Kathleen & I returned yesterday from a week vacation in Hawaii. Had a really fantastic time. The hotel internet was down almost the entire week, which saved me from even TRYING to read my email for like 5 straight days. I got over the withdrawl and enjoyed the sun. I snorkeled. I snuba dived. I drove switchback filed roads in a full size sedan. I took a helecopter tour of the island. I endured jet lag, and some utterly fantastic meals. Fortunately the hotel had a gym, so I managed to only gain a tiny bit of weight. I'm pretty well caught up on my email... but the Tivo is another story. So much CSI to watch...

I'm going to be on The Screen Savers again on Oct 11, and they asked me to plug my appearance. I don't really feel comfortable doing that on the mainpage... so many websites spend so much space plugging their own mojo that it gets incredibly repetitive. It's a pet peeve of mine. So I'll note it here, if you're in Los Angelos Oct 11, email your name, phone number, email address and number of tickets you'll need to TSSTicketline@g4media.com and I guess they'll hook you up. Of course, only like 7 people actually READ my journal, so I guess tell your friends or something.

While on the subject, I'm speaking at Google on friday, and the Georgia Institute of Technology on Oct 26... I'm not really sure if either event is open to the public, but what I am certain of is that I will be spending WAY to much airplane time. On the upside, the new Pokemon games for the gameboy came out recently. I know, laugh if you want... but I've been playing Leaf Green. It's just a simple RPG. Easily pausible. Easily savable. Easy to kill a few minutes waiting in a line or whatever. So with my mp3 player full of episodes of This American Life and the opportunity to 'Catch them All' and become the greatest pokemon trainer of all time, I guess I'll make do with all the time in the steel tubes.

Tragically this means my Sims 2 game will go largely unattended in October. Man the volumes I could write about that game... hafta save that for another time.

So I just want to complain a bit about a constant problem that we have on Slashdot. We get 500 story submissions on a busy day... and we post 15-20. This means that we're going to reject 96% of every story submitted. It means that on average, you would need to submit 25 stories to get just ONE accepted.

Users hate this, and it's understandable. A lot of users just half-ass a submission, a link and maybe a badly spelled rant about how evil some corporate monster is. But others really put in a lot of effort. They clearly spent 5-10 minutes crafting a solid submission, finding and linking related articles around the net, and linking previous stories on Slashdot. Very cool. So when their submission gets rejected, they take that as a slap.

It doesn't help that a story rejection on Slashdot essentially amounts to "Rejected". No explanation. No reason. No justification. Users invent all sorts of reasons, ranging from the likely (they didn't care much for the story) to the conspiratorial (I've submitted 5 stories and they've all been rejected, clearly you hate me and all that I stand for). This morning I found this priceless little gem (reprinted with permission, but name witheld to prevent ego stroking) which really typifies the response I get. I get 3-5 complaints a day, but this one was special.

Subj: Question: Who do you have to fuck to get posted in "Ask Slashdot"?

I'm 0 for 5 now and that's BULLSHIT!!! You bastards don't even have the courtesy to acknowledge the care and thought that goes into a submission? Shame!

For me the illusion is broken. "Community resource?" My Ass!

I will now break down what he said, what he means, and try to respond to it. I shall do so in asshole form becauase it's early and I haven't yet finished my first cup of coffee, and because I'm not clever enough to respond Strongbad style.

