Starship Trooper's Journal: Slashdot Secrets vol. 1: Journal Secrets

Slashdot has a wealth of features that are either poorly documented or not documented at all. In order to improve the Slashdot experience for everyone, here is the first in what may eventually become a series of articles documenting Slashcode's subtleties. All those small but useful features that are forgotten when the time comes to update the FAQ shall finally be exposed! And there is perhaps no part of Slashdot as inadequately documented as the Journal system. So without further ado, I humbly present Slashdot Secrets volume 1: Journal Secrets.

• How do I see a list of all recently written journals?

  Use the 'journals' search op with no search term. The URL http://slashdot.org/search.pl?op=journals works nicely.

• Is there an easy way to catch up on my friends' latest journal entries?

  Yes there is! Try http://slashdot.org/my/amigos to get the full content of the ten latest journals posted by your friends.

• Is it possible to get an RDF feed for journals?

  Yes. To get a feed for someone's journal, use a URL of the form http://slashdot.org/journal.pl?content_type=rss&uid=<uid>, where <uid> is the user ID of the user you want a feed for. You can get a user's ID by going to their user info page and noting the large bold number in parentheses. For example, CmdrTaco's user id is 1. Yours is most likely a bit higher than that :-)

  Alas, there is not yet a way to get an RDF for all journals, or even journals by your friends. This is most likely an oversight on the Slashcode developers' part and not an intentional design decision; hopefully it'll be fixed soon.

• My Karma is Terrible! I can only post two comments a day, even to my own journal! Whatever shall I do?

  Log out and post anonymously. Up to 10 comments per day can be posted from any one IP address, regardless of a user's karma. If you have been banned for excessive negative moderation, however, you're unfortunately stuck unless you get yourself another IP address.

• I enabled comments on my journal and it's getting overrun with Trolls. Slashdot won't let me disable comments. Is there anyway I can stop this?

  You can click the "Edit" link for the entry, copy its content into your paste buffer, and delete the entry. Repost it with comments disabled.

That's all for now. If there's another journal trick, tip or secret I missed that you think should be listed, you're welcome to post a comment below informing us all about it. Suggestions for the next installment of Slashdot Secrets are welcome as well.

Mod my own journal?

[sulli]

I keep hearing rumors that one can moderate comments in one's own journal, but I haven't been able to do that. Is this just a Big Lie told by the Trolls and Crapflooders to keep the People down?

As far as I can tell, no.

[Starship Trooper]

I think having editorial control over the comments in your journal would be a good thing, though. It could be made an option like "Enable Comments". That way, when someone has Editorial Control enabled, a warning can be displayed in the journal discussions so that they know they're at the journal author's mercy rather than the Slashdot editors'. I don't know how well that'd work out, though. Just a thought :-)

pumpernickel, is that you?

[sulli]

goddamn, you find sllort everywhere. it's all a big conspiracy by the Trolls to keep you down!

just to make it really clear: sulli != sllort. I'm a Fan, that's all. Maybe you should become one, and then you can quit stalking everyone else as well.