The Slash source release is wrapping up. I've decided to get a version out the door before I go to work on moderation stuff. The Look & Feel stuff is pretty much functional now (within reason). Check out Taco Hell or Slash to see how different articles on the same server can look. There are glitches yet, but for the most part, things look pretty good. Hit the link to read some notes on the moderation debates, as well as a few notes about recent changes to Slash.

We've got a problem on Slashdot. Along with amazing growth we've experienced in the last 6 months, we've suffered some of the same problems as usenet. Namely the signal to noise ratio on the comments is getting out of control. There are real gems in the comments section, but wading through 'I got the first comment!' crap, or huge rampant offtopic debates is wasting bandwidth and time of the thousands of readers who just want the good stuff. Keep reading to read the deal. Updated read the end

Well folks its friday and I'm ready to relax, so I'm going to take a second and just unload the list of stuff that has changed here recently. Also, note that I've added a link on the left hand menu to 'Ask Slashdot'. We're going to start posting more of them, but only put the more relevant ones of the homepage itself. This will be handled by Cliff Wood who has done a great job filtering these things for us. Hit the link below to read to Slashdot notes.

Browsing the web (instead of coding -- CVS frustration) tonight, I came across Linux Preview, a site which appears to track slashdot articles and translate them into spanish. It's not only an attractive site, with additional touches like Classical Music MP3s, but is also a great idea: many spanish people can now enjoy our articles. It's just a shame that it neither credits slashdot, nor our contributors, but instead claims its own copyright.I hope Francisco Burzi gets my hint... Update: Hint taken. Thanks.

Numerous Slashdot tidbits to report today. For those of you who are interested, you can click the following. Hear about the new comments code, read the exciting bugs list, behold the wacky comments about SlashNET, admire my response to Segfault's recent article, and of course, behold the results of my adventures with my new breadmaker.

The new comments code is in. Hit the link below to read a relatively up-to-date list of the outstanding issues with it. I'm going to bed. Looking forward to reading a few hundred flames from people complaining about it tomorow *grin*. Note IE and Lynx are broken right now. I'll hopefully fix it tomorrow. It's a problem with my Set-Cookie:, so if you are familiar with that stuff, check it out and let me know what I'm doing wrong.

Ok I pulled a boner last night so comment posting broke. It's fixed now, and will be until I finish lunch. Then I'm going to work on the new user system. In the meantime, please test the users script and let me know if you encounter any exceptional wackiness. Hopefully I'll get this sorted out before the monday rush. I've been adding features to Slash all weekend, we'll need a new release pretty quick to get the developers caught up.

Its been awhile since I hopped up on the soapbox, but I guess nows the time. First, a status report: We got about a million hits last week. The new server and connection to UPN held up fine. We saturated the T1 a bit, but the T3 will be in soon. The DNS moved on monday and it seems to be cool. I also wanted to plug Linux-HW who sent us the new 9gig hard drive. Muchos thanks. I also added some links in the 'older stuff' box so you can link directly to previous days stories in the normal homepage format. Much more convenient. Click below to read about Slashdot user accounts and other nifty features that will be coming.

I've recieved quite a number of writeups from folks on the LSA, the LSB, and various other Linux standardization efforts. I've decided that tomorrow I'm going to post a few of the better ones. If you have an opinion (and judging by my swollen inbox, you all do) write an essay saying what you feel and why you feel it. Does Linux need to run free? Is this freedom the thing preventing us from truly being mainstream? We won't resolve it, but hopefully we can fairly present a few sides to the debate.

Welcome to SanFrancisco. We're hooked up on the new box out here in CA. We're now on a T1 that we can load up, and in a few weeks, we'll have a T3 to saturate. You can use 207.218.152.112 for now. temp.slashdot.org should also propogate around sooner or later. I'll get to InterNIC soon. In the meantime, hurry and post lots of comments to make up for the last 24 hours.

Allright this is the temp server. Comment posting has been disable until the box goes up at its new home (hopefully in the next 24hrs or so). I'll overpost things today so nobody gets to bored (This is my chance to post all the flamebait articles I've been saving!). Anyway, sorry about the hassle, but when we get to the new place, there is a whole T1 for Slashdot. And a few weeks later, a T3. Hopefully we won't worry about the Slashdot Effect killing ourselves any more.

