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Journal CmdrTaco's Journal: What a Week: DOA, Progressquest, Moderation, Flame 30

Journal by CmdrTaco
It's been one of those weeks here at Fort Malda. Kathleen & I have both been doing battle with some terrible virus. Not a crippling virus, but definitely one that would prevent we from running a tri-athalon. Of course, my beer gut would also contribute to that, but the disease doesn't help. Plus, after a particularly unlucky D&D session earlier this week, it looks as if my deaf thief (Dorf Squatbottom) will be pretty much dead. So I had to roll up a new character as a backup should I meet my well deserved and overdue death

Also, we got our filthy mits on DOA Xtreme Beach Volleyball. This of course leads to my wife and I spending huge amounts of time playing some sort of strange variaton on a dollhouse, with virtual girls who play volleyball. It's not a flawless game, but it is definitely fun. Plus we were junkies of previous DOA games.

Slashdot had a helluva week. Regular users have been complaining with good reason about serious performance issues. We're still not exactly sure what the problem is (Raid controller? Kernel problem? Badly tuned MySQL? Robots? Traffic Spikes?) but by moving logging to a dedicated box, things seem to have really sped up. Apparently the sizable amount of data being pushed through the system just for logging was creating some problems. It doesn't make a lot of sense- something is clearly wrong... our log entries average a few hundred bytes, and we spike out at no more than 100 requests per second. But we can't seem to find the achilles heal. But at least it works for now.

I also took a fair amount of heat earlier this week from a handful of users hellbent on making my life suck by pumping gallons and gallons of hate into my inbox. Their complaints ranged from legitimate griping about my failure to properly communicate with the Slashdot population to just the usual irrelevant complaining about trivialities.

One thing that is a fair beef is that I don't participate in Slashdot discussions or unlock my journals to posting where users could interact. Unfortunately I've tried to post more, but it tends to snowball. One public post means a few emails and a few posts. Simply participating in a discussion on the site can easily consume an entire day, and unfortunately interacting with users is just one aspect of my job. People forget that I interact with users all day every day, via my inbox, IRC, and the submissions bin. It's just frusterating. I can spend my time talking about Slashdot, or actually doing it. Of course, this irritates some people who simply can't be pleased. I do my best, but there are only so many hours in the day, and some of them are for me too ;)

As an experiment, I'm going to test out a new subscriber plum in this journal entry. Subscribers can now control post access in their journals. I've set this journal entry to allow Friends and Friends of Friends to post to it. If people are cool about it, I'll continue to do that. If there is flooding, I just won't do it any more. Other subscribers can do the same if they so please. You can restrict journal discussions to friends, or friends of friends, or disallow foes or friend's foes. I think it's a pretty useful feature, and a nice 'Thank you' to subscribers who use the journals.

We've got a fairly substantial problem with RSS and Palm pages these days. They represent a decent percentage or our bandwidth, and a constantly growing percentage of our overall requests. This is pretty cool... except that we need to clamp down on abuses- we have some people that load thousands of copies of the headline reader every day. The file only updates every 30 minutes. Loading faster than that just wastes our resources. If you are a developer of an application that snarfes headlines from websites, it would be nice to remember to keep those refreshes to a reasonable number. We actively ban overloaders. A related problem are those lovely web browsers that try to load every link on a page pre-emptively. On the Slashdot homepage, this can be dozens of pages. One client (we don't know which one!) loads every page, but malforms the URL... so it loads dozens of 404 pages. We have users who, in five minutes, load over a thousand 404 requests. That shit ads up fast. We serve 50-60 requests a second- when one or 2 users represent 20% of those requests, we start to have problems. But we have a third of a million users- we can't let a hundred of them consume such a sizable percentage of our limited resources.

I've also been thinking a lot about alterations to the scoring system. One simple thing we've talked about is capping moderations at some number. Right now a handful of comments can consume a huge percentage of moderations. In some cases, 20 or 30 or more mod points. This simply is a waste of points since at that point the battle is tends to be in the 3-5 range. It would make much more sense in terms of the big picture to force users to use their points on new comments. Perhaps we cap the number of moderations at 5 or 10 or something. It's just a thought that I've been toying with recently.

