People have been having trouble accessing a certain news site, formerly run by nerds for about the past 12 hours. Reports from at least 50 people verify this, so it is not just you.
What better place to discuss the great /. outtage of 2014! Does anyone have news on what actually happened? That site does not appear to have an explanation forthcoming.
[Editors's Note: at 14:02 UTC the site was back up again and appeared to be working as normal. We have had our own problems with outages in few months since our inception so I will not take any personal pleasure in their technical hiccup. We will have to see if our readership went up at the same time as /. was offline.]
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(Score: 5, Funny) by RandomSchmoe on Wednesday April 23 2014, @02:15PM
Yesterday I was bored and went on /. after months of ignoring it. As soon as I tried to post a comment it went down. I don't believe in signs, but...
The Best Comments Ever Seen On Slashcode [seenonslash.com]
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Wednesday April 23 2014, @02:22PM
Can you write a script to go through that several times a week then? That would really foul up Dice.com, if all it takes is one comment from you to DoS them.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 2) by SuddenOutbreak on Wednesday April 23 2014, @02:45PM
We know that they're missing Unicode support, but maybe you did a "Bobby Tables" [xkcd.com] post?
(Score: 1) by VortexCortex on Wednesday April 23 2014, @07:31PM
Ah, they just don't make partners like Slashdot anymore...
(Score: 2) by MrGuy on Wednesday April 23 2014, @02:17PM
Sooner or later, everyone gets slashdotted, apparently....
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Ethanol-fueled on Wednesday April 23 2014, @03:15PM
Going to Slashdot is like going to MySpace. Sure, they're both still up, but why would you deliberately visit either*?
You can think wishfully and pine for the good ol' days all you like, but they've made it obviously clear that they're not gonna do away with Beta. They're just gonna dick you around and taper off the old site because they think you're stupid enough not to notice that they're shoving Beta up your ass centimeter-by-centimeter, and you're gonna get used to it and even like it, dammit. They weren't even trying to adopt an apologetic tone, and they sure as hell aren't now.
And even if, magically, they announce that they're gonna halt Beta; it only means that they're gonna be more sneaky about implementing something else even worse and shoving it up your ass in the future.
Build on the lessons learned and move on. All the wishing and bitching in the world won't save that ol' plug from the clutches of the Borg. Start anew. Participate here, or at pipedot, or somewhere else, or even all three; but don't cling to Slashdot. Slashdot may never officially die, but it will always smell funny from here on out.
* Besides to troll, of course
(Score: 3, Interesting) by isostatic on Wednesday April 23 2014, @03:44PM
You're right, but slashdot does have a lot of news that SN doesn't post, or doesn't post in good time. I tracked one story last week, took 24 hours from submission to first comment.
The quality of comments on SN has dropped too since the great start :(
(Score: 3, Informative) by mendax on Wednesday April 23 2014, @06:14PM
Slashdot has money now to pay people to do the editorial work. SN does not, although I have seen a submission of mine get posted in record time. It seems that if a submission tickles the fancy of an editor it gets posted fast. Well, if I were in their shoes that's what I would do so I'm knocking them too much for being human.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
(Score: 2) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Wednesday April 23 2014, @04:15PM
> ...MySpace. Sure, they're both still up, but why would you deliberately visit either*?
> You can think wishfully and pine for the good ol' days all you like,
Are you suggesting that there was once a time when MySpace was worth visiting?
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Wednesday April 23 2014, @04:40PM
While I applaud your viewpoint, peeking in on Beta today looks like they've fixed several of the major problems. I'm not drowning in whitespace anymore (which was the main source of my eyeball-bleeding), text is actually black-on-white (not light-gray-on-white) now, and individual comments are linkable (or was that just a proposed change that they haven't done?).
Comment mod breakdowns don't seem to be accessible, but other than that I can't really remember other major complaints than the whitespace and the corporate disdain (if someone could remind me, that would be great). The new site style kind of makes me feel like I'm floating in a big bowl of unflavored oatmeal in an article, though...there's no green left except at the top and bottom of the page.
The biggest things keeping me here are A) the smaller* and so far better community of posters, and B) Soylent hasn't been invaded by the corporate types yet. Lack of size* is still a bit problematic though.
* Smaller means less noise so far, but also not as many interesting opinions will necessarily pop up. With the old site, I always felt that we were more or less assured of every possible viewpoint popping up in a given article.
P.P.S: I hate forced paragraph break sizing. Just let me put a whole damn line in between my paragraphs! p tags etc. -- nothing seems to work; even br's get stripped out :P
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by bucc5062 on Wednesday April 23 2014, @05:10PM
You got me curious so I went back to the old neighborhood. Funny after being away for a while it just didn't feel the same any more.
Since I could still get to the non-beta site I was able to do a kind of side by side comparison on the Asteroid article. I'd agree that they did attempt to correct some of the complaints, but the overall look was still ... jarring to me. Also, the one thing that really pissed me off was in beta, I have to click (More Please) to see more comments. WTF. 46 comments but I get to see just the first few?
