etiquette

Any of my frequent readers are likely to know that I am a slashdotter. Slashdot, for all its faults, is still by far the finest geek-oriented news aggregator and forum around, at least in English. Slashdotters have long had a battle with Slashdot over story submissions. Duplicate stories abound, and so many press-releases-as-stories have shown up over time that a term has been coined for it: "slashvertisements". The result was that Slashdot introduced the Firehose, in which users (paying or not) can vote for or against story submissions and mark them with descriptive tags.

When I started reading the firehose my first reaction was one of revulsion. Are people really this stupid? Absolutely tons of the submissions have no link, and of those that actually have them, most of the links are absolutely atrocious. This and several other typical failures of story submissions prompted me to write a Slashdot journal entry entitled Slashdotters need Help with Story Submissions in which I railed against poor HTML link etiquette and other issues. Obviously I have some extra time on my hands.