Boing Boing blackout message

by merryandrew • 15 years ago

165 23 15 years ago

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

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.

rcavezza• 15 years ago

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.

mustardhamsters4• 15 years ago

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.

choxi• 15 years ago

we liked it too and designed ours inspired by it: http://www.trybloc.com/

we took out the error message though because it looked a bit confusing and wrote our own copy.

joshkaufman• 15 years ago

Here's my variation: http://personalmba.com/

I changed the headline, as well as included a personal story. Under PIPA/SOPA, there's a high probability my site would've been blacklisted a few months ago due to user-uploaded content, even though I created 99.9% of the information on the site.

Lewton• 15 years ago

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

eekfuh• 15 years ago

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.

astrodust2• 15 years ago

I would not want to be manning the tech support phones today.

mustardhamsters4• 15 years ago

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.

beschizza2• 15 years ago

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

astrodust2• 15 years ago

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.

jon2512chua• 15 years ago

Must do: View page source. :)

bilalhusain• 15 years ago

also check out the php tags

   <?php .* ?>

beschizza2• 15 years ago

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

Boing Boing blackout message

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