How could I possibly out-do the events of this week? I became redundant a long time ago. Rob Malda gets anonymously bitchslapped by a World of Warcraft Administrator. He spends hours* writing a rant about how he totally understands, isn't angry, and then renames his character "Violated". Right.

When he says "the irony of the situation isn't lost on me", he's right. I'm sure the Atlantic Ocean isn't lost on him either. You just can't ignore something so vast, powerful, and... salty.

When Taco bitchslapped my public IP in his Apache config, I created an account named "Trolls" spelled backwards. We're pretty much the same guy. Except I can spell.

In the end, my job has been taken over by the pants of the Malda household, who has responded to Rob's second public posting since his wedding proposal by posting a couple pictures of her cleavage on the Internet with the caption "that'll show my husband, CmdrTaco, that he's not the ONLY one who knows how to assume fake ranks that they didn't earn!" and "Commander Cleavage(why am I posting this?!??)".

I almost got into an argument once with this lady at a gas station. I was talking on my cell phone, and she shut my pump down, turned on the PA, and told me my cell phone could kill everyone. The Eyes of The Gas Station were upon me. I went inside and mentioned that she was voicing a myth. Out poured a tirade of fiction about incinerated cell phone toting firebugs, and I felt it, you know, that old urge to refute stupidity.

But then I realized that being that stupid bitch at the gas station was its own punishment, and I kept driving.

Have fun playing Warcraft, Rob.

-s.

*Hours? Yes. There's not a single spelling mistake. He brooded over that shit.

Two password reset attempts on my account within hours of each other, different user agent, different offshore proxies. Yay for you guys!!! I'd thought all the love was gone.

XOXOXO!
  -s.

ps hi fv

Date: Sat, 11 Jun 2005 09:49:32 +0000

In case you get multiple emails you didn't request, the requester's IP
was 203.217.85.219. Its user agent was
"Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:1.7.6) Gecko/20050"
(not that you should trust that value, but it might be interesting).

Date: Sat, 11 Jun 2005 11:38:43 +0000

In case you get multiple emails you didn't request, the requester's IP
was 132.40.121.33. Its user agent was
"Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0)"
(not that you should trust that value, but it might be interesting).

Kind of had it with Slashdot. They banned my entire IP range again and again for over a week now, because someone on my ISP keeps screwing around. Ban expires, I get a few hours of access and after that it's gone again. Repeatedly reported the ban on my IP and asked for a solution, but nothing.

So, fuck Slashdot.

Now, let's give this Kuroshin thing a try...

Temporary using my journal for this because the fools blocked my entire subnet after someone else from my ISP went wild. Yay.

Anyways, how would you feel to have a mediocre-looking goth girl ranting to you about death and Marilyn Manson? How would you like to PAY for it? How the hell can you get rid of bandwidth-drain caused by 30+ losers jacking of to a low-res overly bright pic of a chubby 30 year old goth-mom with flabby boobs? Would you like to tell these people that "free speech" does not equal "forcing your fat body on my monitor along with your flawed and irrelevant opinions about your life"*?

Help Nintendo sue them. Help them shut down the site or at least take a HUGE financial bite out of it. Some people don't like Viagra pill ads, some don't like ads about purple cars with tank tracks. I don't like ads about insecure goth moms posing en masse on some shitty website hoping that the attention of hundreds of lonely men ( who are all just there to see some T&A ) will make them feel better.

* .. You came here out of free will. If I put up ads all over the internet to try and force my opinion down your throath, feel free to yell at me and hit me with a stick for being a fuckwad. Until then, my point remains.

I can't even reply to my own damn journal anymore, but I can still post journal articles, ho hum. There's still plenty of ways to trolls slashdot even from a journal. Suppose someone could post some lovely little Scientologist bullshit on their journal, in which case Slashdot would be sued to hell and back again. Just an example of course, not going to do it myself. A bug? A design flaw? Who know; I'm sure as hell not going to report it, not after the lousy attitude they put up when I reported earlier bugs.

Ah yes, Slashdot. Been here for a year or two. Don't really keep track to be honest with you people, considering the exact date isn't really that important unless you're really anal about a time-of-joining based hierachy. In which case, UIDs would be a better indicator of 'status' to start with, but I digress. This is nothing about the Slashdot pecking order but more about the current state of Slashdot

You see, back in those days things were different, to say the least. Sure, people flamed the living hell out of eachother, MS bashing was as common as always and the majority of people here worshipped their own nice little pantheon of OSS gods and goddesses. Though I'm not quite sure on the goddesses part, mind you. Hell, I'm talking about a pre-GNAA time, back when trolling consisted largely of posting poorly drawn ASCII penises reading "CmdrTaco was here" or something along the lines of that. Sure, Slashdot has it's share of 'oopsies' but that was understandable. I mean, it had 1000+ replies on ANY topic back then. 2500+ wasn't too uncommon and the number of posts marked 4+ sometimes reached in the 250 area, pretty much what nowadays is the total amount of posts at -1+...

