v1.0 - Original version v1.1 - Cleaned up so it could be distributed v1.2 (15th July 2001) by Kevin Kadow - Removed dependency on wget and changed to LWP - Cleaned up portions of the code v1.3 (16th July 2001) - Started a changelog - Added cache control to reduce server load - Removed slashdot graphic from the top of pages - Removed messages box from above the comments - Cleaned up documentation - Added user definable threshold - Made it so that going to just avantify.cgi will take people to the Slashdot main page v1.4 (29 August 2001) - Quick hacks to get it working under Slash 2.2. Some stuff that shouldn't show, now does, but its better than nothing. Next version will be 2.0 and need a total rewrite *sigh* v2.0 (30 August 2001) - New major version number, entirely new code. Now properly parses the main site, allows you to toggle items on and off and the horriffic searches and replaces have been replaced with pattern matches. - Released under the GNU GPL. The last licence was fine, but thought I might as well support the organisation that provided these nice free tools. v2.1 (20th September 2001) - Added a "(read more)" link and the ability to turn it on and off so that you don't have to scroll down and then back up to link to the article. - Changed copyright symbol to © for cleaner HTML. - Added an option to remove italics from the output so that Palm Pilot versions of Avantgo don't render everything in bold (which in my opinion looks horrible and is difficult to read). v2.2 (26th October 2001) - Added local caching which will reduce the hit on Slashdot when the script is being used by multiple people v2.3 (29th October 2001) - Fixed bug that meant that some scores for comments weren't being shown (thanks to Glenn Phillips for the fix) - Updated the documentation regarding using AvantSlash's local caching (thanks to Glenn Phillips for the suggestion) - Added user definable cache timeout option for advanced users v2.4 (14th December 2001) - Updated the contact details to reflect new URL - Removed my email address from the template to avoid being caught by spam bots crawling the site v2.5 (11th February 2002) - Updated code to work with changes to Slashdot's HTML v2.6 (21st February 2002) - Updated code to work with new URL sections (http://*.slashdot.org) - Added nice logo for no real reason. v2.7 (11th March 2002) - Updated code to work with slightly new HTML redesign - Added alt tag to logo and tagline ("News for Nerds. Stuff that matters") - Added code so that visiting an external site causes all links and images to be removed. - Modified default comment level to be 5 rather than 3 as too often you'd reach your page limit v2.8 (30th May 2002) - Updated code to work with slightly new HTML redesign - Fixed bug that meant that anonymous posters didn't show up (thanks to Dan Fabulich for the fix) - Updated the ad filtering code v2.9 (25th July 2002) - Updated code to work with slightly new HTML redesign - Removed large header at the bottom of each page for a credits page v2.10 (2nd August 2002) - Fixed missing content-type header in credits (thanks to Dan Fabulich for spotting it) - Added the date when the page was collected at the bottom so you know how recent it is. v2.11 (3rd December 2002) - Fixed lack of comments issue when Slashdot changed their formatting - Shortened "Credits, disclaimer and Copyright" link to just "More info..." so it doesn't wrap on my Palm Vx - Cleaned up a bit of code and added other kludges elsewhere v2.12 (14th January 2003) - Fixed Internal Server in comments error due to change of URL (thanks to Joe Maiorana for originally spotting this) v2.13 (20th January 2003) - Fixed blank comments error due to change in Slashdot HTML (thanks to Joe Maiorana for supplying the fix) v2.14 (31 January 2003) - Fixed "Read more" links problem due to change in Slashdot HTML (thanks to Joe Maiorana for supplying the fix) - You can now visit the URL on a WAP phone for a WAP version of Slashdot v2.15 (5th February 2003) - Added option to limit the maximum number of comments shown (thanks to Charles McNulty for the code) - Added an option to turn off the function that "internalizes" external links so you can ensure only Slashdot content is stored (thanks to. Charles McNulty for the code) v2.16 (21st February 2003) - Fixed "Read more" page not showing anything due to changes in Slashdots HTML (thanks to Joe Maiorana for supplying the fix) v2.17 (6th March 2003) - Fixed error message caused by incorrect @ (thanks to Kevin Martin for spotting that one) - Fixed it so that if you have internalize_links set to zero, you can't use the external=1 paramater to clean HTML. This came about because some prat at 63.169.220.2 (firebox.mbe-eng.com) used my script to clean up the Newsweek Site Index on MSNBC (and other links not used by slashdot) and ended up twatting the server good and hard. - Set internalize_links default option to 0 (off) in light of the above. v2.18 (7th April 2003) - Fixed yet another HTML tweek by the Slashdot authors which prevented comments being displayed (thanks to Joe Maiorana for supplying the fix) v2.19 (10th April 2003) - Fixed another HTML tweek by the Slashdot authors which prevented the main page being displayed (thanks to Joe Maiorana yet again for supplying the fix) v2.20 (20th April 2003) - Fixed yet another HTML change by the Slashdot authors which prevented the story on the comments page being displayed. - Fixed silly bug which meant that all page titles weren't being shown. v2.21 (25th July 2003) - Removed additional