SN, don't EVER do that.
The comment stack still looked harder to read. Overall, still not a pleasant experience. Like others, I like the general atmosphere at SN even if the crowd/comment numbers are smaller. Over time I figure some commentary will degrade, but hopefully not to the point where there are 100+ posts and most of them are one line fluff (not even good humor).
Anyway, I'm back and I feel more at home. The submissions may be late, different, who cares, it is not Zombie /. and that is what matters to me.
The more things change, the more they look the same
(Score: 1) by terryk30 on Thursday April 24 2014, @12:52PM
They had promised it would be done. (Although after checking back from time to time I had finally assumed it was a promise that was not going to be kept, until I recently noticed it had been re-implemented in the Beta.)
For me, no comment linking would have definitely been a deal-breaker... but even though it did get done, that's not enough to get me actively back there at this point since:
*I miss being able to collapse and expand comments, though (I know; Javascript...)
(And no, try as I might, I could not get more space before that footnote!)
(Score: 5, Funny) by isostatic on Wednesday April 23 2014, @03:41PM
"Slashdotted" is so 1997. The site Soyled Itself
(Score: 1) by kaszz on Wednesday April 23 2014, @02:19PM
It seems slashdot.org were consistently available from some ISPs but not others. Makes you wonder if there's some malicious intent.
(or perhaps it tried "Beta" on their routing? :-> )
(Score: 1) by ArhcAngel on Wednesday April 23 2014, @02:37PM
That's pretty much what I experienced all day yesterday. We have an AT&T circuit connected to WiFi in our office (Houston, TX) for mobile devices and our corporate network routes all traffic through the home office in S. Florida. I wasn't able to access /. from the AT&T circuit or directly from AT&T wireless data but could access it from the corporate internet and from my personal Ting (Sprint) cell phone.
(Score: 1) by kaszz on Thursday April 24 2014, @12:21AM
Pretty soon after my discovery I had some thoughts on internet censorship.
(Score: 1) by VortexCortex on Thursday April 24 2014, @04:43AM
Yeah, censorship crossed my mind too. However, I then thought about network neutrality. Don't want pages to crawl? A site can pay for the fast lane. Don't want your site to seem unreliable and go down for our customers? A website can pay for the "Five Nines" package. The throttling and service interruptions will always seem cost you just enough to make it worth your while to pay the protection money, but won't be so bad that they piss off ALL your customers... unless you try anything funny, like ringing the coppers, see?
Of course it's fully possible that the admins simply screwed up their load balancer, but it's the thought that counts.
(Score: 1) by kaszz on Thursday April 24 2014, @04:53AM
Unfortunately when a organization has lost trust capital they will always be suspected. And perhaps be punished because they may be guilty and if they aren't well there's still no loss.
(Score: 1) by gman003 on Wednesday April 23 2014, @02:41PM
I was able to access /. at work, but not at home. So either it managed to go down in the small time frame between my last check at work and my first check at home, or it was ISP-related.
Granted, my home ISP (operating as "Telcom inc.", already a bad sign - worse when the top Google results for it bring up a Somali corporation that probably has better service) is a shitty reseller of an already-shitty service. It apparently shows every user as having the same IP - I've had to switch to Bing, because Google classes the entire ISP as malicious and forces you through a Captcha before searching. I figured /. had some similar DDoS-protection filter in place that accidentally caught us. And then there was that time their DNS server was down for an entire weekend... good thing I have 8.8.8.8 memorized.
(Score: 1) by sjwt on Wednesday April 23 2014, @03:07PM
I wasnt on Beta before, I am on beta now..
(Score: 2) by JeanCroix on Wednesday April 23 2014, @03:40PM
(Score: 2) by Woods on Wednesday April 23 2014, @04:05PM
I am still not on Beta... But apparently one of my old comments got modded as being hilarious, so you know... Bonus.
(Score: 2) by EvilSS on Wednesday April 23 2014, @03:58PM
I had the same experience. I jumped from customer WiFi to my phone and it came up fine. I had the same issue trying to get to other sites (one I remember was 7zip.org) during the same time frame.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Horse With Stripes on Wednesday April 23 2014, @02:29PM
If this is Dice's way of implementing a reverse Slashcot I think they gave it as much thought as the beta.
(Score: 2, Funny) by kaszz on Wednesday April 23 2014, @02:34PM
The Beta is probably quite Dicey .. :-v
(Score: 1) by RandomSchmoe on Wednesday April 23 2014, @02:41PM
Ba dum tssshhh [ytimg.com]
The Best Comments Ever Seen On Slashcode [seenonslash.com]
(Score: 1) by kaszz on Thursday April 24 2014, @12:38AM
Don't roll the dice or all your routing will belong into the deep Betahole. Just ask slashgone. The gawking radiation will not save your packets, NSA will!
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Ken_g6 on Wednesday April 23 2014, @02:30PM
First, I read Slashdot over RSS. (I would also like to read Soylent News articles over RSS, but that's another issue.) When I tried to connect to Slashdot proper, e.g. with wget, it would give me about 5K of data and then stop.
