First up, Jon over at Brain Power has improved the job search engine to allow boolean searching, and parenthesis, so you can search for "c++ and not "visual c++" or "(unix and perl) or linux" to help you on your quest for unemployment. Second is a minor change to the posting system. I'm not quite convinced about the exact numbers, but users are now getting a default score based on their comment posting history. ACs still post at 0 and normal users at 1, but based on your past commenting, your scores can start at anywhere from -1 to 4. I've posted the exact numbers, more details, rationale, as well as assorted other comments on the system below.

I've made several major and minor changes again over the last few days. Mainly again regarding moderation, but also you ought to see a few minor UI improvements on the homepage and the comments as well. I like 'em. Hope you do to. Click the link to read some comments on updates to the moderation system (especially important for moderators- you guys have lost some power, so read why :) and more importantly, read my suggested requirements to be eligible for 'Jury Duty'.

We've updated the Jobs page to link through to Brain Power. These guys are relatively new company, but they're a Linux friendly operation (running on Linux and I even see Linux jobs in their engine) so I'm pretty pleased to be working with them (plus I think we get paid if you submit your resume, so go do that *grin*) I found 65 jobs searching for the word "Perl" so they've got something right. Other Slashdot Updates: If those "X Replies Below Threshold" links in the comments annoy you, I've added an option to turn them off from the user preferences. I've got a few more odds and ends to work on with comments, then I'll let the code settle down for a couple days and starting work on the new moderation stuff. Brace yourself.

I subtly changed comment spill- originally articles switched to indexed mode once the total number of comments exceded the spill. Now, the switch to indexed occurs when the number of siblings excedes the spill. This makes more sense to me- extremely deep conversations could cause indexing to occur even if there were only a few top level comments. Added an option to hide scores if you really don't like them. Lots of positive feedback on Highlight Threshold too: I love that feature personally. I'm still working on the Login problems- but I'm not getting very far. Its cookie related though. Also, its Hemos's 23rd birthday today, so send him mail and wish him well. Lets see how much mail he can get *grin*.Update: 03/28 01:37 by H : Well, thanks to all of you yahoos *grin* out there, I've been Slashdotted-or rather, my inbox has. 707 birthday messages-and fetchmail is still going. Thanks folks.

I've attached a summary of the major changes and bug fixes below. These are regarding Nested Mode, Anonymous Posting, Highlight Thresholds, and Login Problems. Also some comments about moderation. If any of these things are on your mind, read on.

Many people are submitting The Obvious article about Jon Katz not belonging on Slashdot. I guess I'm glad that in the end its up to me. Personally, I think most of his articles are good. xach sent us a deja news bit that goes much further. I agree with most of the stuff in these articles, but I also think most of Katz's articles are worth reading, but when he mentions his book, I press the back button. You can too.

For the last few days, I've been doing virtually nothing except read email regarding comments, and making changes to the code to implement new ideas that people have suggested. Click the link below to read a summary of the changes.

As many of you have noticed, something has changed recently with Slashdot moderation. Its not my major change that is still coming, but instead its a significant tweak to the old system. Hit the link below to read the summary of these changes, and comments about them. This is extremely important to any of you who read or post comments.

Todays changelog: I cleaned up the Preferences Page to organize it somewhat rationally. I also cleaned up a lot of sticky code in the comments section. In the process, I added a few useful new options: No Sigs, and some Order controls. Displaying comments by Score, or by reverse date are each quite useful. Nate added a few Slashboxes: Beta News, Be News, Hacker News Network, and someone else suggested Weather in Hell. I also fixed the busted ordering controls on the Custom page and started fiddling around with user definable time zones. I need a good resource on time zones and stuff so I can make daylight savings and crap work properly. Yuckus. Ah well. Should eat some dinner. Its been a few days since I had a real meal.

Well I guess this is todays changelog: First, my space heater is busted so I can't feal my fingers very well. Second, "Light" and "No Icon" options are in the user preferences. Combined with with "No Boxes" and setting your mode to NoComment, you should have a Slashdot that will work on extremely minimal browsers. Comments probably will still die in light mode (and still require a table) but I'll work that out later. Hit the link to read about changes to various Slashboxes.

The arrival of the new server last week brought spare clock cycles to burn. It was time to make Slashdot customizable. Last thursday I announced the ability to filter the story display, but now, we have full customization of the grey boxes on the right side of the homepage. Currently, things like The Poll and Freshmeat dominate, but now we have a couple dozen interesting boxes to choose from, ranging from the User Friendly to the JenniCam to various search forms and headlines to a few of our favorite sites. Or you can just turn them all off. If you are Logged In and you Edit your Preferences. I'm open to suggestions about new boxes, and in the future we'll be allowing users to make and share their own custom boxes. Course by then hopefully we'll have a few more servers to distribute the load over.