• I am angry enough to use impolite language with a total stranger. This is always an issue for me. I like to help readers. I like to answer questions. I'll even answer very controversial and difficult questions if I can. But to start off a message like this... this guy knows for a fact that no good will come of his message. Everything about it. This is purely flame. What does he really expect to come of this message? I actually laughed out loud when I read this one. It was early, and this message was SO stereotypical, it prompted me to share. Now don't get me wrong, I'm no prude. I'll cuss and swear (as anyone who knows me will attest to) but you don't cuss and swear when you are trying to promote change from a stranger. It's just bizarre.
• There is a mysterious "Secret" to getting a story selected. He implies that this is sexual. As if by boning me, he'll get a story posted, even tho I'm pretty sure that even my wife has never managed to get a story posted. Already, there is denial here... he believes that there is a secret to getting a story posted, and it won't matter what I tell him. The truth is less interesting...
• Since he has submitted 5 stories, he is entitled to get one posted This one actually used to bother me. As I mentioned above, we reject 25 submissions for every one we accept. So he is already off by a factor of 5. But it never ceases to amaze me that people think that volume of submissions is a factor in selection. What they don't understand is that we don't even look at the name of the submittor. I deleted hundreds of story submissions yesterday and probably didn't read a single byline. I double check them to make sure they are syntactically correct and not dirty words before I save a final story, but it doesn't even enter in to the story selection process. Each submission is a stand alone event...
• He is entitled to some level of praise and honor for writing a submission This is a fair request, and it has always been an issue on Slashdot that a submission that is not accepted is marked as 'Rejected' and returned to the submittor. Some users take this very personally. From the big picture perspective, we're providing no feedback, so there is no chance for the submittor to improve. From a practical perspective, its just not possible to give a reason... there's simple not enough time. Remember that we're talking about 500 rejections a day. Even if it takes just 10 seconds to decide upon a reason, and select it from a list, we just added 83 minutes to our work day, or 9.6 hours to our work week. We don't have 9.6 extra hours next week. Or the week after that. It's just not possible. The other fact is that the more feedback a user is given, the more dialog they want. We learned this with the moderation system and the user account system. Every piece of data we reveal creates a new discussion. New dialog. New questions. New answers. And more email. Right now 3-5 users email me a day to question a rejected submission. I reply with a form letter. If we provided a reason, I'd bet that number would increase 5 to 10 fold. I don't have time to write 50 more emails a day apologizing and explaining and justifying.
• I should be ashamed because I didn't give him praise As you probably noticed from this journal entry, I'm not really feeling shame.
• His view of Slashdot is diminished as, for him, it is not a community resource. This is the one that really gets me giggling, because he already has said he was submitting 'Ask Slashdot' stories. In other words, he is pissed that we won't answer his question. This isn't about serving the community. This is about serving him. And because Slashdot won't do that, we are failing them. Again, this is very typical of some submittors. The sense of entitlement is strange. The individual always likes to call out the needs of the 500,000 daily Slashdot readers when they don't get their way. Wheras I like to think that the reason that we have those 500,000 daily readers in the first place is that we're doing a pretty good job of selecting stories that do serve the community.
• My Ass! this one confuses me too, but i have a theory: he already demonstrated in his subject line that he considers sex a means to get what he wants. Perhaps this statement is an exclamatory related to that. It's unclear to me if he is offering something, or complaining about previous results. But again, it's a little to much to put into an email to a stranger

So anyway, good morning! I have probably 200 more people to reject before I get to go home today, imagine what my inbox will look like by 5!

We get a lot of telemarketers and have done many things to confuse them over the years. Most inventive is Samzenpus who lives for the challenge presented by random phone calls. When they call and ask for the person in charge of phones, he simply explains that 'We Don't Have Phones'. We've been sharing office space for like 3-4 years now, and this never gets old.

For the last few months, the new game has been 'Hold'. You can usually tell within about 3 seconds if the call is legit or not. If they are obviouslly selling you credit cards or phone service, you politely ask them to be put on hold. Then you start the stopwatch. Most people last 20-30 seconds tops. Today we had someone break not only the never-before-breached 1 minute barrier, she made it TWO minutes. She lasted so long that the phone actually beeped to warn us that there was someone holding! Glorious!

The politics section went live today. I'm quite nervous about it, but it'll be interesting to see what happens with it. After 20 minutes of posting, most comments in the discussion are pretty irrelevant (blah blah color scheme, blah blah jump the shark, blah blah). But then again, people are always incredibly negative whenever Slashdot does ANYTHING new. We'll see what happens when we start posting some content.

Several users commented that they don't think that the Slashdot editors represent much political diversity. For cying out loud, Pudge is an elected official in the GOP! The verbal wars waged in our IRC channels would convince anyone.

I'm certain that we can be fair in our story selection. I'm less certain that our posters and moderators can do the same. Politics brings out the best and worst in people, and I suspect that it will do exactly the same for our moderation system. We'll see all its flaws and strengths.

I'm planning a vacation at the end of the month. Kathleen & I are aiming to go to hawaii for a week. I've never been there and I'm really looking forward to some down time. This summer has been surprisingly stressful for me, and I really need some time to unplug. Unlike our last vacation, I think we're going to plan this one very loose: just a week of nothing. Play it by ear. If something sounds fun, we'll go do it. I'm really looking forward to it. Not looking forward to my inbox after that tho.

After 2.5 years of living in Ann Arbor I finally went to a UofM sporting event. We went and saw them play football again Miami Ohio on saturday. The game was a bit of a blow out, but it was pretty amazing to sit in a crowd of 110,000 people. Took an hour to get through traffic to get home... the normal drive is about 12 minutes. Utterly insane. I need to take better advantage of living where I do... I went to see the Tigers lose a few weeks ago and had a great time. I'm not huge into sports... but there's something about going to the spectacle that is sports when it's on this giant of a scale. I need to see a Red Wings game, and a UofM Basketball game I think.

Next week is LinuxWorld. I'm only going to be there for 2 days, so I'm kinda looking forward to it... well, not the flight part, but seeing some folks. I haven't been to San Francisco in quite some time anyway. Strangely I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing there. I'm told I have to meet with people, but I haven't seen an itinerary or anything, so I guess I'll just wing it.

