During that time we saw 122,089 hits from 42,645 unique IP numbers. Who would have thought that 42,000 people were going to access our site and read our words, all in a single day. This was just an undergraduate research project, not Bush's Tax Plan!
We received accesses from 99 different nations, including 39 hits from Belarus and Luxembourg, 76 hits from Iceland,129 hits from Slovakia, and 206 hits from South Africa. Four of the five hosts generating the most requests for our website were in Australia. Truly the Internet is international. Two French websites (and here), a German website, a Spanish one, Slovak one, a Polish one and a Russian website saw our posting, and also placed a link from themselves to us. However, I have no idea what it says (since I don't speak those languages and my favorite website translator really couldn't understand it either).
We received 54 emails that day, and they were all positive or helpful. A professor from Canada pointed out a similar paper he had done. One Dutch person pointed out four spelling and two grammar errors on my homepage (which was three links away from the research site we posted). A domain name holder with a domain name that would describe our research offered us the domain name without charge (we said yes). Overall, the email we received was kind, helpful, and on topic.
Those words do not describe the comments posted to Slashdot about our web site. There were 241 comments posted about our web site, which was about average for stories posted that day. The first poster wrote "Mad Propz to Spork Nation!". I don't know what that means, but it should have been a clue as to what would follow.
The comments were almost universally negative, and often quite colorful. One poster suggested that our research was the sort of thing that we did when we were tired of watching "caribou mate".
The most most common comment was that we should not have used Microsoft Excel to make our graphs. Somehow the use of Excel invalidates our results entirely and makes us "lame windows weenies". You would have thought that compiling and benchmarking nineteen Linux kernel would have gotten us in the "uses Linux" club. By the way, only 40% of all accesses to our web site that day were from Linux. Thirty-five percent were from Windows, 7% were from Macintoshes, etc.
One user is a student at our school, and wrote a paragraph about how bad our school is. He mentioned that we often lose programming contests. However, at the last programming contest our school had the highest average, and the winning team was from our school. Oh well!
The difference between the emails we received from Slashdot users, and the posts placed on Slashdot's own message system, was quite striking. I can only assume that the people who actually sent email to us must have considered how we would react to their email, and the Slashdot posters must not have cared.
Overall, being slashdotted was a positive experience. It's neat to think that 42,000 people read what my students wrote. It's sad to see their work thoughtlessly insulted via the Slashdot posting mechanism. It's wonderful to read the email we received. In the end, if we get any more interesting results, we'll offer them to Slashdot again.