Slashdot Turns 10 But You Get The Presents

October marks 10 friggin years of Slashdot, and nobody is more surprised about any of this than me. Throughout the month we'll be running a series of navel gazing meta news articles about our history, infrastructure and plans for the future. We're also going to give away 500 t-shirts and ThinkGeek gift certificates to people willing to organize and attend their own local Slashdot parties. One lucky winner will get a cool grand to blow at ThinkGeek! I'm going to attend "official" gatherings in Ann Arbor, MI on Oct 20 and in Palo Alto, CA on Oct 25. But you can read on for details about party organization and how you can win the grand prize. The idea is simple. Visit the Slashdot Anniversary Party Web Page. You can sign up to attend a party, or if there's nobody hosting near you, you can create your own. The details of your local parties are up to you- each has a corresponding discussion so you can work it out amongst yourselves. The Ann Arbor gathering will be at a bar because dammit I'm old and don't have time to go out for beers much these days. But you do whatever works for the folks in your area. Dorm Room. Bar. Gym. Wherever several Slashdot readers gather, we shall attempt to mail shirts until we run out.

To be eligible for schwag, you need to schedule your party by Oct 8 and sign up to attend a party by Oct 9- this will give us time to figure out where to send the shirts, and time to send them before you all start partying naked during the official party window of Oct 19-28.

As for the one thousand dollar ThinkGeek Gift Certificate grand prize, the winner will be the party attendee who submits the coolest thing for our "scrapbook". Videos. Pictures. Songs. Anything you can email. Something that proves that your party was the one we all wish we were at. The deadline for submissions will be Oct 28. We'll have an official submission email address posted later. This is all about creativity and coolness so good luck with that. The grand prize winner will be posted on Oct 31, the end of the month when we can all forget that any of this ever happened.

Oh, and happy birthday to us. Here's to wasting another decade, same as the first.

Comments

wow

[Surt]

It has been a long time.

Re:wow

[CmdrTaco]

Actually, internally AC is 666.

Re:wow

[LiquidCoooled]

That would be mfh (56)

I see nothing wrong with this and would consider it myself if something came along at the right time.

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=118075&cid=9980688

Re:wow

[TheRaven64]

You can configure the date display format in your user preferences. If you are logged in when you look at an archived story, you will get the long format date if you have selected it.

Re:wow

[Eponymous Bastard]

Let's see,
There was the whole voices from the hellmouth thing. A big deal actually, read up on it.
CleverNickName's jokes in trekkie threads look really out of place until you figure out who he is. say, here. The first one I saw was a joke on how something was done on the Enterprise, he simply replied "in my day we did it this way..." and for the life of me I couldn't figure out why he was +5 funny. He also had an ask slashdot which redeemed him for a lot of people.
Trolling, Karma Whoring, Metamoderation have a whole story that I won't get into. There was a troll who upon leaving /. posted a how-to on how to karma whore, which was an interesting read. I wish I could remember his name.
Goatse. That's the reason why links now get the domain name appended.
Slashdot got hacked once, because the production site had the same password as a less secure test site. That was an interesting discussion.
CommanderTaco's wedding proposal (see the FAQ, favorite story). Achieving record number of posts.
Database breaks upon reaching 2**31-1. Site goes back online without threading for a few days.

This is only some I remember. There were other story-related cool stuff. Some interesting interviews as well.

(I have a high UID because I always posted as AC, but I've been here for a long time)

Re:wow

[ink]

http://slashdot.org/zoo.pl?op=check&uid=666

Yep!

Re:wow

[Eponymous Bastard]

Yeah. Everything2 has his farewell post. I thought I recalled something more involved though. It's an interesting read, with some insight on moderation and other things. I dind't notice most of these changes because I was always AC and had no karma.


I signed up for slashdot.org slightly over three years ago. Since that time I've seen it go from an obscure "news for nerds" website to being immensely popular with IT professionals. I was here before Linux was hyped. When Voices from the Hellmouth appeared on the front page, like most everybody else at the time, I was stunned into silence. Not only because this was the first time Katz had posted something that didn't stroke his ego, but also because it was a document that stood on its own. One could hear and feel the words because they were true; Like many on Slashdot I had gone through the now well-known geek/outcast stage during my schooling. Although by now it has been dragged through the media and featured so many times that many people's stomachs turn just mentioning it, but it was important at the time. It was definitely a turning point for the entire community. It was also the first time that Slashdot had featured an article of such far-reaching proportions. It was not Slashdot's daily bread and butter, which consisted mainly of short opinion pieces, a "ask the experts"-styled column and, of course, the daily links.

