Hey, Pudge. The Mumia what's-his-name thing. I turned up with moderator points Thursday or so, first time in my life ever on any slash site (you'd think with 30+ karma on slashdot now and going strong since March and having three story submissions make it to the front page I'd get a chance eventually. :) ). I saw the comment on Mumia had been marked as troll, and didn't think it was quite fair, so I marked it underrated (got a metamoderation notice today that someone thought it was fair). I'm certain the guy's as guilty as sin, and for those who believe in the death penalty (I vascillate, myself) I can't imagine letting him go free, but I felt that just indicating a person was sympathetic to him wasn't enough reason to get a point taken away.
So, I'm sure we all disagree, but that's just a great example of how well the moderation system really works. I mean, some of us felt it was inciting to riot; some of us felt it added nothing to the discussion; some of us felt it added something; some of us felt it didn't hurt. The end result (so far) is that our relative opinions canceled out. :)
Ironically I read some stuff in a slashdot journal recently with some folks screaming about the fact that slashdot editors could moderate at will. (I guess they never realized they have root on the box and admin privileges in the database.) Never bothered me, personally, but I thought it was funny that you casually mention it here and the source code is completely open while the whiners in that journal acted like it was a carefully guarded secret they had discovered.
With the traffic level we have right now, how many people have moderator points at any given time on use Perl;? I couldn't really figure out what to do with my points, actually, and I was glad for that one to have a place to spend them.
Please comment, flame, whatever. :) I'm not going to get my feelings hurt, even if you go back and undo my moderation or whatever. Actually it'd be pretty cool to have proof that someone actually read my journal.
Speaking of which, can anyone actually use the code I wrote down there that Matt Sergeant inspired?
Re:Code
jdavidb on 2001-12-30T21:15:21
Awesome!
5.005
Sorry.
my $fh; open $fh, "file";:) I think in 5.6.1 now. I trip myself up all the time when I move from machine to machine. (My worst problem lately is . Took me forever one day to figure out what an older Perl was trying to tell me about that.
Actually it's kind of cool to me that I could write something you could use, since I've been making heavy use of the module formerly known as Time::Object for over a year now. (I actually had a nearly identical design for a module on my whiteboard for the first six months of 2001.)
Re:Moderating
jdavidb on 2002-01-01T06:54:18
Thanks, pudge!
Yeah, I guess I tend to agree with you on the Mumia thing. I notice it's been modded back down by somebody. We've all been heard now, so I guess life will go on.
Actually I've been a little surprised by just how many karma points I got out of this. I had a karma of 3 and I've had 2 or 3 metamoderations say I was "fair," and that gave me several more points. (Don't trust those numbers; I'm falling asleep at the moment.)
I think I read the same stuff about the IP address hash. Admittedly it could allow slashdot editors to link anonymous posts with non-anonymous posts. On the other hand, it wouldn't be reliable (for example, I have no idea how many people are coming from the same proxy as me). But if you didn't already know slashdot could track your IP address when you posted
... well, take your licks. Asking them to not see it is like asking people to ignore the fact they can reverse engineer CSS. I say they're doing pretty good to transform it into a hash. Personally, by the time I'm so worked up as to write a post and click "post anonymously", I often change my mind about posting anyway.
The paranoid dummies and practiced trolls seem like they're completely unaware the code is open source. Strange.
