OSNews

It's been considered. I don't think we'll do that. We've also discussed having posters with positive averages over a certain number of comments start with +1. That's more likely, but nothing is certain yet.

How about if you just have users who've been on the site for a while have a +1 and all else, including anonymae have a 0. Then make the default threshold 0. That way it only takes one point to knock out a stupid anonymae post, and users who have been here a while reguardless of how much others don't like them will have a better position..
There are people on the site who've got negative rankings when there posts really are positive to the site. I think that's something to address. I'd hate to see the site turn into a popularity contest, like *cough* slashdot. Usually they get them by either:
1.) Posting very strong views which make them look like extremists. Which of course is bound to offend someone, even if it may not be inflammatory.
2.) They get into heated arguments with other users. This is also bound to create an inflammatory remark or too. I've always believed that to be pretty forgiveable as we've all been in a discussion and strongly believed the other individual to be of other than sound mind.
3.) There also tends to be, because this is an english site, a bias against bad english speakers. It's hard to get across a good idea in a language that's not your own...
4.) There are also people who I think are simply going through and modding down one side of a debate. For example they'll go and mod down every strongly pro-linux, pro-microsoft, or pro-apple point. I'm sure you guys catch many of those... Either that or it's people who are simply aversed to debate and mod down every point which is actually asking for a strong discussion.

The site admins are usually pretty good about downmodding obvious anonymous flamebait, so it really may not be necessary.

Let me add, has an irc.osnews.com/net been considered?

Not to my knowledge.

I don't find OSNews one bit more complicated to use since v3, quite the opposite. If future additions are implemented in a similar style while still keeping simplicity in mind, I have no worries.

I agree however with some points raised above about anonymous users being able to chose names again and some way to limit anonymous abuse (because it really feels pointless to moderate them down).

The option to ignore anonymous postings isn't really useful either, because this can't be changed on the fly and most conversations become unreadable with this setting activated. I would find it more useful personally to have an option to apply a certain score modifier to Anonymous users.

I totally agree. The reason I started participating in OSNews discussions in the first place was because of the ability to post with a user name without creating an account... I feel like this should still be available!

Why not start with an HTML compliant site?

Oh my gosh, are you kidding me?? Have you paid attention to any of the conversation history??

We are intentionally non-compliant because our goal isn't compliance -- it's rendering everywhere. We are tested on hundreds of browsers, some very small and obscure. And we render on tons of mobile devices as well. Compliance is NOT a goal of osnews.

What is the obsession everyone has with compliance anyway/ Doesn't it work in your browser? What's the problem then?!

I would imagine, considering the number of rendering paths you have currently, that it wouldn't be hard to add a nice compliant path. And compliancy is always better then non-compliancy. Cleaner. Prettier. Better.

> We are intentionally non-compliant because our goal isn't compliance -- it's rendering everywhere.

I don't think you need to be HTML-Strict if that's what you're saying. HTML-Transitional is designed with your goal in mind.

Nope. Doesn't work.

Trust me, you need a crazy mix of HTML 2 and HTML 3.2 to work on the most browsers possible.

That depends on what you're doing. :-)

I use a crazy mix of browsers to test my own site, for example, including goodies the original IBM WebExplorer for OS/2 and the browser built into StarWriter in StarOffice 5.01, Xiino for PalmOS, and both Links and lynx, and HTML 4.01 Transitional seems to cut it for all of the above.

1)Compliancy makes your site more semantical, thus makes it more visible on the net. Something you may want. You don't have to pay to get google to see you, simply design compliant sites, and you will get better hits.

2)Compliancy makes your site accessible, i.e. blind people can read comfortably your site.

3)Compliancy allows your site to downgrade gracefully on engines that do not support all the features, you don't have to tweak for hours to make it work everywhere..

4) Compliancy makes the page load faster, because it will be smaller and because most of the theming will be in the css, which will be cached by the browser (dowloaded only once for all OSNews webpages).

5) Compliancy allows you to seperate content from presentation. You could easily change the look of your site, if need be.

6) Compliancy will allow you to easily extend your website to future web technologies.

And some more.

I have read the reasons for not being compliant. Personally, I think they are weak. Truly, how many people use Mosaic to browse the web, much less this site, any more? If your HTML was well written according to the specifications, strict is the only real way to go, then you will save yourself, and other, a whole lot of bandwidth. There is a ton of unnecessary HTML in this reply page alone.