But things were pretty good back then. Busy as always, different trolls ( Love you people btw ), massive amounts of dupes by the editors and no subscriptions. People were happy; after all, it's a free service and none of us were paying anything for it. What can be expected of something free which isn't loaded with ads, hmm? Sure, the occasional oopsies kept things interesting between all the articles. We all laughed at Tacos typos and the obligatory funny CBN option in random clever polls. Back then it was decent for a free, uncommercial service.

Today however, I think we can be a tad bit more critical of things. Slashdot started a suibscription system, so the usual argument of "But it's free!" can no longer be applied to the quality of this site. Oh, you're still free to join up and reg but let's face it; the subscribers to Slashdot end up with the same shit the rest of us non-paying people have to deal with. Oh, they don't get ads, true, but neither do I, thanks to Mozilla. Oh sure, subscribers get a few worthless extras thrown in, but it's not hard to imagine anyone actually gives a flying fuck about silly little things like being able to have more then 200 friends or searching your own post history.

But that's not the main thing I'm going to bitch about right now, no. I don't pay, never will pay either, that's my solution to this issue. No, the problem is the ads lately. Have you seen them? There are a few nice ads here, here and here. Ahh, but they don't look like ads, nooo... They are supposed to look like articles! It's fascinating, both us non-subscribers and subscribers have to deal with them. You're reading an article and something just doesn't seem right. It's too aimed at geeks, too professionally written. It smells of a PR stunt, it smells of a person at marketing who found Slashdot. And then you realize it, you're just reading a dumb ad disguised as another poor article. It's like CNN accepting news stories about how great product X is, from the creator of product X. Granted, CNN is ran by professional editors who actually read their own shit.

But there's more: What the fuck is up with the "Related Links" bit? Do the Slashdot people raelly think we're going to storm some OSTG sellout online store en masse? Or is this just some stupid idea that some halfwit at OSTG HQ got wedged up their ass after reading Forbes? Also, why do Slashdot people want to affiliate themselves with OSTG, which hosts great sites like ITManagersJournal.com ( Same shit as Slashdot, just with random buzzwords and more ads ) and Sourceforge ( Develop cheaper, outsource with Sourceforge! )? Shame really. I'd continue bitching but I'm done for now. Just saw the movie "Troy" and I needed to bitch for a few minutes. Sorry about that... Has anyone actually managed to read this far without stabbing themselves in the eyes? Does anyone read this shit to start with?

Seriously, my patience has a limit and after this article, Slashdot just crossed that limit. I dont want to deal with Hemos' sad sense of humour. Coupled with the fact that the site still fails to render properly on mozilla from time to time, still has a broken and blatantly abused moderating system along with retarded and incompetent admins, I wish to know if there are any sites like Slashdot just without the retarded admins.

Thank you in advance,

- Seth

As an (occasional) contributing editor to Trollback, I can assure you that there will be some coverage of some new Slashcode features in the upcoming issue. Before I get to the meat, here's a summary roundup of recent changes:

Slashcode port & service scans anonymous posters.

Modbombing a single user now has adjustable consequences (on Slashdot, it is most likely a bonus, however the default consequence is set as a penalty).

The "excessive bad posting" detector has been given new teeth, blocking the class C subnet of anyone who a moderator disagrees with for periods ranging from weeks to months. See upcoming Trollback for details, or read some journals.

There's a new feature afoot right now, however, which has not been comitted to Slash's public CVS repository yet. The change involves setting someone's Karma from (whatever it was) to "Moderation Abuser". Presumably if you have excellent Karma, and a moderation you make is found to be unfair, your Karma will be changed to "Moderation Abuser". CmdrTaco has repeatedly stated that "Karma is worthless", so officially this doesn't mean anything - however unofficially, it could have big consequences for your account. Here's a first person account. Has anyone else observed this, and some possible consequences?

Comments are enabled, share what information you have.

-s.

P.S. I was finally removed from CmdrTaco's Friend-of-Friends list for this post in his journal, in which I revealed that they had changed Slashcode to adjust the token count of modbombers (in the middle of a diary where he was berating a user for modbombing...). Unable to get Brian Aker (Krow) to de-friend me, Taco de-friended Krow. Alas... sorry Brian! I realize that pointing out that Taco was writing an entire diary about something that Jamie had handled in the code months ago - without telling any of his readers it was handled - was going to be pretty embarassing for Rob, but I didn't expect him to act like such a child.
Right?
P.P.S. Has anyone looked at Slashdot's two year Alexa ranking? I wonder why their popularity has basically regressed to 2002 levels over the last year... thoughts?

