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.
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.
He's right. We need you. Plus, no other sites will have us.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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.
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.
Was it so hard to tell us that?
... yeah, it was. The site was down.
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.
One of my head-desk moments back in the Beta days was a discussion I had with a Slashdot dev -- or someone who claimed to be, and I had no reason to disbelieve him since he seemed to know what he was talking about. The Ars Technica sub-headline of "change for change's sake" was pretty accurate, as this fellow was saying that websites absolutely had to go through redesigns regularly, otherwise users would get "bored" and leave. Creating something better wasn't the primary requirement as much as making something 'different' was. Honestly, that attitude was a stunning indictment of the users and UX development attitudes as well.