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: 2) by Gaaark on Monday August 19 2019, @03:35PM (2 children)
I looked in there a week ago? maybe two? and saw the old stories and wondered why they were still keeping the site up.
Nice to see the will is there if not the ....strength?
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 21 2019, @09:14AM (1 child)
They just lack a good editor
Nudge nudge
Hint hint
Know what I mean?
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Wednesday August 21 2019, @12:22PM
:)
Nudge nudge wink wink so....your wife? Is she a goer? Eh? Eh?
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday August 19 2019, @03:45PM (1 child)
If SN were to go away it is hard to imagine how many people would have to get back to work.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Pslytely Psycho on Monday August 19 2019, @10:31PM
At least 5839, (:
Alex Jones lawyer inspires new TV series: CSI Moron Division.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by ealbers on Monday August 19 2019, @03:56PM (12 children)
Come on, 3 sites is more than doable, SN,slashdot and pipedot, if we visit and post, it'll come alive.
I rotate between SN and slashdot already, I've just resisted and will check pipedot in the sequence each day
(Score: 2, Funny) by bryn on Monday August 19 2019, @04:01PM
Went to check the site out, checked for my username and found I had registered back in 2014! Didn't even know the site existed... :)
He who dares wins. He who hesitates, doesn't.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 19 2019, @05:16PM (9 children)
I noticed Slashdot does not allow anonymous posts anymore though.
(Score: 2) by VanessaE on Monday August 19 2019, @06:36PM (8 children)
It does, only if you're logged-in. Good way to beat 99% of trolls/spam.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 19 2019, @08:19PM
Not really.
The trolls have started creating throwaway accounts with names such as Annnonymous Coward, including the swastika kid.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 19 2019, @09:06PM (5 children)
And hopefully a good way to kill the site, too.
(Score: 2) by Pslytely Psycho on Monday August 19 2019, @10:47PM (4 children)
NOOOO! If Slashdot dies, we may inherit their trolls. Seriously, when this site started, we kinda lucked out and got the best of /. trolls, we can do without huge diatribes and stalking by APK and others!
Alex Jones lawyer inspires new TV series: CSI Moron Division.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 19 2019, @11:21PM (1 child)
Thanks, I like to think of myself as one of the best of /. trolls :)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 20 2019, @01:55AM
A good troll often stirs up a good discussion.
(Score: 2) by Kell on Tuesday August 20 2019, @12:16AM (1 child)
I agree, although we also inherited relatively more political drama than the green site. I feel like we're much more partisan here - not necessarily a bad thing, but it's a thing.
Scientists ask questions. Engineers solve problems.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday August 22 2019, @03:29AM
I'd go with "opinionated" more than "partisan". A lot of folks here aren't huge establishment fans, even if they do prefer one flavor of bullshit over another.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 20 2019, @07:03PM
For some reason I didn't think to log in and try anonymous. Thank you!
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Tuesday August 20 2019, @07:23AM
Yes, sure for the community. But finding sufficient volunteers to keep the site active 24/7 is a bigger nut to crack. And then you have to fund your project. As the Pipedot site is still sitting there they appear to have some funding to keep it going, but that might be a single server. To actually operate a site you need a bit more for redundancy etc.
I'm not sure that checking Pipedot 'every day' will show you anything - they are not updating the stories on their main page. The RSS Feeds are a good source of material for submissions though, although you can go directly to the RSS Feeds without Pipedot. You can even use our own feeds for that purpose....
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Monday August 19 2019, @04:22PM (2 children)
I looked in on Pipedot once. It was in the few chaotic weeks of Beta. Of course I wished them well. But in the end it's who puts in the time to start a new thing. For all the uncertainty in the early weeks of SN, enough people put in enough time to create something new.
SN is not as big as /. It may never be as big as /. But it's a thing in its own right as long as enough Soylentils put in enough time to code, edit, submit, and comment.
Put in the time.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 20 2019, @03:25PM (1 child)
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday August 22 2019, @03:32AM
I'm not personally concerned about quantity. I prefer quality and we've definitely got that going for us compared to most anywhere else. And we're doing it with anonymous users and without banning anyone except spammers.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 19 2019, @04:40PM (6 children)
How is no one noticing that SN went down at the same time? https://soylentnews.org/meta/article.pl?sid=19/08/15/1341210 [soylentnews.org]
Really, is the attention span around here so short?
(Score: 3, Funny) by Runaway1956 on Monday August 19 2019, @05:19PM (4 children)
Well, SOMEONE has to start new conspiracy theories. I guess it's your job, this month.
(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.
(Score: 2) by Common Joe on Tuesday August 20 2019, @08:48AM
Two is an interesting coincidence. But what interests me is that Slashdot got slammed so hard they cut off their AC comments around the same time Pipedot and SoylentNews went off line.
This wasn't just two but all three. Conspiracy or not, I think that should catch our attention.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by stretch611 on Monday August 19 2019, @05:23PM (8 children)
They have not published a new story since 2017. With the idea that the RSS feed is based on stories, how useful is an RSS feed that has not been updated in 2 years?
Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P
(Score: 5, Informative) by bryan on Monday August 19 2019, @06:13PM (5 children)
RSS feeds from other sites. I experimented with a "Homepage" similar to the defunct iGoogle [wikipedia.org] or ad-supported Protopage [wikipedia.org] where you can show a compact view of a dozen or so of your favorite feeds on one page. Then I tried a "Reader" interface similar to the also defunct Google Reader [wikipedia.org] but I never really optimized the database accesses (so the interface is unfortunately rather slow.)
