Slashdot Mirror
Other Sources of the "Slashdot Effect"?
mattsucks asks: "I was surfing Google News today, looking for something interesting. I had just loaded the page, and hit refresh. A new story popped up at the top of the news page, so I chased the link. 'Server Too Busy, Try Again Later' replied the kind webserver. Obviously a Google News-driven Slashdotting was in effect (pun intended). Another example: one of our local talk-radio DJs likes to have his listeners pound the web sites of anyone he is peeved at. He's the #1 DJ in his slot, so when he says 'click' he generates a LOT of traffic. What other causes have people found of the Slashdot Effect?"
If a spammer is foolish enough to host locally and advertise a URL, that's a good way to get yourself slashdotted - assuming people still bombard spamvertised websites with null requests.
This sig no verb.
I've seen memepool /. sites in the past...
Drudgel disasters
Limbaugh
Fark
MSNBC
Slate
CNN
Natura
National disasters
etc.
It seems like you're just coming up with questions for the sake of asking a question. That's the epitome of boring. Responding to such a question is only marginally less boring.
I have been pwned because my
Fark drives a few servers into the ground every day.
you want a list of sources that could create a slashdot effect....
:)
and then you submit the website you hate to these site....
A MASSIVE DDOS!
I run a site that has a lot of technical jiggery-pokery that people seem to like.
/. effect, as I've seen slashdotted sites who've received less.
About once a month or so, my daily hitrate goes up from around 10,000 per day to around 100,000*, as some foreign site discovers the site.
It's only ever foreign sites, too - no English-language sites seem to generate that amount of hits. I suppose I have no way of knowing if I'm the butt of a thousand jokes on the sites that link me.
Anyway, my point is that if you're looking for sources of the slashdot effect, don't forget to include foreign sites, as it's likely that foreign countries could conceivably have 'national portals', or whatever.
* I presume this fits within the bounds of the
For the unenlightened, the correct terminology in such circumstances is that overloaded servers are "Farked", not "Slashdotted". :)
Obviously a Google News-driven Slashdotting was in effect (pun intended).
First of all, the use of "effect" in this story posting is hardly a pun and certainly not humorous. Secondly, I am really can't stand the hackneyed usage of "pun intended" or "no pun intended" especially when it refers to such a weak pun as this one. So either learn how to craft a clever pun or stop calling attention to your feeble attempts.
I've noticed that some of the big news sites (eg: abcnews.com / msnbc.com) often tend to avoid linking to sites that they mention in stories.
I've been infuriated several times being unable to find a link to a site that they were talking about. I originally thought that perhaps it was because they were afraid they would loose page views if their readers discover those other sites.
Now I'm not so sure. After seeing the number of sites that Slashdot destroys on a daily basis, someone much bigger (cnn.com, etc) could do much more damage than Slashdot ever could if they linked from a high-profile story to a small site.
This poses an interesting problem. As people clump around the large popular sites, links between some sites will become one-way. That is, the smaller can link to the bigger, but not vice-versa. The web is no longer equal. At what point does this become a form of self-censorship with knowledge hosted on smaller sites unaccessable to the masses?
has been responsible for the Slashdotting of bookstores.
Penny-Arcade tends to crash webservers whenever they post something.
Britain's well-known celebrity chef Delia Smith is famous for causing 'offline' Slashdot effects by recommending each time she starts a TV series a select group of cooking hardware (pans, utensils etc.) and ingredients (a particular brand of sea salt, for example). These have a tendency to immediately start vanishing from shops (via the checkouts) at an astounding rate, which breeds newspaper stories about how fast they're selling which makes even more people want to buy them...
Miri it is whil Linux ilast...
SA has the added trick of mentioning if the page has a guestbook. All sorts of fun things to do with guestbooks, from ASCII-art renderings of goatse to, well, ASCII-art renderings of tubgirl.
It's widely reported that automated Windows Update downloads cause a sort of "reverse" Slashdot effect in which a significant portion of a location's bandwidth gets consumed up by the update process.
There are no karma whores, only moderation johns
Interestingly enough, they have termed this "being wanged." As in: "Wow, that nifty website we just posted on the frontpage got wanged within fifteen minutes!". You can't make this stuff up, people.
It's a poorly-hidden link to cheats4us, an outwar-style site where users get paid to spam links with a referral code embedded.
Kungfoo probably gives the /. effect too
IMHO the /. effect is an unintentional DDOS, where there are many attempted connections to a web site simultaniously. The greatest instance of this that I can recall is the 9/11 attack, where all the online news services were flooded, BBC, CNN, ananova etc.
I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered.....my life is my own.
