One very common abuse of the posting system is for a user to post something logged in, and then reply to himself anonymously pretending to agree with his point. "Yes yes, I agree with what Joe is saying." Or in the case of trolls, they might go so far as to argue with themself. A single person can make it look as if they are a dozen with just a couple of accounts.

I've seen some pretty terrible abuses of this problem, but usually it's relatively minor. I've been toying with an idea to solve this problem to at least some extent- essentially, if the same IP replies to itself using a different nickname or anonymously, we auto-moderate the reply down. We can exclude proxy servers from this. We could expand this to only allow a single nickname to post within a single forum, but I don't know how many false hits that would catch in the net.

The idea of allowing anonymous posting is that sometimes you need to say something that for very real, very legitimate reasons, you don't want your name attached to it. The logic behind this is that if you're trying to alternate between signing your name and not, you're more likely to be abusing the system than to be using it legitimately.

Thoughts? A few of you can post. Others can email.

I've chosen to return from my self-imposed Slashdot exile of... *checks date of last post*... two months, nineteen days.

I don't have high hopes for an improvement in editorial quality, but I'm willing to give this site another chance.

The next step, if things prove to have stagnated or degenerated even more, will be a pointed e-mail to Taco's bosses and a much longer period of non-visitation.

On May 18 I'm speaking in Tokyo at GLOCOM. Space is very limited, but if you'd like to go, contact Masayuki Hatta. We're apparently also going to have a party on May 19, but I'll yell when I know more.

My WoW Dwarven Paladin on Algazor hit level 26, and Drew/Thorzin from my guild took me on the whirlwind tour to get my mega hammer of bringin-the-hurt-in. I had the first 2 components, but the fourth component required us to haul ass into horde territory. The game continues to amaze me. After 2 weeks of fairly excessive gameplay, I still have only explored a half dozen maps- maybe 5-10% of the world? You seriously could play this game for MONTHS. Which I guess makes sense given the number of level 60 characters with 30-40 game *days* into their chars. Highly addictive. Kathleen's mage is a few levels behind me. Gnomes are adorable. I like to play with her just to here her cheer when we do something neat.

Slashdot's CSS port continues to move along. Tim has the basic stuff done for the generic slashcode theme. We're waiting for Wes to finish mocking up some of the lesser used pages (like journals and user preferences). After we roll those into the slashcode theme, the actual task of moving Slashdot to CSS will likely take only a few more days since it will just be mangling around the CSS files, and the actual slashcode themes will become relatively set in stone. Look and feel can be easily twiddled by editing the css templates, and slashcode itself won't need to be changed. Man HTML has come a long ways in the decade since I started.

And I'd just like to wish a happy birthday to my beautiful wife.

This weekend was Penguicon where I played WoW. Also, I played WoW. And I had a surprisingly interesting panel on the age of the open source hobbyist with Nat Torkington and ESR. There was some lively discussion. I was entertained participating. I hope others had fun too. Also, I played WoW.

With just one night home I packed up and went to Cleveland (which is nothing like Howard the Duck made it out to be) to speak at Case Western. The talk went really well. The audience seemed very responsive. Clearly a large contingent of hardcore Slashdot readers. They even hooked me up with fantastic prizes to give away. I tried to use my cellphone as a clicker for the presentation, which usually works, but the stars were apparently misaligned... oh, and I tend to pace when I talk... right out the range of bluetooth devices ;)

This afternoon I'm going to visit the Rock 'n Roll Hall of Fame which everyone tells me is a glorious waste of time... but they are doing a huge Tommy exhibit and my obsession with Pete Townshend knows no limits. So therefore it beckons to me like... well... WoW.

After the drive back to michigan I think I get to stay "Home" for several weeks. That will be great. Time to level and pet the kittens.

I've resisted the tempation for many months. I know my personality. I know that massives call out to me, begging me to suckle their time consuming bossom. So I never bought a copy of World of Warcraft. Now almost everyone I know has played WoW to some degree and the consensus is pretty much that it is the best massive ever. Anna & Patrick talk about it compulsively... and they finally managed to get the bug lodged into my wife's beautiful head. I bought Kathleen a copy while in California last week. She installed it. I watched her play for all of 60 seconds before I decided I had to play. The next day it was installed on my box and I was off and running.