A bunch of folks went camping up north for Scott's Bachelor party. This was the first time I've been really in "Nature" in years. Sleeping on the ground and stuff. It was actually surprisingly nice. It always surprises me when something that I didn't enjoy as a child turns around and seems a lot nicer as I get older. I think a lot of it was that "Camping" for me as a child was basically a parking lot with a designated square lot. You couldn't be loud because the people in the tent 15 feet on either side of you would hear. It's a lot different to actually have several acres of trees on all sides of you. Makes me want to try to find some land somewhere. I think I'd like to camp a bit, but finding a place that isn't a camping parking lot seems a bit difficult. A nice chunk of land would be swell to just sit on... maybe someday build a house there. Although I can't imagine a universe where I could get internet access in any place that secluded... and I'm not going back to satellite internet ;)

With the completion of the new Section/Topic code, we can finally create a few sections on Slashdot that we've been wanting to do for a long time. The first 2 are live already... the Linux.slashdot.org and IT.slashdot.org sections. Both are obviously subject areas that Slashdot covers extensively. The creation of the sections allows us to post additional content that might otherwise be rejected. I'm very picky about what gets posted to the mainpage because not every Slashdot reader is interested in the same level of detail about any given subject matter... but the sections give us the ability to post stuff in a place where we know it will be read only by the people who are interested in that extra content. We've got at least one more section coming up.. the 'Entertainment' section which will be for TV & Movies and such. We already post a lot of stories in those sections, so this will let us group them together.

The last section is still up for debate... We've long considered 'politics.slashdot.org' with all its pros and cons. I think we're going to do it. As the presidential election gets closer, we would have at least some coverage of major political events. These stories would rarely make it to the Slashdot main page, but we have a lot of people who want to see Slashdot discussion on the major political events. Right now, those discussions happen in related stories... a conservative/liberal debate in a YRO story is very common place. We think it would be fun to run the section for a few months leading up to the election just to see if it's the sort of thing people would like. If it's successful, we'll keep it around. If not, it still provides us with a sort of blueprint for creating sections in Slashdot for specific events that come and go over time...

The code refresh went as well as could be expected... which is to say that there was some twists, turns, and a whole lotta bad aftermath, but that's par for the course. Under the hood things are all working properly. We had a couple of quick bugs that are now fixed. A few more minor bugs are waiting to be swatted. We also temporarily disabled a couple of user functions... nobody noticed some of them, which means we can probably purge some stuff if it helps make the site faster. User customization is great fun, but anything an end user can customize means one less thing that we can effectively cache. The main problem now is performance. Index especially is substantially slower following the refresh. Of course, since 60% of our index page views are anonymous, static HTML, this is only affecting a third of our users, but the effects are noticable. Jamie has been performing herculean efforts of real time optimization to get the kinks worked out.

I, Robot suprised me. On the 'Will Smith Summer Blockbuster Meter' I went into I, Robot expecting something somewhere between Independance Day (Bad) and Wild Wild West (Rancid). Instead I got something more on par with Men In Black (Pretty Good). The special effects are really quite excellent. While the plot is a bit cheesy and some of the dialog is incredibly lame, I was never bored. I roled my eyes a few times, but I also laughed. The audience I saw it with even gasped a few times when some of the more clever things occured. Actual audience response like that is tremendously rare these days. I'm not sure if people are just getting more cynical or movies are getting worse. I won't get into the Book vs Movie thing 'cuz I've never read the Asimov stuff that the movie was 'Suggested By'.

Lastly, if you're in Dearborn, I'm gonna speak friday afternoon at ADHOC (formerly MacHack). I don't have any agenda, so it'd be swell if people showed up so I'd have something to talk about. I wonder about the show. It seems to be in a serious state of flux... I went to the last 2 MacHack's and was really impressed. This really is a small-scale show with a real heart. People doing their thing for the love of it. They legitimately care about the "Yutes", who are respected as little geeks in training. It was a surprisingly cool experience, especially to jaded 'ole me. Hopefully that same spirit is retained this year... of course I won't have time to see since my visit will be just a few hours long.

Returned from Las Vegas a few days ago and accomplished something truly astounding... I actually came out ahead on the blackjack tables! This is doubly impressive when you consider the fact that I was in town for 5 nights. I closed out the week ahead about $500 on the week... this puts my lifetime gambling totals at around $0 total since that one week negated my previous trip to Vegas, Windsor, and New Orleans. So hooray for me!

Kathleen & I also did this bizarre indoor skydiving thing... a giant fan blows you up in the air where you briefly hover and sweat like a mad fool in a dayglo jump suit. It was pretty fun, but it definitely confirms the fact that I am a world champion contender in flab. I just didn't have the strength to do much except fall. Regardless, it's really worth a try if you're ever out there.

