What's up with the blackboxvoting site?

[thecrow]

I'm getting this error:

Fatal error: Can't find file: './jblackbo_blackboxvoting/users.frm' (errno: 13) query: SELECT u.*, s.*, r.name AS role FROM users u INNER JOIN sessions s ON u.uid = s.uid LEFT JOIN role r ON u.rid = r.rid WHERE s.sid = '47e4f73199887c8990fcc8b5edcd192a' AND u.status < 3 LIMIT 0, 1 in /home/jblackbo/public_html/includes/database.mysql.inc on line 97

Anybody know what that means?

[Stephanie]

1. Yesterday they were brought down by millions of hits

They were linked on fark.com - not sure what that is but the site got overloaded from it.

[bearfan454]

2. Bev probably got hacked again.

They can't stand her telling the truth.

[revree]

3. Major story broke today about central voting tabulator being

easily hacked...maybe lots of hits are screwing it up.

[Stephanie]

5. That's it, according to Andy

He said the story was on fark.com -

[OneBlueSky]

4. works fine for me . . . try rebooting your computer . . . n/t

.

[RedEagle]

6. Site was overloaded

I think they tried several different things and had to determine the cause, just in case it was a DOS.

Yes, looks like Fark brought it down, which isn't a nefarius thing.

People may have had access at various times as they shuffled things around and tried different stuff.

However, the Blackboxvoting.org has been upgraded and we hope will now be able to handle the traffic.

Will someone explain who Fark is? I hadn't heard of it before.

[claudiajean]

9. Fark is hard to describe...but very high traffic

Fark is sort of a compendium of "news of the wierd", exceptionally relevant current events that incite a response, stories of people being complete idiots, smoking gun type stuff, tech and web news, and photos of naked or partially naked college girls. (With both "safe for work" and "unsafe for work" labels to prevent embarrasing click throughs of soft porn on the office PC.)

Really.

They have super-high traffic. Millions and millions of hits daily. You can check it out at www.fark.com

Its primary readership is 18 - 35 year old guys. Think Maxim plus the New York Post plus Slash.Dot plus a healthy dose of the best of the BBC. It started as one of the first blogs years ago (1996 I think), when the gentleman who began it was an out-of-work IT guy looking for something to occupy him as he looked for a job. He started just posting links to stories and stuff on the web that caught his attention - everything from indiscreet photos of "girls gone wild" to news stories that outraged him...after a while, he saw that his traffic was through the roof, and realized he might have a marketable commodity in subscriptions to the thing, and the rest is, as they say, history.

It's one of my brother-in-law's first stops as he skims his favorite blogs, newsletters, etc., each day. (And he's a perfectly nice, normal, intelligent guy, committed Democrat, IT manager, great husband and dad, etc.)

Being "Farked" is huge - it guarantees high exposure on the day the site is linked. It is now moderated, because there are SO MANY submissions daily for the front page. If you read through the thousands of comments from the beginning, you'll see that several "Total Fark" (high-end package) subscribers waged a battle yesterday morning to get the mods to post BBV.org to the front page.

My understanding is that the BBV.org people have been told by their ISP that there were over 2.5 million hits yesterday to BBV.org. If you look at how many comments it generated on Fark, that number seems about right.

[nostamj]

7. I'm getting this:

Welcome to Your New Web Site!
Thank You for Hosting with us!

You can replace this page with your own so that visitors to your domain name will see your very own welcome page.

==================================

and a lot more crap. time to get on the horn with Andy again...

[ParanoidPat]

8. I get in just fine.....

.....:shrug: I do have some problems getting to some pages in the forums but I believe it's due to the site having been moved and the page URLs not being updated.

[claudiajean]

10. He knows.

The BBV.org page is being migrated to a substantially upsized bandwidth program this morning.

I have gotten both the page you referenced and the real BBV.org page alternately this morning.

He and Bev are standing by at Porters to appear on Unfiltered this morning on AAR, but will be contacting their ISP as soon as they are done at noon (9am Pacific for us out here on the left coast.)