A Brief History of Slashdot Part 2, Explosions

When last we left off, Slashdot had grown beyond my ability to maintain it as a hobby, as well as beyond the simple DEC Alpha Multia 166 that had served it so well for the first week or two, and then immediately buckled under the traffic. Here in Part 2, we ride the wave of Slashdot's growth from early '98 until whenever my wrists get tired enough that I stop yakking until next week.

A lot of things happened in parallel in the late winter and spring of 1998. We switched over from Ariel, the Alpha, to Triton (yes this is a Little Mermaid thing- all of my machines were named after Disney cartoon characters for many years until I started naming them after anime chars- my current laptop is Lum), a cobbled together from leftover parts dual Pentium. It had more RAM and a bigger hard drive. (As an aside, We're planning on auctioning off the case for charity- the guts are long gone, but stay tuned for more information) Triton itself actually lasted for a year or more serving initially as the entire Slashdot. It later was shipped to California and continued to serve web traffic even after we added a second machine for database traffic.

During spring break of 1998 I rewrote Slashdot from scratch. I looked into PHP and Perl. I researched MySQL and Postgres. And based on what existed in 1998, I chose what was the best for my needs. And while cool kids drove to Florida and saw boobs, I stayed up all night and rewrote almost all of the site from scratch. The new system used mod_perl, making it possible to NOT recompile the whole site for every single page request. And replacing flat text files with an actual honest to god SQL database made performance screamingly fast (for at least a few days anyway) until traffic increases squished us again.

It wasn't but a few weeks later before we were politely asked to get the hell off our network. The traffic being consumed by Slashdot was essentially saturating our ISPs entire T1 during the afternoon. The folks at the MacNet were good to us, but enough was enough. We packed up the box and mailed it to California. Since then, I have never physically touched a computer that was running Slashdot. Hell, I've never even seen them in person. Originally it was distance that made it impossible to see them, but today the SourceForge netops staff maintains the hardware. Frankly it's for the best- I tend to break things when I touch them. Our provider forbids photography inside the colocation facility, so if anyone asks, I've never even seen what the installation looks like. What a stupid policy that is.

The new code made another huge change which was to have long term repercussions. Originally all Slashdot content came from my travels through the internet, and my inbox. After April of 1998, submissions were sent to us via a web form and maintained using a nifty little web interface I hacked together. At the same time, a few friends were given administrative accounts, and among them was Hemos. Up to that point I had posted every single story that appeared on the site. A by-line was added, and the load was distributed. A number of Slashdot volunteers came along in the following months, and several continued to work with us for years more.

We toyed with a number of ways of making some cash around this time as well. The ad agency I worked at tried to sell ads. We partnered for awhile with a couple of different ad selling networks. Eventually we formalized the creation Blockstackers- a corporate shell for Slashdot and later, Everything2. By the end of the summer, Nate had coded our own Ad Server (known as AdFu) and were selling our own ads. Our ad server was a hack, but having worked with a number of mainstream ad systems over the years, it had serious advantages- not the least of which was very high performance.

When the fall semester started up again, I quit my day job and ran Slashdot as my only job... besides school which for that last 3 months hardly counted.

It was right around this point that we created user accounts. For nearly a year all posts had no authentication... but now you could reserve your name. I got UID #1, and to this day can trump this debate in the frequent (and inane) discussions you see in stories where people brag about their low user IDs. Mainly user accounts were created in response to spam. At this point we started having the occasional DDoS and crapflood of our forums. It was a pain in the ass, and led to a long series of security changes including our now infamous moderation system. At first there were a couple dozen friends who could moderate. I used their moderations to find a few hundred more moderators, a system which worked for several months until the comment volume exceeded their available time.

I finished college in the fall of 1998 and was able to dedicate every minute of my life to Slashdot. The moderation system was expanded to include 'Mod Points' and any eligible Slashdot reader could moderate by simply being a regular, positive contributor to the site. Meta Moderation followed soon on. By this point, Slashdot had pretty much all the core functionality that it has today- it didn't visually change for like 5 years after that when we finally redesigned the site.

