise would be to have moderation be available when you have more than 10 points, and it's been more than 2-3 days since you last moderated. I think that would be a better balance than the current haphazard moderation slash has now.....
--
"The nature of BBS Discussions" (Score:2)
Re:Good moderation? (Score:2)
Users are given a certain number of karma points. They can attach those points as positive or negative values, to other accounts. Once they use up those karma points, they're gone -- but they can re-arrange those points if they want.
Say everyone on
There are limitations and ways to abuse this system, but they can be limited. For instance, one way to limit the impact of trolls is to base the number of karma points a user has to give out on the karma value of that user. So the more negative your karma value, the less 'damage' you can cause by spreading around karma.
If users knew their messages would have a global effect on their being read by others, it'd be a nice incentive to be careful about their postings....
Re:Slashdot? (Score:3)
Would it help if we took a new look at the browsing system, rather than moderation? What if we were able to add a rule to the display options such that you don't see any posts moderated as "-1 Troll"?
Better still, what if you like to read Slashdot for a good laugh, don't mind if the topic strays a bit, and really don't like those posts that make you learn something. It would be nice if you could add virtual adjustments for each level of moderation: +1 funny, +0 offtopic, and -2 informative.This way, you can filter out the things you don't want to see, while bringing back in some of the ones you weren't interested in.
The next step from there would be to open everything way up: you've gone part of the way from crude "good / bad" descriptions to a more meaningful content based description. You can augment that by adding in more adjectives for moderation. These adjectives don't have to be so much in terms of good vs bad, but rather as adjectives are meant to be: descriptions.
Political. Poetic. Surreal. Sublime. Yet Another Microsoft Bashing. Yet Another Linux Stroking.
You get the idea.
The final step would be to make moderation a much more common occurance, because you would have to gather much more input to determine which posts have which attributes. I'm not sure where the line there should be -- on one hand, it's tempting to say all users can always moderate once they get the 20 karma points or whatever it is. That would probably be a black hole for system abuse though. Maybe a second tier? Those above, say, 30-50 points {?} could moderate all the time, while those between 20 and that upper tier cutoff would get to periodically like they do now. I'm not sure, it would have to be fleshed out if the idea got anywhere near that far.
In any event, I've been disappointed in the moderation system for months now, and some sort of change would be very welcome.
Does this [slashdot.org] count? As they say, read the FAQ... :)
Slashdot should be commended (Score:4)
I give kudos to Slashdot for being one of the only commercial sites on the web that does this.
Re:Oh please... (Score:2)
Trolls were sparse? I doubt it, you didn't know that you were being trolled.
Truly. I'll wager that every single person here who was into the BBS scene, at some time called some local lamer warez board, chatted to the sysop, and pretended to be a cool phreakin' dude from the other side of the planet. We sure did.. lock your modem to some crazy speed like 4800 baud, blame it on the noise from all the different boxes you were using to phreak, talk in broken english.. and watch this high school kid running a BBS off his twin-floppy no-hard-drive A500 bullshit you about his 500meg of 0-day warez.. hilarious trolling fun!!
Oh please... (Score:2)
I remember the BBS days quite well, I operated a BBS here in the Chicago area (The Pirates Cove). We were a popular BBS, but at its peak there were only 300 active members, and all were computer enthusiasts. No one was given access without being reviewed first.
With the web, anyone and everyone can visit a web site and post. You will never be able to eliminate trolling.
Personally, I think that the trolls are an important part of the experience. Don't like it, browse at +1.
Re:(somewhat OT) Technical Comment about GlassCode (Score:2)
Re:Another site with bloody lousy HTML!! (Score:2)
There's 6 other skins. Take your pick. If they all suck to you, then sorry I did my best. If you're really that annoyed by it, you can try downloading the skin SDK and making your own skin and sending it to me
Re:This should be exciting (Score:2)
The server is slowly murmuring to its lonely self
:)
Re:Oh please...(OT with a purpose) (Score:2)
Well, you can put them in a box instead. Hopefully, this site will suck all of the Katz inspired intelectuals, poetry, politics and such out of Slashdot. Fork!
