The Firehose is a collection of all the content that appears anywhere on Slashdot. Everything from comments and journal entries to RSS feeds and story submissions go into the firehose, and you can filter and interact with them in a number of ways. The plus/minus box on the left side of firehose entry lets you vote on that particular piece of content; plus if you like it, minus if you don't. A small context menu will appear when you select one, giving you the option of appending one of a few common, more descriptive tags. You can also expand the submission and use the tag box if you'd like to add a specific tag of your choice, such as "awesome" or "typo." Voting and tagging is useful and helpful; it shows other firehose users what the interesting submissions are, and helps the editors decide which ones make it to the front page.
Answered by: Soulskill
Last Modified: 05/01/2009
The text field in the top right corner is where you enter filter terms. You can sort for any particular type of entry by entering its type into the field and hitting enter. For example, doing "journal" would sort for journal entries. You can also sort for story, comment, feed, bookmark, and submission. Putting a "-" in front of a type will exclude that type. For example: "-feed" would exclude all RSS feeds. You can also sort for things like "linux", "openbsd" or "riaa" to see stories with those tags or comments and submissions that mention them. You can set it to display particular users or editors if you'd like to see just the things they've contributed by doing "user:CmdrTaco".
We realize this is a lot to take in, so we've given you several easy ways to see what readers are usually most interested in. The left side menu lets you sort by topic; hitting the Games link will show you entries related to games. Once you've used a term in the filter field, you'll notice a new entry in the section menu called "untitled," which has an edit icon next to it. You can click on that to create and save custom filters. Afterward they'll appear in that side menu for easy access. You can also use the tabs near the top to see several common views: Stories brings up a list of the recent front page items, while Recent and Popular show submissions fitting those descriptions. Using the edit button on the tab lets you modify them and save the new settings. You can also subscribe to an RSS feed for a particular tab or section.
nswered by: Soulskill
Last Modified: 05/01/2009
The colors serve as a rough quality rating for entries in the firehose. You can sort for colors by using the color-picker next to the filter field. Red is the most popular, black is the least popular, and story submissions enter the firehose at blue. Your nods and nixes affect this, so the more often you vote, the more useful color sorting becomes. The lower your color threshold, the more content you'll see. Once you get down to violet and black, you'll have a ton of feeds and comments, and filter terms will really help to focus in on the content you want to see.
Answered by: Soulskill
Last Modified: 05/01/2009
Slashdot is user-driven, but it's still up to the editors to maintain some basic content standards that fit the theme of the site. A submission may be very interesting, but also very off-topic. Political submissions often fall into this category. Another common reason is because the submission is a dupe. For every dupe that makes it to the front page, there are dozens that get weeded out by the editors. Some of them get voted up very high; after all, it was interesting enough to be run the first time. But, if you'd like to rely solely on user selections, you're certainly welcome to do so -- just filter to -story.
Answered by: Soulskill
Last Modified: 05/01/2009
Well first of all, we're happy to use good ideas when we see them. Countless websites have knocked off our cool ideas, just like we joyously took ideas from those that came before us. But ultimately the idea here is not to imitate any other social network news site. We feel that the editorial layer that exists on top of Slashdot is important. But we also think that having many eyeballs will help us more efficiently sort through the ever increasing volume of content on this here internet of ours. That's why we'll aim to strike a balance. Slashdot stories will continue to be posted by our editors. We will use the advice given to us by our readers. Sometimes we will agree, and other times we won't. You are welcome to read more or less editor content depending on your tastes.
At the end of the day, striking a balance between the wisdom of crowds and the tyranny of mobs is a difficult one. It's also a personal one: some people might regard it as having a moral component. Others may just want to read a bunch of good stories no matter what the methodology. We're hoping that we can strike a balance that will work for everyone. Your feedback can only improve the system for everyone.
Answered by: CmdrTaco
Last Modified: 08/02/2007
Currently we work great under Firefox 1.5, 2.0, and 3.0 as well as Safari. IE7 and IE8 are functional but has glitches that we are working to fix. The iPhone functions as well with a number of optimizations for small screens (although the bandwidth requirements are still fairly steep so you are probably better off on a WiFi connection for now).
IE6 is known to be broken. Other browsers might work, but we haven't really tested them. We're keeping an eye on Chrome and Opera, and fixing bugs when we have time.
Answered by: CmdrTaco
Last Modified: 05/01/2009
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