In the following months the site was pulling down enough money that all of us were able to quit day jobs and work on Blockstackers related projects. During this time we never had a month in the red- we never had debt. We always broke even. Of course, when you live and work in a burnt out dump in a very small town, that's not that hard to do! At this point it was Me running Slashdot, Dave doing Sysadmin work, Kurt in charge of HR/Bizdev etc, Jeff in charge of sales/marketing and Nate working on E2. We hired CowboyNeal around that time as well. Everyone helped everyone else: I'd write HTML for Nate or he'd hack some odd code for me. Looking back it was probably the most creatively satisfying period in Slashdot's history. Ideas could be implemented quickly. Cash was tight, but we could always afford beer. Life was good.

First post had become a huge problem- since it took several minutes for comments to appear, there would often be 5-10 of them. So I wrote a task that would post a random templated first postish looking thing to every story before anyone else could see it. After a real post appeared, it would delete itself. It was called fpsBeDamned. It ran for several months until a few people noticed them disappearing, and accused me of deleting comments. As the FAQ says- we really don't delete comments except for the incredibly rare DMCA or Secret Service mandated events. So important was the rights of the bot, that I eventually disabled it. It was a fun experiment tho, and I really started learning about the sorts of things people will do to screw with a public system, and what I would need to stop it. I also became increasingly aware that I was going to need a lot of help and hardware to deal with it.

Which takes us to mid 99... it was time to go corporate. Which we'll talk about next week.

Heh

[CWRUisTakingMyMoney (939585)]

until whenever my wrists get tired enough that I stop yakking...

Funny, that's not what I called it back in the day.

Re:

[ThirdPrize (938147)]

It's a typo, he means yanking ...

Yeah,

[Jeremiah Cornelius (137)]

Well over 300 Bps, on a surplus Bell Teletype, it takes a while for us old-timers to "get" these "jokes".

I haven't been able to see anything remotely like pr0n, since Taco's bogofilter began to screen out the Penis Bird.

Re:Yeah,

[Nazlfrag (1035012)]

(.Y.) There ya go.

Re:Yeah,

[mcpkaaos (449561)]

That looks more like an extreme close-up of a pissed off Tweety bird.

Here he is on the move: (.Y.)

Pictures?

[caferace (442)]

Our provider forbids photography inside the colocation facility, so if anyone asks, I've never even seen what the installation looks like. What a stupid policy that is.

ISTR that we did indeed see posted pictures of the box once it was shipped to California. And yes, that is a stupid policy.

Not news

[east coast (590680)]

Man, this stuff is nearly ten years old. It's not news.

Way to keep up with the latest in technology, Taco.

I'm sure it will be duped in a few more years again.

Re:

[ArwynH (883499)]

Man, this stuff is nearly ten years old. It's not news.

You must be new here.

^_^ or maybe I'm the one who's new and enjoyed reading it.

Re:

[Jeremiah Cornelius (137)]

REAL /. History:

• 
  GOATSE.CX
  Grits
  GNAA (hated this crap)
  Portman / nudity / petrification
  Penis Bird
  MEEPT!
  Your ideas intrigue me sir, and I would like to subscribe to your newsletter
  Troll Talk (Yeah! Hidden Topics!)
  In Soviet America...
  All your base...
  I for one, welcome...
  

Re:Not news

[aurispector (530273)]

you forgot Beowolf clusters...

Links, please?

[Scareduck (177470)]

You might consider linking back to the Part 1 [slashdot.org] of the series, especially since it's rolled off the history page and is now a feckin' week old.

Don't worry

[JeanBaptiste (537955)]

I expect we'll see it posted a few more times.

Sigh

[mfh (56)]

Those were the days.

PS... STFU about Ebay, douches.

Re:Sigh

[Ralph Yarro (704772)]

Those were the days.

PS... STFU about Ebay, douches.

FLAMEBAIT? That was a joke. A slightly self mocking joke by mfh, one of the great Slashdot icons of our time. If you don't get it then you're too young to have mod points. What'd you do, just buy them on ebay?

2nd post problem

[digitaldc (879047)]

First post had become a huge problem- since it took several minutes for comments to appear, there would often be 5-10 of them. So I wrote a task that would post a random templated first postish looking thing to every story before anyone else could see it

That is awesome, now how do you kill the 2nd post problem? ;)
Kidding aside, congratulations on 10 years of /.!

DMCA and Secret Service

[athloi (1075845)]

As the FAQ says- we really don't delete comments except for the incredibly rare DMCA or Secret Service mandated events.

You can't just dangle that out there. Please tell us more. We, the readers, love intrigue.

Re:DMCA and Secret Service

[tgd (2822)]

The first rule of secret service takedown orders: you don't talk about secret service takedown orders...

Re:DMCA and Secret Service

[Misch (158807)]

See Scientologists Force Comment Off Slashdot [slashdot.org]

Re:DMCA and Secret Service

[jamieswith (682838)]

--You will rephrase your request for me to go to hell. Goto statements are not acceptable programming constructs

Ok then,

if (fork()==0) {
execv(ptrHell, ptrYourSoul);
} else {
return;
}

Would "Fork off to hell and die!" be better?

Re:

[richie2000 (159732)]

I was going to ask about that. I remember the Secret Service post (can't find it now, though), but had managed to miss the DMCA one. Oh and CmdrTaco, it seems the post you link to from the Scientology story has gone missing: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?cid=274&sid=01&tid=88 [slashdot.org]

Re:DMCA and Secret Service

[richie2000 (159732)]

Not sure what the secret service one was (and we'll probably never find out).

I remember most of it. Someone issued a death threat to the President of the US and the Secret Service had it removed. In its stead was a post from Jamie explaining the situation, in red. I tried finding it just now, searching for "secret service assassinate president jamie" in a few different varieties, but no luck. My Google-fu must be waning, or the post's "gone missing"...

Re:DMCA and Secret Service

[HarvardAce (771954)]

I tried finding it just now, searching for TEXT REMOVED in a few different varieties, but no luck. My Google-fu must be waning, or the post's "gone missing"...

You may not have found the post, but I have a feeling that the secret service will be finding you very shortly for the above post.

The old story submission page

[BadAnalogyGuy (945258)]

I appreciate how the story submission process has become for more open than it once was. The Firehose is a pretty neat implementation of an idea cribbed from other online forums. However, I still wonder about the benefit of using user journals as story submission sources.

What used to be a cool way of keeping a blog and fostering a relatively active community around a few "hub" users (FK, etc.) has become a spam tool of attention whore users who skim crap stories from all the usual news sources and post them as journal entries in the hopes of getting published on the front page. Seriously, there is a user who just posts reviews of new cell hardware. The move of journals from a community-building feature to attention whore feeder has completely broken the original use of journals.

In another vein, why are you guys still banning people for being very active? I'm alluding to the problem of bots which you fixed by auto-banning any user who hits the site more than a certain number of times within a few hours. For anyone actively engaged in a thread, refreshing the page to get the latest comments is essential, so getting a large number of hits all at once from a single IP may not necessarily be the result of bots. With all your work on the code, I find it hard to believe that you can't figure out a heuristic to separate legitimate users from spiders and bots.

Other than that, I can't believe I've spent this much time on this site. I expect Bill Shatner to tell me to get a life and move out of my parents' basement.

Why not apply Karma rules to Firehose submissions?

[Mahjub Sa'aden (1100387)]

Karma was originally conceived of to weed out good comment submissions from the bad ones, yes? Why not extend that system to the Firehose. If your submissions are modded down enough, you slip below some threshold, or just can't submit, period.

The important things in life

[Rob T Firefly (844560)]

And based on what existed in 1998, I chose what was the best for my needs. And while cool kids drove to Florida and saw boobs, I stayed up all night and rewrote almost all of the site from scratch.

Considering Slashdot's role in your later marriage, one could conceivably say you took the long, roundabout route...

Re:

[David_W (35680)]

Considering who he married I'd say he got fucked both times.

Wait, isn't that the point?

Re:The important things in life

[spun (1352)]

Considering who he married I'd say he got fucked both times.

Wait, isn't that the point?

As someone who has only been married for four years, I'm still saving my second time for a special occasion. The first was nice, though.

I want to hear about you trying to move to Mac...

[Nova Express (100383)]

...but you had to move back because it kept taking forever to transfer that one 17 MB file...

Screenshots

[FatAlb3rt (533682)]

Any screenshots hanging around to show the evolution of slashdot?

Re:

[IthnkImParanoid (410494)]

It looked just like this, but with less ads :)

Re:

[CoreDump01 (558675)]

Or, you could simply subscribe [slashdot.org] to slashdot, rendering your plugins useless and helping your favorite timekiller financially.

Re:Screenshots

[sar (398)]

use the wayback machine [archive.org]. :) http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://slashdot.org [archive.org]

Re:Screenshots

[gardyloo (512791)]

Just imagine pink. Lots of pink. And ponies. OMFG.

UIDs

[E-Lad (1262)]

It was right around this point that we created user accounts. For nearly a year all posts had no authentication... but now you could reserve your name

I wonder if my UID was created on the Multia. Who cares how /low/ one's UID is. All that matters was if it was created on the Multia or not ;)

Re:

[shani (1674)]

Who cares how /low/ one's UID is. All that matters was if it was created on the Multia or not

Easy for those of you with a low UID to say. :(

Lucky bastard...

Re:

[2short (466733)]

"Who cares how /low/ one's UID is. All that matters was if it was created on the Multia or not ;)"

Bah! What an arbitrary criteria.

Clearly, what matters is whether your UID is PRIME!

Re:UIDs

[Captain Splendid (673276)]

Sadly, that would be this [slashdot.org] never-used account.

Cachedot?

[Erich (151)]

Was this about the time when we had cachedot.slashdot.org? I remember it was updated about once an hour and was infinitely faster than the "real" slashdot page.

Slashdot has Ads?

[by Anonymous Coward]

[disables AdBlock]

Well, would you look at that...

Something unmentioned

[markhb (11721)]

I realize that you are trying to recap years of history in a short story, but there was one thing I recall from the early days, pre-moderation: some comments would get point scores, usually 1 or sometimes (rarely) 2. I remember hoping that some day, something I had written would be considered useful / funny / striking enough to get a point, but I don't think it ever happened. How did that work? Also, where does the great password caper, where CmdrTaco discovers that even if There's More Than One Way To Do It, keeping user info in a plaintext flatfile is Not One Of Them, come into the story?

ever tempted by the dot-com boom?

[schwaang (667808)]

I mean, at that time there must have been a zillion well-funded operations that would've hired you with a high salary *and* stock, given that you had actual experience running a high-volume site.

First post

[Jake73 (306340)]

First post!!!

Re:They do delete posts

[fbjon (692006)]

we really don't delete comments except for the incredibly rare DMCA or Secret Service mandated events. Not true! A few years back after Timothy or somebody posted a dupe almost back to back he was so embarassed that he nuked the story along with all the posts in it.....

Not quite the same thing. Nuking a dupe story nukes(?) all comments in a fairly destructive and unbiased way. Deleting individual posts would be much worse.

Re:

[Shadow Wrought (586631)]

Taco is in the Secret service, but keep that to yourself.

Taco is the Secret Service.

Re:They do delete posts

[Captain Splendid (673276)]

In Soviet Russia, Secret Service Tacos you!

Mods, be gentle, this is my (honest!) first ever attempt at a "In Soviet Russia... joke

Re:They do delete posts

[Shadow Wrought (586631)]

Mods, be gentle, this is my (honest!) first ever attempt at a "In Soviet Russia... joke

Nyet! Stalin had more compassion than we do!

--The Mods

Re:More pathetic narcissistic navel-gazing

[Mushdot (943219)]

One thing that always gets me is the amount of time people put into trying to either:

• Get the first post
• Write some anonymous trolling/flaming crap

Once after doing some moderating, I left my browsing level at -1 by accident. For a few days until I realised, I thought Slashdot had been overtaken by some sort of dedicated spam operation, but no, that's just the usual amount of crap you see browsing at that level.

I still can't believe people constantly post the same racist/trolling insults to pretty much every article submitted, but I guess it gives you a good idea of what kind of people there are in this world.

And then there are people like the AC im replying to, who probably have an account but daren't speak with their ID for fear of repercussion.

It just goes to show that moderating does work

Re:relocate

[p0tat03 (985078)]

Last I checked, here in Canada the police, intelligence service, or any other form of law enforcement can also demand removal of sensitive information related to ongoing investigations or national security...

Re:

[mikael (484)]

The funny thing is, if you look at the five year graph with a scale 0.0 to 0.8, there is this strange peak between 2006 and 2007. Just before the end of 2005 there is the first peak, then another at the beginning of the second quarter of 2006. After that, there is a slow decline towards 0.2

Slashdot also appears to be more busy during the weekdays that the weekends, which gives a strange sawtooth pattern. Still, slashdot is still in the top 1000 sites, ranking 686.

Re:Are you fucking crazy?

[Seraphim_72 (622457)]

without introducing new errers

Pot meet 1/6th kettle ...