Spider-man 2 was quite great. I really didn't except this to be able to touch the original, so imagine my surprise when it actually ran its predecessor right off the road. There are some great sequences, tons of great funny little moments, and a lot of great effects. This makes it possible to overlook a few complaints (some of the special effects came up lacking, a few plot points and not enough spidey one-liners). Of course, if you're reading this, you've probably already seen the flick... who am I kidding?

The neighbors cut loose with an impressive fireworks display. Apparently this is a regular occurance, but last year I must not have been around. We were watching a little TV last night when I heard a thunk... I thought a bird hit the window, but discovered happy explosions in the night sky instead. So we wandered over and watched the pretty colors and the big booms. No better way to celebrate our nation's independance then blowing pieces of it up! Good times.

Looking forward to visiting AnimeNext this weekend. Anime Fans in the NYC area should definitely look into it.. Kathleen & I had great fun last year, so it will be cool to see whats up again this year. Plus, a trip to New York is always fun. Catch a show. Eat some food. This time around I hope to actually have some touristy time in to spend... might go visit the Statue of Liberty. I've been to NYC dozens of times and never visited either the gugenheim or the statue of liberty. It seems like I should try to do at least one of them!

Anyone who knows me knows that I seek food like a homing pigeon. In fact our decision to move to Ann Arbor was at least partially swayed by the huge number of excellent restaruants in the area. Of course, as is human nature, over the last 2 years Kathleen & I have fallen into something of a rut, finding a half dozen favorites, while leaving dozens of places untried. Recently I've decided to chagne that so I've tried to eat at a new place at least once a week. Last week we tried 'Eve' in Kerrytown... it replaces the Kerrytown Bistro (which I never ate at) and was quite surprised at just how good it was. I've eaten at countless fine places, and this one stands right at the very top of the list. It's a pretty small place, but the service was great and the food was knock-my-socks-off good. If you're in the area, check it out.

Long have I postponed getting familiar with CSS. I've poked around with style sheets here and there over the years and always found them to be nice, but not necessary. If I were to design a new site from scratch today, I would undoubtedly implement it using CSS. To actually get more familiar with it, I decided last week to start to port CmdrTaco.net. Since I removed the link to the site from the left hand menu of Slashdot, traffic has dropped off quite a bit, so people don't complain when I break things as much. I still haven't totally removed tables from the site, but I've stopped (for the most part) using them for the old layout tricks that you needed to use circa 1997 in order to get nice layouts... now I can redefine my H1s to have a background color, a nice font, an alignment, and suddenly I don't need a table and a font tag every time I want a header. Man do I wish this shit was available when we originally designed Slashdot. Someday I hope to redesign Slashdot and make everything nice and compliant, but it seems that hacking an old site to use CSS is far more work than creating a new site from scratch. Ah well, someday I guess. By then maybe CSS will be more consistent over safari/mozilla/MSIE so it won't be impossible to make the site look good to all readers.

I've always wanted to see the Barenaked Ladies in concert, but for whatever reason, always seemed to have a scheduling problem when they played anywhere near me. Well in August they are playing in Clarkston, so I figured I'd buy tickets. I went to Ticketmaster.com at the *second* they went on sale, and the best seats available were already like 40-50 rows back. How is that possible? Can someone out there explain to me the voodoo necessary to get reasonably close seats to concerts? Clearly its not through ticketmaster... so how does it work? There must be a secret passphrase or something. I guess I can wait a few weeks and try to eBay some tickets. Maybe that will work out. This clearly is an area I have little expertise in.

Storms have been flowing through michigan for the last few weeks. It's really tiring. I've never been a sound sleeper when the thunder gets cracking, or if it gets really windy, so I haven't had many good nights sleep in the last couple weeks. At least the lawn finally looks nice and green.

Someone recently asked me about the planned moderation stuff... they wanted to know why it's taking so long, so I figured I'd explain that. The reason is that we haven't started coding yet. And the reason for that is this whole "Section/Topics" thing. This won't really have much affect on any end users, but its sort of an internal thing that really needs to be done. Internally, Slashcode has "Topics" and "Sections". Topics are like "GNOME" and "It's Funny Laugh". They define the subject matter of the story. "Sections" are the menu on the left hand side (Apple, BSD, Games, etc). Now you'll notice that some of these "Sections" define subject matter. Others define data types (note the unique data fields in the Books section- author, ISBN code etc).

The short problem is that a story can have many topics, but only 1 section. So when you visit the 'Apple' section, you can't see a book review... because stories can have just 1 section.

This actually has a lot of subtle affects on the code and makes lots of simple things hugely difficult. Things like targetted advertising... the thing that makes it possible for us to sell a lot of the ads on Slashdot is our targetting. The more precise the target, the more money people will pay. So, if you are a book vendor writing apple books, on networking, you might by the ads on those specific article types. And right now, we really can't do that. We can do 'Apple' + 'Networking' or 'Books' + 'Networking' but not 'Apple' + 'Books'. It's just a real pain and it causes us a serious mess.

