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Security alert overload

Posted by dave on · 8 comments
LXer; By Dave Whitinger 		Mail this story
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There have been 12 security alerts posted already today, and each time I think I've posted the last one, another appears. This raises a question that I've had for a while, and now seems a good time to ask... Should we make a filtering program for the LXer homepage?

These days about 2,000 individuals hit the LXer home page newswire at least once a day, which means that there are people out there getting a real use and value out of this site. My job here is to filter all the news out there and present it to you the reader in a simple and unobtrusive manner.

The security alerts are, in my view, important for the community and are a valid news item for the newswire. At the same time, however, it can be annoying to see dozens of alerts for a distribution you don't use.

Thus, I'm proposing a new feature for LXer: category filtering. My idea is to allow you to setup a preference option in which you can check off the items of which you have no interest, and then those items you checked off would no longer appear on your homepage. Does that sound like something that you would use? I only want to add the feature if it would get some use, so please let me know by e-mail or by posting below.

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Comments (8)

good

florin ·
Filtering is good in any case. However, there are lots of Linux security sites, why lxer.com should add to the redundancy and relay the security news anyway?
felixmoeller ·
I think, this is a really good idea.

It would be nice to disable security alerts completly. Most desktop users are not interested in them. It might be nice rank how serious they are, so as a normal user you would just see the really important ones.

Florin is right there are a lot of other security sites.

jsgasse ·
I also used the "vote" function for easy compilation of result, if it helps (yes - no to the proposition).
dave Story submitter ·
I will soon be writing additional functions that will let us use the voting data to see what stories the readers care about, and what (types) they don't.

Not doing security alerts at all? Sounds good to me - I'll give it some thought.

dave
dave Story submitter ·
I've thought more about this, and I think it's true that posting secalerts here at LXer is an unnecessary duplication of effort. I've written to LWN (who does the best security alert publishing that I've found) and asked if he is interested in syndicating his stuff over here. Then I can still alert the readers here to alerts, but I won't have to clog the homepage with them.

dave
number6x ·
I think if you group the security alerts, and list the five or six most current in a box on the right of the page the clutter would be avoided.

Members could choose to have the box displayed, or suppress it with their own setup controls. You could possibly allow us to filter by distribution name.

I think that posting them is useful, but I only run debian, libranet, and SuSE. Many of the other alerts do not interest me, but they are probably useful to others.

Thanks for asking Dave.

Sean
peragrin ·
I would say filter them by Distrobution. mandrake, debian, SuSe, etc. Let the default be you can see all of them, but you can hide the ones that aren't of use to you personally.

Filtering

plovs ·
Filtering content is a very good idea I think. I do like the security alerts, but not for distro's I do not use. And probably everybody thinks like that. LXER is already one of the best linux-news sites, and this would only make it better, thanks for your hard work.

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