Slashdot Outage Update

Obviously Slashdot has had some issues the past couple days. For those wondering, we inherited an aging hardware setup in the acquisition that was located physically far away from us. We made a big investment in a new hardware set up, and ran into sizable issues including a massive DDOS during the migration process. Going forward we expect much better uptime. If we inconvenienced anyone, we're sorry. If it's any consolation, it wasn't fun for us either, and our team worked non-stop for days to get Slashdot back online. With our new infrastructure in place, we will be dedicating a lot of time and resources this year to improving Slashdot.

Comments

Display down-voter ids

[myid]

Whipslash and Slashdot, welcome back.

Can I make a request? If someone down-votes a post, I'd like the down-voter's user id to be added to a list of down-voters for that post. Then if you move your mouse over the post's score (ex: "Score:0"), I'd like the list of that post's down-voters to appear in a small pop-up window.

Hopefully listing the down-voters for a post would discourage people from down-voting it because they don't agree with it (vs. because the down-voter thought the post was useless or harmful).

Re:"We inheritied"

[pz]

It's just a fact that the previous setup was located across the country from us

Allow me to pile on here: I've been part of the dev team for a site that was, at the time, substantially larger than Slashdot in terms of global traffic (we peaked at Alexa global 103, if memory serves). We couldn't have given one hoot where the servers were located because we never, ever had to physically go to the machines. We had paid lackeys at each of the colo sites to do that. Need to reboot a server? Shoot an email or make a call to on-site support. Need to reconfigure a load balancer? Then ssh is your friend. Blaming your problems on the locations of the servers really doesn't hold water.