SlashNOT

Matthew writes: By now, all techheads know about the “Slashdot Effect”: Enormously popular but self-righteous website links to a low bandwidth high processing requirement site run by one guy in his basement, thus taking it down. And that guy is supposed to be thrilled to lose both his inbound and outbound connections and e-mail for the joy of having been slashdotted.

But lately, Slashdot’s increasing popularity and complete impunity towards linking to small sites has gotten seriously old for the small site operator. It’s beyond a joke and becoming a serious directed attack. To be fair and ethical, Slashdot should pull links when site operators ask them to before a case goes to court and establish a precedent eliminating the current “fair use” linking policy that precedent has established.

If you’ve been (or hope to be) Slashdotted, we have a solution for you:

Redirect your linked page to SlashNOT! We offer this free service only because we care about you and want to make the unwanted traffic go away. Since Slashdot typically links directly to a page inside your site structure, redirecting just that page to us will give you back your bandwidth and allow you to keep the remainder of your site up. Best of all, you get to stick it to slashdot! We want to make linking to SlashNOT the “official” way to mitigate the Slashdot effect for those site operators whose requests to de-link has been ignored by Slashdot. So feel free to spread the word in newsgroups. Once Slashdot realizes that by not listening that they’re feeding traffic to a satire site, they’ll begin delinking those who request it, which is the ultimate goal of this project.

Why? Because we care about your site.