Rusty Foster
writes:
After nearly two months of downtime, today marks the re-launch
of Kuro5hin.org (pronounced “corrosion”), a popular news and
discussion site that was taken down by founder Rusty Foster on July
26th after several days of scripted spamming and denial of service
attacks.
The site is an attempt to create a self-organizing web
community, by allowing any reader not only to submit news and
editorial items and comment on them when they are posted, but also
to decide what submissions should be posted, by voting on each
submission. All stories are written, submitted, chosen, and
discussed entirely by the readers themselves. Site administrators
merely make sure the software and servers run smoothly, and fix the
occasional grammar mistake.
First launched in January of 2000, the site ran smoothly until
late July, gaining over 4,000 registered users, serving nearly 1/2
million pages a day, and becoming a favorite gathering spot
especially for the Linux and Free software communities. But
starting July 23rd, the story submission queue and the comments
began filling up with nonsense posts generated by a script, and
submitted too fast for site administrators to keep up. Rusty
decided to take the site down until measures could be put in place
to prevent this kind of abuse.
It took somewhat longer than anticipated, since Rusty was in the
middle of a move to California at the time, but the site finally
went back up at 10AM Pacific time this morning, with a host of new
features, including anti-script defenses, a collaborative user
trust system called “Mojo,” and a redesign which introduces
sections for News, Media, Freedom & Politics, and more.
Running on new servers donated by VA Linux Systems, and
colocated at the New York facilities of VHosting.com, the
all-volunteer staff of Kuro5hin.org believe the site will be better
than ever. Co-administrator Dylan Griffiths said he missed the
users most, “who are a wonderful crowd of caring generous people.
I’m really happy we’re back finally.”
Rusty, who lives in San Francisco, can be reached for comment by
email at rusty@kuro5hin.org. Dylan, in
Saskatchewan, may be reached by email at inoshiro@kuro5hin.org.
For more on the July attacks, see the Slashdot stories “Kuro5hin
Forced Down By DOS” (http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/07/26/1155243)
and “Kuro5hin – Bitter and Hopeful” (http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/07/26/2027241),
or the Register story “Script kiddies fell Kuro5hin” (http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/archive/12197.html).
Kuro5hin.org is online at http://www.kuro5hin.org