Okay, so the last few years "blogging", apart from having an atrocious name, has become a fad. Fair enough, because in essence it's a good thing, allowing people to post stories on the internet and have others comment on it, without the retarded Slashdot admins or the GNAA trolls. Over time, some wonderful journals came online, with examples such as the MSDN journals and Groklaw. These sites function as portals for people to communicate, exchange ideas about certain subjects and to gather information from people who know what they are talking about.

Unforunately, journals are not limited to that.

The last few years also witnessed a massive rise in "personal" journals. Some of these are fairly tolerable and more or less make a fair bit of sense, communication wise. For example, a random 20 year old exchange student keeping track of stuff using a journal for friends at home. For things like that, personal journals work nicely enough and serve a purpose. It sure as hell beats phoning all your friends and telling them all the same story about your latest stunt as a foreigner. But sadly, most journals are horrid. Poorly written and of little interest of anyone except those who already know the exact details, these journals litter the internet, crosslinking and polluting search engines. It's bad enough to realize I share this planet with a random 18 year old ugly girl who doesn't understand basic concepts like "punctuation", "paragraphs" and "capitalization". It's even worse when her bullshit gets crosslinked by other people, crosslinked again, and again... And thus screwing up several popular search algorithms.

The end result? Rendering Google and other search sites useless regarding some items you want to look for. At least 30% of most of my search results these days consists of blogs where someone, womewhere is venting his or her opinion. I don't want opinions, I want facts about stuff I look for. I can form my own opinion, thank you. I'd provide you people with a good example, but the person who that journal belongs to is kind of touchy and takes everything as a personal assault against herself, lately. Figures. Anyways, bitching about it will not get anyone anywhere, so here are some possible solutions for this... problem.

• Removal of popular public journal sites from main search features. ( LiveJournal, Blogger, etc )
• Adding specific journal search features to popular search engine. ( To counter the above )
• Adding a specific Slashdot section regarding journals and "blogs". ( Easy to disable/ignore. )

These would solve allot of problems... The search results would not be contaminated anymore, people like me would not have to deal with uninportant information anymore, the bloggers can still look and search for eachother's stories and I can finally ignore craps about blogs on slashdot. Sounds like a win-win situation to me. Here's to hoping Google and the like will implement something like this... And that the Slashdot admins would make a seperate section. However, I highly doubt the latter one, regarding the incompetence of the Slashdot admins.

I know, ironic I post this in a Slashdot journal. At least it's not personal crap, it's actually an issue that lives among people on the internet. Then again, I'm high on irony lately...

Hi! Welcome to Seth's wonderful little world here on Slashdot. Where news, geeks and linux-fundamentalism meet up with my warped mind and "reality distortion" field. ( Copyright Steve Jobs, or so they say... )

Anyways, on a slightly more serious note, ( Which would mean no porn, sorry. ) I recently encountered something which could be defined as a bug here on Slashdot. If my comments were modded up as Funny, my karma would not increase, most likely the same thing for all users. This seems logical enough, considering user A's sense of humour might be vastly different from user B's sense of humour. However, once something gets modded up as Funny, it can also be modded down. That, DOES cost a user karma, meaning a "5, Funny" comment could actually cost a user ( quite ) some karma. This in a whole opens the system for abuse: Mod someone up to "5, Funny", then mod bomb them down with another account to "-1, Funny" with Overrated mods, which would cost the user 6 points of karma and due to Overrated mods not being available for metamoderation, the mod-bomber would not get affected at all.

And even despite all this, why do Funny comments not gain any karma? Sure, Funny might be interpreted as relative, considering we all got a different sense of humour, but all other mods can be relative as well. Some comment might be Insightful to one, yet not at all to someone else, for example. Bundled with the fact that Overrated and Underrated do not apply to metamoderation, it's very hard for me to view the Slashdot moderation system as anything other than ineffective, unfair and just plain broken.

And I did report this as a bug, considering the OS way of things where the users are the ears and eyes and bugtesters of the developers and all that. However, the reply I got on the Slash project ( Slashdot's SF project, complete with bug report system and all, for those of you who don't know... ) was downright unprofessional. The internet is a bad medium for jokes, so I seriously hope I misunderstood that and that it actually was a joke.

Edit:
Very cute, shortly after some others and I mentioned the unfairness of the mod system in a thread on the main discussion part, all of us get comments moderated Offtopic. Not other offtopic posts, ( Because the posts were, after all, offtopic. ) but only the offtopic ones criticizing the moderation system. Cute.

I am NOT a goth. People have been wondering about that because of the "Dark Lord" bit and I tell you, it's not because I'm a goth. It's because terrorists, liberals, Tony Blair and other evil people have already laid claims on my usualy nickname, "Seth". Serves me right for ripping of ancient Egyptian mythology.

