Date: Mon, 18 Sep 2000 01:40:02 -0400
From: Rusty Foster <rusty@kuro5hin.org>
To: lwn@lwn.net
Subject: Kuro5hin.org re-launches today

09/18/2000
10:00 AM PDT

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 attacks.

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 for 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."

For more on the July attacks, see the Slashdot stories "Kuro5hin Forced
Down By DOS" (http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/07/26/1155243) and
"Kuro5hin - Bitter and Hopeful"
(http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/07/26/2027241), or the Register
story "Script kiddies fell Kuro5hin"
(http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/archive/12197.html).

Kuro5hin.org is online at http://www.kuro5hin.org/
-- 
Rusty foster
rusty@kuro5hin.org
http://www.kuro5hin.org/