I'm playing on Azgalor and actually got my real nickname so feel free to say hi or mail me cool toys. I'm running a level 11 dwarven paladin and having a quite enjoyable time of it now that I have a decent mace and can actually kick out enough damage to kill things. I've run most of the quests so far with Kathleen (who is running a gnomish sorc). The hype is right: WoW really took everything from its predecessors and just kinda said "Fuck it all, lets do it right." Unfortunately I also have real life to contend with... real responsibilities take away from getting a piece of miner gear or something so that I can get that sweet sweet XP. I need to sit down and decide upon a path for my char. What abilities and such I wish to focus on. And strategies for making my char more effective.

I have maxed out my vacation time, so I guess I could just take a week off and play... but that might be a little foolish. Maybe every OTHER day for a couple weeks!

Penguicon is this weekend. I've heard of a number of people that are going, but so far there's been no real demand to organize any sort of Slashdot extravaganza. I'll be speaking somewhere, and hopefully showing my fandubs in the anime room. Should be good times. Or I'll just sit in my hotel room and try to level.

Penguicon is just a few weeks away and I'm really looking forward to it... I've got copies of studio Sokodei's fandubs en route for the show, so we'll be watching Fanboy Bebop, ReDeath, and Nescaflowne. I'll also be doing a couple panels, and at least one Slashdot specific panel. Last year we had a LOT of people show up, and had to quit only because the room was usurped. This year we'll figure something better out. The show is held in Novi (sorta between detroit and ann arbor) so if you're in eastern michigan, consider coming. I'm hoping to arrange some sort of Slashdot gathering at the show but don't know if we're talking about 5 guys or 50, so help me out if you're interested in participating. It may be as simple as hanging out in the hotel bar for an hour or something. I don't really know, but I'm open to ideas.

A few weeks ago we brought hardware.slashdot.org online with relatively little fanfare. Like IT before it, it representes little in the way of new content, but it will offer users a way of finding specific subject matter. I was supposed to have 'entertainment.slashdot.org' up around the same time, but this has gone poorly. So here is a bunch of logos that Kathleen & I worked out for the section. We never found one that we really liked... so I'm throwing this out as a challange to any of you readers... try to design an entertainment logo... it needs to have the curve, and the word 'Slashdot' in the font Caliseo in it. Colors, backgrounds, everything else is up for grabs. I promise at least a t-shirt if we use your design (plus the immeasurable value of me plugging you in my journal... you can almost smell the 31337).

I'm actually travelling a lot in the next few weeks. Penguicon, California, Cleveland, Tokyo, and possibly Vegas. 5 trips in about 7 weeks. The new Pokemon emerald comes out in a few weeks, so that could keep me company on long flights... otherwise I may have to buy a PSP. I've resisted so far. It's taken every oz. of willpower I don't have. Me want. Me want much.

I was sick all weekend. Some sort of cold/sinus thing that kept me pretty well on my ass. The upside is that I had some cool stuff to watch on ye old boob tube... lately I've been watching Bab 5 on DVD. I'm shamed to admit that I've never watched this show before. I've been netflixing the discs, and thought the show wholey mediocre. Then like around episode 7 they had a really good episode. Kathleen has seen the whole series years ago and was really pimping the show to me... and since the first half dozen episodes were mediocre or bad, well she was pleased that we finally hit "Good" stuff. Now I'm looking forward to seeing there the show goes. Of course, with 102 more episodes, I imagine it will be a year before I get through them all!

Last week I animated a short commercial. You'll be able to see it soon enough. But this has really got my animation bug on again. Last fall Big Rob & I wrote a screenplay for shits and giggles... we tried to shoot it ourselves with friends. Unfortunately there were several problems- like the fact that we have one camera, and the sound was awful, oh and we can't act worth shit. I cut together one and a half scenes and it was pretty clear that it wasn't going to work out how we wanted.

Now I'm thinking more about trying to animate that script, or at least use it as a launching point for something based on the same characters. I have some stylistic ideas about how to do it. The original script was really funny: It was originally staged as a sort of pseudo reality TV thing, we were watching a lot of Trailer Park Boys at the time, and thought that the format could work well with our characters and setting.

