Boing Boing blackout message | Hacker News Reader

Boing Boing blackout message

boingboing.net

165 pointsmerryandrew23 comments

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.

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.

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.

You might simply remove "503: Service Unavailable"

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.

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

Let's be clear that among the blackout messages, yours is unequivocally the best. Specifically, it is concise and effective in a way that neither Wikipedia nor Google's messages are.

That said, I do agree that it would be more effective sans-503 error.

I didn't write the copy, but I did do the design. We're proud to be part of this protest. Thanks for your kind words.

I like it. I think it works for Boing Boing. It would be problematic at a general news site. I'd assume most BB readers are regular readers. And they probably lean 'geek.' In that context, it works.

I think your page is excellent. I don't really believe that the 503 message is too much-- people are used to 404s, so I think it will be fine.

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.

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.

Nice post! The example is clarifying.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

Must do: View page source. :)

also check out the php tags

   <?php .* ?>

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

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