Slashdot Mirror
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.
I appreciate the concern, conspiracy theories, and even the anger and vitriol. It's nice to see people care.
It's nice to have /. back.
You are appreciated.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
I've been coming here for over 12 years. Always interesting, always insightful. We appreciate you. It's a rough world out there, sorry about the DDOS.
Was it a genuine DDOS or just bugs in Cisco firmware. I worked at a place that installed a few large pieces of Cisco hardware and within weeks though they had become under a massive DDOS attack. Come to find out it was a bug that regressed in the Cisco firmware. It seems like it would make sense to me that, with new hardware, a similar issue might have occurred.
Just leave the UI alone during your improvements? :) :)
It's good having a site that doesn't peg CPUs, consume vast amounts of bandwidth or require modern graphics cards just to render the page.
We're not blaming anyone. It's just a fact that the previous setup was located across the country from us, and wasn't built by us, so it was not an optimal situation for us. Does it suck that we were down for a while? Hell yeah. Could we have done some things differently and perhaps better? Most definitely. Not sure what your objective with your comment is though.
It would also allow tit-for-tat moderation by the psychopaths of the board. What a perfectly horrible idea.
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You inherited what you did.
Why not take this opportunity for a new code base? It's time for a "new" website to discuss on. Reddit's going through a redesign that people hate. People are fed up with Facebook and Twitter.
Slashdot's moderation system is still hands down the best I've come across. It's even managed to handle something 4Chan and Twitter couldn't, completely anonymous posts. It's capped to prevent bandwagoning to oblivion, it gives taxonomy to a post's quality. +5 Funny is different than +5 Interesting and I wish I could sort by moderation classification as well. The random distribution means that you can't just make sockpuppets (not that it doesn't happen).
And if you're looking for funding, I'd pay money to be a part of a website if it meant good discussion. Officially branch out away from technology.
Let us use markdown, add unicode support, add markdown support, give it a good API.
Oh, we get it. *wink*
You're not saying it was the Russians, but it was totally the Russians.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Yes, if an account consistently downvotes far more than upvotes they should receive even less mod points. We need to mod up what is good or important, not downvote what we don't like. This promotes more discussion instead of burying comments.
There should be enough data to run some statistical analysis on how a moderator moderates.
If someone is consistently labeling a certain user or marks posts as "Troll" when it's eventually a +3 then give less weight to their moderation ability.
or "Slashdot uses AI to moderate comments".
and I take responsibility for my actions
Says the anonymous coward.
Was it so hard to tell us that? You couldn't have said told us what was going on before now? Still, thanks for bringing it back.
I am very glad that slashdot exists and thank all for their wonderful work at slashdot.
Hope you will recover soon.
Been coming here for 20 years now (hard to believe how the time has gone). Likewise, thank you, keep up the good work. Although I must say the last couple of days have been a bit more productive! ;)
Tell me about it....And I'm in the 20+ years club, too.
Hey, never mind that "As our way of thanking you for your positive contributions to Slashdot, you are eligible to disable advertising" box; I'm happy to give /. the impression revenues. But would you mind sending me a few of the old servers? They'd have great retirements as historically-significant World Community Grid space heaters!
BigBlockMopar, aka. 71911
515 Somerset Street West
Ottawa, ON
Canada
K1R 5J9
I'm glad you're back up, guys. Missed you.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
Seems to me that such a system would discourage honest moderation and only serve to create "mod" wars. There is a reason why voting is a private matter and does not subject to voters to public criticism.
Besides, if everyone with mod points browsed at -1 as recommended most abuses would be corrected for. Slashdot has been part of my daily life for over 20 years and I would hate to see it devolve into petty popularity contests.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
I actually had to work yesterday! Oh the horrors!
I'm not saying it was aliens, but....
I call utter BS here. It is not 1990s when people needed to be in close proximity to their garages to run reliable websites.
Gee, it's almost like they just TOLD you that they migrated away from the older platform specifically so it wouldn't be such a hands-on administrative burden like the older platform.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Isn't there already meta-moderation? Isn't that already what it is there for?
I've been active on Slashdot for many years. This is my second account, my new account only five years old or so. I have an affection for this site.
I've been managing servers far longer, since 1997 or so.
I've owned two hosting companies and consulted for several others. I've had the opportunity to contribute code to the Apache server, the Linux kernel, and a lot of the other software we all use. I've been writing code in Perl, like Slashdot uses, the whole time. I was once the only person allowed to touch the GirlsGoneWild servers because I was the only one trusted to not break something. So in other words, I've been around a while.
