For the record, some of this stuff is not visible in the backend and only becomes obvious once a story is live. Doesn't excuse issues left standing, of course. We are inching closer to end-to-end UTF8 support which will solve much of this, but it'll be a while still as we tackle other issues.

You make it sound as if Slashdot is running on a very simple setup, like a mom-and-pop shop site. That's of course not the case, so before you play armchair quarterback, maybe think this through a little bit? For the record, no hardware broke, no critical systems were overlooked, and planning was extensive and through. Shit still happened, and the crew stuck it out and fixed it, with outside consultant help.

Fixed

Actually, end-to-end UTF8 support in the pipeline. Slashcode's Perl innards and some other technicalities make the transition non--trivial, but we are committed to doing it.

At Slashdot we use the acme tool as well, rolling it out now across our infrastructure. Dependable, quick and easy.

We almost match that at Slashdot headquarters: Dual Dell UP2715K monitors in either orientation, MBP Pro 13", external keyboard and mouse is our standard setup. Devs run the OS of their choice, most stick with OSX, but some choose a Linux distro instead. Obviously we can beat you on uid if we want to. ;-)

Don't hold your breath on freshmeat.net. We removed its name from slashdotmedia.com's header this morning.

Also, folks switched their tech spending to phones, smart home products and other gadgetry. Don't expect for a minute that this hasn't taken a bite out of desktop and laptop sales.

(Very late to the party) I thought so too. How hard can it be to enable UTF8 end to end? Turns out Perl is its own can of worms. So we will be upgrading app servers, then work on the code base, and finally make sure database tables are all correct and web server configured to spit out the correct things. It'll take us a bit of time, but we are doing it. From whipslash on down everyone is committed.

Fair enough. Thanks for your clarification. In the interest of full disclosure: I head up the tech teams behind this and its sister site, but not adops or sales. Posting from my corporate account this time.