If animated, the whole thing needs to be changed up a bit... for starters, since the animation quality will be pretty shitty, some of the physical gags need to be rewritten or removed. We'll need to focus more on the dialog and less on the actions of the characters in order for me to reasonably be able to animate the whole thing more or less alone. Practically speaking the original script was set in reality. Animation gives us a lot more flexibility about how we define "reality" in the show.

It'll likely be months before I have anything to show for it since we'll be operating at the speed of hobby unless some Slashdot reader is actually the president of CBS or something. No? Didn't think so. You bastards.

Penguicon is coming up again, and I'm looking forward. This will be my third year attending the show. I'm supposedly going to do a panel or speech or something, but I don't exactly know for sure what will be expected of me. What I do know is that I shall drink beer. Hang out with nice people. And maybe catch a few panels. If you're in eastern michigan, you might really enjoy it. Kathleen claims she's going to wear her halloween costume at least once during the show. My wife is hot.

I'm working on a short video that I need to embed into a web page. I know a fair bit about the various codecs and platforms, but I'm really struggling with what is the most compatible way to do this. I've toyed with divx, quicktime, avis and various mpg variations. I'm trying to get 30 seconds down to a meg, and have it render within the browser window.

What experiences do people have with this? For testing it I'm simply using the EMBED tag and a sorneson encoded quicktime file. It's simple, and works on windows boxes that have QT properly installed, but I really want it to work on Linux, Firefox, and (sadly) MSIE.

Email if you have comments.

One of the most common requests I get today is to bring Slashdot up to date with modern web technologies like CSS & XHTML. People ask this question in a variety of ways ranging from the accusatory and conspiratorial to the flat out mean. Some fairly elaborate conspiracies have been suggested to me, usually involving me taking money from someone or another in exchanging for not updating Slashdot's core HTML. And often people just say we're lazy. And thats true, but only to a point.

The truth is that bringing Slashdot into the modern era of web design would please me beyond measure. It is unfortunately, non-trivial to do this. We already have a highly templated system under the hood here, so for many parts of our code maintenance, it isn't that necessary. But at the end of the day, smaller pages that render compatibly over many platforms trumps anything else.

A few projects have tried over the years to CSSify Slashdot, but they rarely go the distance. They take the first steps... like showing Slashdot's Index in CSS. Of course that can be done. And in fact, it's relatively easy. I took a crack at it myself last summer and in a few hours had duplicated the index without any real problem.

But thats just the first step. Slashdot has dozens of pages with unique formatting. Some of these are used by many users, like, oh, for example this journal that you're looking at. It won't require a lot of custom CSS to make it work, but it'll take some. Also there's the difference between logged in users and anonymous cowards. There are a number of user interface differences. The real kicker is the administrative functionality. Most users don't understand the depth of functionality hidden under the hood of Slashdot for managing not just submissions and story editing, but countless pages for countless bits of functionality throughout the site.

Of course, a lot of that admin specific functionaltiy can be ignored for a later date, and no doubt thats exactly what we'll do..

When the core xhtml is done, we also will need to do CSS style templates for each of the subsections on Slashdot, as well as each of the Slash based sites at OSTG that might also wish to partake in the CSS goodness.

Fortunately for us, Wes, OSTGs super HTML pimp is going to take a crack at actually making a proper CSS/xHTML layout for Slashdot. From there, we can put static pages up to make sure that it is compatibile with the various browsers out there. Then we can move on to actually making Slashdot use that new code...

Thats all underway now. I'd love to hear feedback, but I'd rather someone jsut handed us feature complete templates... not just "The First Steps". I bet a dozen people have taken the first steps. Look at my proof of concept! See it can be done! Don't get me wrong- thats swell.. but showing someone that you can walk is a lot different then telling them 'Great, now walk to philly and get me a cheesesteak'

(Standard mod system musings apply... I'm just ranting on thoughts about Slashdot's mod system. Nothing here is set in stone. These are just ideas that I'm mulling around.)

Karma doesn't work very well on Slashdot. The reason for that is really because it is tracking 2 seperate, and largely unrelated things: Posting & Moderating. The moderation system already seperates these things: moderation evaluates comments, and meta moderation evaluates the moderators. The former determines "Score" of comments, and the latter determines who gets more mod points in the future.

