I'm sure a lot of you knew it was coming. The steady stream of emails asking "When is Slashdot gonna IPO" and messages from VCs pretty well proves that you guys knew it as well as I did. Well the cost and overhead of running Slashdot independently finally began to overwhelm us. After much deliberation and careful analysis, we're excited to announce that we've been acquired by Andover.net. Read more to learn what this means.

Copyleft has redone all their pages, so it only makes sense that we get some new T-Shirts up there too. So we're going to try to do a contest for some new designs. I'm going to serve as Judge (and god am I ruthless judge) on this one, and the Winner (or Winners if there are several good entries) will get the fame and glory of having their names and designs displayed here... as well as a $100 credit at Copyleft. Hit the link below to read the specifications.

First and foremost, we've moved the images to a new box. As many of you noticed, it was running temporarily off a non-standard port on the ad server. This was causing havoc for those of you behind firewalls. The new VA box is in place (blatant plug). It's horribly over powered (Dual P2) for the task at hand so to make things interesting (and to get Jesse to stop whining) we're trying out FreeBSD on it. I've also added several minor features to the comments section, as well as fixed a few bugs. Click the link below to read about them.

Catatomic writes "The Village Voice has an interesting article about Katz "Voices From The Hellmouth" Check it out here. " Well, interesting is one way to put it; incendiary is another. Worth checking out though. Click below to get a response from Katz, who was interviewed for this article.

Normally I reserve stories about Slashdot to the quickies bin, but this article is getting submitted so many times that if I don't post it, I'll spend the rest of the day deleting it from the submissions box. Bill Longabaugh wrote in to send us a piece by Dan Gillmor over at the San Jose Mercury News about Slashdot. It's a nice little 'Slashdot as a weblog' piece apparently designed to stroke my ego. Update: 05/25 03:42 by CT : I've begun rewriting the Moderator Guidelines, so if you're interested, please check them out and submit comments (or diffs :)

Several notes attached below regarding the system in general, but also regarding minor changes to moderation. If you have ever had moderator access, or ever expect to get it, please read the link below to read a few comments on minor changes to the system, plus answers to faqs that keep flooding my inbox. Never fear, I'll be rewriting the moderator guidelines just as soon as I have a few hours of peace and quiet.

Madoc writes "Was just over at Seti@Home's site, and saw that they've introduced teams now! There are 2 Slashdot teams, we should probably standardize on one: Slashdot.org and Team Slashdot " I vote for Team Slashdot. Go seek out new intelligence if this rocks your boat better than cracking DES keys.

It's Official: Slashdot served up its One Hundred Millionth page at 6:57pm Eastern. (It was a Mac user from cs.purdue.edu loading the homepage if you're curious). Thanks to the authors, story submittors, comment posters, and especially to the thousands of you who just keep reloading day after day.

As you probably noticed, the Server really bogged down today. The reason is quite simple: Katz's story, with about 500 comments weighed in at about a meg. 70 httpd's trying to serve a one meg file (which takes 2-3 minutes for most of you to download) perhaps a dozen times a second. Do the math *grin*. So I have a server level setting that will enforce Comment Limits when we get bogged. This will annoy the heck out of some how you, but it vastly speeds up page loads. After that mess, I'm glad to have some good news: I brought the 2500 stories online that I yanked awhile back when we were getting overloaded (mostly stories from late 97 early 98) so you can search for them again. More random musings are attached below.

I added the Cheesy Portal Page. No you can't configure it- its just all the Slashboxes that you could possibly have on Slashdot in one gigantic page. Several folks asked for this, I could actually see it being kinda useful if you're on a fast connection and don't mind a huge homepage. Next, the Brain Power boys have their Neuro Network stuff live now. Its like $5 per resume and $10 per new affiliate. So if ya put 'sd' in the 'more info' blank, Slashdot gets to pay the bandwidth bill again this month. The search engine has been shaping up quite nicely too. Lastly, The moderator stuff is basically up to speed now. Several dozen jurors are getting randomly selected each day to moderate discussions. We'll see how it goes. Fingers crossed.

