Why I won't be pointing to Slashdot (at least for now)
If you follow the tech news at all, then you've got to be suffering from the same overload problem I am. A few years ago, finding interesting tech news was like hanging your tongue under a dripping faucet in the middle of the desert. But now, it's like drinking water from a firehouse. There's so much happening everyday that it's impossible for any one person to stay on top of it all (thanks in large part to the blogosphere and the explosion in sources of credible information).
One reason I was having a problem was that I was subscribed to too many RSS feeds. So many that I stopped paying attention for the last few months. But last week, I finally circled back to the task of whittling down the number of subscriptions to a manageable number and then, I started getting back into the habit of looking for interesting posts to link to and write about. One of the first was a post on Slashdot. But when I clicked through, here's what I got:
The message goes on to offer other advice on what could be the problem. For example, whatever system on CNET's network that's over-zealously crawling Slashdot could be going through the same proxy as I am and it could be that proxy that's been banned.
Sure enough, after contacting the e-mail address listed on the ban notification, the folks at Slashdot think that's what it is and according to them, it's a 'runaway Wordpress crawler' that hit Slashdot over 20K times on 6/11. More evidence that this is the problem is the fact that there are others on the CNET corporate network who can see Slashdot (they must be going through a different proxy).
I was told that they'd unban me as soon as I gave them some assurance that our installation of Wordpress wouldn't do it again. I'm working on that now with our IT guys. In the meantime, I'm blind to Slashdot (and I wish they'd unban me on goodwill).
<sidbar>This is just another reason virtualization makes more sense. If for example, I had a virtual machine that wasn't on the corporate network, I could just flip to that and view Slashdot from a completely different (and unbanned IP address). </sidebar>