

Boing Boing blackout message - merryandrew
http://boingboing.net/503

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famousactress
Been checking out everyone's banners and pages, and this is my favorite. It's
incredibly arresting, well written, and has good calls to action.

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rcavezza
I disagree.

On a quick glance, I assumed there was a page error.

Their page works if you take the time to read it, but I assume most non
technical users will open the page, see the page error, assume the page is
down for technical reasons, and go about the rest of their day.

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mustardhamsters
Hi, I'm the guy who made this page. We've been talking about SOPA for weeks,
and announced that we were blacking out several days ago. I think that our
readership is on top of that, but I might be persuaded to amend the message...
I thought it was fairly clear.

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merryandrew
You might simply remove "503: Service Unavailable"

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mustardhamsters
What about "503: Service Intentionally Unavailable"?

Edit: Actually, I don't want to change it. I don't think our readers will read
three words and skip the explanation. I think much more highly of them than
that.

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jules
The thing is, people are trained to skip error pages. What do you think would
happen if you format it as parked domain page? It's not the users you'd
perhaps think lowly of that have the most trained impulse to close error
pages; it's the more technical users.

Here's a suggestion: format the page as if it was taken down by the
government. Something like this:
<http://corecorina.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/rippoker.jpg>

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Lewton
They win points for clearly stating in the first paragraph how they would be
affected and why they oppose it.

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astrodust
I'm honestly surprised their 503 page isn't as NASCAR with advertisements as
their regular page is. This must be costing them a fortune.

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eekfuh
I love that they are doing this, BUT the big header "503: Service Unavailable"
is what is first read and in my experience, most users will just stop in their
tracks and return later (assuming the site is having technical issues) without
reading the rest.

~~~
mustardhamsters
We made some deliberate decisions to try to make it look as little as possible
like a real error code. I think most people will realize that it's not an
actual technical issue, nothing else on our site looks like this and we've
given them plenty of warning through posts.

~~~
beschizza
Right. I wanted it to be pure apache error message except for the text. El
Hamstero Mustardo here talked me down.

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joshmanders
Their execution is better than Wikipedia's in my opinion. Well done,
BoingBoing.

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jon2512chua
Must do: View page source. :)

~~~
bilalhusain
also check out the php tags

    
    
       <?php .* ?>

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beschizza
The text was Cory, the viewsource was Dean (Mustardhamsters here at HN).
Thanks, guys!

