CmdrTaco's Journal: Comment History, Frequent Mod Access, Traffic

The comment history rewrite went into this weeks code refresh, and as with any change that affects this many users, people have their opinions. There are a couple of bugs and a couple of oversights that we will get fixed up, hopefully by next week. To me the most annoying problem is that there is no way to see if a comment is attached to a discussion, poll, journal, or story. Other users are confused by my decision to place the 'attached to Story Name' text *after* the comments themselves. So many in fact that I may end up moving it. I thought it made more sense this way, but it looks like I was wrong.

As for the update itself, some people have complained, but most of my direct feedback has been pretty cool about it. The most substantial change was simply to group posts made to the same discussion. This reduces redundant information, and groups related comments. I think this is all a good thing. What I don't understand is that a few people say it looks more cluttered. For most discussions, we reduced the amount of text on your screen. I think that it's the right alignment of the 'attached to' text. As always, we're taking polite feedback.

Lately a few users have emailed me saying that they seem to be getting frequent mod points. I just wanted to note that in most cases this is a good thing. Mod points are distributed to users who meet a variety of criteria including karma, reading activity, posting history, meta moderation activity. Good meta moderators will get mod points faster. The most common reason to not get mod points is that you read to much Slashdot! Moderator points are given to users who's reading habits are in the middle of the bell curve. I get occasionally emails from someone who angrilly tells me that he reads Slashdot a thousand times a day, but never gets mod points... well he's to far outside the bell curve to be eligibile.

Traffic on Slashdot appears to have risen in recent months again. A normal weekday is like 3.5 million pages. All the hardware seems to be holding up just fine, although I have to think at this point that more hardware would have a corrosponding page count increase.

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

The Curve

[fm6]

Lately a few users have emailed me saying that they seem to be getting frequent mod points.

This happened to me a couple years ago. I'd been cruising along, getting mod points once every 6 weeks or so. Then all of a sudden I was getting them every 3 or 4 days. And then you had that big upgrade, and I haven't gotten mod points since.

I feel slighted! <sniff>

too many mod points?

[molo]

Rob, I think there may be too many mod points in the system. Lots of stories are getting more than 30 +4 and +5 comments. I usually read at +4 to increase the SNR, but now just about anything is getting modded up.

Some examples:

Amazon Sued for Patent Infringement: 58 of 260
Games: Magic Words - Interactive Fiction in the 21st Century: 50 of 250
Industry Threatened by Innovation at the 'Edge'?: 36 of 116, 31%

I'd prefer not to read at +5, but I might have to change it. I used to read at +3, but the amount

My observations

[singularity]

The new user info page iis interesting, and will take some getting used to. I am used to briefly scanning my user info page to get a rough idea of the ratio of my posts modded up to those that are not (generally about 1:2).

I do think the right justification of the "Attached to" should be changed. I think left justified below the comment subject would work, maybe indented a tabstop or so.

As far as mod points go, and I know you are not going to answer this question: I am wondering where the bell curve is as