[rescue] Re: Look who's a slashdot weenie!

[Rip Loomis]

Jonathan C. Patschke writes: 

> The first "trolls" on Slashdot (aside from The Glorious MEEPT!!!, who
> isn't really a troll, I think) were people who competed for the first
> comment on a story.  After a while, you'd see ten or more messages with
> "First Post" in the subject line, and no text.

Just to clarify--you do realize that the whole "frist prost" thing
started because the slashdot back-end code needed $post[0] to be
generated as part of making the story available, right?  There were
weenies who tried to compete, but there was *always* an anonymous
first post for a while there, along about 1.1-1.3 code.  It was
a documented "feature" (read as: horrible kluge) that was fixed
just before they finally got around to releasing the code for
outside use.  By then the first post crap had gotten a lot of
people pretty annoyed.  Yes, there was some randomization of the
exact nature of that first post, but it was an artifact of the
slashcode engine rather than an actual user doing it. 

Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but I ran a slashcode-based
site in the 1.3 days (just after it was publically released) and
I made sure I read all the docs/warnings before I put it up live.
That background is what the above is based upon, and no I can't
be arsed to go find a good reference to confirm it now. 

0 - that wasn't a footnote, it was an index number into the array.
   Phhbbtt. 

 --Rip