And its more complex then that... "Sections" were actually built entirely off a kludge. See, I created Sections originally, nearly 6 years ago to define data types, mainly for the book reviews. Since these Data Types required things to look a little different, I effectively then had "Skins" at the same time, for no extra work. When I needed Skins, I used Sections which really weren't supposed to do that. And 6 years later we need to undo all that.

Now we're in the middle of seperating Skins, Subject Matter, and Data Types from the tangled mess of Sections & Topics. When it's done, it will be elegant and simple. It will make a lot of things much cleaner on our end. End users will barely notice, except that the menu of 'Sections' on the left hand side might become more dynamic... instead of those static groupings, we could instead group sections by activity... for example, if there are a lot of stories on Networking, we could throw 'Networking' in there, and link an index of stories about networking. When 'Calera' is a top story, perhaps it would trickle to the top of the list... instead of having the BSD section in there which might go a week without a story, we could instead have sections be used to give you a sort of at-a-glance view of what areas of slashdot news are making waves. It should be very cool.

Unfortunately, all these things take time. Implementation on this takes a lot of work. And then we need to port several sites to the new code. And test it. And debug it. And finally, after all that we can deploy this, and THEN we can go to work on moderation changes. Unless Pudge, Jamie, Vroom, and Pater revolt ;)

Last night Kathleen & I went to see Allison Kraus, along with a host of other folk singers at the Fox Theater in Detroit. (Thanks Cliff!). Over the course of the evening, we saw like a half a dozen acts, and many of the performers from the Oh Brother Where Art Thou soundtrack. It was a pretty impressive show. It was in stark contrast to The Strokes who we saw earlier this week... much less body surfing, many more bald heads. I enjoyed both shows, but for completely different reasons.

I got my HD Tivo finally. I read on the Tivo Community Forums that ABC warehouse had a few (ABC is a midwest electronics store.. they have a dozen or so outlets around michigan and often they have slimey sales people. I hate people working on commission usually.). I called a few of the local stores and got vastly conflicting stories, but mostly they amounted to "They have them in the central warehouse, but not here." Since a guy in the forum claimed he bought 6 from his local outlet, I figured out where their central warehouse is, and called all the ABC outlets near it. On my third call I got lucky- they had one on a truck, just 30 or so minutes away. Victory is mine!

I've since hooked up an antenna with mixed results. I get all the stations I wanted except UPN (No Star Trek Enterprise for me!). A few of the channels break up a little. Since pretty much everything I care about watching on network TV ends in the next week or so, I'm not super broke up, and I have the summer to figure out how to resolve it. Of course, I'm quite scared of heights, so clomping around on the roof assembling an antenna, and aiming it was quite the treat. Yikes. But DAMN HDTV is cool. I just wish everything I watched was available high def.

What's strange is that while my direction antenna is aimed at detroit (east) I'm actually getting signals from Toledo (south). Not GREAT signals, but pretty good. From my location I probably can get Toledo, Lansing, and Detroit. No particular reason to actually bother, and I don't want the roof of my house to look like I'm conducting elaborate science in the basement, but it is pretty neat. Its strange how HDTV is resurecting the old fashioned antenna, just when it seemed like satellites and cable would kill it.

In work related news, I have an odd story to relay. A guy emailed me a few weeks ago to complain that he was being "Mod Bombed". Specificly, he cited the potential for abuse in the Overrated mod tag... since Over/Underrated aren't subject to M2, a bad moderator can use those tags to escape the wrath of the meta moderator. Of course, there are other checks in there too, and statistically, people don't substantially use these tags more than the others, so while there is potential for abuse, it's actually not as large of a problem as people think. But it CAN be abused, and occasionally it is. Anyway, this guy feared conspiracy, so I checked in on him... and sure enough, someone had moderated him down 5 times, overrated, in a very short amount of time. None of his comments were particularly bad or good. Probably not worthy of the abuse.

But thats not the funny part... the funny part is that the complainer did the exact same thing. He used the overrated tag on another user a bunch of times... in FACT, he used his mod points on the very user who moderated him down. The two of them were waging a little mod war against each other, and one tattled on the other. I guess this is something else I need to consider in a future revision of the mod system. But I'm still preetty amazed... it takes a lot of balls to try to tattle on someone when you are doing the very thing you are tattling about.

