A submission from an AC prompted the following.
Pipedot (https://pipedot.org/) was another reaction to Slashdot Beta but didn't get going as quickly as SN. Nevertheless Bryan, the owner, created a useful site with nice features like the "Feed" page for RSS reading.
Last Thursday Aug 15, the site started sending out 502 codes in response to any attempts at access and it remained like that for a short while. We have seen no explanation regarding the outage. However, at the time of this story's writing, the site is back online again.
Pipedot is not currently accepting new stories and hasn't published one since 2017, but it hasn't gone away. Those running the site believe that it didn't justify the level of effort to keep pushing out stories when they were really competing with other Slashdot alternatives, including ourselves. But, recognising that things can change, the site is still 'live' and ready to go if needed. It provides a very useful RSS feed which is available for anyone to use and it provides a lot of useful material for potential submissions.
We have a good and friendly relationship with Pipedot and we are very happy to cooperate with them, especially as we did in the first year or two after Slashdot Beta. It is also reassuring to know that, if something unexpected happens to our own site, it would only be a matter of days before an alternative site could be up and running. We are pleased to discover that last weeks event was only a temporary blip and not a sign that Pipedot was going away. We wish them every success for the future.
(Score: 5, Informative) by bryan on Monday August 19 2019, @06:18PM (3 children)
Before I left for vacation last week, I turned off a few of my computers. Seems I turned off too many and accidentally turned off the backup computer that moves the database backups off the live site. After a few days, the untransfered backups exceeded the storage capacity of the live site and started to cause problems. Woops! Sorry for any inconvenience as the site was down on Friday-Saturday while I was traveling.
I'm looking at a few changes to the backup process that should prevent these types of problems in the future.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 20 2019, @02:36AM (1 child)
Thank you for the explanation, and for all your contributions over the years since *uck Beta.
(Score: 3, Funny) by chromas on Wednesday August 21 2019, @04:27AM
You can say "Duck" here.
(Score: 2) by Common Joe on Tuesday August 20 2019, @08:52AM
I agree with AC. It's good to see still you around and I'm glad you keep Pipedot up. I'll tip my hat to you, sir.