Have you considered PHP?
Yeah I've thought about it. I used it a little bit in ages past, but have
since grown very fond of Perl. And since I have a fairly sizable amount
of code already written, most of which I am fond of, I probably won't be
starting over in the immediate future.
What about First Posters?
There are a thousand ways we could try to stop the lame crap that
people seem to want to post on Slashdot. Meept, First Post, and some
of the more obvious troll bait is just part of the crap that we get to deal with.
If you are posting this stuff, just stop, it's a waste of everyone's time.
As for solutions, we've talked about many. Among the best are
- Not allowing Anonymous posts first - I don't want to restrict AC posts
any more than we do already. This seems like an unfair restrction to me.
- Reversing the order of comments - Conversation tends to flow forward,
so simply reversing the comment order would make things confusing. Besides,
then we'd have a Last Post Problem.
- Randomize the first few posts - This doesn't eliminate the problem. The
first post messages would still be there. They are annoying.
So what to do? Careful moderation or upping the standard page threshold to require
more points than a default anonymous post gets. If it continues to be a problem,
that will probably happen.
Basically we are trying to moderate as best we can, removing spam, troll posts,
first posts, offtopic stuff. The moderation system doesn't delete anything, it
just marks it down, so people can choose how much they want to read, or not read.
We are slowly getting up to speed with this. We have only a dozen or so moderators
currently, but are slowly getting more. Its a big job to read the thousand+ messages
that float through Slashdot in a typical day, we'll get on top of it eventually.
Mirroring will be a feature in a future version of Slash. A distributed Slashdot could
take a zillion forms, and I've worked out several ways that it could potentially
be done. As it stands, I don't have time to implement it. Maybe someday. As for
most other suggestions, they usually revolve around expensive hardware that we can't afford,
so they simply aren't an option.
I've considered it, but not for very long. Sure, Perl is slower/less efficient that
C, but its high level string manipulation make a lot of things really easy, that
in C would hurt. A lot. Besides, mod_perl is compiling my scripts already- sure,
its compiled to perl form, but thats not all that bad. Especially considering
that writing a lot of this stuff in C would be a ton of code.
We're really not generating that many pages dynamically. The homepage, the
section indexes, and the articles are all generated and stored for users as
updates occur. These pages represent 50-60% of the sites total traffic.
The only pages that are generated dynamically are the comments pages. These
are dynamic for several reasons:
- They change a lot
- The deeper you go, the fewer times the pages are hit
- User preferences and thresholds allow the comments
to be customized to a users tastes. The static
pages ignore those tastes.
The poll scripts are part of Slash which is available on ftp.slashdot.org.
I suspect that there are better polling scripts available if you just
want polling- these polls are tightly integrated with the rest of
Slash to allow nifty things like let users behind firewalls vote
in they are logged in.
It's on ftp.slashdot.org and its called Slash (The Slashdot-Like
Automated Storytelling Homepage). The code is GPL, with the tiny
restriction that you must link us back with a Slashdot logo if you
use the code. v0.2 is pretty raunchy, but v0.3 will be online soon.
There are several people already running v0.2 for sites around the
net, bt the new features in v0.3 will actually make it usable and
configurable without delving into actual perl.
You can email your questions to askslashdot@slashdot.org. Please note that this is not where you want to
report bugs or complain about Slashdot, this is where you want to ask
general questions that the Slashdot readers can try to answer. If your
question is directed towards Slashdot, you're better off mailing me.
(malda@slashdot.org)
I'd love to. But there are 2 problems: Advertising and Time. I
can't advertise on an NNTP server very easily. I could possibly
append ads to comments, but that would be really annoying and
not something advertisers would necessarily dig. Slashdot costs
a lot to run each month, and right now I'm wary of doing this.
The other factor is time. I don't have time to write the gateway right
now. But it is on my TODO list. It'll happen- just not today.
This is a fairly often requested feature that I simply don't want to implement.
Of the 300+ submissions each day, we post perhaps a dozen. The others
are mostly duplicates of each other, repeats of stories we've posted
days or even months ago. Then there is the offensive stuff, the
completely unreadable, the stuff with broken HTML, spam, submissions that
really are meant to be email to an author, feature suggestions, and all
sorts of things that just aren't appropriate for distribution.