I continue to obsess over my lack of HD Tivo with little hope of any change. In fact, the plot thickened recently. I pre-ordered a Tivo from Solid Signal... their FAQ says they won't charge my credit card until they are ready to ship. Well, the credit card charge cleared on tuesday, but no shipping number was emailed. My emails to them are ignored. I'm pretty suspicious of this behavior. I mean, I'd like to try to get one from a few other sources, but my CC is already in for the cost of this one. Ideally they've shipped it and its en route via next day shipping today. But I'm pretty wary of this. I know that technically it's illegal for a vendor to charge without shipping something. But I've also found that quite a number of vendors like to ignore that pesky little law. And of course they may just have forgotten to mail me a tracking number. But that doesn't seem very likely.

They are going now for around $1500 on eBay. It's just not worth paying $500 over retail for the things. I'd pay a small premium to get it in time to enjoy the last few episodes of the Sopranos in HDTV, but not $500.

While I'm still thinking about HDTV, I configured my xbox to work in HDTV 720p mode now. Since I primarily use my xbox to run XBMC and play anime fansubs, this works really great since the menus are quite legible at 720p, and enjoy the extra pixels for longer lists of files to scroll through. Organizing my fansub collection is something of a chore. I have like 15 gigs of unwatched stuff, and perhaps 50 gigs of stuff I hang on to for no particular reason even tho I've either seen it, or probably won't ever bother. But it's a really great setup. The only down side is that I'm still on the shallow end of the bandwidth pool, so I have to download files at the office and carry them home on a hard drive. Not the end of the world, but hey whatcha gonna do. If you're into fansubs, look for Gantz. Man that is some crazy stuff.

I have a yellow legal pad that I've mostly gone through now working and reworking how the moderation system needs to store data. Every time I get close, I realize something fundamental is screwy with how I'm doing it. I keep trying to abstract ALL Penalties and Rewards into just a few simple tables, but that just doesn't seem to work. I'm gonna need far more data types because Penalties and Rewards have many sources and modifiers Like, a Poster gets a reward for getting modded up, and a Moderator gets a reward for that same mod, but not until meta moderation time. Likewise, the meta moderator gets rewarded at M2 resolution too. Each of these actions has a corrosponding punishment too. But I want other information to affect punishments and rewards as well. A user with terrible karma needs a different penalties than one with excellent.

My hope is that each of these people: Poster, Moderator, Meta Moderator has a list of modifiers that can be applied to them. For example, poster modifiers might be 'Excellent Karma' or 'Posting From Large Proxy Server' 'Subscriber' 'Long Comment' 'Bayesian Filtering Says Troll'. Whatever modifiers I could think of that might apply. But each of this filters could ultimately affect the rewards and penalties associated with the post. Moderators have a similiar list... some are security related, but some are more obvious. Remember my 'Rock Star' moderator comments from a previous journal... a Rock Star would be a moderator modifier. The penalty for some actions for a Rock Star would be reduced. Others might be increased. Its all up in the air.

I think I have a pretty good list of these modifiers, but I guess the point is really to abstract this enough so that new ones can be added really easily. I mentioned the Bayesian Filter above... this could be a really useful filter, and relatively trivial to implement. Just user the worst 5% of comments as spam and the best 5% as ham or something. Certain words are bound to occur frequently in troll comments. Jamie has been wanting to do this forever. But if we design the new mod system correctly, the Bayesian filter is just a couple dozen lines somewhere to add, and it becomes a behind-the-scenes modifier attached to the post, with perhaps a slight affect on the penalty/rewards for the poster.

In the last few weeks, news of Google's impending IPO has reached a fever pitch. Every news site is chatting about it. NPR won't shut up about it. But it really strikes a chord with me. I have a special fondness for Google. Our first Google story was Google Does Linux from August 6 in 1998. Back then nobody had heard of Google. They were doing only a few thousand searches a day... and we mentioned them not for being a good search engine... but because they had a Linux Specific search query! It was incredibly useful... I had tried to use Google before; they were making noise in the Linux world because they were a really cool application using Linux... anyway, my note in the story? "today was the first time that I successfully used Google without it crashing." What a glorious endorsement! Slashdot was only a year old. Our traffic was already pretty impressive. They were a cute upstart using cool technology to do what other search engines were already failing at. I felt a kinship: we were both based on Linux. We were doing something other places tried to do, but doing a better job.

We didn't mention Google again for like 4 months, but around then the media frenzy surrounding them began to pick up. Salon & Techweb posted stories about them that we linked to. In Feb of 99 we noted that Google goes beta. My note on this story was that "their cached version of Slashdot is from October".

By then it was clear that Google had dwarfed us. What was a secret amongst the most savy internet users was now appearing in mainstream news. We posted other Google stories after that... many of them surrounding their Linux technology. Their 4000 node Linux cluster was the stuff of Legend. They got their venture capital funding while the "Business" of Slashdot was becoming a tangible thing around me. Of course, we eventually were bought by Andover.net who went public, and they took years building what today is a pretty impressive business built on even more impressive technology.