Re:Sheepish tendencies (Score:2)
My experience on /. is that a certain slant will start to appear in a discussion, be it liberal or conservaitve, then this slant is made more pronounced by the moderation system. Opposing views never get moderated up enough. The impact is two fold: those with opposing views stop posting; and moderators stop using their moderating points on the conflicting posts, since they have litte chance of moderating a post to visiblity.
I've never visited half-empty before, but I'm looking forward to see how they solve the problems. Hopefully, some of the ideas can be used on /.
eric
Re:(somewhat OT) Technical Comment about GlassCode (Score:3)
Most of my posts make it to 5 (check my karma if you don't believe me). Especially considering how rarely I post to
Honestly, i don't see why an observation about the performance of GlassCode isn't a valid comment when the code itself is released.
Yes, I'm an anti-Java person. I think i'm a pretty well justified one, in general. I honestly have yet to see the Java system that performs as advertised. Now maybe GlassCode really is just under the weather and is usually better, but you'll forgive me. My last two anecdotal Java experiences were:
- Using the SameTime (IBM's message client, used a lot internally there) Java client on Linux. The beast took 90 megs of space (RSS). By contrast, the SashXB SameTime client (which my group wrote), took only 30 megs, and ran much more responsively (this was on GHz pIII's, running IBM's absolute-latest JITC-based JRE). And the SashXB version was written in JavaScript on top of Mozilla
- Using JAlice, the new version of the Alice virtual reality tool (built at CMU). They have terrible problems with pausing and catching in the middle of rendering (they had to totally give up on the laughable Java3D, and write JNI around DX8, which kinda misses the whole point, doesn't it?). It would render smoothly for a bit, and then just freeze for a significant fraction of a second, a couple times a second. They're still fighting the problems.
For the record. If you want to write it in Java, write it in C or C++. Don't give me the cross-platform BS, there are plenty of cross platform large C/C++ projects (all the Quakes; GNOME; Mozilla; the kernel). Carmack himself said (paraphrase) "I like the discipline being cross-platform brings to code". Arguing for Java on the basis of ease-of-coding (basically saying "I like GC") is a cop-out -- you're trading away a lot of speed because you're too lazy to manage your memory (I agree, it's tough. Everyone who writes code should be forced to pass CMU's OS class, 15-412, or restricted to writing HTML/JS/VB and nothing more complicated...). But even if Java was compiled just like C, it would be a lot slower, due to some fairly subtle language level tradoffs (basically the heavy reliance of Java on dynamic type and function resolution, and the fact that almost every primitive operation in the language requires doing such resolution).
But if you can write it in a language specialized to the task, do so. PERL can be gobbledygook hard to read. It can be quite elegant if coded well. But either way, I guarantee you the PERL will allow a much more concise representation of the problem. Compared to Java accessing SQL
I agree, it was unfair of me to rag on GlassCode under
The best way to write a web app is.... (Score:3)
In any complicated system, there are any number of factors that can affect performance. People have a nasty tendency to focus on one "obvious" bottleneck (program speed in web apps, cpu speed in PC apps, buffer size in comm apps), completely neglecting all the other, usually more important, factors.
Now who's trolling? Perl does seem to attract more than its share of sloppy programmers (slackers like languages that do your string management for you__________________
Re:(somewhat OT) Technical Comment about GlassCode (Score:2)
You think perhaps the
First of all JSP pages will always load slow the first time because they're being compiled. Secondly servlets, being bytecode, are *plenty* fast. I'm pretty happy servlets were used over <insert your hackish CGI preference>. If you are writing a complicated system like Glasscode in Perl, well, God help you. Writing it in C is just plain stupid, and is the icing on your troll post.
Probably (Score:3)
Re:(somewhat OT) Technical Comment about GlassCode (Score:2)
Perl has it's place, so does Java. If Perl is written with out reguard to how it works underneath, it is slow; same with Java. I've seen many very slow systems that allocate and deallocate tremendous amount of memory for every transaction.