Tomorrow we are shipping the server to UPN. We've been shooting around many ideas about how exactly we're going to handle it, and after weighing all possible alternatives, what will be happening is as follows: The server will go out as late in the day as possible that will guarantee next day shipping. We'll definately insure the box. If it blows up, I want to buy a corvette and a quad CPU alpha to replace it :). However, in the meantime, we've got a temp box. It's a slower box, so to make up for it, we're going to disable comment posting. It won't be long, so please don't make me feel guilty about it. This will at least allow us to post stories for the day. After the move, we'll sort out the DNS stuff, and then hopefully, I won't have to worry about bandwidth or CPU or memory or anything for a long time.

Allright we're back up. Few minor glitches popped up, but hopefully everything is functional again. Keep an eye out for strange behavior. Hopefully things will be less strange now that we have a nice clean box running the show.

Ben Burdick (weez) writes "SlashNET's second forum was a success. A log of the night conversing with the Stampede Linux developers can be found here "

Well due to an oversight in Slashdot's code, posting of the 2000th story has caused the stock market to crash, as well as causing Russia to accidentally launch their nukes. If only we had thought ahead, so many lives could have been spared. Oh wait, different 2k problem. Anyway, we set our daily hits record (224,000 hits in a single day) on wed, as well as posting our 2,000th story (this one!). It's been a good week, but now I'm moving Slashdot to a brand new 9gig HD, and then we'll be ready to move to faster bandwidth country and prepare for the 10k story bug which will probably cause a comet to destroy the earth.

Ben Burdick (weez) writes "SlashNET will be conducting a forum with the developers of Stampede Linux on Saturday at 10 p.m EST. The forum will be held in #TheVoid. "

First, since we have spare clock cycles and memory, I implemented a Comment Search Script. Use it if you desire. Next I fixed the poll booth comment glitch that was causing everything to look funky. Third, I changed the banner HTML to a never version using (Ack!) Layers/IFrames. The page renders much faster on my box now. If anyone notices browser incompatibilities, let me know (please don't email just to tell me you hate layers. I already don't have time to reply to all of my mail). Next up is a rewrite to a chunk of the homepage so it displays the last 24 hours of stories in the main space, and the previous 24 hours in the Older Stuff box. Hopefully later today. The mysql bug is still here, but I've got a cron job making sure we don't stay down for long...

The third-to-last piece of hardware just went in the Slashdot box this morning. VA Research (Blatant Plug Alert:Go Buy Stuff From Them!) sent us some parts- RAM being the important one. The box now weighs in as a Dual P2/266 with 256 megs of RAM. This will mean that the box will still function during heavy posting (ala any time either KDE or Gnome is hinted at *grin*). The last piece is a hard drive/uber fast controller which should be here RSN. Then if we can just iron out the mysql glitch, everything will be spiffy to ship the server out to the land of vast bandwidth. We're getting there folks, so keep hanging in there. As a side note, we had 182,000 hits yesterday- all this hardware should give us some room to grow now.

OK, a good number of you have been e-mailing about the server status, where we are going to co-locate. Stop it. Thanks to the wonder of the Pine inbox beep, my laptop sounds like I am trying to start a stacatoo rap group. I think I'm gonna go gold next week.
Anyway, we are going to be moving out West, young man, to the fabled hills of San Fransico. Blacklight, who handles the ads for here, Everything and others will be coloing with us on a (ta-da) T1 and a T3, so that should give us room to grow. We will be living at UPN, for those who care. New hardware is coming for both Everything and Slashdot, so that will be picking up as well. Lastly, if anyone is interested in writing book reviews, please drop me a line.

I've sorted out most of the kinks now. For those who are curious, the system currently is dying because of a glitch in Mysql- occasionally it just goes nuts and uses 100% CPU. When that occurs, Slashdot becomes unusable until the process is killed. I've upgraded almost everything to the latest version, as well as drasticly simplified a few of the more complicated parts of the site, so I'm hoping things are cool. We should have more RAM and a new HD in the next day or 2. After we're sure those are stable, we're shiping the box to a new ISP where we'll have more bandwidth than even Slashdot can consume. Then life shall be peachy. At least, I hope...