Plus, you get the "works in every browser" almost for free. There are couple older browsers where a heavily styled page does not degrade cleanly but tough love to them; lynx works just fine and just about on any platform. You seem to love the fact that you render on tons of mobile devices -- CSS2 has a "handheld" media rule specifically for that purpose. Your mobile users would no longer have to go to special URLs (if they still have to any more).

Basically, your reasons for using quirky HTML are lame. However, I am not going to be one of those who say "change it because it absolutely MUST be compliant." Sure, I feel that way but it is your site. Do with it what you want. I just don't think it is right for a web site about technology to purposefully scoff at the effort to keep websites working as they were intended -- on any platform without having to use special code. What are you going to do when browsers deprecate quirks mode?

It's coming. I promise, you'll see it sometime in the near future.

> One possible solution would be to let anon users give a name and have it show up in black with no hyperlink.

Or just have it say: "By Anonymous As ______ on ...". The _____ would contain the name they provided, but you can still easily see that it was posted anonymously and not by a registered user. Then, if people are worried about getting impersonated, they can register and avoid the problem entirely.

Registering an account is simple. If someone wants a moniker associated with their posts, then they can create an account. If people want to be anonymous then they can be anonymous. Being anonymous while having a moniker offers what benefit, exactly?

I should also add that having to create an account hasn't curtailed certain parties (Moulinneuf for an extreme example) from posting a lot of troll bait. There's really no substitute for vigilance.

Being anonymous while having a moniker offers what benefit, exactly?

We could actually understand who's talking with whom. It's just very confusing if 80% of the postings come from Mr. Anonymous.

The only time I have a problem following OSNews threads is when articles get > 100 comments. Now I can raise my threshold and weed some of them out, which is a good thing.

If you read a message that is in reply to something that you haven't read you can click on the "In reply to" link which is also very cool.

I like it.

The lack of a threaded comment display is the single more annoying thing about OSNews, I think.

While one can click on the Reply links and such to follow each thread, that's not always as efficient in a web browser as it could be.

If you make threading optional, then you get the problem that those users who have it enabled will write their postings with less context, assuming that readers will have threading enabled, too. In result, following discussions will become a lot harder for those who prefer the flat view. Just try the flat view on any popular threaded news site and you'll see what I mean.

I don't see why this is so important, after all comments should be about adding useful information to a news item and not so much about discussing totally unrelated topics. There is a reason why most popular web forums have adopted the flat view and even gmail uses it with success instead of email-threading. It's a lot less confusing and much easier to keep track of new additions.

You can't have a reply mechanism in place, complete with a link to the page of replies, without the threading mechanism being inherent. The threading is already in OSNews v3, and people are already making use of it. Now that @so-and-so etc. is out of fashion, it's become near-impossible to sort through what's being responded to without having some sort of threading view. While you personally may not use it, a lot of people would be a lot happier if they could follow conversations with some bit of coherency.

I don't see why this is so important, after all comments should be about adding useful information to a news item and not so much about discussing totally unrelated topics.

Why would they be unrelated? That seems like a much more Slashdot-esque behavior to me than what I've come to expect from OSNews readers.

Besides, threading allows you to simply skip over unrelated conversations...

One thing I might advocate is a limit to thread depth; e.g. three replies deep is the max. This would ensure that threads never got too convoluted and out of hand in terms of followability.

Not that I support their lack of a compliant page, but noncompliant pages are required for many old browsers. Try opening a XHTML/CSS site in, say, Netscape 3 (still company policy browser for a company I do work for). No CSS support, no HTML support (well, it supports HTML, but not any of the ratified standards). Or try opening a page that uses divs for positioning in IE4 (as compared to tables). Or try opening any of this junk in a mobile browser, especially an old one. FONT tags are ugly as sin. But they're required for older browsers. I'm not dissing any of that. But it would be very little work to put in an additional render path that produced clean XHTML/CSS code and used server-side browser detection (if they need it, they can have my PHP browser detection algorithm, but I'm sure they can make their own) to send that code only to Gecko and KHTML/WebKit browsers. And maybe Opera, if we ask really nicely. But what do I know? Maybe they use some kind of horrible internal templating system to manage all of this, and it wouldn't work with that kind of a set up.