Java is sort of like VB, it is very easy to write bad code; it is difficult to write good code. In perl it is difficult to write/maintain anything, hence most things have been somewhat thought out. Linus uses this as an arguement to not allow debuggers into the kernel. It would enable lesser programmers to participate creating ugly code (apparently me included).
Since I haven't connected yet, I'm assuming that there isn't a cache (like squid) sitting in front of the server, which does seem dumb.
Joe
Nothing is perfect (Score:2)
--------------------------------------
I'm a karma whore, mod me up damn you!
Re:Qualitative Analysis, not Quantitative... (Score:2)
Posts that get attention will be moderated. Posts that don't get attention will be unclassified. The way you filter the posts is determined on what you would like to read. Would you like to read the 'pro' arguments, the 'con' arguments. Comments that were 'pro' and 'interesting', or 'con' and 'troll'. +1 or +5 tells you nothing more than the idea that a number of people "liked" the post. Now your filters are subject to the general concensus of the population that uses the forum. If that population consists of a bunch of neo-nazis, their grading will reflect their personal biases. If they're a bunch of Windows-huggin users, the BSD-huggin users will likely get a consistently lower grade on their posts.
No. "Simple" grading schemes may be fast, but they're not effective.They are not useful. They are subject to the bias of the population of the forum. Frankly, I'm tired of them.
With all the Java Sucks comments... (Score:2)
I do agree that the bottleneck seems to be the servlets (not Apache).. weither it's the MySQL or the Java I can't tell.
Any suggestions?
Then again, since it's a Celeron 450 w/128MB RAM dynamically generating content, I suppose there's only so much you can expect when faced with the slashdot effect
Re:Sheepish tendencies (Score:4)
Imagine an N-dimensional space, where every user and every posting is represented as a point in that space. Whenever you rate a posting with "+", your point and that posting's position move a bit closer to each other. When you rate a posting with "-" these two positions move away from each other. The poster's point also moves in the same direction as his postings.
Now, when you post a new comment, at first it will appear right where you are. After several "moderations" from other users it will be moved to where it's liked better, and you will be dragged along after it.
After many iterations, this kind of "Slashdot Space" should evolve into several clusters of think-alike users and comments they like. So if you rate negatively all KDE-vs-Gnome pissing contests, you'll soon get far away from them, and from the users that post them.
Your reading treshold would be maximum distance between your own position and position of acceptable posts. Or you can think of it as "eye-sight". Another useful thing could be to assign each comment a "size" quality, or visibility. Comments rated positively from many different users "grow" and become visible from afar. This is probably necessary to prevent a split-up of the forum into several group of users who never hear of each other.
Now the difficult part is the choice of N (dimensionality) and the initial system state. You could set some meta-positions or lighthouses, landmarks, whatever, that represent the unmovable positions people can use to orient themselves. For example, there could be a M$-bashing landmark, Pro-M$ landmark on the opposite side of the universe, goat.cx landmark, Pro-Napster landmark, etc.
Cool thing is, if you keep a database of all +/- ratings, you can always generate a new version of the space if a need arises, like if a new dimension (er, landmark) pops up. And even better, you can "dumb down" the space to any two dimensions and show it as a graphic on demand. Now that would give a whole new meaning to whereami command :).
Re:With all the Java Sucks comments... (Score:2)
And you made fun of me because it was impossibly slow.. it was running Java on 64 megs of RAM
Someone shoot me
You code fast! (Score:3)
Wow, you coded all this in ten days? We need more programmers like you!
---------------
License issues (Score:2)
(Slightly) OT: May I inquire... (Score:2)
I found out about it from a slightly more difficult to find sid on slashdot than the TOP article on the FRONT page..I am of the belief that it is best to let people hunt a little bit for such a site, rather than repeatedly subjecting it to the whole panoply of lusers that could possibly be accessing the front page of Slashdot.