And NOW I see the value in being able to rate other DNKers comments....+1 to Rob.

I'm with gazelem67; FTP is a stable protocol with a long, successful track record. I don't use it often, but when I do I seldom have a problem. The author concludes that FTP is "outdated, insecure, slow, unfriendly" -- the same could be said for Morse Code, for instance. Does that mean Morse Code is irrelevant or useless? Hardly. Like FTP, Morse Code fits the bill in a particular niche. Additionally, just as painful command-line FTP operations led to smart FTP clients, the agonizing and error-prone process of keying Morse Code eventually drove the development of automatic Morse Code transmitters.

Now if we were talking about Gopher, I might be more inclined to agree. :)

Hmm, and in the comments one could mock the spammers. Could be quite therapeutic!

(And perhaps a useful resource for generating a spammer blacklist)

So we would vote for the most entertaining spam links? :D

Are there any common characteristics of spammer accounts (domain, user agent, length of post) you've noticed, Gavin?

Very cool. :)

monty: I wasn't aware of a Gravatar-induced slowdown. I understand your point about Digg, though I think DNK is far more useful since it doesn't have the swarms of partisan morons turning every item into a political debate.

Anyway, I came across a potential solution to the Gravatar speed problem: http://troubleseeker.com/2006/12/15/taming-the-gravatar .

If a DNK user doesn't have a Gravatar account, what's the worst that can happen...they're assigned a default avatar? Seems like a pretty small price to pay. On the other hand, users with Gravatars (disclosure: I'm one of them) have yet another site that supports their online 'branding'.

Gavin, I say go ahead with it -- the time it takes to add support for custom avatars will probably be better spent on other DNK features. monty is prudent to be wary of a third-party solution but I really don't see much of a downside.

Lame.

No thanks.

Gah! I meant "it has" instead of "is has". Sorry.

"Get over the name and look at the tool."

I did. IT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH .NET -- THESE ARE JAVA TOOLS!

Color me crazy, but on a site called DotNetKicks you should be linking to .NET related content. This article is no more relavent to .NET than if I linked to a page about Adobe Flash-related technologies and saying "ooh, wouldn't it be cool if Silverlight could do this too??"

No .NET, no kick from me. And I'd tack on an additional -1 kick if I could for the political references....we're inundated with that crap everywhere else, we don't need it in technical circles.

TweeZz, those benchmarks are a tad dated (October 2006). jQuery 1.1.3, which was just released, is much faster than previous versions -- see http://jquery.com/blog/2007/07/01/jquery-113-800-faster-still-20kb/ .

Personally, I've drifted from prototype/scriptaculous to Mootools...but after giving jQuery a good long look after seeing this on DNK I'm likely to use it on my next project.

Agreed....how did this suddenly make it onto the front page with 9 kicks after being lost in the "upcoming stories" section for *days* with only 2 kicks?

I do not like the idea of a karma system; to some folks, a good karma score can become more important than actually posting useful items and thus leads to abuse. Currently I decide which links on DNK to follow based first upon user comments (if any) then by the description and number of kicks....but I don't see karma improving my particular method.

As for a -1 kick -- I'm all in favor of that. Such an ability would knock spam down in the (relatively short) period of time it remains on DNK (the 'report spam' function works well). Additionally, it would provide a balance to kick abuse (i.e. a user coming in under multiple accounts and kicking a clearly useless article).

I'm quite happy with DNK as it is, but if you have to add something...make it the -1 kick. Avoid the karma system at all costs.