Poll 2014-03-16 Which features are the most important?
Poll
Which features are the most important?
Mail system
17 votes (9%)
Blog / Journal
33 votes (17%)
Friends and foes
22 votes (11%)
Achievements
14 votes (7%)
Search
63 votes (32%)
Daily newsletter
7 votes (4%)
Extra features (beyond slashcode)
19 votes (10%)
NSA backdoor
25 votes (13%)
Reply 34 comments

Approval Voting (Score: 5, Informative)

by bryan@pipedot.org on 2014-03-16 05:45 (#KF)

More information on this poll can be found here.

And yes, the NSA option is a joke !

Re: Approval Voting (Score: 5, Insightful)

by scott@pipedot.org on 2014-03-16 07:05 (#KG)

Reach feature parity with Slashcode first, then make this better than that Perl-hell.

Re: Approval Voting (Score: 2, Insightful)

by billshooterofbul@pipedot.org on 2014-03-16 18:32 (#KP)

I'm not sure we really need things like "achivements" or the blog/journal system. I don't think they're very important, and I don't think many people used them.

I do think things like unicode support should get priority over that

Re: Approval Voting (Score: 3, Informative)

by scott@pipedot.org on 2014-03-17 08:08 (#M3)

Could you explain why you want Unicode support as a high-priority item over other features?

Re: Approval Voting (Score: 2, Insightful)

by foobarbazbot@pipedot.org on 2014-03-17 21:42 (#MV)

I love approval and range voting, think they're generally the best option for choosing a single winner, and am delighted to see pipedot using one of them.

But , in a poll on "which features are the most important", I'm not sure approval's the right answer.

Of course, it depends on what exactly you plan to use the results for -- if the idea is to only implement features that a certain fraction of voters approve, approval's good. But if the idea is that you aim for feature-parity with /, so all these features are to be implemented eventually, but you're seeking to prioritize the order of feature implementation according to community feedback, I think using a rank ballot with Kemeny-Young counting would be better. To me, the poll title suggests the latter, but I could be misinterpreting it...

The thing about approval voting is that (provided the voter is smart about their own threshold of approval) it's good at reflecting the strength of preferences (even though it quantizes them to 1 bit!) -- if you can't stand any but your two favorites, you won't accidentally contribute to the election of the guy you put as number 3. But the flip side is, it loses the order of preference between any two candidates you do approve, and between any two candidates you don't approve. So in a case where all candidates are winning, we just want to sort them, the information of preference order is IMO more important than preference strength.

For example, suppose 60% of voters approve both items A and B (may also approve others, but at least those two), 30% approve neither -- with approval voting, you're letting the remaining 10% decide which order to tackle these two features in (by the difference of (A, !B) vs. (!A,B) votes). But using a rank ballot, you get the priorities of all voters. Of course the 10% with mixed votes will have a known preference, but the 60% block gets to specify which of these two beloved features they find most important, and the 30% block gets to specify which of these useless-to-them features they care least about... end result, Kemeny-Young spits out an order of tackling the features that makes the most people happiest.

Re: Approval Voting (Score: 2, Informative)

by foobarbazbot@pipedot.org on 2014-03-17 21:48 (#MW)

And of course, having posted this, I go back to the main page, and see an article that (1) clarifies any question about this poll's intent, and (2) is really the right place to have posted the above... And it turns out you (bryan) even linked it in the post I replied to.

*hangs head*

Notifications (Score: 5, Insightful)

by vanderhoth@pipedot.org on 2014-03-16 09:18 (#KJ)

How about notifications that someone has responded to one of your comments?

Re: Notifications (Score: 5, Interesting)

by guises@pipedot.org on 2014-03-16 09:51 (#KM)

This is the one that I was looking for.

I'd also like the accordion script for replying to a comment, so I don't have to go to a new page.

Re: Notifications (Score: 4, Insightful)

by danieldvorkin@pipedot.org on 2014-03-17 00:54 (#KZ)

This, and generally bringing the "my comments" page to (at least) feature-parity with /.

Re: Notifications (Score: 1)

by link@pipedot.org on 2014-03-18 04:03 (#MX)

Yeah. I can't get from my comment to the story or thread where the comment was posted.

Leave the search to Google et all- just format the site so that searching is easier with those engines. For example the current format of stories with the line "on YYYY-mm-dd" is likely to work much better than Slashdot's when searching for stories in the past, but could be improved so that story metadata is not confused with comment metadata.

Re: Notifications (Score: 1)

by reziac@pipedot.org on 2014-03-20 03:26 (#PP)

I'd settle for getting a daily mailer so I can be reminded this place exists.

(As it is, I depend on the reminder in your sig on Other Sites. Thanks!)

keep it up (Score: 5, Informative)

by nadaou@pipedot.org on 2014-03-16 09:23 (#KK)

You're doing a great job here.

Re: keep it up (Score: 2, Interesting)

by songofthepogo@pipedot.org on 2014-03-18 17:39 (#NK)

And fourthed.

I keep forgetting this site is here, but when I do remember to check in on it I'm always impressed with the progress in development. Great job, bryan. I'm hopeful more people will find this site and contribute comments. Other than remembering to visit and, to the best of my meager ability, contribute meaningful comments, is there anything else I could/should be doing to help the site grow?

Re: keep it up (Score: 2, Funny)

by bryan@pipedot.org on 2014-03-18 20:09 (#NR)

Submit stories!