The rest is history I guess. Google continued to explode, exceeding everyone's wildest imagination... well, except Brin & Page s'pose. Google is a cultural phenomonom, not just an internet thing, or a business thing. But I think what makes it great is not whats new about Google, but whats old about it. Their simple page design in 1998 was already throwback to the internet of years before. Mainstream websites were starting to get more and more bloated: advertisements, gifs, columns, clutter. More bling than a measely modem could handle. But Google was clean and simple... their page looked like websites did before Netscape made "Page Layout" a factor in website design. Everything else about Google may be bigger or better now, but what made them great in August of '98 continues to make them great today. I hope their IPO doesn't change that.

One of my most frequent questions from readers is pretty amusing: They complain that they get mod points to often! Actually, they aren't complaining as much as they are worrying that something is broken and they think they are reporting a bug.

This is how the system works. We have many controls in the system that are designed to give good moderators mod points more often. There are a variety of tests, but in short... the more deserving a comment is of the mod you gave it, the faster you will get mod points. Moderating a Score:0 to -1 or a Score:1 to 2 has FAR more effect than moderating a Score:4 to 5. We figure you're working harder if you are moderating in the middle of the bell curve, and that deserves to be rewarded. Of course, these rewards are dependant on fair m2, and other factors as well, so its reasonably controlled. A good moderator can get mod points every 48 to 72 hours. And thats exactly what we want.

The opposite is also true, certain activities reduce your likelihood of being granted mod points. Like, letting your points expire unused... or having several mods being rated unfair. Or if all you ever do is moderate Score:4 comments "Funny".

But this leads me to another point... when we revise the system, more points is better. Right now we're using 7 to 8k mod points every day... 7 or 8 mods for every 10 or 11 comments. This is a reasonable balance. We're limited because more points really only dilutes the value of Score:5 comments... plus this is about as many mods as we can meta moderate.

The new system removes the absolute scoring... so now putting 20 or 30k moderation points into the system will actually improve the quality of the discussion. The trick is of course figuring out how to put these points in. Do we give more users access? Do we give users more points when they get access? Or do we pick certain users... we've nicknamed them 'Rock Stars' and give them many many mod points... 50 points per day? 100 points?

There are tons of risks and tons of benefits associated with this... we've thought pretty extensively about them. There would need to be certain controls to prevent abuse... like if a Rock Star moderated his own IP, that would be an obviously suspicious activity... or if a Rock Star spent 25 points on a single user account. Right now I can pick a dozen moderators that are great. These guys use perhaps 50 mod points a month... they do the things I mentioned above, and maintain extremely high % of Fairness in M2. Keeping an eye on a dozen users isn't that hard... especially because serious abuse becomes VERY obvious very quickly. A moderator who has 5 points might not be doing anything obviously wrong... but you look at his account 3 weeks later and see that in his 3 turns as a moderator, he has used all his points on 4 different users... well, something suspicious is happening there. We could definitely have a few rules keep good controls on these users.

The upside is that these users wouldn't feel the need to save their points for the 'best' comments... these dozen users could produce as many moderations as 100 other users... and provided they were able to maintain the % of fairness and not abuse the system, the whole system benefits.

In the early days of Slashdot moderation, we had a few hundred users with unlimited moderation powers. The difference here is that this pool of Rock Stars is dynamic... sellected algorithmically from the cream of the crop of our moderation pool.

Anyway, it's just a thought. As always, if you can reply here, feel free. Else email me.

The HDTV Tivo's are out of stock or back ordered everywhere. Apparently a few hundred actually made it. There's even one on eBay. It doens't close for another 6 days... I guess I can be patient... I'm just annoyed that they are hard to come by. I want HDTV CSI!

The High Def Tivos are apparently available in extremely limited quantities now... specifically the HR10-250.. I can't find one., but I'm lusting in an unholy way. Anyone know how I can get one? It seems like SOMEONE out there has to have a connection! I'm all ready to go- got my triple LNB sat dish setup. Still need an over-the-air antenna for some local stations, but that mostly involves mounting metal on my roof. I'm scared of heights. Not sure if Kathleen is up to this task :)

Many users provided me with interesting bits of feedback about my plans to replace threshold with viewing modes and volume controls. Overwhelmingly positive feedback with a few good points that I'll take into consideration. The biggest challange will be retaining context for users who want it. This will be tied to volume controls... we will provide a drop down with a few different volume controls: one will be very strict, choosing only the best comments, often (usually?) at the expense of context. Another setting will provide many comments and more context... at the bottom will be an uncut view with all the glorious context, even if said context is crap... I think this is gonna work out pretty well.