Howard Stern is a big cause of the slashdot effect. He likes to mention URLs on his radio show but as soon as he spouts out the address, it's instantly swamped, literally seconds later it's impossible to get to whatever site he mentioned. He's gotten a bit more savvy lately, where he'll load up the site on his in-studio computer first, then give out the URL on the air, so that at least he can get to the site to talk about it.
A friend of mine runs a site that hosted a copy of the "AC-130 Gunship.wmv" video clip that showed US forces blowing the living hell out of buildings and vehicles in Afghanistan, even chasing down the apparent Taliban who were running from the scene, and firing upon them. It was filmed from a helicopter and made the rounds on the 'net a few months ago, before the whole Iraq thing started. Howard mentioned my friend's site on the air (not gonna post the URL for obvious reasons) and he wound up with almost $300 in overage bandwidth fees. He paid the fees and is still at the same host, it was a ton of advertising for the site, albeit at a price.
But I think that radio is a clear slashdotter. When someone with an audience of millions mentions a URL on the airwaves, and mentions it in a way that incites listeners to visit, that site is a goner!
Anytime Oprah opens her mouth, hundreds of grocery store owners' assholes pucker up in fear that she'll come in and wipe them clean out of stock.
Anytime Dr. Phil opens his mouth, hundreds of legitimate businesses selling $WHATEVER_DR_PHIL_IS_DERIDING_TODAY close their doors cause they know they won't have any customers for a week.
"After a half hour, the final bit of DOOM data made its way to Wisconsin. The moment it did, ten thousand gamers swamped the site. The weight of their requests was too much. The University of Wisconsin's computer network buckled. David Datta's computer crashed.
"Oh my God," he stammered to Jay over the phone. "I've never seen anything like this."
This quote is from the book Masters of Doom, chapter 9. You can read chapter 9 for yourself at Gamespy.
By the way...what is all this talk about Spam?
- Bill
"Refresh already, dammit!"
I think one of the first slashdot effects was for a webserver in Purdue, with a professor's home page about lighting charcoal fires using liquid oxygen. It was mentioned in a Dave Barry column, and the server melted down quickly.
I can't find a date, as his site has been changed to "The people in charge have requested this web site be removed. 2/6/2003 --ghg". Sad. It was really cool, with lots of pictures, movies, etc.
Anyway, I think it was like '92 or '94 or somewhere around there.
Computer Geek: The Slashdot Effect is the sudden, relatively temporary surge in traffic to a Web site that occurs when a high-traffic Web site or other source posts a story that refers visitors to another Web site.
Yoda: Pales it does to the Dark Side
Yoda: Fear is the path of the dark side. Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering.
Computer Geek: But the slashdot effect is cool!
Yoda: Zapht! [Yoda cuts Computer Geek in half with light saber.] Weak in the force was that one.
Sig: Hot girls and girls with alcohol on my homepage.
George Goble is the man you're referring to. I remember his posted graphs of web traffic after the Letterman show back in '95-- not sure how long they had been up on his site. The liquid oxygen grill-lighting was truly impressive-- several of the lesser grills he tried actually evaporated in the intense heat.
It's a sad, sad day that ECN has requested Goble remove his web page. That guy is a Purdue institution.
http://www.eldtrain.com.au/members/humour/humour24 .htm
I'm sure there are other people mirroring bits and pieces of the original videos here and there. Post 'em if you find 'em!
In a fair number of cases, it's stupidity that does it. Example: back when I worked for Sun, one of our customers was A Big Speciality Retailer (I'm a little limited here, but ABRS sells stuff that is big at Christmas for small humans, okay?) The CEO, P.H. Boss, had decided that a web presence was the Next Big Thing, so he'd hired a couple guys to build a web site, which they did in good ars Technica fashion, using tcl on a little bitty Sun server -- as I recall it was a single processor desktop box, like a 250. Connected to a DSL line, I believe.
Mr. Boss thought this was such a great site that he went out and made a $50 million advertising buy, nationally, starting at Thanksgiving. What he didn't do was tell the technical people.
The result was that everyone's mom left the Thanksgiving football games, logged on and tried to hit the server. Later measures suggested the server peaked at more than 1000 hits/sec. Needless to say, this served as a very effective smoke test, and sure enough the server smoked.
Old P.H. was most disturbed with the technical people, with Sun, and with the whole web thing -- he couldn't understand why he couldn't spend $10K on a web site and $50 million on advertising and get perfect performance.
I visit the Lord of the Rings fan site TheOneRing.Net on a daily basis. They have "TORNed" sites within 10 minutes of posting. They also post links to any LOTR related polls on other sites such as "favorite movie". LOTR wins every time after being linked.
I am sure other "geeky" fan sites have the same effect.
-- No Comment
This is more like advertising, though whether or not Delia ever received benefits from those she plugs I don't know. A lot of people get offered free hardware (in this case utensils) in hopes that they'll give them popular reviews.