Of course, changing the scoring system entirely is still on my mind. We're cursed/blessed with this 3-4 year old concept that one moderator point translates to one point change in a comment's score. I want to figure out a way to score all comments in a discussion relative to each other, instead of on an absolute -1 to 5 range. Then a user's preferences might be 'Show me the top 5% of comments' or 'Show me the top 50% of all comments'. With our existing system that doesn't work very well since 2 comments of the same score are indistinguishable from each other.

Could this ultimately lead to the end of the -1..5 range of scoring on Slashdot? Perhaps! However if we could figure out a way to maintain it, I'd like to. Plus we have 31,000 older discussions to consider- new scoring systems need to be backwards compatible, at least in terms of user interface.

It would be pretty interesting tho- we now have a bunch of values ready and waiting in your user preference. You could say I value Funny as +1, Insightful as +2, Offtopic as -2, Karma Bonus as +5, Long Comment Bonus as +2... right now that all ultimately reduces down to a simple sum. But there are tons more factors that could be considered. One I like is the time difference between moderation, post, and discussion start. Moderation #100 might have more meaning than Moderation #2- the discussion is more fleshed out.

So we take all these modifiers, we sum them up, and now we have a pretty decent ordering of a discussion. Right now a 1000 comment discussion is broken into 7 groups, from -1 to 5. Perhaps a user would instead choose to read only above the 50th percentile, or the top 20 comments from the discussion.

Anyway, its a fun topic to think about. And practically speaking, its not that difficult to actually implement. The hard part is deciding all these pesky rules: Does a user with karma 50 count more than a user with karma 10? How much more? Does a subscribers moderation bare more weight? Moon phase? Discussion size?

I seriously doubt we'll do anything about this for the next few months, if ever. A quick glance over our Source Forge bugs and feature request list will show everyone that we're just a little busy already. And with our relatively constant growth in users, we need to always compensate for the next 10% traffic growth.

I'm now level 30 in progressquest. What a bizarre "Game".

This discussion was created by CmdrTaco (1) for Friends and Friends of Friends only, but now has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

What a Week: DOA, Progressquest, Moderation, Flame More

What a Week: DOA, Progressquest, Moderation, Flame

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  • In a thread with krow, I posted this [slashdot.org] request for the very same feature your now allowing. I know that sometimes you wouldn't want to post a journal entry, or a comment to a story because it so easy for bad people to write bad scripts to scour your websites lookign for your posts, and replying to them with nasty things to say. I encountered this problem when one of the Editors of OS news posted a reply to one of my journals, and I found attached to it a nasty script born reply.

    For a while I decided to disable journal comments because this feature hasn't manifested itself. Not to mention a few times I would have replied toyour journal if I were allowed to. ;)

    I'm going to get the new Panzer Dragon game for the Xbox after work today. I must say the DOA game would be nice, but is it worth it? really?

    • And it's not usually even scripts. It's just people with a bug up their bum, and no sense of politeness.

      This is one feature that I hope encourages a few folks to subscribe and use their journals more. I just hope that it works.

      I haven't seen panzer dragon. Kathleen and I were just DOA junkies, playing 2 to death on the PS/2. She just likes Lei Fang a lot. So DOA3 and Xtreme Beach Volleyball are logical extensions. I really don't know if it would be fun except that we're fans of the games, so this is a silly diversion.

      And also, games seem to be getting shorter. It's not uncommon for a $50 game to be defeated in 10-15 hours. So "Worth it" is a kind of vague concept. We've each played for about 4 hours, plus a couple hours of vs. play. So we've got 10 hours out of this game. I don't know if it'll still be in the xbox slot in 2 weeks, but it's already consumed more of my time then The Two Towers or Tony Hawk 4.

      CowboyNeal bought me & kathleen a Gamecube for xmas/wedding presents, and the new Metroid and Super Smash Brothers Melee, and we haven't even been able to play it yet! I need controller extension cables to get from my stereo rack to my chair!

  • finally, it harkens back to the days of /tacohell...
    only, with a less annoying color scheme.

    I know you get a lot of crap, but there is a huge silent number of people who love what you do. Also, people wouldn't bitch if it wasn't important to them. ( pause to think about that...) ok, maybe they'd bitch anyway ;)

    again, thanks for letting comments open up in here!
    • I think that the only reason I still do this is because I know it's important to people. If people weren't passionate about it, I'd probably just quit. I just wish people could be a little more civil sometimes.