First up, news of the Brain Power job search engine Go search for a job and submit your resume 'cuz supposedly we get some money through this as part of their new Affiliates program. Next, A few new Slashboxes to choose from now: a "Random" box, a "10 Hot Comments" box, as well as Wired & Byte. If you know of cool sites with the my.netscape RDF backend, lemme know. Lastly, Hit the link to read assorted comments on the moderation system, as well as minor changes to it.

Enucite writes "ZDNet has an article entitled "Gore's 'open source' blasphemy". It talks about the Gore 2000 website, then goes on to talk about the response on Slashdot" I wish articles referring to Slashdot comments would link the comment so that their readers could read the whole thread and not just the 2 sentances the story writer felt like sharing. And I wish they could figure out who "Anonymous Coward" really is. Ah well, nice to see we made some waves, but the offending passage still apears on the web site.

First up, Jon over at Brain Power has improved the job search engine to allow boolean searching, and parenthesis, so you can search for "c++ and not "visual c++" or "(unix and perl) or linux" to help you on your quest for unemployment. Second is a minor change to the posting system. I'm not quite convinced about the exact numbers, but users are now getting a default score based on their comment posting history. ACs still post at 0 and normal users at 1, but based on your past commenting, your scores can start at anywhere from -1 to 4. I've posted the exact numbers, more details, rationale, as well as assorted other comments on the system below.

I've made several major and minor changes again over the last few days. Mainly again regarding moderation, but also you ought to see a few minor UI improvements on the homepage and the comments as well. I like 'em. Hope you do to. Click the link to read some comments on updates to the moderation system (especially important for moderators- you guys have lost some power, so read why :) and more importantly, read my suggested requirements to be eligible for 'Jury Duty'.

We've updated the Jobs page to link through to Brain Power. These guys are relatively new company, but they're a Linux friendly operation (running on Linux and I even see Linux jobs in their engine) so I'm pretty pleased to be working with them (plus I think we get paid if you submit your resume, so go do that *grin*) I found 65 jobs searching for the word "Perl" so they've got something right. Other Slashdot Updates: If those "X Replies Below Threshold" links in the comments annoy you, I've added an option to turn them off from the user preferences. I've got a few more odds and ends to work on with comments, then I'll let the code settle down for a couple days and starting work on the new moderation stuff. Brace yourself.

I subtly changed comment spill- originally articles switched to indexed mode once the total number of comments exceded the spill. Now, the switch to indexed occurs when the number of siblings excedes the spill. This makes more sense to me- extremely deep conversations could cause indexing to occur even if there were only a few top level comments. Added an option to hide scores if you really don't like them. Lots of positive feedback on Highlight Threshold too: I love that feature personally. I'm still working on the Login problems- but I'm not getting very far. Its cookie related though. Also, its Hemos's 23rd birthday today, so send him mail and wish him well. Lets see how much mail he can get *grin*.Update: 03/28 01:37 by H : Well, thanks to all of you yahoos *grin* out there, I've been Slashdotted-or rather, my inbox has. 707 birthday messages-and fetchmail is still going. Thanks folks.

I've attached a summary of the major changes and bug fixes below. These are regarding Nested Mode, Anonymous Posting, Highlight Thresholds, and Login Problems. Also some comments about moderation. If any of these things are on your mind, read on.

Many people are submitting The Obvious article about Jon Katz not belonging on Slashdot. I guess I'm glad that in the end its up to me. Personally, I think most of his articles are good. xach sent us a deja news bit that goes much further. I agree with most of the stuff in these articles, but I also think most of Katz's articles are worth reading, but when he mentions his book, I press the back button. You can too.

For the last few days, I've been doing virtually nothing except read email regarding comments, and making changes to the code to implement new ideas that people have suggested. Click the link below to read a summary of the changes.

As many of you have noticed, something has changed recently with Slashdot moderation. Its not my major change that is still coming, but instead its a significant tweak to the old system. Hit the link below to read the summary of these changes, and comments about them. This is extremely important to any of you who read or post comments.