If you want to compare this to slashdot, I guess we could call a good slashdotting a "successful" advertising campaign. No... we didn't nuke your server, we just advertised it reallllly well.
I agree. To say that a particular kind of effect "was in effect" is not a pun, is not funny, and not even remotely clever.
The IT team at CBS had worked for months to get their website up for "Survivor", with behind the scenes footage, bios of all the contestants, etc all set to debut with the first episode. a couple of days before the premier, some bright sales guy at MI called a VP at CBS and asked if they needed any testing services. He was assured that everything was ready for the big event. Wednesday came, the show was a hit, and the website melted about 30 seconds after the show was over. Thursday morning, the sales rep again called the VP, and was rudely told that everything was under control and to please stop calling. CBS then spent approx $300,000 that week beefing up their webservers in preperation for next weeks show.
Next wednesday night, the servers lasted about 5 minutes before meltdown.
Thursday morning, the VP of CBS called the sales rep at MI and asked "How much?".
Real SUV's don't have cupholders
It's 5:42 A.M., do you know where your stack pointer is?
Being Canadian we up in the great white north have only limited knowledge of the Slashdot effect. Most of us not being use to AOL key words to access the internet, do not suffer from the Slashdot effect. There are a large group of lemmings which unfortunately is growing. They occasionaly create some website hangs, coming from the illiterate lemming communities at MSN and AOL Canada, fortunately there is as yet only very limited MSN and AOL Canada broad band access!
As this changes and more keyboard challenged individuals gain broad band internet access then certainly isolation of that segment might become necessary. Signs and symptoms of the disease are everywhere, heres a list. 1. does your computer not work if you unplug the mouse 2. does your computer desktop require 15 or 20 guis at boot to make you feel comfortable.
3. if screen freezes and the net goes do you panic, and call AOL Canada 4. do you require AOL or MSN to tell you what to access and how to use the internet. 5. do you answer emails that promise penial enlargement. 6. do you need to rush out and buy the latest copy of an anti virus software every year. 7. someone turned off (load images) on your browser and in your panic you took in your computer, and after consultation was convinced you needed a new one, so you got Windows XP because you can now control things. If you answered yes to any of these questions then you are exibiting symptoms of lemmingitis and need to do something other than use up band width.
OH THE SHAME I fell off the wagon and use sigs again!
I have no idea what you are talking about. The slashdot effect has nothing to do with AOL and the effects are felt globally because they hit the hosting server. Canada = USA = Croatia when it comes to the slashdot effect being felt unless there are mirrors for different countries/regions. Have you been reading slashdot very long?
Furthermore, Canadians never take pride in being Canadian - we're all way too busy apologizing for not being Americans.
I remember when the Howard Stern national radio show discovered someone, who happened to be hosted at my ISP at the time, discovered a realistic life size sex doll sold on the net. Did a whole show on it. 96-97?
Caused a brief problem, which the ISP solved by moving the site to a dedicated Pentium Freebsd Apache box on its own port on the switch. 4 point something million hits that day.
Wouldn't be much of a big deal, except that MS was running ads on TV boasting about their single server's ability to handle 1 million hits/day.
I've no idea what that bandwidth cost those folks, but I'm sure they sold enough to cover it.
the hungry hacker asks: I'm hungry, anyone else? If so, maybe we could order in pizza? Anytime when I'm hungry, you know sitting there hacking away and you need to eat even if you're a geek, right, so I order in some pizza. Does anyone else recognize this behaviour? Or do you order in some chinese food instead? What do humans in general and geeks in particular eat?"
At the job, we don't do time cards or anything like that. Our timekeeper Kronos is web based. So, you can guess what happens around 17:00. Then again around 18:00. And again, around 19:00
What, me Tweet?
I have been reading Slashdot for about 2 years. Thanks for telling me how it is distributed. I thought Slashdot was run by the US postal service, and read by Bucky Fuller and Einstein through quantum time effects postings. In general AOL and MSN do not suffer the same effect, as they work by the million monkeys using mice effect.
OH THE SHAME I fell off the wagon and use sigs again!
When the User Friendly LOTD went to Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie on MP3.com, the Three Dead Trolls found themselves removed from said site. The MP3.com admins were accusing them of ballot stuffing. It took a major brouhaha between MP3.com and the UFie community, led by Illiad, to get them back up.
Other sites have been UFie'd, but that one actually took some effort to resolve.
This has been done by a virus in the past - the browser homepage was set to a HTTP served file that was a trojan executable. The virus spread so quickly that it became a victim of its own success due to the servers hosting the file crashing.
"I love deadlines. I love the wooshing sound they make as they fly past" Douglas N Adams