      Ah tacohell. I kinda miss it... but in all fairness, I made that stupid purple layout in like 3 minutes just to test something. Who knew it would stick for years.

  • It's nice to be able to give feedback. :)

    I'm looking forward to moderation changes -- I think just about anything would be interesting...it'll be neat to see how/if the read of the conversation can change.

    The current layout seems to be in flux right now. Having the user page in the (right) sidebar is cool. I like the idea, but it's making the pages draw awkwardly in every browser I've tried. Lots of scrolling to get to the content. Is there any chance that might morph over the next few weeks?

    Anyway...having friend type people being able to comment is nifty.

    • We're really trying to fix the users.pl page layout problems. There are many of them and the problems vary from browser to browser. We'll get there, but it'll take time, and people politely submitting bug reports to the sourceforge project page, and preferably including screenshots and detailed browser information.

      The big white hole on half the user pages pisses me off. It'll be fixed soon.

  • Hey,

    We started out this week at each other's throats on email. Glad we got past that. You had very good points about your time constraints, and about the tendency of communication to snowball. And I have to say thank you for letting us post responses in your journal, and giving us a heads-up about what you're thinking about changing down the road. This gives us time to think about it ourselves, and make recommendations.

    I can spend my time talking about Slashdot, or actually doing it.

    I would argue that talking about Slashdot not on Slashdot is where your chief time-crunch is coming from. Why respond to the same questions, complaints, trolls, and flames over and over? Do it once, where people can find it, and then RTFM anyone who asks the same question again. =)

    Anyway, I wrote up a journal [slashdot.org] entry with my plan. I investigate what changes are being done, write it up, and try to direct questions to that forum first, before they wind up in your email box. If there was an official forum for this place, it would only decrease the amount of traffic hitting your inbox, but I'll do the best I can with my journal. If it saves you some time repeating yourself, and increases general community awareness of code changes, I'll consider it a success.

    A journal entry means dozens of emails. Suddenly everything I do becomes questioned. And I have to answer.

    See if this journal entry gets as many emails. I have a feeling that most of the people with feedback will post here (if they can), instead of emailing you about it. Centralizing your communication should reduce the number of times you find yourself repeating ... yourself. Hmm. I feel like I've said that before. =)

    Simply participating in a discussion on the site can easily consume an entire day...

    Welcome to our world. =)
    • I would argue that talking about Slashdot not on Slashdot is where your chief time-crunch is coming from.

      That isn't really true. The real crunch comes from engaging users in a public forum. In other words, this discussion. Replying in private means a 1 to 1 discussion. Replying in public means usually several spawned discussions, either on the site, or off it. The solution that has worked best for me historically is to avoid public discussion. The people who have serious issues come to me directly and have them addressed. And I don't have to deal with a hundred emails.

      I know you disagree, it's just that this morning I have double the emails that I usually have on a saturday morning. And it's saturday! I wanna be offline by 1 or so and go to a movie!

  • This is a damned fine start. Now that I/we know the nature of what you have to deal with (RSS problems, malformed whatevers, etc.) it's seems like you (collectively) are doing something other than playing UT2K3.

    I still think it's more useful to have discussions about Slash here as opposed to on K5.

    What I would like, just as a user, is the ability to have base level comments of a certain level or higher (say 3) and ALL comments nested below that one. It reflects how I read (find a good top level thread, open it in another window, and switch to '-1' and read the thread).

    BTW, if you aren't reading it yet, I highly recommend you pick up 'Fables'. It's a DC/Vertigo comic. Funny stuff.
    • Yes now that you/we know the nature of the problems, I expect patches. I've never actually played any version of unreal. It frusterates me that people prefer to assume the worst about us, as we sit in IRC and try to fix the problems. We're all quite good at running Slashdot here- problems that stick around for more than a day or 2 are usually fairly complex. Not an indicator that we're all off playing video games.

      As for your threading suggestion, that's a reasonable one. Perhaps we could expand the hard/soft thresholds somehow. Patches are always welcome.

      I've heard Fables is worth a read. I'm storming through a stack of Daredevil in preperation for the movie these days. Plus V for Vendetta and a few other random trades. Comic overload.

      • As for your threading suggestion, that's a reasonable one. Perhaps we could expand the hard/soft thresholds somehow. Patches are always welcome.