Re: keep it up (Score: 1)

by reziac@pipedot.org on 2014-03-20 03:29 (#PQ)

Bells and whistles, meh. All I really need now is a daily mailer, so I can be reminded to check in every day. Which otherwise, I forget. :(

Re: keep it up (Score: 3, Funny)

by bryan@pipedot.org on 2014-03-21 04:46 (#QQ)

It seems that, currently, the NSA backdoor "feature" is 3x more popular than the daily mailer! :)

More options (Score: 3, Insightful)

by canaaerus@pipedot.org on 2014-03-16 20:37 (#KR)

I'd like there to be a |.rssfeed. Unicode support would also be nice.

Re: More options (Score: 5, Informative)

by zafiro17@pipedot.org on 2014-03-16 21:20 (#KT)

RSS Feed already exists! It's at the bottom of the page, or http://pipedot.org/atom .

I'll add my voice to the chorus saying this site is headed in the right direction, and it remains really gorgeous to look at. I have no need for a journal/blog, a daily newsletter, or other. I'd appreciate it if the site is responsive (that is, on a small screen, if the CSS design allows the stuff at the right hand side to reposition itself at the bottom). I visit |. regularly on a mix of desktops, smartphones, and tablets. Slashdot was almost unusable on a small screen, and their improvements miraculously made it worse. Soylent is no better. This site does pretty well but there's room for improvement.

In the meantime, how about an offer to help, in a non-coding way? It seems you could use a fleet of editors, each overseeing a topic, to make sure you have a steady stream of content. There are probably a lot of folks eager to help make this site succeed.

Re: More options (Score: 2)

by rocks@pipedot.org on 2014-03-16 22:57 (#KX)

Thanks for the tip on the RSS feed. This is a feature I want(ed), but hadn't found.

Re: More options (Score: 1)

by canaaerus@pipedot.org on 2014-03-17 08:32 (#M4)

Ah ok, found it, thank you.
I previously only looked at the "subscribe"-button which firefox displays, when there is a feed associated to a site.
Maybe you could add this link/meta-data, to make the feed more accessible?

...
oh, and here I was bitten by the missing unicode support, when I wanted to use true quotation marks...
the error message could be more verbose about the problem too

Re: More options (Score: 1)

by bryan@pipedot.org on 2014-03-18 20:11 (#NS)

Maybe you could add this link/meta-data, to make the feed more accessible?
Added.

Features. (Score: 5, Insightful)

by claywar@pipedot.org on 2014-03-17 02:59 (#M1)

To be honest, additional bells and whistles are nice, but in the end its about accessible content. So long as article descriptions are accurate, links are provided, and conversation happens, what does it matter if there is achievements, friends, foes, blogs, and so on. Keep it simple, and grow knowing that your core is strong and well-defined.

That being said, the ability to search will be awesome in the future.

Re: Features. (Score: 1)

by odm@pipedot.org on 2014-03-18 13:11 (#ND)

I agree, no important features are missing. The only thing really missing here is up to date content. If the articles posted were identical to slashdot then more people would migrate here permanently, but as it is I now visit both sites - slashdot for the news, and here in the hope that the same article is posted so I can discuss it.

More info (Score: 2, Interesting)

by hombre@pipedot.org on 2014-03-17 18:29 (#MH)

Can we get a description, including proposed features, of the proposed additions rather than just a bullet list?

Anonymous posting (Score: 4, Insightful)

by stroucki@pipedot.org on 2014-03-17 21:21 (#MQ)

Because people can't always be on the record. There seems to be a button, but it had no effect.

Re: Anonymous posting (Score: 3, Insightful)

by stroucki@pipedot.org on 2014-03-17 21:22 (#MR)

Oh, I shouldn't be allowed to upmod my own posts. :)

Re: Anonymous posting (Score: 1)

by songofthepogo@pipedot.org on 2014-03-18 17:50 (#NM)

I was just wondering about this, too. The approach to moderation here is interesting, I think, and I'm eager to see how it pans out, but there are certain aspects of it that have me wondering "is this a feature, or a bug?" I agree that posters shouldn't be able to mod their own posts. Further, it appears I can mod a given post as often as I like, and I think I would prefer that I be able to mod a post only once (though possibly an "undo moderation" option should be available, since I'm clumsy and might click the wrong moderation option).

We need more people (Score: 2, Insightful)

by nightsky30@pipedot.org on 2014-03-18 12:50 (#N9)

I like how the site is progressing, but I think what is needed most is more users. I haven't the foggiest idea how that may be implemented through code. We could write an AC Bot! *Kidding* :D As a user, I can start posting pipedot in all my sigs to try and spread the word.

It feels weird always having mod points.

Simple tweak/suggestion (Score: 3, Insightful)

by kerrany@pipedot.org on 2014-03-19 14:06 (#P8)

Put the title of the story in the title of the page, please? Right now I have 3 Pipedot tabs open, and I have no idea which one is which! I've got to switch between them to see which is the conversation I'm watching for updates on; which is the conversation I'm posting in actively, and which is the conversation for that interesting story I read earlier and haven't finished yet.

Re: Simple tweak/suggestion (Score: 1)

by reziac@pipedot.org on 2014-03-20 03:36 (#PR)

Geez yes, please! and also helpful to rig it so the page name is derived from the article (as is now done on Slashdot) rather than just a number-code that I don't remember I have to replace until I've already drilled down to where I want it sorted ... ah crap, cancel, copy article name, drill down again, save as, paste name.

PS. Really like it here!

Most important: AGPL licensing (Score: 2, Insightful)

by jondo@pipedot.org on 2014-03-25 22:07 (#TS)

You announced to release the |. source under GPL. Please make it AGPL instead, as suitable to SaaS.