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Comment by mustardhamsters | Hacker News Reader

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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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.

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