Unfortunately both of these systems use "Karma" as a key value in making their respective determinations. This kinda sucks.

It makes sense that we create a new variable, which right now I'm calling "Influence" to track a user's effectiveness as a moderator. Karma would continue to exist, but it would try instead to track your effectiveness as a poster.

Influence would instead track your moderation, more specifically your fairness rating in meta moderation. And the idea here would be to find the users who are the very best moderators, for more on *why* see my previous journal on rockstar moderators.

The new mod system will internally track comment scores as floats... so a user with a high influence could weigh more heavily then a user with low influence. An insightful from a user with 200 unanimous fair meta moderations under his belt could cause a comment to rise in score more than Joe Newbie who just got mod points for the first time today. But a single unfair moderation from our super user will cause him to lose much influence.

I also think there's something to be said about changing many of the numbers in slashcode from absolutes, to percentiles. This holds true in discussions (Score -1..5 is limited... we should instead be looking for percentiles... the best NN comments, the 10th percentile etc) as well as Karma... "Excellent" karma is not a static thing... it should instead refer to users being in the top NN% of all our actively posting users. The Karma Bonus should only be available to some "Best" percentile of users. Likewise, influence should be doled out in percentiles as well. But it's important to balance the system by increasing the penalties appropriately. If a user in the 90th percentile has the ability to move a comment score 10x more than a user in the 0th percentile, then his penalties should also be 10x as great. With great power comes great responsibiltiy!

The idea is that the very best moderators will have more power: perhaps gaining mod points faster, or else rate comments higher/faster than other users... but if they screw up, they should fall much faster.

Another interesting side effect of this is that we could give mod points to more users... but just have their "Influence" very low. We could use this to test their effectiveness. Here are some totally random numbers to try to explain what I'm getting at:

Joe has moderated 500 comments, and 499 of them are rated fairly. He is in the 99th percentile of Slashdot moderators. He gets mod points every 2-3 days. If he mods a comment 'Insightful' it goes from score 1 to 5 immediately. But if he gets modded unfairly, he will drop far... perhaps to the 50th percentile. From there his moderations only move comments up 1 point.

Bob has never moderated before. He gets his first mod points, and he actually only causes comments to move up .1. In other words, no meaningful effect at all (well, not exactly, since the new system is all floats, that could actually matter, but thats not what I'm getting at here). Anyway, he is meta moderated fairly, and with each passing 'Fair' his "Influence" increases a little bit. An unfair rating causes him to fall a bit, but since he has so little influence to begin with, its not that far... at least not the first time anyway... if a pattern is determined, he loses mucho influence. After a dozen fair mods, his moderations can move a comment by 1 or more.

The idea is as always, to keep damage control on high: if Joe goes outta wack, he's penalized hard and fast. But if he always mods well, he slowly rises in the rankings, and he can moderate more., and have his moderations weigh more in score calculation. Likewise, now we have a good way to determine if Bob will be a fair moderator. He can be "Ramped Up" as he earns it. This means we can give *more* users mod points. Encouraging more participation in the system, but weighing the newbies lighter than the old hands. That way the moderation system can move faster since trusted users will have more points, but newbies can participate. Sorta like a training period where mistakes aren't penalized as harshly.

Today, I'm being hit by the supposedly Gecko-only Slashdot layout problem, where the middle column will appear slightly under the left column. This has happened on rare occasions in the past, but is happening consistently since I fired up the browser a bit after noon EST. Neither Mozilla nor Galeon have been updated on this box in weeks.

I've always suspected that this was more of a crappy Slashcode problem than a Gecko problem.

Smooth move, Ex-Lax.

Just a short trip to Boston. Barely 48 hours. LinuxWorld in Boston has its flaws... the main flaw being "Not New York". I really love a trip to NY. I love to try to find a show to see or a fantastic dinner somewhere. Tradeshows are tradeshows, and they really are pretty much the same no matter what the subject matter is or where they are, so for me its more about people that I meet... old friends or new ones.

