I'm assuming you are using an AOL connection? Perhaps you are going through a proxy server shared by thousands or millions of other users, or the DHCP server gave you an address formerly used by the proxy, and accesses from this one IP exceeded the threshold.

The rate limiting is obviously designed to stop people from checking the site every second when a new story is only posted once an hour , probably so some script kiddie doesn't always try to get "first post". Our systems have many rate limiters in place and if someone trips one they can generally figure out what they did wrong.

As far as the slashdot effect being abusive, at this point if your web server can't handle a slashdot link you are doing something wrong and don't deserve the massive amounts of free advertising you are getting.

-Posted by Eric on April 4, 2003 01:29 AM

Sorry, but that simply isn't a fair statement.

Any large site such as Slashdot, Fark.com, etc isn't naive. It knows it's own stats, and the effect it can have on the everyday, non-commercial grade server. The majority of web sites are simply not load-ballanced heavy duty Slashdot-ready sites.

Blaming the owner of a $9.00/month website for his site dying from a Slashdot link is like blaming a home owner when a river floods and crushes his house. And as any large partner in any community, one has to be aware of the tidal wave one causes when they come into the harbour. It's part of internet life, but definately not our fault.

Most of us would *love* the free exposure, because Slashdot is the bomb.. but we simply can't afford the bandwidth cost, or don't have direct control of our servers.

Mind you, *I* still like Slashdot.

-Posted by Quinn on April 4, 2003 05:01 AM

Eric: I am going thru our proxies, so I assume you are correct.

Quinn:
"The majority of web sites are simply not load-ballanced heavy duty Slashdot-ready sites."

So, don't you find their statement just a bit ironic?

I find it ironic, and a little bit annoying to receive a message like I did thru my RSS reader (more accurately, their tone isn't exactly friendly, but it doesn't need to be either, so...).

To be clear, I generally don't like slashdot due to the misquotes, poorly researched postings, redundant postings, and the generally low quality of 'news' (imho of course). So, as they say it's so easy to do, I go elsewhere.

Last point, if I ever did get slashdotted, it would cost me money. Potentially lots of it. Even if my host had the server configged to take that kind of traffic, that kind of traffic would cost me real dollars. But, I know my host could not handle that kind of traffic (It's not a quad Xeon or E10K), and since I'm on a shared server, I would be impacting the other people who are on my host.

I've taken the steps to avoid a slashdotting by

• writing crappy posts that will never get linked to (heheh)
• preemptively referrer banning (via htaccess) the slashdot domain (perhaps I am paranoid)

-Posted by Dan on April 4, 2003 09:45 AM

Hrm, I re-read Eric's then Quinn's post, and realized Quinn was replying to Eric. This is one of those times where threaded comments would come in handy! I stall can't decide if I want implement that tho...

-Posted by Dan on April 4, 2003 10:07 AM