        On a related (but slightly different note), I'd like the ability to switch from Threaded to Nested view once the number of children of a specific cid that I'm viewing is below a certain (ideally user-configurable) threshold. The way I tend to read is by looking through the whole story, and clicking on a given cid that I'm interested in to read all the replies relevant to that comment. At that point, I almost invariably want Nested view. I always thought that was pretty much the point of index spill, but it only seems to work for the whole story, not for individual comment threads.

        As for patches, there are only so many hours in the day! I already have a backlog of fixes for fvwm2, sylpheed and mozilla, before I can even contemplate anything else. Besides, "Hell is other people's perl" -- Linux Journal Editors Awards, 2000 :-)

  • Any chance journal templates will make another appearance?

    You might even have a little contest for people to submit their own page layouts and the top 5 or 10 will become layout options. You could give away pageviews as a prize. Just a thought.

    • Journal Templates could possibly make a comeback, but if we did it, I'd really like to see a few more templates, and a user preference to override them.

      We certainly would accept templates from users. The sourceforge project patch section accepts files. You could attach HTML, or better yet, actual Slash templates. Of course, thats true of Slashdot itself. If someone submitted a better layout for Slashdot, I'd consider it too!

      As for giving page views as a prize, It's something we could probably do. I'd definitely give pages for a redesigned homepage... hell, you'd get your name in a Slashdot Story for that one. But I don't know about a simple journal template ;)

      • Journal Templates could possibly make a comeback, but if we did it, I'd really like to see a few more templates, and a user preference to override them.

        This could make another fun feature, if you think about it - let people override the layout per journal and display this information on the journal itself in the form of "The journal template is overridden by 94% of all readers."

        No, seriously, that would be *very* cool. It would make me actually use my journal and a template. It would be fun. You could make the journals a bit more part of the culture in /. by introducing moderation of journal entries and letting readers browse by this.

  • As mentioned by the other posters, thanks for providing the feature to post in this journal, it is very helpful.

    Anyhow, I've been spending quite a bit of time IRCing and AIMing with various users lately, and we all feel that the additional subscriber features are a step in the right direction. But, we also feel that as long as only a selected few, even if they are random, can be chosen to moderate, it would be unfair to give subscribers greater voice in moderation. It would allow them to control the views presented more, much like the olden days of the select 100 or so who moderated as much as they want.

    Even if you try to be open-minded, your sterotypes and personal opinion will cloud your judgement.
    • There are many things to consider when we're talking about moderation and adding umph to subscribers. The most significant thing is that Subscribers Moderate Better. Not always, but statistically. We want more and better moderation. Subscribers average a better fairness rating according to M2 than users across the board. In fact it directly corrolates- the more you pay, the more fair you are. There are obviously outliers to this fact, but it's true enough that it warrants consideration.

      I'm not saying we're going to let subscribers moderate 20 points every day or anything, I'm just saying that if given more points, they are statistically more likely to use them fairly than users who don't subscribe.

      The other issue is that more chances to moderate mean more chances to be meta moderated. So if subscribers got double the mod points, they'd be meta moderated twice as much. An 'Unfair' Moderator can always lose karma. A 'Fair' Moderation has a relatively slim chance of gaining karma. So more moderations means more chances to err.

      So anyway, it's something we're considering, and it's somethign that I don't think can be fairly dismissed outright. We want more moderation points to be used. Subscribers statistically use them better. So it's definitely a possibility that we've discussed.

      But don't expect a patch next week to do it. There are a few more controls I'd impose if we did do this.

      • I'm not saying we're going to let subscribers moderate 20 points every day or anything, I'm just saying that if given more points, they are statistically more likely to use them fairly than users who don't subscribe.

        The problem with this statistic is that it will go out the window the second you tie subscription to increased moderation privileges. The people who want a better way to abuse moderation will probably be willing to pay for the privilege. Would that be acceptable? Increased funding, but damaged moderation.

        An 'Unfair' Moderator can always lose karma. A 'Fair' Moderation has a relatively slim chance of gaining karma. So more moderations means more chances to err.

        Not sure how the algorithm works, if it would be enough to check the people that want to be able to pay to be bad moderators, but you might want to keep it in mind...

        • The problem with this statistic is that it will go out the window the second you tie subscription to increased moderation privileges.

          I'm not certain of that. The number of truly bad moderators are very small. And how many of them would intentionally moderate badly if they cared enough to give us $5? I don't honestly know. If we ever did implement this, we certainly would keep a very VERY close eye on things.

