Have you considered PHP?
Yeah I've thought about it. I used it a little bit in ages past, but have
since grown very fond of Perl. And since I have a fairly sizable amount
of code already written, most of which I am fond of, I probably won't be
starting over in the immediate future.
What about First Posters?
There are a thousand ways we could try to stop the lame crap that
people seem to want to post on Slashdot. Meept, First Post, and some
of the more obvious troll bait is just part of the crap that we get to deal with.
If you are posting this stuff, just stop, it's a waste of everyone's time.
As for solutions, we've talked about many. Among the best are
- Not allowing Anonymous posts first - I don't want to restrict AC posts
any more than we do already. This seems like an unfair restrction to me.
- Reversing the order of comments - Conversation tends to flow forward,
so simply reversing the comment order would make things confusing. Besides,
then we'd have a Last Post Problem.
- Randomize the first few posts - This doesn't eliminate the problem. The
first post messages would still be there. They are annoying.
So what to do? Careful moderation or upping the standard page threshold to require
more points than a default anonymous post gets. If it continues to be a problem,
that will probably happen.
Basically we are trying to moderate as best we can, removing spam, troll posts,
first posts, offtopic stuff. The moderation system doesn't delete anything, it
just marks it down, so people can choose how much they want to read, or not
read. A better description of the moderation system can be read on the
moderator guidelines page.
Mirroring will be a feature in a future version of Slash. A distributed Slashdot could
take a zillion forms, and I've worked out several ways that it could potentially
be done. As it stands, I don't have time to implement it. Maybe someday. As for
most other suggestions, they usually revolve around expensive hardware that we can't afford,
so they simply aren't an option.
I've considered it, but not for very long. Sure, Perl is slower/less efficient that
C, but its high level string manipulation make a lot of things really easy, that
in C would hurt. A lot. Besides, mod_perl is compiling my scripts already- sure,
its compiled to perl form, but thats not all that bad. Especially considering
that writing a lot of this stuff in C would be a ton of code.
We're really not generating that many pages dynamically. The homepage, the
section indexes, and the articles are all generated and stored for users as
updates occur. These pages represent 50-60% of the sites total traffic.
The only pages that are generated dynamically are the comments pages. These
are dynamic for several reasons:
- They change a lot
- The deeper you go, the fewer times the pages are hit
- User preferences and thresholds allow the comments
to be customized to a users tastes. The static
pages ignore those tastes.
The poll scripts are part of Slash which is available on
