On 29 April 2002, Jonathan Corbet said:
> (BTW, if anybody's curious about what I'm doing, see lwn.net:8088.  I'd
> love to hear comments, but please don't put up any links to the site.)

Ooh neat!  Just the sort of publicity we need.  Time for a
"Quixote-Powered" icon, perhaps?  ;-)

lwn.net:8088 is pretty slow right now -- is it using a CGI script
instead of something faster, or is there a real performance problem?
Searching the security vuln. DB was particularly slow -- took > 45 sec
to get the list of Debian security notices.

I tried to post a comment without logging in and got a traceback:

  Traceback (most recent call last):
    File "/usr/local/lib/python2.1/site-packages/quixote/publish.py", line 655,
in publish
      output = self.try_publish(request, env.get('PATH_INFO', ''))
    File "/usr/local/lib/python2.1/site-packages/quixote/publish.py", line 607,
in try_publish
      output = object(request)
    File "/home/corbet/qlwn/ContentPublisher.py", line 104, in comment
      return Comments.CommentPublisher (request).new (request, self.content)
    File "/home/corbet/qlwn/Comments.ptl", line 136, in new
      return Login.LoginRequired (request, 'comment posting')
  AttributeError: 'qlwn.Login' module has no attribute 'LoginRequired'

I created an account and logged in, but that didn't seem to have any
effect.  I think I have disabled cookies for lwn.net -- I generally do
that for sites with banner ads that I don't need to login to.  ;-)  You
probably need some cookies-disabled-detection code, and a "You need to
enable cookies to login" page.  We might just have a working example
somewhere...

All right, after enabling cookies for lwn.net, I was able to login and
then add a comment (to the PHP book story).  When I go look at my
comment, it says "No comments have been posted".  OK, now I get it: no
comments *about my comment* have been posted.  Hmmmmm.  Allowing
comments-on-comments is an interesting way to do a threaded discussion,
but the terminology is confusing.  Maybe "comment" should refer to
top-level messages attached to a story, and then everything below that
should be a "reply".

Ooh, just noticed that I -- a random surfer who just got a free login --
have an "Article operations" box with "withdraw" and "delete" links.
Presumably those are for admins only.  They don't work right now, but it
could be bad if they did!

On a higher level, I sure hope you're not planning to turn LWN into
Slashdot for grownups!  I read LWN for the stories, and I do *not* read
Slashdot *because of* the comments.

        Greg
--
Greg Ward - software developer                gward@mems-exchange.org
MEMS Exchange                            http://www.mems-exchange.org