Read the post I linked. Threading is nice, but then you end up with something like Slashdot where there's a million different disconnected conversations going on. That happens to a lesser degree here, but because people can't follow a million different conversations (I guess clicking on the "# Replies" button is too hard), they mostly end up talking about either something that has something to do with the topic, the GPL vs BSD/any other license, or how much the Gnome devs suck.

Which brings me to my next suggestion, for Adam. Add 3 new fields to our User Profiles. They can be "combo box" fields. The first one will be "Stance on GNU GPL". The second one will be "Stance on Gnome devs". The third one will be "Stance on OS X/Windows". Yes, the stance on both will be in one combo box. It is left as an exercise to the reader to decide what the user had in mind when they answered that question. Through this addition, most of the comments here can be avoided, just by clicking somebody's user profile. Brilliant! :-)

Which brings me to my next suggestion, for Adam. Add 3 new fields to our User Profiles. They can be "combo box" fields. The first one will be "Stance on GNU GPL". The second one will be "Stance on Gnome devs". The third one will be "Stance on OS X/Windows".

I definitely feel like a huge nerd for reading that and laughing out loud.

You may not like being able to follow the thread of a conversation, but your personal preferences shouldn't dictate whether or not an *optional* view is incorporated. Furthermore, the lack of a threaded view has hardly prevented threaded conversations in the least, as you suggest, as this particular thread clearly demonstrates. All it does is make sorting through the conversations a lot harder.

do you think arbitrary comment deletion is a good direction for OSNEWS to go, considering that we consider ourselves part of the FREE movement?

No, I think it sucks.

But the comment included some especially inciteful terms (inciteful, not insightful) that were explicitly offensive and directed at our editors. That has happened exactly ONCE, and I hope never again. You happened to catch it the one time it occured. I promise you, the VAST majority of moderation is done by users now, and this is a very rare exception, but I would absolutely do it again, and will not hesitate if that type of content is posted on this site again.

This is not subject to US law, this is a private site. While I personally encourage freedom and freedom of speech and I know David does too, I do not and will not protect hate speech. Period. Would you agree that that's fair?

No, just use a References-based threading mechanism like USENET does. That will take care of itself. The site already knows which message you're responding to, so just link each child message to its parent with a pointer, and (if needed) create pointers the other way to ease display.

Not much difference between writing XHTML (which should contain no presentation, just organization) and XML/XSLT, except you need to do more work for XML/XSLT. Especially in a dynamic site, where everything's pulled from the databse on-demand anyhow. Would you have them first pull from the database, then generate an XML document, then apply an XSLT transformation to create an XHTML document to pass onto the user, then apply the CSS presentation on top of that? Seems a tad complex to me...

That reminds me... How about a "xy new comments" display and a click on it would directly jump to the first new comment (another thing which is easier to implement with flat views).

I definitely agree with your #1. Being able to moderate linked articles would be a godsend, especially if we could set a filter level for the main page (say, filter out all articles over 6 hours old with a score of less than 5, so we still see the new ones, but don't see the crap). There's a lot of articles that I find poorly written and not really suitable for contribution, and that I would enjoy modding down.

Roguelazer wrote:
> I definitely agree with your #1. Being able to moderate
> linked articles would be a godsend, especially if we
> could set a filter level for the main page (say, filter
> out all articles over 6 hours old with a score of less
> than 5, so we still see the new ones, but don't see the
> crap). There's a lot of articles that I find poorly
> written and not really suitable for contribution, and
> that I would enjoy modding down.

Yeah, the articles here have a large deviation in quality from very good to very bad. And that's just for the ones that I actually read!

Automatic selective quoting would be nice, too, like the old BBS days!

Am I correct in my understanding that now entire threads get moderated down with the original post?

No. Posts are individually modded down, and the vast majority of the moderation is done by users. However, the cases when an admin "cleans up" a thread, often times, if there is a massive off topic thread, they'll take out the entire thread and you're a victim of collateral damage. That's exactly why new mod options are better - now you won't be penalized.

Ah, this sounds great. I just let out a little steam about off topic posts yesterday.

How could that work? *All* comments start at 0, and the email is submitted to the mail queue when the comment is submitted.

Sorry, replied to the wrong post:

Write an email job that runs every say...10 minutes or so. If it finds a comment on a thread that satisfies a threshold set by the user for emails, send the comment. Should involve a trivial amount of coding :-).