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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 19 2019, @06:57PM (3 children)
You think it is coincidence that two slashdot replacement sites went down on the same day for mysterious reasons?
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Tuesday August 20 2019, @07:25AM
(Score: 1) by NickM on Tuesday August 20 2019, @03:30PM (1 child)
I a master of typographic, grammatical and miscellaneous errors !
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 21 2019, @09:11AM
Can that explain why yammer and Twitter were "down" (online but not usable) in north america at the same time?
Where is my tin foil hat? Oh. Right. I left it behind at that green place.