Anyways, to make sure people will comment on this, I'll add some random porn links to this journal posting! Enjoy! ( And know your limits: Stop when it starts to chafe. )

SOBIG...

CODE RED...

NIMDA...

SLAMMER...

BLASTER...

There's a lot out there that can harm your network...

Together, there's alot we can do to help.

MICROSOFT

Not that great, but definitely worth a 'heh!'. So... heh!

1. Go visit your good friend Google.
2. Type in "computer".
3. Feel lucky.
4. Laugh. :)

Lately I'm beginning to see ads for "Slashdot Personals". Yay. I think I'd rather give homosexuality a try. Desperate OSDL marketeers ripping of desperate geeks on a site which is desperate for new "news". Woot!

It came to my attention recently that my ongoing trouncing of CmdrTaco had been interrupted by having myself retired from Whatsbetter.com. Of course I had to do my best to rectify the situation, and the good folks at Whatsbetter.com were happy to oblige. Much to my dismay they had interpreted my lack of recent journal posting as a sign of my demise. While I admit I owe you all a status update on Slashcode (it's coming!) I will have to make do for now with some tidbits from the mailbag:

--

Hey sllort,

I've re-enabled the item... One of my admins must have retired it. Your /.
jounal has not been updated in the last 5 months. Spending your time at K5
these days? Or have you found new and better places to troll ;-)

Enjoy the site,
-chris

>hello, noticed that in the following pairing:
>
>http://www.whatsbetter.com/display.pyt?item=14198&item=14199
>
>one Slashdot user was retired as "old" and the other was not. Just wanted
>to let you know that neither user is old nor retired, we both write
>journals regularly, here are the links:
>
>http://slashdot.org/~cmdrtaco/journal/
>http://slashdot.org/~sllort/journal/
>
>I do not like being retired as "old", i'm only 27, i'm active on the site
>and i'm as active now as when i was added.
>
>let me know what you decide,
>
>-sllort.

Of course, I have no idea what he's talking about with this "trolling" nonsense, but he's re-activated my account for more Taco-crushing, and that's what's important. Thanks, Chris.

--

Hi,

as far as I am unknown, the best thing is to introduce myself.

Working in political sciences but interested by IT since I'm 15 (4 years
already), I just took some distant glances at /., so far. I just got
involved in the overall /. picture, until I got moderation points, too
quickly in my opinion.

I quickly realized that some deep trends where impairing the very spirit of
what was in my mind a quite flawless system. I posted various documented
posts questionning Apple's software, marketing policy, prices policy etc.
until I just went aware that they were plainly ignored, or modded down. I
just had the bad taste to say that, at last, Windows XP was a respectable
OS. I just had the foolish idea of defending Oracle.

Then I decided to make some researches about people in the same frustrating
state of mind as mine. And quite quickly I found this by now old story about
the troll survey. I found that many many clever people were relayed in the
remote electronical sphere of purgatory. And that maybe you were the boldest
one of these.

So my questions are naturally coming to you : what do you think of Slashdot
by now ? Did you improve to evaluate how many people were backing you ? Are
they any other sites as /., with other moderation/participation systems ? If
not, what about building an alternative one ?

It just looks like many of us stay frustrated by the current status of /.
And frankly this is sad.
If in any case you can't/don't want to respond, plz leave a blank message.
I'll keep looking for freedom advocates.

Regards,
Jdif

p.s : reading Top Ten ?

Wow. "remote electronical sphere of purgatory". Putting aside for a moment your... diction... yes, I've spent some time at k5 recently. K5 is what Taco would call "navel gazer's anonymous", what Seth Finkelstein would call "more writer fair", and what I would call "fractionally less fucked up". As far as being upset with /. - well, they've managed to stay "in business" for five years, and nobody's threatening their market niche yet, though God only knows if they're profitable. It's a sad thing that some real assmasters are in charge, but we can always hope that something better will come along - or as you point out, we can do something about it.

As far as reading goes, allow me to suggest the September and October edition of Trollback - the new editorial staff deserves plenty of praise.

-s.

Yes yes, it's that time again. Not really, I'm just bored at the moment and after reading this bit about some porn peddler being governor of California, I decided it was time to update this thingy again! So, move over Larry Flynt, you amateur! Make way for the professionals!

• See, I like red too... Or reddish... Or whatever!
• Mmmm, très bien!
• Not the best there is but I need to be consistent and have three entries...

Remember, don't forget to mark me a foe so you never get too see my journal updates. Hmm. That didn't make sense, did it? Also, you people ought to be glad that there are individuals like me daring enough to filter out crappy pornography of really ugly women. That series might be bad enough to cause impotence, so be warned. I'm in favour of equeal oppurtunities but I say that girl's future is NOT in the porn business. Yuck.