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Kuro5hin returns with added Mojo

Rusty and Dylan parlay parlez-vous

The Kuro5hin community should flash back any minute now, two months after a denial of service attack took the site down.

Pronounced "corrosion" and not "Kew-ro-five-hin" (we were soooo relieved to discover), K5 modestly set out to do be a better Slashdot than Slashdot, and rapidly gained a reputation this spring as an intelligent salon for debating the Big Issues du jour. And since these days it can be up to a fortnight or more befoe Slashdot takes notice of many a hot geekish story, it looked pretty topical too. (Rusty adds that the Slashdot boys have been a huge help since the DoS attack.)

Much was attributed to an intriguing peer moderation system, which has further enhanced since the DoS attack, as the K5 Ministry of Information explained to us in this posting:-

"After nearly two months of downtime, today marks the re-launch of Kuro5hin.org (pronounced "corrosion"), a popular news and discussion site that was taken down by founder Rusty Foster on July 26th after several days of scripted spamming and denial of service ttacks."

"The site is an attempt to create a self-organizing web community, by allowing any reader not only to submit news and editorial items and comment on them when they are posted, but also to decide what submissions should be posted, by voting on each submission. All stories are written, submitted, chosen, and discussed entirely by the readers
themselves. Site administrators merely make sure the software and servers run smoothly, and fix the occasional grammar mistake."

"First launched in January of 2000, the site ran smoothly until late July, gaining over 4,000 registered users, serving nearly 1/2 million pages a day, and becoming a favorite gathering spot especially or the Linux and Free software communities. But starting July 23rd, the story submission queue and the comments began filling up with nonsense posts generated by a script, and submitted too fast for site administrators to keep up. Rusty decided to take the site down until measures could be put in place to prevent this kind of abuse."

"It took somewhat longer than anticipated, since Rusty was in the middle of a move to California at the time, but the site finally went back up at 10AM Pacific time this morning, with a host of new features, including anti-script defenses, a collaborative user trust system called "Mojo," and a redesign which introduces sections for News, Media, Freedom & Politics, and more."

"Running on new servers donated by VA Linux Systems, and colocated at the New York facilities of VHosting.com, the all-volunteer staff of Kuro5hin.org believe the site will be better than ever. Co-administrator Dylan Griffiths said he missed the users most, 'who are a wonderful crowd of caring generous people. I'm really happy we're back finally.'

And so are we boys, so are we.®

Related link

Script kiddies fell Kuro5hin

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