My cell phone wouldn't connect over my WiFi, but later I tried 3G, and it did connect. So I suspect this only affected certain networks.
(Score: 3, Informative) by xorsyst on Wednesday April 23 2014, @03:27PM
So agree about the rss - I'd drop /. completely if I could read the rss for SN like I can for /.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 23 2014, @06:27PM
Tiny Tiny RSS and the FeedMod plugin makes it possible. I read all my SN news through rss...
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Thursday April 24 2014, @03:15AM
I kept getting stalls in the browser -- it would get enough header to ID the page, but that's all.
Eventually I gave up and came here instead. ;)
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by mth on Wednesday April 23 2014, @02:42PM
I didn't encounter anything unexpected: the RSS feed worked fine and I could read comments as well. I'm connected to the net via UPC in the Netherlands.
Unrelated, I did notice that they're putting annoying hovering ads on the non-beta front page. I have Flash on a white list regime and Slashdot is not on that list, so all it does is display an empty frame with some controls from Google in the top-right corner, but it is still an ad intruding into the content area of the page.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 23 2014, @02:43PM
this isn't a kuro5hin diary it's a FP story! WTF
http://i.imgur.com/oSNQoWN.jpg [imgur.com]
(Score: 3, Informative) by cosurgi on Wednesday April 23 2014, @03:22PM
Just like first poster here. I went there and it went down.
I tried to ping, and it was barely answering: 90% of pings were lost. But 10% were received. Not good enough to load the website. I had suspicions that it's my home network connection, so I connected through vnc to a PC at the university (which has 10 MB/sec bandwidth to another university across whole Europe). The vnc connection was good, so it was not a problem with my ISP. What was intriguing is that /. responded to 100% of pings and the website loaded just fine.
So /. was down, but only in certain IP ranges.
#
#\ @ ? [adom.de] Colonize Mars [kozicki.pl]
#
(Score: 2) by AudioGuy on Wednesday April 23 2014, @05:57PM
I had the same experience as many here - it was inaccessible from my home system, but available from a couple other systems.
Comcast was having a lot of problems during that time period (from their own problem map) and today a trace shows my access goes through Comcast to get to Slashdot.
I suspect this was a backbone routing problem.
This chart is occasionally useful:
http://www.internetpulse.net/Main.aspx?xAxis=Desti nation&yAxis=Origin&zAxis=Metric&nAxis=Period [internetpulse.net]
(Score: 1) by fallen1 on Wednesday April 23 2014, @03:34PM
trying to access /. yesterday. Pretty much all day. Checked the "is slashdot down" page and it showed up. Google showed it up. Traceroute showed ... issues along the way, with long times cropping up at a few points. I had no trouble getting to Soylent though.
Weirdness happens.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 23 2014, @03:40PM
Yeah, it was down all day for me. I got a lot of work done!
(Score: 1) by gitano on Wednesday April 23 2014, @04:10PM
Was down for me connecting from a spanish ISP.
(Score: 2, Funny) by bziman on Wednesday April 23 2014, @05:29PM
People keep mentioning "that other site", and I can't help but feel like it's sort of the same as when you keep mentioning your ex to your new significant other. It's annoying and hurtful. I don't care if you cheat on Soylent News with Slashdot, but could you stop rubbing it in our faces?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Tork on Wednesday April 23 2014, @05:51PM
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 4, Funny) by MrGuy on Wednesday April 23 2014, @06:15PM
He's a spy! Kill him!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Tork on Wednesday April 23 2014, @09:39PM
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 1) by bziman on Wednesday April 23 2014, @08:12PM
My exes aren't my partner's enemy, but she still doesn't want to hear about them. I still check out the other site occasionally, but I don't want to read about it here.
(Score: 2) by mrider on Wednesday April 23 2014, @08:08PM
Somehow, I can't help but feel a bit smug about my SIG...
Doctor: "Do you hear voices?"
Me: "Only when my bluetooth is charged."
(Score: 1) by Leebert on Wednesday April 23 2014, @07:09PM
I hear from [a] source(s) within /. that it was a routing issue with Savvis.
(Score: 2, Informative) by jim302 on Wednesday April 23 2014, @09:52PM
I believe this is correct... There is evidence of a problem at CenturyLink/Savvis which was impacting Slashdot: https://puck.nether.net/pipermail/outages/2014-Apr il/006891.html [nether.net]
(Score: 2) by nightsky30 on Wednesday April 23 2014, @07:16PM
They went full beta!!!
(Score: 1) by kaszz on Thursday April 24 2014, @12:24AM
Maybe slashdot could fix https access. But I guess that's hard when in bed with the higher powers.
(Score: 3, Informative) by zim on Thursday April 24 2014, @02:52AM
http://www.isitdownrightnow.com/
Good place to find out such things as they happen.
It will either show it as down.
Or like in this case... Give you a place to read that other people can't reach it either.