Slashdotted
Posted May 30th, 2004 @ 09:05pm by Erik J. Barzeski
Brad, one of FSS's gifted developers I'm happy to call a team member, has been banned from accessing Slashdot. Brad is working on PulpFiction and Slashdot is one of our default feeds. Andy, another FSS team member, was banned late last year for three or four days.
Why was Brad banned? Did he post bad comments or something? No. He was banned for taking up too many resources. Yes: the site that results in poor sites "being slashdotted" blocks users.
Either your network or ip address has been banned from Slashdot due to script flooding that originated from your network or ip address - or this IP might have been used to post comments designed to break web browser rendering. Or you crawled us with a rude robot, especially one that doesn't understand RFCs very well. We have limited resources here and are fairly protective of them.
Ahhh, the irony!! Here's an image of Brad's current view of Slashdot.
Donate Life
Posted 30 May 2004 at 9:55pm #
The ridiculous part of this is that you can get banned for nothing more than fetching an RSS feed twice in less than an hour (or maybe it's half an hour, it's been so long since I unsubscribed that I don't remember), because this somehow takes too many resources. Of course, you can sit there and reload the front page every five minutes all day long and nothing will happen.
Furthermore, if RSS really is taking up so many resources, I don't see why they can't implement the well known and popular solution of actually using the last-modified date and etag for aggregators that support it. Heck, if they just generated the RSS statically every now and then (a perfectly reasonable thing to do on a high-traffic site, I should think) Apache would do all the work for them.
Since I find it hard to believe the maintainers of /. are that technically incompetent, I can only take the conspiratorial view and assume they do this because they want it to be annoying. After all, the rest of the site is annoying enough to begin with, and people who use RSS aren't feeding the trolls or looking at ads...
Posted 30 May 2004 at 10:16pm #
Yeah, had that happen to me when I was setting up MacNews. Once every 30 minutes and three hours later I was banned.
Moved to 35, it went away in a day. "curled" the main page every minute overnight and it was still going in the morning. curled the RSS feed and I was banned in minutes.
Tards.
Posted 30 May 2004 at 11:02pm #
I was banned late last year for accessing their RSS feed too much. My RSS reader was set to check every 45 minutes and I left it open overnight. When I woke up I was banned. It was rather poor. :/
Posted 31 May 2004 at 12:34am #
Although I agree that it is lame for Slashdot to do this, I think this is a good reason for a new preference to be added to PulpFiction: don't access feeds at startup. If you quit/restart PF several times too quickly, you get banned. Hopefully you can get this into the next release.
Posted 31 May 2004 at 1:52am #
PulpFiction should only be checking a feed on startup if the next check time has expired. Say you have it set to check every 30 min, check at 1 o'clock and quit PF at 1:10. If you launch at 1:20 it shouldn't be checking at launch, but if you launch anytime after 1:30 it will.
Relaunching wasn't my problem. I rewrote the way the subscription window works since it was a major speed problem. It was when I was testing the updating of the subscription stats that it happened.
Posted 31 May 2004 at 6:11am #
Definitely agree with iRideSnow's suggestion.
Posted 31 May 2004 at 10:19am #
Yeah, I've heard about this. What's ridiculous is that one day I was bored and reloaded /.'s page for like 20 minutes every, I dunno, 10 seconds or something out of sheer boredom. Nothing happened to me.
Posted 31 May 2004 at 10:31am #
Very simple answer (a hunch really): RSS feeds don't contain ads. The website does.
Posted 31 May 2004 at 8:19pm #
Slashdot's technical incompetence is well known.
You can happily reload their humongous tag-soup of a site at will, but grabbing their RSS feed too often gets you banned. Bah.
Posted 03 Jun 2004 at 8:40pm #
Just use AlterSlash, which brings you /. in a digested form (and also sports a good RSS feeds, not just the first couple of lines).