This article is a timeline of the most important major events in Slashdot history. Since its inception in 1997, the geek/technology web site Slashdot has had a long chronology of events that have contributed to its unique subculture. Slashdot (often abbreviated to /.) is a popular technology-related website, updated many times daily with articles that are short summaries of stories on other websites with links to the stories, and provisions for readers to comment on the story. ... The Slashdot subculture is a mixture of juvenilia, sarcasm, deliberately bad jokes, intellectual arrogance and highly developed and artistic attempts to provoke outraged responses from other forum users, amuse them, or challenge their thinking on the popular Slashdot technology website. ... Anonymous Coward is a term applied within some online communities to describe users who post without a handle; it is a dummy name attributed to anonymous posts used by some weblogs that allow posting by people without registering for accounts. ... Rob Malda Rob Malda (born May 10, 1976), also known as CmdrTaco, is the founder of Slashdot. ... CowboyNeal is the online nickname (handle) on Slashdot and other websites of Slashdot editor Jon Pater. ... Jonathan Katz (born 1947) is a U.S. journalist and writer. ... The Slashdot effect is a particular example of how a popular website can cause a smaller site to slow down or even temporarily close after causing a great increase in the number of visitors going to the smaller site. ... Slash (a backronym for Slashdot Like Automated Story-telling Homepage) is the open source collection of Perl scripts which runs Slashdot, one of the oldest and most popular collaborative weblogs around. ... Slashdot trolling phenomena make up a large subset of the bizarre and complex subculture found on the popular technology website Slashdot. ... Trolltalk (also known as 20721) is a hidden story ID of the online news discussion forum Slashdot, where Slashdot trolls used to converse amongst themselves, often demonstrating new trolling techniques, bragging about successful trolling and insulting each other. ... Professor Frink from The Simpsons, a stereotypical science geek. ... This article needs to be cleaned up to conform to a higher standard of quality. ... Slashdot (often abbreviated to /.) is a popular technology-related website, updated many times daily with articles that are short summaries of stories on other websites with links to the stories, and provisions for readers to comment on the story. ... The Slashdot subculture is a mixture of juvenilia, sarcasm, deliberately bad jokes, intellectual arrogance and highly developed and artistic attempts to provoke outraged responses from other forum users, amuse them, or challenge their thinking on the popular Slashdot technology website. ...

1997

• July - shortlived forerunner to Slashdot, called "Chips & Dips" [1]

• September - Slashdot is created by Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda. The name "Slashdot" was chosen for the resulting unusual URL, "http://slashdot.org" (or when read aloud, "Aitch tee tee pee colon slash slash slash dot dot org"). [2]

• December 31 - First archived Slashdot post. [3]

Rob Malda Rob Malda (born May 10, 1976), also known as CmdrTaco, is the founder of Slashdot. ... A Uniform Resource Locator, URL (spelled out as an acronym, not pronounced as earl), or Web address, is a standardized address name layout for resources (such as documents or images) on the Internet (or elsewhere). ...

1998

• February 2 - Slashdot accepts advertisers.

• May 10 - Rob Malda turns 22.

• May 13 - Slashdot introduces the "Ask Slashdot" section.[4]

• September 14 - Slashdot is hacked.[5]

• November 6 - Jon Katz discovers Slashdot.Slashdot article, Jon Katz's article.

• December 17 - Slashdot founder Rob Malda graduates from Hope College.[6]

Generally speaking, advertising is the paid promotion of goods, services, companies and ideas by an identified sponsor. ... Jonathan Katz (born 1947) is a U.S. journalist and writer. ... Hope College is a small, private, residential liberal arts college located in Holland, Michigan. ...

1999

• February 1 - The Slashdot effect is first mentioned.[7]

• May 13 - Slashdot serves up its one hundred millionth page.[8]

• June 29 - Slashdot is acquired by Andover.net.[9]

• September 7 - Meta-moderation is introduced to Slashdot[10]

• September 10 - Slashdot announces the addition of the "Your Rights Online" section.