My next major problem is the moderation labels. Insightful, Informative, Interesting. These have a lot of overlap. I'd like to update the list of mod labels with a handful of new labels that will make it easier to focus discussions. We're not gonna add things like 'Pun' or 'Asshole', but I would love to do a better job letting moderators choose appropriate labels. Perhaps labels that address specific problems (plagerisim? opinionated? misleading?). I don't know exactly what these labels are... but I always appreciate feedback (in my journal if you can post, or my inbox if you can't). A good moderation label has a matching up and down label (like Funny, Unfunny). I really hope that most labels in the revamp have opposites so we can remove 'Overrated' and 'Underrated' and instead let you moderate an Interesting comment as Uninteresting. (Assuming we keep 'Interesting' that is).

A very good point was made by a forgotten user who emailed me... why include a score at all? Percentages? Scores? What true benefit does this provide a casual reader? Assuming our scoring system works, your preferences say "I want to read only a few comments, and I want to read with less humor". Do they really CARE that a comment that they are reading scores within the 93rd percentile of all comments? If they want to read more comments, they simply choose a mode that gives them more comments. We can offer scores to logged in users who turn them on... but for anonymous users reading at default modes, are the scores simply distracting? I'm not talking about the labels here... I think a comment with a note in the header saying it is 60% Insightful is more helpful than today's "Score:4" or a revised system with something like '55th Percentile". Users will always be able to find the garbage posts by increasing the volume of comments they read... but some users carry their Score:-1 comments as a badge of honor, or proof of a conspiracy against them. Anything I can do to remove "The Game" can only serve to improve the focus of discussions for the vast majority of our readers who never post, and just don't want to read garbage.

I suspect that would be a helluva controversial move tho.

It's also worth noting that the Karma Bonus is deprecated under this new system... I think that might bother people too... posters LIKE their karma bonus. I get angry email whenever ANYTHING related to the bonus comes into question. Users feel that it is their god given right to have that checkbox. But in this new system, the function... the simple Score+1 bonus no longer really exists... instead the users karma is one of countless factors used to sort discussions. It's probably worth running some stats to see what % of users with the karma bonus available to them choose to use it vs disable it.

Imagine Slashdot completely seperates comment quality from comment quantity. Imagine that new controls exist that choose how many comments you want to read. Imagine that we get rid of Score:-1 to Score:5. Imagine that 'Order by Score' was replaced with something that actually mattered. Instead of the Score:-1..5 drop down list you are familiar with, a new box takes its place... it contains these options... these options replace the vast majority of user preferences that exist currently in users.pl. They would sort the discussion based on what comments you are most likely to read. These titles are bullshit too. I'll pick better labels later on. Also remember that Score:-1 to 5 doesn't need to exist. Instead, I'm trying to think of comments in terms of the best to worst. Like the 90th percentile instead of Score:5. It's also worth noting that this really doesn't affect moderation at all. There are still mod points, given out the same way, but what we DO with those points is less about Score:3, Interesting, and more about trying to shape discussions according to reader choices. We also need to factor in Zoo/Friends/Foe into these discussions as well.

Stay on Target In this mode, comments tagged as humorous are slightly penalized. Newer comments might also be penalized. The highest rated comments would be those moderated as insightful and interesting. Poster karma would be a factor, but not as large as it is today. This would be the preferred viewing mode for those who wanted a discussion to stay on track... ontopic. Highly focused. Less emphasis on the sillier side of Slashdot. Thats not to say that a humorous comment or witty satire would never appear, but it would take more moderation to make it happen. This would be roughly comperable to a threshold of 4 or 5... but with a user preference penalty of -1 on Funny. This is probably what anonymous readers would see, in conjunction with an 'Order by Score' comment sort order.

Laugh In Under this mode, the comments that were deemed silly would be more highly tolerated than they might otherwise be. Similiar to above, but without assigning penalties to the funny moderated comments.

Gem Seeker This is more for moderators. There are certain comment types that we want to get in front of moderators quickly. For example new posts, and especially posts from new users. Research has shown that a new user who is moderated is more likely to post again then one who isn't. So lets encourage that. The most insightful and interesting comments might be less highly positioned within the discussion to encourage the moderator to find the gems that might otherwise be lost deep within the discussion.

Uncut Like Score:-1 today, this would simply throw the whole mess into the discussion and let you sort it out.

The 'Sort by' drop down remains pretty much the same, but the Scores of the comments will be affected by which viewing mode you are reading in. A really great comment in 'Laugh In' mode will be lower rated in 'Stay on Target' mode... and a piece of crap piece of flamebait might not be visible in either of those modes, but it will still (obviously) make the cut in the Uncut mode. It might have a lower score, but anybody who simply chooses uncut & raw mode, plus order by post time will get the exact same thing as Score:-1 does now.

If anyone has thoughts on other logical viewing modes, I'd love to hear them. My main goal is to keep this simple tho... but I'm trying to think of other ways of reading a discussion, and not really coming up with much.