Slashdot Mirror
Addendum to The Slashdot Effect Internet Paper
Spock_NPA writes "An addendum to the Slashdot Effect Internet Paper is available here. It details the effect of Slashdot on the Slashdot Effect Internet Paper."
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Isn't it time for the slashdot crew to write a statistical analysis of the reading frequency of the slashdot stories about the slashdot effect papers? If everybody keeps this up, we'll have a new academic subdiscipline in no time! "slashdot science", maybe, or "statistical geekology". If we get the terms 'postmodern' or 'cultural imperialism' into the title as well, we'll be rolling in grant money...
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
What about including a click-through counter in every link that's posted on ./? And then have a top ten ranking which links got clicked most in the last month or so (or maybe ranked by clicks/time unit).
That would also be interesting to get an idea what load these servers have to deal with. I am not sure if the Slashdot Effect paper is really very representative.
EagerEyes.org: Visualization and Visual Communication
250 hits per minute. Now we know how big the slashdot effect is. Has anyone else seen surges this big (from 30/min to 250/min) from other sources other that /.?
There is a second resurgence, on a much smaller scale, two day's later which peaks at about 9:30am, with an abrupt fall off and then a re-resurgence around 6pm that day. This is seen in Figure 4. plot. The author scanned the various Linux news web pages for posting of the /. effect article but found none. This small resurgence occurring 2 days after the initial posting by /. is unexplained and open to interpretation.
.htaccess/cgi hacks. I've found some interesting things this way, including links from news sites/mailing-lists/newsgroups from over the world that I wouldn't have found otherwise. A link to the author's paper could have been posted on a russian linux news site, for example.
.html, this isn't a problem as you can have a .htaccess file that specifies something like "AddHandler cgi-script .html" or you can point people to the directory and respecify the DirectoryIndex.
;print;
It's easy to log the referrer in Apache. I do it using a combination of
If you're curious as to how this can be done under Apache, here's a rough description (apologies in advance for any ugly or careless code and any "Slashdot munging" in indentation, etc that may occur).
(1) Point people to a CGI script, not the direct page. If you want this file to end with
(2) Now here's the fun part. The script dumps the page to the requester then logs the interesting environment variables set by Apache.
Example script:
#!/usr/bin/perl
# Navindra Umanee <navindra@cs.mcgill.ca>
# Give them the page.
open(indexPage, "/path/to/real/content.html");
@fileStats = stat(indexPage);
$modifiedTime = gmtime($fileStats[9]);
$modifiedTime =~ s/^(...) (...) (\d\d?) (\d\d:\d\d:\d\d) (\d\d\d\d)/$1\, $3 $2 $5 $4 GMT/;
# first, print HTTP header
print "Content-Type: text/html\n";
print "Last-Modified: $modifiedTime\n";
print "Content-Length: $fileStats[7]\n";
print "Accept-Ranges: bytes\n\n";
# then, print body
while(){
}
close(indexPage);
# Now log the information.
$log="../khtmltest.log";
$localtime = `date`;
open(logFile, ">>$log");
print logFile "$localtime";
print logFile "$ENV{'REMOTE_ADDR'} - $ENV{'REMOTE_HOST'}\n";
print logFile "$ENV{'HTTP_USER_AGENT'}\n";
print logFile "$ENV{'HTTP_REFERER'}\n";
print logFile "\n";
close(logFile);
Cheers,
Navin.
I'm not sure if I'm babbeling sh*t here or not, but I am ABSOLUTLY SURE I have seen that paper before, reported on /. 6 or 12 months ago. It *MAY* have been the origional but I am fairly certain it was an addendum to the origional reporting the effects of the /. effect on the report of the /. effect.
/. etc... I dunno. Comments included "what next, a report on the /. effect on the report of the report of the report of the /. effect" etc.
The graphs had lines saying when it was posted on betanews,
Again, I may just be dribbling sh*t (or dajavu or something)
anyway.
Cyas
uptime: 50 days, 21:18, 1 user,
load average: 0.49, 0.35, 0.24
processes: 132
yesterday: 76525
today: 1
ever: 203679322
These stats are shown in a 'slashbox' for registered users. A Custom Page that show these stats along with many other items.
What's missing from the /. stats is the average ratio between 'proccesses' and 'unique visits'. This number would prove valuable. Rob? are you reading this ? :)
> actually i think all this "ph1r5t p05t" stuff is rather funny.
/. is if you step back and look at it. There's also the meta-moderation that started after the moderation scheme was set up. And then there is the meta-meta-moderation comments that people started making after they noticed the meta-moderation. (It was amazing how quickly the term "meta-moderation" sprang up and came into common use.) Now I'm sure someone will point out that my commenting on meta-meta-moderation may qualify as meta-meta-meta-moderation; and of course you know what the comment on that will qualify for.
A lot of stuff on
Other things are the numerous "that's not worth posting" posts, which always strike me as really ironic, since someone is taking the trouble to comment on something that they say wasn't worth mentioning in the first place.
And then there are the obligatory "that's been mentioned before" posts.
And the "just got to work my political views in" posts, where people can't resist mentioning the moral status of [Bill_Clinton, George_Bush] (almost always in the subject line, since it doesn't do much good to hide inflammatory views down in the body of a post).
I'm sure there are more that I haven't noticed. Perhaps this would be a suitable topic for a companion paper, or at least a Guide to Slashdot.
All in all, I can imagine that this is really an entertaining site for those lurkers with a sense of humor about human nature.
--
It's October 6th. Where's W2K? Over the horizon again, eh?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade