Unexpected Slashdot Downtime

Netcraft confirmed it ... Slashdot was dying for several hours (along with SourceForge, which shares a corporate overlord and router). Some planned downtime from our provider apparently didn't come back up quite as planned. Sorry for the inconvenience. On the upside, we're moving to a new network and hardware soon, so the site should be much faster and more stable rsn.

How about moving to a better news system?

[deadmongrel]

The quality of stories on /. has been down for the past few years.
Things I hate about /.(No particular order)
1. Goddam CSS design
2. dupes
3. slashadvertisement
4. bad summaries
5. lazy editors

Re:How about moving to a better news system?

[TheLostSamurai]

The quality of stories on /. has been down for the past few years. Things I hate about /.(No particular order) 1. Goddam CSS design 2. dupes 3. slashadvertisement 4. bad summaries 5. lazy editors

And yet here you are.

Re:If it was planned downtime...

[Pharmboy]

If it was planned downtime....why wouldn't you just post a story about it? That way we don't all panic when Slashdot won't load (and hit the site nonstop when it comes back).

And exactly HOW were we to read this story that was posted on the website, while that website was down? You have suggested yourself into a circular argument. Most normal people (which includes /. readers) don't check the site every 15 minutes, 24 hours a day, so the vast majority wouldn't have seen it.

Re:Modernization?

[moosesocks]

Idealism is fantastic, but you've got to draw the line between ideology and pragmatism somewhere, and focus on supporting your existing users (and paying the bills).

This is why slashdot was so reluctant to use .PNGs on the homepage for years. (The topic icons are still .GIF, although I believe that's simply due to the .GIF patent expiring around the same time that it became "safe" to use .PNGs as a design element)

That all said, IPv6 wouldn't break compatibility with existing IPv4 users, and would be a fantastic gesture to the internet community at large. Of course, if IPv6 support would cost a mint to implement, or force them into a "less desirable" data centre, it wouldn't be practical.

Re:Modernization?

[dkf]

Actually, the main thing that would make for 21st-Century cred is accepting UTF-8 text.

Agreed, even though I'm an English speaker.

I've had a couple of posts recently on topics where it would have been better to use Chinese or Japanese characters (though not very many of them).

More to the point, those of us who are math and science geeks (I hear there are a few round here) will like being able to express basic things like greek letters, superscripts, assorted operators, etc. Browsers have got a lot better at their UTF-8 support over the past few years, and there are a good few decent fonts about too.

What are the reasons for holding back? Well, the main one is that the current database holds the data in ISO-8859-1 (probably) and would either need converting or at least to have some kind of migration strategy (extra column for the encoding?) which could be rather messy.