The show itself was fine- as is typical for LinuxWorld, the talks aren't as technical as I generally am looking for. For my time, I'd prefer an OSCON to a LinuxWorld in terms of raw 'Learning Stuff'. Case in point- Jay Beale from the bastille project gave a packed room a talk on the honeynet project... the speech was fine, but he spent the entire time discussing what a honeynet was, and what the project is. Now, I would imagine that, given the packed room, everyone KNOWS what a honeynet is... we're there for the juicy details: he spoke of having a psychiatrist on the project... but we didn't get to hear about the juicy stuff they GET from that. Tell me about the psychological profiles collected. Discuss what new tools the script kiddies are using. What sorts of attacks are gaining popularity? I guess I want less of 'What was it' and more of 'What they do'. I guess I'll just have to reading the juicy stuff on the web ;)

My own BOF went well, although there seemed to be something of a Snafu at the start... this BOF wasn't given a lecture room, but instead put into a lounge... plus they scheduled 2 BOFs in the same room at the same time... worst of all, my arch nemesis, the evil Brian "Krow" Aker was the other guy. Ooooo I hate him soooo muuuuch! Oh wait, no I don't :) I did my usual Q&A sorta thing. Some good questions but I wish I could do BOFs more focused on improving the moderation system, but only a tiny percentage of Slashdot readers truly understand it, so its hard to do that in a forum like a BOF. I can't exactly require a questionaire before you get to ask questions to guarantee that you understand the subtleties of the system ;)

After hearing words from many people (mostly Nate) saying The O.C. is good I finally decided to see for myself. I've now watched 15 episodes in the last 2 weeks and I finally have made my decision- it's just a flat out good show. Often it's simply soap opera brain candy, but I'm constantly amused by the accurate cultural stuff I see in the show. They play video games and talk about stuff I like. Characters are frequently named with not-so-sly comic book references... still no Slashdot reference tho... a clear oversight I'm willing to overlook... for now... but I've got my eye on you Josh Schwartz!

I almost forgot to mention that I'll be at LinuxWorld in Boston next week giving a BOF session Wednesday early evening. I've got the room for 90 minutes, so show up and ask your questions about Slashdot and I'll try to lie quickly on my feet to disguise the fact that I'm utterly clueless and lame. But hey, at least I talk really fast and sometimes make with the funny.

Last night I woke up at 2:30 AM and couldn't fall back asleep pretty much all night. I think I finally dozed off around 7am... just in time to get up ~7:15 to be at work by 7:30. Not a particularly pleasant way to spend a night. I typically am a pretty sound sleeper so this was pretty unusual. After an hour or two in bed I moved to the couch and read some comic books. Then I startled a cat who knocked over a lamp breaking a light bulb. Really soothing relaxing night 'stuff 'eh? Stupid purring cats.

Someone tried to sell slashdot.cn on eBay along with some other domains. No bids. Not even their 7 cent start. We were hoping it would go for like $25, then we'd wait for the transfer, and then slap a trademark claim on it and get it back. That would be funny. Maybe a little mean tho ;)

So I'm curious if anyone out there has seen any real research (not just anecdotal crap) in trying to figure out accurate user counts... like, the average number of IPs used by an individual online over say, a week.

I know lots of strange stats for Slashdot: 321,000 IPs viewed the index yesterday. I also know that some IPs are shared by hundreds of users (like the time we accidentally banned microsoft's proxy server ;) and I know that some people hop IPs like crazy. But it seems like all of those numbers could be melted together to get a real true 'Average'. If the "Average" user uses 3.5 IPs/week, then we could take a rough stab at translating unique IPs into actual numbers of people viewed.

So what i'm looking for is scholarly research on that sort of thing. Anyone see anything? I know these numbers will vary tremendously from place to place... like I imagine Slashdot is doubly skewed: I bet we have a high density of users with static IPs... a static IP is sort of a thing of the past... something generally now more rare since most consumer level networks have gone to DHCP... but Slashdot readers would like to have DNS and services, so they'd be more likely to sit on the same IP over a long stretch of time. On the other hand, they also would be likely to have multiple devices, so I could see a single user checking Slashdot from their handheld, their laptop, desktop and office.

Anyway, I'm going to try to figure out some numbers here for us, but I'm curious what others have bumped into. You can email me if you can't post.