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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
Heh, I worked at bookstore when Oprah started her book club. I didn't really enjoy being yelled at by lots of middle aged women who were peeved that we sold our single copy of "The Deep End of the Ocean" to someone else already. ("What do you mean you're out? It was on TV!")I was firmly convinced that if Oprah recommended the Chilton's 1985 Volvo repair guide that thousands of mindless Oprah watchers would have bought that too.
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