I've been a busy boy- but mostly today has been debugging and optimizing stuff. With the new filterable homepage, the server needs to do a lot more work (those dynamic pages don't just generate themselves people!) But I think I've sorted out the major bugs at this point. (note:mod_perl is so cool). http://slashdot.org/ should automatically route logged-in users to index.pl, but serve everyone else the static page. Hopefully this will help keep things quick. Plus I've done a lot to optimize out SQL where possible. Thanks to everyone who has been helping test this stuff out and sent suggestions- most of the suggestions are coded now. We should be ready for wide scale testing tomorrow. (Assuming no major bugs crop up yet tonight and cause me to miss the X-Files)

Logged in users will notice New Options on the Preferences Page. (non-logged in users should go to the Accounts Page and login). Last night I added the ability to filter Slashdot on Author, Section and Topic for all you Katz haters. Today I added an option to configure how much news you want on the homepage. Tonight I finish configuring of the grey boxes on the right hand side of the homepage. Its actually working nicely: I've got a picture of Dust Puppy, the JenniCam, and a couple forms for my favorite search engines. You can even have a custom block for your own bookmarks if you really care. If you have URLs to sites that have open back ends that we could import useful stuff from, let us know. We've already got our favorites in there, but we could do anything that makes sense so send in suggestions- preferably with parsable back end pages or perl scripts to make it easy. Having a fast server is cool. We can do much neater things. Update: 03/11 02:18 by CT : Did I mention you can now disable comments? *grin*

President John F. Kennedy wrote in to say that Propaganda 5 is out. Another outstanding series of background images. RPoet wrote in to say that The Gimp had a 1.1.3 developer release come out. Bill the Cat sent us another strange eBay Auction Item. Les VanBrunt sent me a picture from LWCE that should be destroyed. netweasel sent us a link to Jesus Action Figures! Collect All 12 Apostles! Jesus! With Super Healing Grip! I bet Boba Fett would win. Bowie J. Poag wrote in to say that CopyLeft now has Themes.org shirts for sale. unitron sent us a link to Phone Spell which converts ph#s to words. I found some cute ones for mine- wish my area code didn't have a 1 in it. Lastly, another reminder to go to the User Account page and edit your preferences. Slashdot article filtering should be working. More coming tomorrow, assuming this stuff works as advertised.

A truckload of you have emailed to curse me because you aren't getting emails from the system for lost passwords and new accounts. I'm getting emails from some of my accounts, but not from others, so hopefully I can get this working soon. Probably just switch to Net::SMTP. But wait, thats not all. Hit the link for a big batch of assorted updates pertaining to bug fixes, hardware updates, and new features coming up on Slashdot. Its fun for the whole family assuming your whole family is deranged. Update: 03/10 11:34 by CT : I think email is working again. Hopefully everyone can stop emailing me now *grin*. Update: 03/10 11:55 by CT : The Users Page has been updated- click 'Preferences' to get the first round of Slashdot customization. More hopefully in the next day or 2.

The new box is stabilizing at 206.170.14.76. Thanks to the several of you who've commented on various things. Yeah, its a bit slow- but thats actually because I think we were hitting our bandwidth cap. Anyway I've got a new kernel and I've shut off the useless services, and I think we're almost ready, but I need some of that Slashdot Effect for once to make sure we're gonna go uninterupted tomorrow. So go to 206.170.14.76 for a couple minutes and post some comments or something. Lets see how revved up this beast really is. (don't worry about 404s- I haven't moved the 200 megs of old articles over yet) Update: 03/09 01:31 by CT : Wow! You guys kicked more pages out of that thing than I would have thought possible. It was doing about 3 times the load of Slashdot. I think its stable. You can be gentle again *grin*

Allright the big beefy new VA Research box (Dual P2/450 with 512 megs of RAM- replacing a dual P2/266 with 256 megs!) is up and running at 206.170.14.76. Go ahead an smash it around a little bit. I need a little bit of that Slashdot Effect before I try actually running Slashdot on top of it. If we don't have any major problems, I'll probably switch everything over later tonight. The old server was handling over a half a million pages per day. Hopefully this one will have muscle enough to support us while I work on the personalized homepage stuff. Update: 03/08 05:27 by CT : THUD. that didn't take long.

Proof once again that I shouldn't be allowed anywhere near a root password, Slashdot's httpd has begun crashing. It dies about every 4 minutes for no apparent reason. Nothing shows up in any of the logs. I haven't changed a single thing on this damn machine since last wed, and this started yesterday, so its either gremlins or script kiddies. Anyhoo, please hang in there- I'm working as fast as I can. I'm going to be shuffling around some hardware soon (including a much faster box for Slashdot) so hopefully that will help. This puts a delay on the new moderation system (grr) but I'll get to it. I'll be a bit balder but I'll get to it. I gotta hire a sysadmin. Ugh. Update: 03/08 01:15 by CT : Please stop sending resumes!

Tonight at 7 (for once on Slashdot, the times will be pacfic and not eastern!) we're going to hang out at some place called Cafe Babylon- its like a block away from the Convention Center. It meets my single requirement for an eating establishment: net access. So anyway, the BSI boys are gonna hang out there this evening (Alex is giving me free food! Yee haw) If you're in the area, stop in. We'll have our own little Slashdot pre-LinuxWorld party. It'll be fun.

The excerpting of my book "Running To The Mountain" on Slashdot last week was shockingly and surprisingly successful. Because of the excerpting here, I shot near the top of Amazon's Top 100-selling books in just a few hours, and stayed on the list all weekend. This experiment in digital literary empowerment flew in the face of just about every conventional publishing wisdom about how books and the Internet and Web do -- or don't -- interact. It suggested that for writers, as well as for so many other groups, the Net can, in fact, be just as empowering as gasbags like me have been saying for years. What happened to me wasn't supposed to happen. It shocked my publisher, and more than a few journalists. And typically,it provoked some especially ugly -- and for me, quite sad -- discussions and accusations on the site.