I don't know who posted this, but I will point out that who ever it was has no official relationship with Slashdot. No company or external entity has been granted any special authority to moderate discussions on Slashdot.

I must say: I'm surprised to hear you say that I am "no one". I run linux as my primary OS, and have for years. I most certainly do not think that I am representative of the average computer user, nor are my friends, but I have more friends running Linux on their personal computers than those running windows.

That would be a bug, not a conspiracy. I'll see to it gets fixed.

For what its worth, I personally agree with you.

If I can get Wil Wheaton to come back, I will.

Perhaps if I tweet at him loudly

The actual badge will likely be something like the slashdot icon that appears with my user name (though it will clearly be the sponsor's logo, not slashdot's. As that by itself would be easily overlooked, we will also have a different color for the header above their comments.

You make an excellent point here, and I agree with you. I do think that it will be very important for the sponsor's to ensure that the person they select to be their representative be actually knowledgeable on the topic at hand. I don't think that I as a developer here will be able to enforce that, and I'm not even sure that the sales people and executives can really force potential sponsor's to provide a liaison who is really an expert. That having been said, as I believe your comment bares out, sponsor's who do not provide a high quality liaison to the discussion will likely feel the effects rather quickly.

To be up front: we probably will not have everything squared away and perfect the first time, but if this concept does get some traction, we should get better over time, and its these types of frank conveersations between our readers and our staff (both editorial and engineering) that will help us get there.