Jahf's Journal: Big boys need to have cache!

A quick thread that pretty well sums up how I feel about the way /. and Google and like can really abuse their best participants ...

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=101442&cid=8655929

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Pasted here in case the above link ever dies but I may miss parts of the discussion because of it

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Re:Yeesh (Score:1)
by thesaur (681425) on Wed Mar 24, '04 08:57 AM (#8655929)

However, that cannot prevent an attack by Google. You wouldn't want to block requests referred by google.com, because you do want people to find your site, right?

As reported in a previous story [slashdot.org], Google linked their main logo graphic to an information academic site and brought it down [swin.edu.au]. Subsequently, Slashdot hit [swin.edu.au], but it didn't hold a candle to Google. Fortunately, such attacks by Google are rare. Of course, there is no way to determine your risk for a Google attack, unlike slashdot attacks.

The best idea is to always keep your server ready to handle any load.

I'll probably get modded down for this, but so be it.
[ Reply to This | Parent ]

Re:Yeesh by thesaur (Score:1)
Re:Yeesh (Score:1)
by Jahf (21968) on Wed Mar 24, '04 10:59 AM (#8657449)
(Last Journal: Wed Oct 29, '03 04:29 AM)
Depends on if you care if people see your site ... I know one guy who takes all traffic referred by Google, /. and a couple of other sites (he occasionally publishes tech goodness) to the Google cached version of his page.

Most people can't afford to keep their personal servers ready to handle 1% of the load that Google's image fiasco or 10% of a popular article on /. can throw at them.

Should those people be penalized by not being able to have their own site (rather than surrendering control to a bunch of web farm monkeys)? No, sites like /. and Google, which espouse the idea of being good net citizens on principle should realize that often they are some of the worst net citizens out there.

Wow ... wasn't expecting it to turn into a rant, oh well :)

And who cares about being modded down? *laugh*
        [ Reply to This | Parent ]

Re:Yeesh (Score:1)
by Jahf (21968) on Wed Mar 24, '04 11:05 AM (#8657551)
(Last Journal: Wed Oct 29, '03 04:29 AM)
btw I doubt even the referer->GoogleCache mechanism would save most sites from the inadvertant DDOS that Google provided by that image link. Just more argument to Google and /. being better citizens.

Perhaps /. could wait to publish a story until Google had it cached and then give the -option- in a user pref to allow links to be rewritten to the Google cache ...

Perhaps Google could add a new piece to the stale robots.txt standard like "cache-link-only" so that Google would know the author was only interested in being in the Google engine if Google directed all links to it's own cache for that particular site.

Both are opt-in programs that allow the rest of us to have good conscience when viewing tiny sites via links from beasts like Google and /.

BTW, I don't want people to get me wrong ... I might not have a -job- without /. or Google since I use them for research and learning every day along with a host of other sites. I don't want them -gone- I just want them to be a bit more responsible for their actions. To paraphrase J. Depp, they're "something like big dumb pupp"ies ... in this case we like to pet them and they're usually sweet but sometimes they can bite the hand that pets them when they get overzealous.