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posted by martyb on Friday May 21 2021, @12:25AM   Printer-friendly

As many of you noticed, we had a site crash today. From around 1300 until 2200 UTC (2021-05-20).

A HUGE thank you goes to mechanicjay who spent the whole time trying to get our ndb (cluster) working again. It's an uncommon configuration, which made recovery especially challenging... there's just not a lot of documentation about it on the web.

I reached out and got hold of The Mighty Buzzard on the phone. Then put him in touch with mechanicjay who got us back up and running using backups.

Unfortunately, we had to go way back until April 14 to get a working backup. (I don't know all the details, but it appears something went sideways on neon).

We're all wiped out right now. When we have rested and had a chance to discuss things, we'll post an update.

In the meantime, please join me in thanking mechanicjay and TMB for all they did to get us up and running again!

 
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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by istartedi on Friday May 21 2021, @07:10AM (12 children)

    by istartedi (123) on Friday May 21 2021, @07:10AM (#1137478) Journal

    There seems to be a move to do that here lately, and I don't get it. It's like the last vestige of the Internet before it became TV. I'm not generally a conspiratorial type; but it seems like TPTB want to kill Slash and anything like it so that we've got nothing to do but play the anger games you see on other sites.

    Really though, what does that have to do with backups? Aren't most backup solutions going to be agnostic of how the site operates?

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  • (Score: 0, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 21 2021, @10:45AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 21 2021, @10:45AM (#1137507)

    Slash is dead. The repeated crashes show you can’t even claim it’s in maintenance mode.

    User moderation is a joke. Too many people trying to game the system. It’s one of the reasons people maintain sock puppets. User moderation is no better than Facebook likes. It’s just noise at this point. An experiment that failed.

    And now all the posts regarding NCommanders observations in his resignation post, and all the questions it raised about how it was deleted from the story queue after the submission was accepted, are conveniently gone.

    “Because the backups over the last month are corrupted.”

    Unfortunately believable given the lack of any real technical professionalism on a “tech” site.

    • (Score: 2) by Mykl on Friday May 21 2021, @11:17PM

      by Mykl (1112) on Friday May 21 2021, @11:17PM (#1137651)

      But did they fake the Moon landing or not?

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 21 2021, @12:10PM (9 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 21 2021, @12:10PM (#1137523)

    I think there's a big split in the community - the ones who always log in, disparage ACs, and love moderation, and those who don't (the AC posters and those who log in just to set the site to -1 for easy reading).

    • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 21 2021, @02:02PM (8 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 21 2021, @02:02PM (#1137535)

      Wanna bet that the AC posters include people who used to log in but are fed up? I know that was my motivation - I gave up on this site’s libtard “post any hate shit you want” policy. I wanted this site to succeed, but now it’s become a cautionary tale more than anything else.

      The emphasis on moderation over everything else (including the articles and journals) is a destructive distraction. You want to let someone know what you think, get your lazy fingers moving and post a reply. Moderation is about as ineffective as signing an online petition - its literally the least you can do except doing nothing at all. Slactivism. A motivation for running sock puppets.

      It also discourages logged in users from posting unpopular truths because they’ll be mod-bombed into silence for challenging the groupthink. There was a time when anyone who posted about how RMS hasn’t done anything useful in decades would be modded to oblivion. Now? Not so much.

      Same thing with the long-running mantra that open source HAD to be more secure. Now we know that all software is insecure and buggy by nature, irrespective of whether it’s open or closed, because writing great code is HARD.

      But useless user moderation is still a sacred cow for too many. “It’s what made slashdot great”. That is a LIE. What made it great was the tech boom, being in the right place at the right time. It still has user moderation , so why is it not still great? Because user moderation didn’t save it.

      Ask yourself why this site is in decline during a pandemic, when you should have tons of submissions and so many talented volunteers that you’d have to beat them off with a stick.

      Nobody with serious skills wants to work with someone like TMB. Or enable hate speech like EF. The first tentative steps towards addressing this are too little too late. I don’t want colleagues, friends, or family to associate me with such a clusterfuck. It’s not as bad as 4chan, but that’s just damning with the faintest of praise.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 21 2021, @03:05PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 21 2021, @03:05PM (#1137551)

        when it was posted politely, u disagreed
        when it was posted in frustration, u called it flame
        when it is now posted withou any makup, u now call it hatespeech...

        -zug

      • (Score: 3, Insightful) by istartedi on Friday May 21 2021, @04:12PM (2 children)

        by istartedi (123) on Friday May 21 2021, @04:12PM (#1137579) Journal

        How are you defining "great"? Are you defining it as having a larger user base? If so, that comes with a lot of problems that would, IMHO, not make a Slash site great.

        These sites have limited appeal *and that's good*.

        Are you defining great in terms of the quality of the posts?

        I think we're on a spectrum there. There are other tech sites from which I learn more, but there's also a lot of very popular social media that's garbage.

