Slashdot

What is this crazy tags thing?

Slashdot is currently experimenting with tagging articles. You are encouraged to use this feature to submit a handful of tags: brief labels that you think best describe this article. You might choose to say that this is an article about 'security' and 'mozilla'.

This is all very beta. Currently, tagging is open to our users whose accounts are more than about six months old. If your account is more recent, you can still get tag access by becoming a Slashdot subscriber.

We don't know exactly how this will all work, and a lot of it really depends on you. If you choose to add your own tags, be aware:

• Your tags are public. Everyone will be able to see them!
• Individual tags should not include spaces: a space is used to enter multiple tags. Use "bigbrother", not "big brother".
• For the opposite of a tag, prefix it with "!", e.g. "!funny" means "not funny."
• Keep your tags brief. No full sentences. Tags are not comments.
• We provide a few example tags for you. Use them if you like.
• Don't forget to click 'Tag' to save your tags.
• After you save, your current list of tags is put back into the text field for you. If you clear it and re-click Tag, your old tags are undone. To add more tags, just add them to your list and re-click Tag.
• Tags must be all-lowercase, no punctuation. Numbers can appear but can't be first. Smoosh them up: for "Web 2.0", tag "web20". Max 64 chars.
• Avoid plurals when possible: "harddrive", not "harddrives". But sometimes singular would be silly: "starwars".

We're excited about this, and see huge potential for this system. From user feedback on articles, to comment moderation, the system is really limited only by your participation, and our database hardware!

Answered by: CmdrTaco
Last Modified: 11/22/07

Are tags objective or subjective? Can I use any tag I want?

Other tagging systems let users make up any tags they want, and punt on the issue of objective meaning. So the tag "foo" means for each user whatever they want it to mean, and to the system it means nothing at all, it's just an identifier.

We're going to build the next generation of moderation on top of tags. That means we're going to poach your namespace. Some tags will have a substantive effect on the system right from the start (or very soon). Our article tagger knows about tags like "dupe" or "typo". When we roll out tagging on comments, we will teach it "troll" and "informative". These tags can have a meaning in the system. And when you come up with ways of using tags that we haven't anticipated, we will bring them into the system.

But your tags do not belong to you, they belong to everyone. We reserve the right to make changes that we think are necessary. Since this system is totally experimental, we don't know exactly what all of this might mean: it could mean one day we consolidate and change all "canine" to "dog" tags. It could mean we define some system tag and usurp another tag. This is the nature of a system in active development. Don't say we didn't warn you!

Tags elsewhere are your own personal playground and nobody cares if you mess around. On Slashdot, abusive uses of tags could have negative consequences. Precisely what that means, we don't know yet.

Yes, that's pretty arbitrary. We'll spell out policy as this evolves. For now, the deal is: tag in good faith, and if there's abuse, we'll deal with it in good faith.

Answered by: CmdrTaco
Last Modified: 2/10/06

What tags are defined?

Use dupe only when a Slashdot story is an actual duplicate of a previous Slashdot story, offering no new information.

(Misusing the dupe or !dupe tag, by the way, is a great way to ensure your user account has reduced effect on our system in the years to come. Using it accurately and quickly will do the opposite.)

Use typo when a Slashdot story writeup has spelling or grammatical errors, or bad HTML like a malformed link. Do not tag the story with the misspelled word in question.

These tags will alert us to problems immediately, which we love! But they won't show up on the top tags list. Trying to get around this with similarly spelled (but system-meaningless) tags like "dupitydupe" is discouraged.

Answered by: CmdrTaco
Last Modified: 11/22/07

What are Slashdot Bookmarks?

Slashdot Bookmarks exist to give you a quick place to save URLs for later, to share them with the Slashdot Community, and to submit them to the Slashdot Editors for consideration for posting.

Remember first and foremost that your bookmarks are public: whatever you bookmark will be available to any user of Slashdot. You can also tag your bookmarks to aid you in finding them later.

After you bookmark a URL, you will have the option to either Submit it directly to the Slashdot submission bin, or better yet, to write a Journal Entry about it. Slashdot Journal Entries can now be automatically submitted to Slashdot editors for mainpage post consideration, so bookmarks are a great way to quickly submit stories.

Answered by: CmdrTaco
Last Modified: 3/22/06

How do I save a Slashdot Bookmark?

You can bookmark a site by directly going to the bookmarks page, or alternatively, you can use the following lump of javascript as a browser button, and save it dynamically from your browser toolbar:

All you need to do is drag one of the following links to your bookmark toolbar, or right-click and save the link as a bookmark. Subscribers using SSL will want to use the HTTPS version of this link.

HTTP: Post to Slashdot (general users)
HTTPS: Post to Slashdot (for subscribers using SSL)

Answered by: CmdrTaco
Last Modified: 03/22/06

How do I encourage my readers to bookmark at Slashdot?

In case your site's webpages aren't already cluttered enough with "Digg It" and "Add to Del.icio.us" links, you can add a badge or link that automatically submits your page to Slashdot. If enough readers click, your page will be brought to our editors' attention -- it's like a cheap, fast submit.pl.

Badges look like this, and besides allowing submission, show readers the current popularity of a submitted page and let them vote on it themselves. Here's a block of HTML you can include in any page:

<script src="http://slashdot.org/slashdot-it.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

You'll find details and examples in our Badges How-To.

Answered by: scc
Last Modified: 10/03/07

How do I share my Bookmarks?

Your bookmarks are available to you at /my/bookmarks. You can access other users' bookmarks from their homepages. To read mine, you would use /~CmdrTaco/bookmarks.

Answered by: CmdrTaco
Last Modified: 3/22/06

How can I see what Slashdotters are tagging?

At http://slashdot.org/tags you can see some of the most popular tags. Each tag shows something about readers' thoughts on stories and bookmarks. Categorizational tags often work like a mini-search (web20, google, globalwarming, diebold, bush, rumor, xbox), and commentary tags give a glimpse into Slashdotters' opinions (itsatrap, fud, snakeoil, cool, finally, whocares, and the Jeopardy-style answers yes and no).

You can see your own tags by visiting /my/tags, or any user's tags at /~CmdrTaco/tags.

We'll be doing the usual improvements -- RSS feeds, tag clouds, nicer formatting -- a little while down the road.

Answered by: CmdrTaco
Last Modified: 11/02/06

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