$ rm slashdot.rss

09 August 2004 @ early morning | Comments (3)

Slashdot has begun banning IP addresses for feedreader abuse. I’m not really sure how long this has been included in their account FAQ, but today I learned first hand because my IP address at work was banned. I arrived today to read:

Do Not Bother Contacting Us For 72 Hours

Your RSS reader is abusing the Slashdot server. You are requesting pages more often than our terms of service allow.

Trouble is, everyone at work appears with the same host when browsing the web (as is the case with many networks). Furthermore, even if everyone were to change their feedreader settings to update no more often than 2 or even 6 hours, we’d still get banned every morning when everyone logs in to their system between 8:00-8:30. So pretty much the whole setup sucks ass and I’m getting pretty close to writing off Slashdot entirely. Surprisingly, the prospect of deleting Slashdot’s XML feed from my subscriptions list gives me very little anxiety (actually it’s already been removed as of now).

Lately they’ve been increasingly slow at publishing popular links and news (this may be more due in part to my worsening addiction to feedreaders and on-demand content). It’s not uncommon to see something posted to Slashdot that appeared on Blogdex a day or two earlier.

I rarely actually use /. as a source of information anymore – blogs beat it to the punch about 99% of the time. I’ve begun opting for sites run by geeks who have a sense of humor and a smaller audience (Forever Geek).

The steadily improving technology surrounding blogging, XML, Wifi, handhelds, cell phones, and social networking is exponentially increasing the rate of meme propogation, making it less necessary for one primary resource of that information. With “link” resources (such as waxy.org) and “trending” resources (such as Blogdex and Bloglines), is Slashdot now redundant? Are we approaching a P2P structure for most information, with XML as a filelist of sorts? Am I beginning to sound like that annoying woman from Sex and the City?

Btw, whatever became of the push toward a standards-compliant, CSS/XHTML rebuild of their site? They’d spend massively less on bandwidth if they retooled their site, although I do acknowledge the fact that millions of simultaneous RSS requests can still be about as debilitating as a DDoS attack.