Otter's Journal: A suggestion for Slashcode

I was reading the comments on the Bad Science story -- ~400 comments at >0, with almost half coming in a single thread. Someone posted an offtopic attack on creationism, triggering a still-going squabble between various zealots, nitwits and trolls. I'd like to skip the whole thing, but raising the threshold cuts out posts across the board, and the weird way threads break across pages means going to the next page doesn't help. Not an unusual problem.

What I'd really like would be an "ignore thread" button. Click it and that thread (perhaps by saving the base comment ID to a single-session cookie) gets dropped out of all comment display.

Truth is, it's probably too much complexity for too little benefit to be justified here, but I'll put in a feature request at Slashcode...

Heh...

[Ari Rahikkala]

So I see I'm not the only one who read at most a couple of the starting posts of that thread and promptly scrolled over to ignore the rest. If ads are the first thing you learn to ignore online, discussions about religion are the second thing...

Re:Heh...

[Otter]

Here's another one [slashdot.org] -- again, I'd really love to be able to check a box and read the rest of the comments without this offtopic idiocy.

That's a really good idea

[Degrees]

I don't know anything about slashcode to know if it is easy, or difficult, but it sounds like a good idea to me. I don't know how one would get the page serving query to short-circuit results where parent comment = nnnnnnn, but an actual DB programmer might know a tricky way of getting that done.

I'd use the preferences modifier of "-6 off-topic" if I could count on that moderation being applied consistantly.

A really CPU intensive option would be to let everyone be a moderator - for their own view queries.

Too much filtering could be a bad thing

[bhima]

I have been thinking along similar lines for a while. Actually what I was thinking of was more like my UseNet kilefile. So If a comment contains the words GNAA, (old, people, korea), Goatse, Tub Girl, &tc it's modded down. Comments with things I find interesting would be modded up like: Blue Gene/L, OS X, Sony Cell, Freescale, Natalie Portman (joke!).

Anyway I was going on thinking I was quite clever and on to something when I went drinking with a friend who had just returned from a lengthy business

Re:Too much filtering could be a bad thing

[Otter]

First, I'm not talking about preemptive filtering -- just about flexibility in the display. It's something that in, say, a threaded newsreader is easy to do by clicking a thread shut but which the Slashcode interface doesn't allow.

Regarding your larger point -- ya can't win! The criticism from Europeans has always been that the US media were too monolithic and lacked a wide diversity of viewpoints. Now there's a wider range of news outlets and that's bad? I see the downside to splintering as well, but anyon

Re:Too much filtering could be a bad thing

[bhima]

I really don't want to turn this discussion into a EU vs. US thing because I am forced in to listen to that all the time. My intern, being an intern, listens to the radio station I choose: FM4 (sounds like FM fear). FM4 has news in 5 or 6 languages the english news is provided by NPR & BBC and if you listen to them in the US or UK you'd recognise the voices. The german news is provided by the AT & DE analogs to reutores I really don't want to turn this discussion into a EU vs. US thing because I

Re:Too much filtering could be a bad thing

[Otter]

...the locals cover everything Arnie ever says or does (I live in the governator's home town)...

In general, I find that Austrians, and to a lesser extent, Germans and German-Swiss, are fascinated by Schwarzenegger. I work for a Swiss company and that's one of the first things visitors mention or ask about.