which appeared after each story blurb due to Slashdot template change. - Added silly feature where any comments by me have a link to the credits of AvantSlash (yes, it's sad, sue me). - Fixed stupid bug which means that an empty line stopped all comments below it being shown. v2.22 (4th November 2003) - Updated code to cope with HTML change by the Slashdot authors which prevented the list of stories being shown. v2.23 (20th February 2004) - Updated code to cope with HTML change by the Slashdot authors which prevented the list of stories being shown. v2.24 (22nd March 2004) - Updated code to cope with HTML change by the Slashdot authors which prevented the list of stories being shown. (Thanks to Dan Fulbright for supplying the fix). v2.25 (26th April 2004) - Updated code to cope when one of the Slashdot authors forgets to put a department name in. - Added patch kindly provided by John Milton which fixes some warnings when using perl -cw. - Moved logo to the left for better viewing with Opera on series 60 devices. v2.26 (19th July 2004) - Updated code to cope with Slashdot HTML change (they've oddly removed the # in all references to colours) v2.27 (12th August 2004) - Fixed bug which means that if you viewed the site on a WAP phone, you weren't correctly redirected to the Google WML to HTML converter. - Added debugging code to easily work out what to fix when the Slashdot authors change the design again. - Fixed bug where cleaned up external pages wouldn't be viewable at all. v2.28 (2nd November 2004) - Fixed bug where AvantSlash would prefer showing WML to web browsers that support both WML and HTML. This was a problem especially with Pocket Internet Explorer on the Microsoft Smartphone and PocketPC Phone Edition. v2.29 (18th January 2005) - Updated the advert filter code. v2.30 (17th March 2005) - Updated code to cope with Slashdot HTML change (they've converted their table tags to lovercase, not sure what that achieves) v2.31 (18th March 2005) - Updated code to cope with more Slashdot HTML changes (another set of case changes) - Updated other sections of the code so that case changes won't cause it to break again - If a comment gets truncated for being too long, AvantSlash will now indicate this. v2.32 (28th April 2005) - Updated code to cope with a change to the format of URL used by each referenced article on the main page. v3.0 (1st June 2005) - Updated code to remove additional newline before the (read more) link. - Removed all configuration from the main script and placed it into a seperate file. This means that future updates won't mean that you need to re-apply your configuration settings. v3.1 (15th June 2005) - Fixed critial bug regarding the cache timeout which meant it was always set to a value that would get the IP from which AvantSlash connected from banned. v3.2 (3rd October 2005) - Updated all parsing code to cope with the change on the Slashdot site to HTML and CSS. v3.3 (19th October 2005) - Fixed a bug which meant that articles with no specific section were not being displayed on the main page (thanks to Steve McNally for spotting it) v3.4 (9th December 2005) - Updated code so that additional parts to an article (used for reviews, slashback and other such things) are now shown when you follow the read more link. - Updated the code to work with the XHTML changes to the comments section. - Added functionality to automatically fix mismatched blockquote tags which can cause later comments to become incorrectly indented. v3.5 (2nd May 2006) - Fixed a bug which meant that people who quoted parent posters with the blockquote tag would never have their own comment shown. - Added functionality so that whenever someone references a previous Slashdot article (eg. a dupe or when something has been previously covered) it is handled by Avantslash. - Added graceful handling of problems relating to AvantSlash's inability to parse the content returned by Slashdot's webserver. - Added support for showing mini-articles posted in other sections on the same page. - Added an informative message when there are no comments at a certain threshold. - Fixed various bugs caused by yet another change to Slashdot's HTML. v3.6 (21st July 2006) - Fixed a bug so that you can see "mini stories" again. - Added support for specifying an issue date in the URL to view news days, weeks or years old. Many thanks to Ithier de Lestrange for the code. - Fixed a bug where if a comment contained the blockquote tag, then it wasn't shown. - Cleaned up code relating to setting the correct directory and added informative error message when it is wrongly configured. v3.7 (18 September 2006) - Updated code to support the HTML changes on the Slashdot comments page. v3.8 (27 October 2006) - Updated code to support the HTML changes on the Slashdot main page as they decided to insert a space into a heading tag. - Fixed bug where comments page caused internal server error when debug mode was turned on. - Fixed bug where sometimes the first part of an article is missing because Slashdot's HTML incorrectly tags two blocks of text as the intro (rather than just one). v3.9 (3rd November 2006) - Updated code to support the HTML changes on the Slashdot main page. - Corrected the CHANGELOG to reflect the right version numbers. - Updated the README to take into account that Palm devices and offline browsing isn't as popular as Windows Mobile, Blackberries and online browsing as it was in 2002 when the original README was written. v3.10 (10th February 2007) - Updated code to work around Slashdot's bizzare insistence that requests to the main page have a referer of slashdot.org. - Updated the issue functionality to work with Slashdot's recent HTML change which was missed in v3.9. Many thanks to Ithier de Lestrange for the code. - Updated the code to correctly redirect (almost) any link to another Slashdot article within the story or a comment back through AvantSlash. - Updated Copyright references to dates. - Added an option to turn blockquoted content into italics for devices that cannot handle the indented text very well. - Fixed yet another Slashdot fiddle where they added a space in a label which caused the main page to break. - Added a debugging option which dumps the post-processed HTML. This is only going to be useful if you're trying to fix any problems. v3.11 (9th October 2007) - Added ability to override the default threshold to read more or less. There is an option in the configuration file to turn it on or off. - Fixed a number of bugs relating to the Google WML proxy which prevented the script from correctly recognising it, sending the correct page to convert and redirecting to it when viewing (thanks to Han-Kwang Nienhuys for all the fixes). - Fixed a bug which meant that some of the smaller stories were not being displayed on the mainpage. v3.12 (28th October 2007) - Updated the code to support the HTML changes made by Slashdot to the comments page. v3.13 (4th April 2008) - Fixed bug which meant that users were directed to a non-working Google page when viewing on a basic WML only enabled browser. - Fixed bug which meant that browsers which report they support "application/xhtml" but not "text/html" are wrongly presented with the WML version of Slashdot. - Updated the code to support the HTML changes made by Slashdot to the comments page.