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PROGRAMMING PARADIGMS
Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot bear the falconer
-W.B. Yeats, "The Second Coming"
With the publication of Running Weblogs with Slash, by Brian Aker and Dave Krieger (O'Reilly & Associates. 2002 ISBN 0-596-002), even more people can create their own Slashdot-like sites. The Slashdot influence continues to grow. There are many such Slashdot-like sites, most of which could be called "weblogs." Some of the weblogs built with Slash, the software behind the legendary weblog Slashdot, can be found at http://yass.slashcode .com/. Slash code lies behind everything, from a self-described "crabby personal site" to serious political sites like http:// www.YuccaMountainFacts.org/, set up to inform the public about a proposed nuclear waste storage site in Nevada.
The Slash saga began in 1997 when Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda started running, and writing frequent content updates to, a web site called "Chips and Dips" on a university student account. Later that same year, Rob and his friend Jeff "Hemos" Bates registered the slashdot.org domain, moved to a dedicated server, and began automating the web-publishing process. With the help of more friends, they added user polls, user comments, remote administration, templates, a web interface for editing stories, and an overflowing plate of Pert spaghetti. Eventually that spaghetti got (somewhat) untangled and became Slash- the "Slashdot Like Automated Storytelling Homepage." And slashdot.org discovered that it was a weblog, or blog. By the time Slashdot was (on some days) eating up the entire bandwidth allocation of Holland, Michigan, the unmoderated user comment system was showing the need for some moderation if the inevitable inanities were not to bury the gems of commentary. At first the moderators were hand picked, but soon moderation was opened to the entire Slashdot community.
The Slash moderation system evolved over time in response to felt needs. But there was a value system at work, too: Slash moderation embodies the freespeech analog of the Hippocratic principle-first of all, censor nothing. Any illiterate, inconsiderate, immoderate, immodest idiot can post any kind of inane comment to a Slash site, and if you set your idiot threshold low enough, you can read the idiot's drivel. Or not. The moderation system gives a valuation to comments and you can use that to get a...