Submitted by ck on January 11th, 2006

Facts

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, one of DirectNIC's employees in New Orleans kept a blog that provided a captivating first-hand account of the chaos overwhelming the city. Besides providing intriguing social commentary, the blog had a lot of technical insights into keeping a datacenter running throughout the course of a natural disaster.

At the very top of the blog, the author had listed some especially pertinent information. One of the bullet points clearly presented at the top of the page read:

If you want to link to my blog, please use this URL: http://mgno.com/

The slashdot story that linked tens of thousands of readers to the blog used http://www.livejournal.com/users/interdictor/ instead of the requested uri.

Commentary

While this injustice is a single case of CowboyNeal irresponsibly posting a submission, Slashdot's editorial staff have a long history of posting stories without reading the articles they link to. This instance merely epitomizes the irresponsible attitude of Slashdot editors. In this case, the editor who approved the story should have at least taken a cursory glance at the target site and changed the submitted link to reflect the blog author's request. The editor made no such change.

The blog's author made a clearly visible request specifically for large-traffic sites like slashdot. Given the well-documented effects of the "slashdot effect," ignorance of such a request can only be seen as irresponsible, indicating once again that the editors have no regard for the sites they link to.

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