  • I'll never forget the day that I woke up and went about my usual business, which includes launching Mozilla and reading the latest news at Slashdot.org and DrudgeReport.com.

    The ekrout [slashdot.org] account was getting really fun to watch, as he had a ton of karma, nearly 600 friends, and really just enjoyed conversing via comments and commentary on your great site, a site that has probably one of the most amazing audiences anywhere on the Web.

    Unfortunately, however, as I read later that day, he could no longer log-in and use his account. It had been tampered with, either by the Slashdot administrators or by a third-party hacker, but in turned out that it didn't matter regardless of who the perpetrator was. After dozens of emails back and forth between ekrout, yourself, and other Slashteam folks, nothing was ever settled. To this day he continues to be exiled from the site.

    The sad truth is that his last comment ever at this site was one that spoke poorly about one of your advertisers, and as a result, his membership privileges were revoked forever, either by a Slashdot insider or someone from the company whose product was being featured in an article. There have been old troll tales of things like this happening to other people, but never one that was told directly to me by a friend. Sure, ekrout may have controversial, but so is anyone who achieves a certain level of fame in a particular medium.

    Will you ever return his account to him, or is it a long and forgotten event that has been brushed under the rug? If nothing else I consider myself a good friend, and as a friend, I felt that it was appropriate to pose this question to you.

    Thank you for reading.
    • Conspiracy theories like this frustrate me at the same time as they infuriate me.

      We didn't tamper with his account. But yet it has been accessed since the day that he complained that he could no longer access it. So what are we to conclude? Either he is lying (very possible) or this is some random stranger who is trying to steal in account via a little social hacking (oh Gee Mr. Taco, I lost my password, my account is blah diddy blah. Please mail me a new one. Mu-hahaha).

      If you don't know the email address listed in your account, I'm not going to give it back.

      We really should add one of those Secret Phrases to the user information thing with the secret question and answer pair. That might help in a situation like this.

      As for this particiluar account, you're a good friend to stick up for him. Nothing was brushed under the rug tho. There is no conspiracy. It's just a simple case where I can't tell if this guy is the rightful owner of the account, so I won't reset his password. I would do the same if someone emailed me claiming to be Amsterdam Vallon or Bruce Perens. If the mail-password button doesn't work for you, and you don't even know the email address associated with your account, I simply can't reset passwords and mail a new one to random accounts.

      Sometimes it sucks, but it's not a conspiracy.

      • Secret Phrases are lame. I can never remember mine. I am a ton more likely to remember my password or email address. My two cents. :)
  • Any reason you know of that the BFAs on story pages (you know, the tall advertisements right after the story text) sometimes push down the last line of story text? This looks pretty ugly and makes the story hard-to-read to boot.
    • There are a few obnoxious layout problems with BFAs. Unfortunately we've not tracked them all down yet. Send us screenshots, Save-As HTML, browser information, and preferably patches to that HTML that fix it.
  • As an experiment, I'm going to test out a new subscriber plum in this journal entry. Subscribers can now control post access in their journals. I've set this journal entry to allow Friends and Friends of Friends to post to it.

    This is indeed a very cool feature, however it raises an interesting issue. I might just be a doofus, but I thought Friends of Friends were those users who your friends had listed as friends, so if I am in your FOAF list, that should mean that one of your friends has me as a friend, so I should see a blue dot next to someone in your friends list. Looking at your friends [slashdot.org] page I see no blue dots, yet I do appear as a friend of friend [slashdot.org]. It's almost as if this [slashdot.org] is actually Fans of Friends.

    Oh, and while on the subject of subscriber plums, I would consider subscribing, but have no way to do so. I do not own a credit card and without a credit card PayPal won't let me open an account. Any chance of being able to pay by cheque in the not too distant future?
    • There might be some bugs in the Zoo display stuff. I've been havinga few problems myself so we'll definitely look into it.

      As for payment options besides Paypal and credit cards, I don't really foresee it any time soon. If we knew a few hundred people would do it, we'd figure out a way, but I kinda doubt that we have that many would-be-subscribers that don't have access to paypal & credit cards.

  • Subscribers can now control post access in their journals.

    Now that is the most useful application of the Zoo concept i have seen yet. Great work, keep it up!

  • Interesting changes to the site of length--but, you know, variety is the spice of life.

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