There is, it's the downvote button. The distinction of why a downvote is useless.

Edit: yeah, karma is needed.

Actually I think it would be incredible useful.

You could use it to shift a community to a more useful direction.

A more direct way of eliminating common errors.

If on a cool new tech that's renewable if someone starts another bloody global warming discussion being able to downvote as OT could try and keep people on topic rather than having to down vote something you agree with.

There are issues with the idea, it can become censorshop, but I find it an interesting one.

You could blend colors too. Reddish-purple = off-topic troll. Dark orange = weird and scary troll. etc.

Edit: another thing I should have mentioned is that it seemed to me that only those comments made after I gained this ability were downvotable, the thread my last few comments were in was sprinkled with downvotable comments, which were newer, and non-downvotable comments which were there before mine. I might have been imagining this or be mistaken though.

EDIT: checking again at 507 and I now have the power to downvote. So there's our answer (plus my moderately shameless play for some upvotes worked).

https://xkcd.com/1224/

I think you might be mistaken. You might not have noticed yet that the downvote option disappears on its own a set time (24 hours, I think) after the comment was made. Perhaps it was only the comments older than this threshold that were non-votable?

I think my karma accrued overnight, so when I noticed I'd exceeded the threshold a lot of the thread was perhaps a day old. The only thing I am relatively certain of is that some of the older comments in the thread were not downvotable, and the newer ones were.

That would be quite computationally intensive to implement.

How about a tag system associated with each posting? Then you can have just a scalar "weight" and a set of keywords (string labels), each with a designated meaning. You press a "plus" button or something, and a menu with optional tagging pops up (tag clouds can be used).

Some tags could be "spam", others could be "didn't read" and users can build their own threshold filters for tags. (0) spam; (4) didn't read; (3) incomplete; ...

As for "didn't read", if you're not interested, just move on. If you think the article is inappropriate and can, flag and move on. If you see a comment that looks like the poster didn't read the article, you can call civilly call out what is in the article, and perhaps down vote the comment.

Yeah I thought about this very hard actually, and came to the conclusion that just a "weight"(+) button is enough.

And, if you care that much so that you would waste your time providing more ... contextual meta-info (about the weight itself), you simply need a pop-up and a quick way to select words from a common dictionary. Certain users can even make content "more spammish" by simply increasing the weight with a click (they agree with the labeling and they are "special" in some way).

This, and the weight itself should provide enough info for a comprehensive "decoration" of the postings.

I can't fault you - slashdot hasn't been relevant for.. at least a decade.

Lolling hard at suggestions to use Cygwin as a viable alternative to WSL because of this tiny nit.

So basically "there is a gaping hole in the middle of the street but it's ok, I've put a 'road ends here' sign in front of it so now it's the drivers' fault if something happens"

In this case this results in a lot of files not being editable by windows programs, plain and simple - such as the entirety of /etc and /home. That's a pretty bad situation.

What you're describing there is road works and yes of course it would be the drivers fault if they drove into the middle of the work. Even aside the obvious point about the work being sign posted, it's the drivers job to be vigilant of hazards - including those that aren't signposted (eg potholes).

> In this case this results in a lot of files not being editable by windows programs, plain and simple - such as the entirety of /etc and /home. That's a pretty bad situation.

Think about it more like using the right tools to edit the right job. You wouldn't blame Windows / Microsoft if someone screwed up their registry because they edited that binary blob in Notepad instead of Regedit. Equally if someone is clued up enough about Linux to install and use the Linux subsystem then it's reasonable enough to expect them to use Linux tools to modify the files on the Linux filesystem.

I create a file in my WSL home directory, and want to edit it in Sublime. So I google "where is the WSL home directory stored" and get `%LOCALAPPDATA%\lxss`. I plug that into WIN+R, and get the files in explorer. At no point was I stopped or even warned.

The reason is clear. WSL is grafted on to Windows, and has low priority. The windows shell and filesystem teams are currently not working to improve integration from their side (at least not publicly visible).

The shell people could put up a banner in explorer, like you got in Program Files in previous windows versions, that you shouldn't edit these files (e.g. via desktop.ini). From the filesystem side, it should be possible to make the kernel know about WSL and prohibit writing to those files from windows.

WSL could also have been implemented with an image file, instead of individual files in `%LOCALAPPDATA%\lxss`. The reason they did it this way, I believe, was to keep open the possibility of future two-way-integration. But this would mean change-listeners not only in Linux land, but in Windows-land... which again would need deeper integration from other groups at MS. I suspect once WSL has proven itself a bit, they'll add full transparent two-way-integration, i.e. you'll be able to edit lxss files from windows one day.

And how would the shell team put up a banner in Sublime?

If the kernel prevented these files from being written to, how would we install the distro in the first place?

Could, should, might, may. Yep, there are 100 ways in which some things could, and may yet, be done, but these choices were made for hundreds of sound reasons.

We're still working hard on WSL - lots of improvements in the pipe.

I just wanted to make clear that the parent comment is slightly hypberbolic.