        We're somewhere in the middle. There's nothing wrong with that. The Internet has plenty of room for Lambda The Ultimate (which is coincidentally also down at the moment), Soylent, and reddit. They serve different communities.

        As for hate speech, you can't call Soylent a failure there. Hate speech always comes along for the ride, and as long as it's not the generally endorsed view of the community it doesn't harm us. If you think that's the situation we're in, you haven't really looked at too many other sites.

        Is there some group-think here? Sure, but it's nothing like reddit or a lot of other places. If it were, I wouldn't be here.

        It's almost like you're looking at a completely different site. Cautionary tale??? I just don't see that.

        We're small, people speak their mind here, and not everything is agreeable to you. That's not failure.

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        • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 21 2021, @04:20PM (1 child)

          by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 21 2021, @04:20PM (#1137580)

          "Hate speech" is a bullshit term with no meaning, or rather, it means whatever the person who uses it wants to mean, which is simply: "Shut up!"

          Our language is constantly being degraded by invented words with no meaning and also removing meaning from old words.

          • (Score: 3, Insightful) by PiMuNu on Friday May 21 2021, @04:24PM

            by PiMuNu (3823) on Friday May 21 2021, @04:24PM (#1137581)

            Get thee to a nunnery

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 21 2021, @05:22PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 21 2021, @05:22PM (#1137591)

        I would not feel safe in posting opinion under a constant identifier on today's internet. It won't help you, but it can come to hurt you.

      • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 21 2021, @05:30PM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 21 2021, @05:30PM (#1137593)

        Total Pilpul comment, or bot comment.

        "I gave up on this site’s libtard “post any hate shit you want” policy."

        This isn't the '90's anymore. Free speech is now a conservative policy, not a "libtard" one. If you don't believe me, look at Reddit and Facebook.

        "It also discourages logged in users from posting unpopular truths because they’ll be mod-bombed into silence for challenging the groupthink. There was a time when anyone who posted about how RMS hasn’t done anything useful in decades would be modded to oblivion. Now? Not so much."

        I remember that discussion, and compared to the others, moderation was totally balanced there, it being a charged topic. If you're gonna complain about mod imbalances and being modded into oblivion, then try criticizing cancel culture, woke bullshit, unnecessary lockdowns/vaccinations, and BLM riots. Then, you will truly see the downmod sockpuppetry at work.

        "Same thing with the long-running mantra that open source HAD to be more secure. Now we know that all software is insecure and buggy by nature, irrespective of whether it’s open or closed, because writing great code is HARD. "

        Linux: All the corporate ownership of Windows, with none of the functionality. "Stupid Windows users." "Yeah I know, Microsoft is a corporation and won't let you see the code. But with Linux there are many eyes on the code so it's secure." It isn't the year 2000 anymore, Linux is completely corporate and spook-owned. Look at its "sponsors" if you don't believe me.

        " But useless user moderation is still a sacred cow for too many. “It’s what made slashdot great”. That is a LIE. What made it great was the tech boom, being in the right place at the right time. It still has user moderation , so why is it not still great? Because user moderation didn’t save it. Ask yourself why this site is in decline during a pandemic, when you should have tons of submissions and so many talented volunteers that you’d have to beat them off with a stick.

        Hey stupid, just because you went woke doesn't mean that everybody else in the tech industry did. Anti-wokers are the new "niggers" of the internet. When the woke fad starts to wind down in a year or three because it's alienated everybody except you, I doub't you'll take away any lesson from it.

        "Nobody with serious skills wants to work with someone like TMB. Or enable hate speech like EF. The first tentative steps towards addressing this are too little too late. I don’t want colleagues, friends, or family to associate me with such a clusterfuck. It’s not as bad as 4chan, but that’s just damning with the faintest of praise."

        Huh, I seem to remember TMB saving your asses, so apparently some people DO want to work with TMB -- I'd hire him over anybody with pronouns and a BLM stamp in their resume, because I know he's gonna get shit done rather than find faults with everybody else. A lot of EF's comments are crap but he's made plenty of good ones, many of which brought the crybabies out of the woodwork to whine because he bruised their fragile egos. It's like being the jock in a room full of fat White kids. I think a lot of people just don't want to admit that they were wrong about woke bullshit as their narratives crumble all around them.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 22 2021, @09:32PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 22 2021, @09:32PM (#1137810)

          Hahahaha

          That explains why all the conservative moderated platforms ban people for ideological violations. As usual you nutbars have it backwards but believe the lies you're told.

      • (Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Thursday June 03 2021, @08:28PM

        by Joe Desertrat (2454) on Thursday June 03 2021, @08:28PM (#1141556)

        It also discourages logged in users from posting unpopular truths because they’ll be mod-bombed into silence for challenging the groupthink.

        Go with "unpopular opinions" instead of "unpopular truths" and maybe you might have a complaint. Most of the "mod-bombed" comments, if they are posted in serious discussions, are down modded because they have no real basis in fact, they are usually just rehashes of various already discredited ideas. If something gets down modded that probably shouldn't have been, it usually gets modded back to at least its starting point by those that disagree.