• October 15 - Slashdot announces the addition of two new sections: Apache and BSD.

The Slashdot effect is a particular example of how a popular website can cause a smaller site to slow down or even temporarily close after causing a great increase in the number of visitors going to the smaller site. ...

2000

• February 3 - Andover.net, Slashdot's parent company, merges with Linux company VA Linux

• February 24 - Slashdot's 10,000th article is posted.[11]

• May - Slashdot is the victim of a week-long Distributed Denial-of-Service attack.[12]

• September 28 - Slashdot is hacked by two hackers going by the names "Nohican" and "{}".[13]

Unix systems filiation. ... LNUX stock price (09-Dec-1999 through 09-Dec-2000) VA Software Corporation (NASDAQ: LNUX), formerly VA Linux Systems (and VA Research before that), is the provider of the SourceForge Development Intelligence application. ...

2001

• March 9 - An anonymous poster posts the full text of Scientology's OT III ("Operating Thetan Level Three") document in a comment attached to a Slashdot article. The Church of Scientology then demanded that the Slashdot editors remove the post under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. A week later, in a long article [14], the Slashdot editors explained their decision to remove the page.

• August 18 - Slashcode 2.2 is released, which allows for comment notification, journals, and UNIX-style user pages[15].

A Scientology Center on Hollywood Boulevard in Hollywood, California Scientology is a system of beliefs, teachings and rituals, originally established as an alternative psychotherapy in 1952 by science-fiction author L. Ron Hubbard, then recharacterized by him in 1953 as an applied religious philosophy. ... Official Scientology Cross Symbol The Church of Scientology is a new religious movement that was founded by science fiction author L. Ron Hubbard as an organization dedicated to the practice of Scientology, an applied religious philosophy formulated by Hubbard. ... The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is a controversial United States copyright law. ... Slash (a backronym for Slashdot Like Automated Story-telling Homepage) is the open source collection of Perl scripts which runs Slashdot, one of the oldest and most popular collaborative weblogs around. ... It has been suggested that this article or section be merged with Unix-like. ...

2002

• January 2 - Slashdot introduces the "zoo" system, allowing the marking of users as "friend" and "foe"[16].

• January 16 - January 30 - An off-topic post purported to be detailing the results of an investigation into the Slashdot trolling phenomena becomes itself the subject of a "moderation war" and ends up being moderated a record 851 times (as well as getting 268 direct replies). The editors are accused of indiscriminately modding down all the posts in the thread collectively as well as permanently banning anyone who moderated the post up from moderating or meta-moderating again. [17][18]

• February 14 - In an article titled "Kathleen Fent Read This Story[19]", Slashdot founder Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda proposed to his long-time girlfriend and now wife Kathleen Fent.

• March 1 - Slashdot begins a subscription service, where subscribers are given special perks in exchange for a small fee.

Slashdot trolling phenomena make up a large subset of the bizarre and complex subculture found on the popular technology website Slashdot. ... Moderation is the process of eliminating or lessening extremes. ... A meta-moderation system is an arrangement used on some Internet websites (such as internet forums, web logs and news websites) which invite user comments. ...

2003

• March 6 - Slashdot subscribers are given the ability[20] to see articles 10-20 minutes before they are released to the general public.

2004

• May - Slashdot bans HTTP proxies running on ports 3128, 80, 8000 and 8080 from posting and institutes a system of semipermanent posting bans on the subnets of users who are negatively moderated several times.

• August 18 - Slashdot has its ten millionth user posting. [21]

• September 7 - Slashdot "goes political" [22] [23] and creates a new politics subsection, two months before the 2004 presidential election.

The word subnet may refer to: An abbreviation for subnetwork A mathematical net. ...

2005

• April 8 - Slashdot introduces "day passes", allowing all users to enjoy the benefits of subscribers for the duration of one day if they watch a commercial.

• September 22 - Slashdot begins using HTML 4.01 and CSS on its pages, replacing the aging HTML 3.2-based system which had been in place for many years.