Slashcode

» see slashcode.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

On 22 September 2009 at 12:42, Jamie McCarthy pushed a commit to the public Slashcode repository titled "Tagboxes: debug_log to ease checking abbr/sectiononly scoring." The last words of the message are "tracks internal commit" followed by a hash. Nothing was ever pushed after it. The repository is still on SourceForge and still marked active, with that commit sitting on top of everything before it.

Slash, which almost everybody called Slashcode, was the software Rob Malda wrote in the spring of 1998 to run Slashdot. Andover.net bought Slashdot in June 1999, and on 31 March 2000 the code went out under the GPL, announced on Slashdot in a story headlined "Slashcode v1.0 Released." The SourceForge project was registered a week later. Perl, running on Apache against a MySQL database. What other people wanted out of the box was the comment machinery: threaded discussion with a moderation system over it, plus karma to decide who got to moderate.

Version 2 arrived in 2001, worked on by Brian Aker and Chris Nandor among others. O'Reilly published a book about it in January 2002, "Running Weblogs with Slash," which tells you how seriously the idea was taken at the time. Then the public side slowly quieted down. The last file release on SourceForge was in August 2006. Jamie McCarthy and Chris Nandor maintained it until 2009.

~ the case file ~

~ what shipped in the tarball ~

The documentation directory held a file called slasherd.png, which turns out to be an entity-relationship diagram labeled "ERD for Slashdot 01.10.00." It is the actual database schema of Slashdot as of 1 October 2000, every table drawn out in boxes with the keys marked: stories, comments, moderatorlog, pollquestions, users_info, accesslog. Running a Slashdot-shaped site meant working from somebody else's production schema, published in the documentation directory for anyone who downloaded the tarball.

The Turkish web I grew up on ran on phpBB and vBulletin instead. Those gave you boards and post counts and a signature field, which is where I put my hardware list, and they had no concept of a comment being scored by other readers. Slash's karma model never crossed over. I read about the thing for years before I ever saw a site that used it.

~ the citation nobody checked ~

English Wikipedia has said for years that the original codebase was abandoned in September 2009, and that sentence has carried a citation-needed tag since January 2019. Nobody checked it. The repository confirms it to the day, and it also explains the mechanism, because the final commit message is the giveaway. The public tree was a mirror of an internal one. Slashdot kept developing the site privately and stopped copying the work outward. No announcement exists because the private repository carried on without interruption.

The project's own website lasted a little longer. slashcode.com served its own pages until March 2012, and from April that year it has been a redirect to the SourceForge project. Fourteen years of that redirect are in the archive, a 301 roughly once a month.

~ the fork that kept it ~

In 2014 the people who started SoylentNews took the 2009 snapshot, named it Rehash, and built a site on it. It remains under the GPL, it accepts contributions, and it is the only place that code is still doing the job it was written for. In May 2023 the SoylentNews team announced the site would close at the end of June, then reversed the decision on 5 June. The engine is older than most of the people arguing in its comment threads.

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