As an example, my homepage currently shows the most recent articles on the news sites I like to visit. Or I can browse all their articles on the site, such as the feeds for Anandtech [pipedot.org] and Ars Technica [pipedot.org].
(Score: 2) by bart9h on Monday August 19 2019, @06:52PM (4 children)
What about Feedly [feedly.com]?
That's what I use to keep track of SoylentNews, comics, and various other news sites and blogs.
(Score: 3, Informative) by bryan on Monday August 19 2019, @08:56PM (3 children)
Indeed, I did briefly use Protopage to replace iGoogle and Feedly to replace Google Reader. Wikipedia even has a list of feed aggregators [wikipedia.org] to choose from. But many of them, including Feedly, are non-free software. If you navigate to feedly.com with JavaScript turned off, you'll get a perfectly blank page. Protopage plastered ads on my homepage that adblock/noscript couldn't fully block.
I'm a developer, and I saw an itch to scratch. I wanted a site that was free-software, that worked without JavaScript, did not have any ads, and that I could expand as I pleased.
(Score: 2) by Pslytely Psycho on Monday August 19 2019, @10:52PM (2 children)
Glad to see your still around Bryan!
I check on the pipe at least once a month hoping to see a stir of life.
Glad to see it has not gone quietly into the night.
Alex Jones lawyer inspires new TV series: CSI Moron Division.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 20 2019, @12:41AM (1 child)
Did you mean go gentle into that good night?
(Score: 2) by Pslytely Psycho on Wednesday August 21 2019, @06:12AM
Nah, just keeping the grand tradition of mangling quotes alive!
(:
Alex Jones lawyer inspires new TV series: CSI Moron Division.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 19 2019, @06:15PM (1 child)
The feed seems to aggregate other sources? http://pipedot.org/feed/ [pipedot.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 20 2019, @02:34AM
Yes, other sources. That link, http://pipedot.org/feed/ [pipedot.org] gives many examples, but it's easy to add any RSS feed to your personal Feed page.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 19 2019, @05:42PM (2 children)
Pipedot was up first, but Bryan was a backroom coder rather than the very active-in-comparison chat group behind this site. And that, my friends, is why Ken Olsen and DEC failed. Lack of marketing.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Monday August 19 2019, @06:21PM (1 child)
Well, some of the "marketing" was rather vile. E.g. at one point they were the only source from which you could buy DEC formatted floppies. I'm not sure if those were hard formatted floppies or not (i.e., part of the formatting depended on the holes punched in around the center), that *could* have been Wang. But that was sufficient that I decided that I'd rather deal with someone else. Even Apple was better.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 19 2019, @06:43PM
Not hard-sectored floppies. The difficulty was that they crammed 10 sectors on a track, so formatting a disk required tighter speed tolerance than the drives they shipped to customers. This was the RX50, single-sided double density 5.25". The drives were built as a pair; you flipped the disks from the top drive to the bottom. This allowed two drives to be built with no more hardware than a normal double-sided drive (both drives ran off the same spindle motor, heads for both drives were mounted in a single carriage between the drives, so seeking one drive would move the other). Eventually, someone wrote software to display the drive speed on a Rainbow so that you could tweak it into the range (there was a pot that affected the speed control) to allow formatting.
(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.
(Score: 4, Funny) by PartTimeZombie on Monday August 19 2019, @10:15PM (2 children)
Kill the heretics! Unbelievers!
Oh. Yes, yes of course. Ahem.
Welcome Pipedotters. Ahem.
Please ignore the torches and pitchforks. Um, harvest festival?
Yes, harvest festival.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 20 2019, @12:30AM (1 child)
Well, there was that time Pipedot was testing a federation-like feature to synchronize content from another site, and they had a kind implicit okay that SN did not mind until some users that did not know what was happening flipped out thinking that Pipedot was plagarizing their content/comments. I think Bryan quickly apologized for the confusion and turned it off. Sad to see an interesting feature die because of a misunderstanding.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 21 2019, @04:29AM
Especially since 99.1% of our content is just blockquotes from other sites.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 19 2019, @11:57PM (2 children)
You guys should definitely get their cooperation to make SN responsive!
(Score: 2) by Kell on Tuesday August 20 2019, @12:18AM (1 child)
Combine the red site and the blue site to be the purple site.
Scientists ask questions. Engineers solve problems.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 20 2019, @02:39AM
Not sure that we need more purple prose...
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 20 2019, @01:23AM (4 children)
I didn't know anything about pipedot until this article, but the feeds seem to display quite nicely on mobile platforms, whereas soylentnews gives the desktop view and won't wrap text. So I get a ridiculously small pitch 4 font and have to pinch and zoom, then swipe left and right to read every sentence which is a real bummer for SN because I actually prefer it here over the cesspool that /. has become.
I apologize in advance if this has been covered already, and I sincerely do not know. Are there any plans for soylentnews to have a mobile friendly site?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 20 2019, @02:18AM
SN can get more readable on mobile if you play around with some browser settings, but a mobile layout has been pretty low on the devs priority list. There is always the option of running an install of AvantSlash [avantslash.org] if you are the do-it-yourself type.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 20 2019, @02:41AM
Somewhere on Pipedot, I think Bryan summarizes his coding goals for his site--this included mobile/small screens and a number of newer things that aren't in the Slashcode that SN started from.
(Score: 2, Informative) by EETech1 on Tuesday August 20 2019, @07:40AM
Opera mobile
Enable text reflow
You're welcome!
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday August 22 2019, @03:44AM
It's on the to-do list but not very high on it. That said, if you want to bake up some mobile CSS and pull request it, rock on with your bad self.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.