I’ve mentioned it before on here, but AvantSlash is one of my favorite web apps and now it appears Slashdot doesn’t quite approve of it’s place in the world wide web, so they banned it’s IP. For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, if you want to visit Slashdot on your low-resolution browser (PDA or cell phone), it’s great because it strips out all the pictures, ads, unnecesary links, etc… All it gives you is what you want, the stories and the discussion, perfectly formatted. While Slashdot does have their own “lite” version (link), it is pretty sub-par with it’s limited stories per page, 5 comments, etc…
Other websites have done similiar things before and sometimes limit the content of their RSS feeds (i.e. Slashdot doesn’t include the latest story with feeds), because after all, they own the content, and I’m fine with that. However, for the bastion of open-source and creative sharing on the internet, it seems rather hipocritical to take an action like this. Especially considering their stance on their stories (only posting “unedited” stories from users) and comments (“Comments are owned by the Poster”) it doesn’t seem right to now ban people from reading stories which you claim not to own or have any control over in the first place. You can’t have your cake and eat it too.
Luckily, you can still download the source code to running on your own server.
Gotta say, I’m a bit dissapointed.
Update: It appears that the ban has been lifted. I’m guessing that it was unintentional to begin with as they do ban users for hammering their rss feed. No exect word on what happened, but the avantslash site does say this…
“Two severe bugs crept into the 3.0 release relating to the way that AvantSlash handles requests for out-of-date pages and caching. Use of version 3.0 will generate excessive requests to the Slashdot server and get your IP banned. As such, it is highly recommended to update to v3.1 which resolves these issues.”
Tis a sad day for PDA geeks everywhere.
Teej
Does /. offer a for-pay service that does what advantslash does?
Maybe they banned it in preparation for buying it to offer.
Or, they could just be a bunch of assholes.
See http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=4456 for more information …
Ugh, my favorite script of Richards gone, gone, gone. Derek, you may wish to update some of the links here as they are not working (fourteenminutes.com and the freshmeat link). Still looking for the 3.1 code myself as all I have is the non-working 2.32 (/. made changes over the weekend it appears that broke the story content).
Funny, my local v2.32 hasn’t stopped working. I didn’t even realize there was trouble with AvantSlash until today when no comments were showing on any of the stories, so I came to check out if there was a bug in the code. Turns out that there were no +5 comments on any of the stories on the front page at the time, but now there are a few and they are showing up as usual.
I’m not looking forward to the rumored Slashdot CSS redesign, though.
Yikes! Where has become of http://www.fourteenminutes.com ??? Has it been hijacked by a google-spam site?
I want my AvantSlash! It’s the only sane way to read Slashdot on my prehistoric Handspring Visor.
While it doesn’t look incredibly different, all the code for slashdot changed when they moved a more CSS style friendly style. I haven’t taken a look at the AvantSlash code, or the new slashdot html code, but I am going to guess the script will need a rewrite, so who knows if we will see it again.
The good news is that I am working on mixing the Slashdot, Digg.com, and Bash.org RSS feeds into one that will of course be cell phone/PDA friendly. The downside is the delay the comes with the RSS feeds as you typically miss the last one or two stories. Also, including comments would be quite a feat that I don’t believe will be possible. But Digg offers more stories at a faster pace, so it shouldn’t be so bad without the /. comments.
The problem I have experienced thus far is subtle differences from one feed to the next that I am still trying to sort out and make them mesh together well. So check back as I will hopefully have a working version within the coming weeks.