The State of Slashdot: Https, Poll Changes, Auto-Refresh, Videos, and More

As of yesterday, Slashdot now serves over https. In addition, the polls have been moved exclusively to the right rail, and will not show up with the other stories any longer. We've also disabled auto-refresh, and fixed various issues with search and other features. In the last few weeks, we've also discontinued videos, and removed the "Jobs" section of the site.

Great improvements

[ftobin]

I'm happy to see such improvements! I wish I could continue to be a paying subscriber (seems permanently disabled) to avoid ads, in contrast to using an adblocker, to help support the site. It was a win-win situation for both of us!

Re:

[whipslash]

True. We've made a lot of changes to the ads since the last owners so they are very non intrusive. However we are looking at bringing the subscriber model back as well.

Cheers

[simplypeachy]

Thanks! That's a pretty good list of squashed gripes that I know a lot of people had and the HTTPS is a nice new feature.

https?

[jimbob6]

Https is fine but does that mean the site will no longer be available on over http? That's going to brake a lot of legacy function.

Re:

[adolf]

Works fine for me, both ways.

On my desktop I use HTTPS Everywhere, so it gets HTTPS by default. On my phone, I get HTTP by default.

No issues.

Re:

[whipslash]

Thanks for the feedback. We are in the process of doing much of what you mentioned. Piwik will also be the analytics we use going forward very soon instead of GA.

TLS

[Kardos]

Thanks for enabling TLS, it was long overdue! The new overlords are shaping up pretty well.

A few requests

[spork invasion]

1) Can you open source the code that's running Slashdot? For a long portion of Slashdot's history, the code was open source. It might not have been precisely the same code at any given time, but it was pretty damn close. As a show of good faith, why not start hosting it on Sourceforge again? I'm pretty sure the old project is still there.

2) Can you re-enable the old search functionality [slashdot.org] that used to work? While searching for stories works pretty well with the normal search page, there's a lot of functionali