I’ve mentioned it on here before, but AvantSlash is one of my favorite web apps and now it appears Slashdot doesn’t quite approve of its place in the world wide web, so they banned its IP. For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, if you want to visit Slashdot on your low-resolution browser (PDA or cell phone), it’s great because it strips out all the pictures, ads, unnecesary links, etc… All it gives you is what you want, the stories and the discussion, perfectly formatted. While Slashdot does have their own “lite” version, it is pretty sub-par with limited stories per page and 5 comments.

Other websites have done similiar things before and sometimes limit the content of their RSS feeds (i.e. Slashdot doesn’t include the latest story with feeds), because after all, they own the content, and I’m fine with that. However, for the bastion of open-source and creative sharing on the internet, it seems rather hipocritical to take an action like this. Especially considering their stance on stories and comments (contributions are unedited and owned by the contributor) it doesn’t seem right to ban users from reading stories which you claim not to own in the first place. You can’t have your cake and eat it too.

Luckily, you can still download the source code and run it on your own server.

Gotta say, I’m a bit dissapointed.

Update: It appears that the ban has been lifted. I’m guessing that it was unintentional to begin with as they do ban users for hammering their rss feed. No exect word on what happened, but the avantslash site does say this… “Two severe bugs crept into the 3.0 release relating to the way that AvantSlash handles requests for out-of-date pages and caching. Use of version 3.0 will generate excessive requests to the Slashdot server and get your IP banned. As such, it is highly recommended to update to v3.1 which resolves these issues.”