OSNews

I've wrapping up what can only be called "moderation 2," what will surely end up being the biggest rewrite of OSNews voting/moderation since it was introduced. Since we made our last changes and introduced the "report" button, we've had to field many questions and address confusion about what the vote down button means now. Rather than attempt to band-aid the confusing but functional current system, we're going to start with a new moderation paradigm.

The new system will be word based, so you'll choose a term that will assign + or - points to a comment. But before I get too into it, tell me what words you think should be available for moderation. Here's what we've got so far:

Informative, Insightful, Funny are positive mods
Troll, Inaccurate, and Offtopic are negative mods

Then we have a Report Abuse option for... you guessed it... reporting comments that violate to the TOS such as spam, personal attacks, or or hate speech.

Are we missing anything?

ZFS is listed as "experimental support" - does anyone know how stable and reliable this support is (or know where I can look to find more information out about FBSD's ZFS support)?

After recently being converted to the excellent Arch distro of Linux I'm slightly saddened to read the following announcement:

http://www.archlinux.org/ (item in pink)

While I understand that the majority of Arch users are German speaking, I also can't help thinking that this move will only hinder the distro from gaining more "market share" (for want a better term).

While there are hundreds of other distro's available, Arch was the only one (aside Slackware) I've liked: it's package manager was simple and effective, it used BSD style init's (I've never agreed with Linux's excessively complex run-time modes). But despite all the simplicity, it never felt 'dumbed down' (like the more 'mainstream' of desktop distros can do â€" particularly Ubuntu), it's free from bloat and highly configurable.

Not being a German speaker, I feel my support is going to be somewhat neglected.

What are your thoughts Arch or distro langauges in general?

As some of you will immediately notice, I've disabled themeing on the site. Very few users - fewer than 1% actually - use themes at all, and we are preparing to make some site structure changes that will make maintaining themes very challenging. As a result, we've disabled themes and we will be rolling out our changes in the coming weeks or months. When we're confident our output is stable, we'll look into re-introducing themes in a new, improved, and much more complete fashion. In the meantime, the site will only be offered with our default skin. Thanks.

There are many interesting new alternative operating systems: Syllable, Haiku etc. They may promise speed, low system requirements and many good and promising features. However, I've been hoping that also the security of these new operating systems would be discussed more.

On the age of Internet can we even imagine a desktop operating system without also a connection to the Internet? With networking comes the need for security.

Although there may be no problem now and although developers may see many more urgent goals, the potential threats of future should be considered too. I think the history of old MS Windows versions at least up to Windows ME shows that network security cannot be easily added into the OS as an afterthought but it should be thought about and build into the OS right from the start.

I'm not entirely sure if this is the proper place to post this. My apologies if this was the wrong arena.

I'm accustomed to surfing websites on my mobile, especially news-sites. Full-web sites, no WAP or other pseudo-web thing.

Unfortunately OSnews feeds my Opera Mini(on a HTC TyTn II if that matters) a downscaled adapted version. This is probably great for those who are using a crappy browser that can't handle full HTML or have expensive mobile net.

Some of us would like the full HTML version on our mobiles

Doing one of these things would be great IMO:
- Have OSnews.com always serve a proper HTML page regardless of the device retrieving it, and have m.OSnews.com for mobile
- Continue as now, but at the top page include a link to a preferences page where you can set if you prefer the full HTML or mobile version. (And this setting is of course remembered!)

I shall be thankfull if any or the proposed solutions or something else that fixes the problem are implemente

Is it possible?

If I remember correctly there was an option to cancel news recommendations in older OSnews? Why is there no such option now? (Or am I blind and just missing it?)

It is easy to press the recommend this article button. However, people may change their minds and they can make mistakes. There might be better articles later, like reviews of a product, and you might want to recommend only the one that seems the best one of them in your opinion, and cancel the recommendations for older poorer reviews.

Here's an idea, maybe not of huge importance but might be useful sometimes.

On the OSnews "Submit News" page you can see suggested news by others. Why not give links there too? Sometimes, when I've submitted news, I've noticed there an interesting news article submitted by others. Usually the submitted news are so new that search engines like Google haven't yet indexed them and thus cannot find them if I try.

On the other hand, I could see one major headache and problem: spam and advertisements... The amount of spam in the submitted news might increase? But maybe that would not be an enormous problem after all?

(By the way, a submitted news article today that I might be interested in reading too, is "Accidental in-depth analysis of Ruby on Rails shortcomings". Does anyone know the link to that one?)

I found this today:

http://www.met.police.uk/so/at_hotline.htm

If you:
Have a front door that you close,
Use a camera,
Use a mobile phone
Have a white van
Use cleaning chemicals
Have a Credit Card
Use a computer
Travel
OR
Have a garage

then YOU could be a terrorist. Phone the hotline and assume the Anti-Terrorist-Submission-position while you wait for the black helicopters to arrive

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