Slashdot at the time, to me was an experiment which was always on the verge of exploding. The scores of posts from users, the quick corrections as the authors realized (once again) that they had posted too soon, the inevitable technical difficulties - through all of this it seemed that the thing that kept the site from melting down was the fact that one could login to Slashdot and see what other people had to say. Whether it was Microsoft's latest underhanded tactic or a cool hack of a random piece of hardware, Slashdot had it covered... and more importantly, had the opinions of other like-minded people for one to read.

During all of that you had me. Like a fair number of other geeks, my job was boring and unchallenging. And like most people in tech support and web design, you get a lot of downtime too. One can only surf the web for so long before you've seen everything and been everywhere. Whatever the four-color glossies say, the interactive world out here is tiring, both mentally and physically. The natural solution, to me, was to lay on the refresh button of my browser and start posting to Slashdot. On practically every article that I could come up with an opinion on, I posted to. Some of them were fine works of literary art. Others were little more than OOG_THE_CAVEMAN posts, except without the capitalization.

In the middle of all this commotion a seemingly unsolvable problem appeared: Slashdot was becoming more popular. Doesn't seem like much of a problem, really, until you realize one of the first laws of the internet: "In any large gathering, the majority of people are idiots". Like Usenet, a subculture rapidly formed whose only objective, it seemed, was to crash the system by overloading it with stupidity. We tried ignoring it. Then we denounced it. Finally, we moderated it.

I probably narrowly missed being one of the "first 200" moderators. I'm glad I missed being selected because "Version 1.0" fared about as well as one could expect. Not only did it start on fire, but it also set a lot of other people on fire. Mass flaming ensued. A lot of normally well-tempered slashdotters suddenly had picked up their pitchfork and were threatening to lynch Rob. Oh, and the trolls? They were right there, continuing their stupid commentary and replying with silly comments... completely unaware that they had caused the Slashdot crew to silently segfault, and probably a lot of the readership in the process.

"Version 2.0", implemented maybe two months later, was pressed into service because the popularity of Slashdot (and hence the number of stupid people) had reached a level which was overwhelming even the 200 mode

Re:wow

[el_munkie]

I thought that that was Signal 9 or something.

Re:One has to ask...

[Joe Mucchiello]

Noob! How could you ignore Natalie Portman and Petrification? Where was the tagging beta then?

Re:Historical Exhibit?

[brunascle]

Jan 13th, 1998, the oldest index archive.org has

Chips and Dips

[linebackn]

Actually, before it was Slashdot, it was "Chips And Dips", a section on Rob Malda's Personal site.

For a while archive.org had an archive of a Chips and Dips page, but it mysteriously disappeared. The files I retrieved are here: http://toastytech.com/files/chipsndips.html

I wasn't there myself at the beginning, I discovered Slashdot one of the first times C-Net News.com linked to it - and then I just stupidly hung around without signing up for ages until there was some article I wanted to comment on (probably something anti-IE)

BTW, anyone got the original Chips & Dips logo graphic? Archive.org never did have that.

Re:One has to ask...

[AmaDaden]

If you really want to know start checking from here.
http://slashdot.org/index.pl?issue=19971231
I was board one day and figured out just how far back I could get /. to go. I just want to know where the other few months went. Lost in an upgrade I guess.

Re:obligatory

[JackMeyhoff]

RedHat chooses Gnome!!!! Boooooo

Re:Historical Exhibit?

[martyb]

Jan 11, 1998 (Article #421) from trying links on that page to older articles.

NATALIE PORTMAN IS NAKED

[inKubus]

In the little prequel thingy to Wes Anderson's The Darjeeling Limited

Re:will there be bonuses?

[Anonymous Coward]

The way things are going in Russia these days, it may not be as implausible as you imply. ;)

Re:Suggestion: Reposting stories from 10 years ago

[808140]

There were no "modded up" comments, as there was no mod system back then.

Re:One has to ask...

[jamie]

We'd totally love that. If you'd serious about trying, write a /. journal about it and see if there's interest. If there is, email us (email me directly if you want).

I imagine we could help by e.g. providing a dump of what story sid's and comment cid's pre-2000 we do have...