Journal firstpostrobot's Journal: Now That Is Strange... 3
Update: the story returned a few minutes later. The links below are now fully operational! Too strange!
Here's something very strange. My robot was about to get First Post on a story about DIRECTV dropping broadband service. Here's the URL: click it if you like:
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/12/13/2050257
It doesn't work! It looks like the story was deleted just seconds after it hit the front page. Here it is, in its entirety:
News | Posted by michael on Friday December 13, @04:29PM
from the fatality dept.
Phroggy writes "Effective today (Friday the 13th), DIRECTV Broadband is officially out of business. The company will remain partially operational for the next 60 to 90 days, and we will work to transition our roughly 160,000 customers to another provider. Details are still sketchy. So, anybody gonna be hiring in the Portland area in a couple months?" There's a press release about the shutdown.
The "Reply" link generated an unexpected response -- a listing of recent articles that I've never seen on Slashdot. It looked like a search result listing. In fact, you can see for yourself!
I guess I'd better add that code to check for completely unexpected responses to posting. I'm currently looking for the expected success screen or else declare failure. I'll have to look for an expected failure screen and break if something strange appears.
One caveat: I haven't checked the links. It's possible that they are misleading, or even [shudder] goatse'd! Clicker beware...
first conspiracy post! (Score:1)