Assorted Slashdot Updates

As you probably noticed, the Server really bogged down today. The reason is quite simple: Katz's story, with about 500 comments weighed in at about a meg. 70 httpd's trying to serve a one meg file (which takes 2-3 minutes for most of you to download) perhaps a dozen times a second. Do the math *grin*. So I have a server level setting that will enforce Comment Limits when we get bogged. This will annoy the heck out of some how you, but it vastly speeds up page loads. After that mess, I'm glad to have some good news: I brought the 2500 stories online that I yanked awhile back when we were getting overloaded (mostly stories from late 97 early 98) so you can search for them again. More random musings are attached below. I changed the numbered links on the homepage (and the word 'XX Bytes in Body') to link to the article instead of to the comments page, so you can cleanly use them instead of the 'Read More' link to browse at -1 or 'No Comments' mode, and still read the article contents. Thanks to the 8 billion of you who asked for that one :)

I added a Default Comment Limit now. Originally the limit was 50,000 (in other words, never :) but I've changed that to 100. This won't happen much, but it will be a good line of defense when those stories get really huge. You can still change that number in your user preferences if it annoys you. Your user preference will always take priority, unless the server goes into Overload mode.

Finally, I wanna strut a bit: Since we brought the old archives back online, Slashdot now has over 5400 stories in the database. Over 3300 of them were posted by yours truly, which strangely seems to explain my lack of a social life at this point :) Anyway, I just thought that was cool.