Too much of a good thing, I guess. On Monday morning, the IP address used by the First Post Robot was banned from Slashdot. I made it easy for them... all the First Post activity came from a single IP address, out of curiosity to see what would happen. Here's what happened (typos and bad grammar/capitalization maintained):

Either your network or ip address has been banned from this site

Here's an overview of the FirstPost Big Weekend, December 13-15, 2002, when I let the First Post Robot it run unattended all weekend for the first time.

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

I'm facing a difficult choice! Do I release the source for the First Post Robot?

Pros:
* I'll learn what I could do better.
* Others will learn from my efforts and improve their legitimate coding skills.

Cons:
* I'll learn how lame my code is.
* Others will learn from my efforts and improve their illegitimate haXor skillz.

What do you think?

This journal entry will be used to record successes (and perhaps, notable failures) of the First Post Robot. I can't promise to keep it up to date, of course.

And if you're thinking, "Why is this luser trashing up Slashdot", please refer to Slashdot's thoughts on the subject.

I'm sure someone has created a First Post Robot before. But this is my attempt at the fine art of hacking Slashdot. Obviously, I have created a special account just for this purpose, and will gleefully watch its Karma drop to the floor, then dig a hole and burrow even further.