In all that time, I've never seen a site move cause a week of down time unless people just kept making mistake after mistake after mistake. It's just not necessary to have more than a few minutes down time *even when things go very wrong*. When things go right, switching to a new server in a new location has no down time, or on a highly dynamic site you can use 60 seconds to expire DNS caches (with the the TTL previously lowered). When unexpected problems come up and people don't know the best way to handle them, you can have a few hours of down time.
Evidence suggests that the planning and execution of the new hosting and the move was very poor. Shit happened, I know. Maybe a hard drive failed. That's why your new server uses RAID 10, so hard drive failures don't take the site down. Maybe you thought the new server was ready, but it wasn't. That's when you flip the switch to revert back to the old server for a day while you fix the new one. Unfortunate things happened, they do happen. And your technical team didn't know how to handle them properly.
May I suggest you have an outside, independent, expert have a look at your new server setup and make some suggestions on how to make it robust? It's clear the people who handled this don't know how to do servers in a robust way. Heck I'd *volunteer* to give you an hour of my time discussing it and looking it over, without charge, just because I have an affection for Slashdot and this community. [ Not audience ;) ]
Blaming your problems on the locations of the servers really doesn't hold water.
Holding water raises the chances of sinking a lot.
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
Sorry but that sounds like a witch-hunt.
Moderation is supposed to be anonymous.
Afaik meta moderation only affects that post; not future moderation points.
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.
That's a possibility- thanks for the suggestion. Anyone else have an opinion on this?
Yeah. Bad idea. It would breed retaliation.
Better to keep the moderators anonymous, and let meta-moderating take care of abusive moderators.
Also, the algorithm that awards mod-points can be adjusted to reflect someone's ratio of down-mods to up-mods.
No matter what kind of system you set up, there will be users who figure out how to "game" it. Maybe some sentiment analysis and machine learning could be used to find such users, and reduce their chance of moderating.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
whipslash inquired:
Anyone else have an opinion on this?
I do. It's a terrible idea.
Revealing the identities of moderators will merely give the trolls specific targets on which to concentrate their venom, without providing the community with any benefit in compensation. The current system, which prevents moderators from posting in a thread they moderate sort of works. De-anonymizing those mods, in addition to preventing the moderator from posting under his/her actual identity, will simply further discourage those of us who get mod points from using them at all. It's just Not A Good Idea.
If you want to do something actually useful about the moderation system, try revisiting the existing categories, instead. For instance, why do we need both Troll and Flamebait? They're essentially synonyms, after all. And why isn't there a -1 Misinformed or -1 Stupid, instead? Those would actually be useful additions to the mod categories for posts that are neither Trollish nor Flamebait-y, but are, instead simply, genuinely idiotic or factually wrong, but not inflammatory or critical in nature - and they'd be a lot more on-target for those kinds of posts than -1 Overrated, n'est ce pas?
Anyway, that's my fiftieth of a dollar. Thanks for asking ...
Check out my novel.
but distance no longer makes any difference in an internet-based service
This comment is brought to you by the same thought process which comes up with: Trump was right to fire weather forecasters because we can just get the weather forecast through an app.
So your argument is that you worked for a much bigger company with a much bigger staff, and therefore Slashdot should be able to do even better?
What?
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
In an extensive and unprecedented news briefing this evening, the Council of Elders announced that they have begun a new defensive campaign against the blue world that is the third body from our local star.
K'Nord, speaker for the Council of Elders' Planetary Land Defense Forces, elaborated:
"For many years the blue worlders have launched probes and other devices at our glorious home world, with little success. Even when they can land their pitiful machines we have engaged in a subtle subterfuge campaign to further hobble their ability to collect information on our planet. None the less, the Council has grown tired of the annoyance posed by the blue worlders' continued attempts to reach our sweet red soil, and the undue alarm among the populace that it has created. As a result, the Council has approved a new plan to disrupt the communications of the invaders at the source, in order to render them unable to send future probes."
Detailing the plan, K'Nord revealed that the signals intelligence arm of the Defensive Forces had successfully accessed the exceptionally primitive data networks of the blue worlders, using their own equipment against them to block communications and disrupt the ongoing functionality of the tribals' society. Several communications nodes were rendered inert in this fashion, including those identified with the codenames SourceForge and Slashdot. Defensive analysts believe that these nodes are among the most important to the invaders' society, and that with their failure, the invaders will be unable to complete even the most basic of calculations to reach the planet.
"The pathetic blue worlders have proven time and time again that they are entirely reliant on machines for even the most basic of functions. Without these they are as helpless as an infant chirocican; their natural cognitive abilities pale in comparison to even our least extraordinary younglings."
When a junior reporter noted that taking a proactive stance against the third planet could attract further undesirable attention from the invaders, K'Nord quickly isolated the traitor and had their gelsacs carefully eviscerated, for use as wetware in the construction of further communication disruption devices.