Books about Slashdot from Amazon.com

Suitable for both Web and Perl developers, Running Weblogs with Slash provides a lively and thorough tour of how to get started with your own moderated Web log community powered by Slash 2.0, an open-source content-management solution.

With sometimes arcane online help (or the lack of it), open-source software is often tough to master, and Slash 2.0, the open-source Web log software package, is probably no exception. Written in a notably clear--and often entertaining--style, this title provides an insider's view of what works best with Slash. Starting with the history of the software behind Slashdot (www.slashdot.org), a popular developer Web site, the authors trace the evolution of Slash as an open-source software package. While this is interesting reading on its own, you'll also get acquainted with the concepts behind a moderated Web log, where individual users contribute content which is edited for others in the community.

A chapter on installing and configuring Slash (along with Apache and Perl support) will help demystify the process of getting started. The authors include a suitable level of detail here, which should help newbies get started with Slash without much trouble.

The heart of this book looks at how Slash works and what features you'll need to master to run a Web log effectively. You'll master basic Slash terminology (like "authors," "moderators," and "stories") and the process of getting different users to contribute, edit, and post content to a site. The in-depth coverage of different configuration options available in Slash will help you customize your site, while taking advantage of built-in features (like user polls, for example).

Slash moderators not only edit and police content, but "meta-moderation" ensures that moderators' behavior can be adjusted on the fly. The authors discuss how all this works (including earning and losing "karma" points). There's also plenty here on the nuts and bolts of managing your site--whether it's getting new content, controlling abuse, or filtering out the bad stuff (using regular expressions)--in order to keep your Web log running smoothly.

Later sections dig into how to customize your Slash site, from using basic content options (like Slashboxes to display stories) to how to customize the look and feel of your site. Advanced material on ways to tweak Perl scripts provides even more options for developers. For programmers, the book concludes with handy references to the architecture, database, template language, and Perl APIs used within Slash.

Written with notable wit, Running Weblogs with Slash will allow just about anyone to get started with Slash successfully, whether you want to run it out of the box or do more heavy-duty customization. Along with some valuable technical detail, it provides an in-depth look at one of the most intriguing open-source software efforts to emerge from recent online culture. --Richard Dragan

Topics covered: Introduction to Slashdot, Web logs, and the Slash open-source project; overview of the Slash user and author interfaces; the Slash publishing cycle, installing and configuring Slash (including Apache and mod_perl hints); basic administration tasks in Slash (editing authors and configuration variables); editing and updating stories (basic story-editing options plus linking stories to other content); reviewing and approving submissions; comments and filters (including using regular expressions to filter submissions effectively); content moderation (including criteria for allowing moderation rights for users); meta-moderation (evaluating moderators, plus karma points explained); guidelines for topics and sessions (including choosing icons); hints for managing Slash communities (establishing tone, how to choose stories, finding content, site promotion); managing authors and users (the self-governing moderation system); deleting stories and anti-abuse features; customizing Slash sites (the Site Block Editor); headline swapping with XML, RDF, and RSS; Slashboxes; managing user polls; advanced customization techniques (changing the look and feel of your site); using templates and banner ads; themes and plug-ins (including the Slashprint plug-in); hints for customizing Perl modules in Slash; internationalization tips; advanced administration techniques (tweaking daemons used to run Slash tasks); Slash utilities (including template-tool, and runtask); and appendices for Slash architecture, database tables, template language reference, the Slash APIs, and configuration variables..
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The Best of SlashNOT is a collection of short satirical stories ranging from true observations of humorous events to hilarious absurdity that any true geek will love. The Best of SlashNOT takes the most humorous stories from posted on SlashNOT.com and presents them in the order that the SlashNOT community ranked them. You won't find Geek humor funnier or more laser focused on technology than The Best of SlashNOT. Articles include all the community favorites, like: . Einstein returns from grave to bitch-slap dark matter . Quaker: The non-violent first person shooter . Microsoft seeking two letters cooler than X and P . Science reverts to mad science Universe even darker and scarier than previously thought . Google arrested while dumping body . Gates and Torvalds to finally settle this thing . Schrodinger arrested on cruelty, weapons charges . IBM developing Artificial Stupidity . Microsoft releases Windows XP Homeless edition SlashNOT is a satirical website that parodies Slashdot.com, the ridiculou.
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Abstract
Large-scale, online communication systems allow many-to-many interactions among users, which can result in a variety of positive outcomes. However, the prevalence of information overload and the prevalence of user misbehavior in online, text-based environments may create barriers to realizing the benefits of online interactions. Attempts to manage online communication systems in the past depended on techniques that cannot be applied to, or do not allow, large-scale interactions. Slashdot is a large-scale, long-lived Web discussion community that uses a form of recommendation system to provide feedback about the quality of comments users post to the site. This dissertation examines how users employ the ratings provided by the system, whether comment ratings have an effect on how new users of the site participate, and how users making recommendations about content actually provide ratings. I find that users do employ ratings to change how they view content, but that there is some resistance that prevents them from doing so readily. To overcome this friction, I recommend dynamic changes based on the choices of other users who seem more willing to make interface changes based on comment ratings. I find that new user participation on Slashdot is affected by feedback on the initial comment made by the new member, but that the number of times the new user visits the site before and after posting their first comment is just as important in determining how the new member will participate in the future. Finally, I find that ratings are being sufficiently applied to comments, but that some comments are not receiving fair attention because they appear later in the life of a discussion, or deeper in the threaded architecture used to organize comments. This work finds that initial scoring of comments based on the identity of the user posting the content helps to relieve the pressure of attaining sufficient ratings on comments. Also, labels used to describe comments provide valuable feedback for customizing how users with different motivations may read comments. I also find that comment ratings positively affect user experiences in a large, online discussion system, with surveys reporting high levels of user satisfaction with the rating system. The Slashdot case shows how the use of recommendations in an online discussion system creates organization that ameliorates the problems of information overload and user misbehavior, while still allowing for large-scale, heterogeneous interactions.

Citation Details
Title: Ratings use in an online discussion system: The Slashdot case
Author: Lampe, Clifford A.
Advisor: Resnick, Paul J.
Degree: PhD (year: 2006)
School: UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
Publish Date: Aug 2006
ISBN: 0-542-56932-9


Distributed by ProQuest Information and Learning.
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