Bardot
Barrapunto was a news website related to free software, technology and digital rights.
It was updated several times a day with articles that were often short summaries of news on other websites, links to that news, and also allowed the reader to comment on the news. The site resembles a blog in many ways, however it does have threaded comments. The name comes from the website that inspired Slashdot, Slashdot, and was chosen with the intention of confusing those trying to pronounce the URL of the website ("h-t-t-p-colon-slash- slash-slashdot-dot-com").
In August 2019, and in the absence of an official statement on the matter, the website stopped responding.
History
Slashdot first came to light on June 7, 1999, inspired by Slashdot. At first it used the same software as Slashdot, then developed some of its own adaptations, to finally return to the original distribution. The software he uses is Slash and it is free software. Barrapunto was created by people from the university environment and the free software community, who in turn became the original editors of the site.
Barrapunto is a reference in the Hispanic Internet, it is an open news publication system but controlled by the editors. Since July 2004, the material published in Barrapunto is protected by a Creative Commons-By license.
Barrapunto turned out to be the winner of the 20Blogs Awards organized by the online newspaper 20 minutos, in the category of "Best blog community".
On November 4, 2006, the remodeling of the site was announced, highly anticipated by its readers.
Readers
The regular readers of Barrapunto are mostly followers of computing and technology, especially the free software movement and GNU/Linux. Visitor participation is critical as the site relies on current news discussion, and to a lesser extent on personal blog entries and polls (where anyone can vote). In fact, sometimes it is possible to find more useful information among the comments than in the news itself.[citation required]
Some of the topics covered in Barrapunto are: science, training and employment, books, leisure, and, above all, cyber rights and free software, the basis of the project.
Operation
Barrapunto is a collaborative weblog, where readers are an inseparable part of the dynamics of the site. Users submit stories (articles) to the contribution queue and, if they are registered users, they can put them on their own blog. A team of editors filter the queue and, after reviewing them, they put those stories on the front page based on their own tastes and general interest. Users can also post comments on stories.
To promote quality comments, comments may receive scores (positive or negative) through moderation points that are distributed pseudo-randomly among users. These scores affect the user's karma, which in turn influences the user's initial comment score. Comments from unregistered users have a starting point of 0, comments from registered users with less than 20 karma points have a starting point and comments from registered users with 20 or more karma points. i>karma have 2 starting points (the latter can have a starting point of your choice). A user can have a maximum of 50 karma points.
Unregistered users all have the pseudonym poor little talker, a nickname based on the name of the social criticism newspaper created by Mariano José de Larra (previously the anonymous were called asshole without a name , modified for being too offensive); the talkative poor things are a classic of Barrapunto.[citation needed] From the lazy talkative thing that is a user who has not bothered to register, to the also classic trolls, whether thematic, political or spelling.
To control moderation, Barrapunto uses meta-moderation (moderating moderators), which helps contain occasionally existing abuse cases.
Barpoint Effect
Due to the large traffic generated by the site, the move to the front page of a news item produced a notable increase in visits to the linked web pages.
There are cases in which the linked server becomes saturated due to the number of visits received, so that it is very slow, does not respond to some requests, or even stops working completely (it "goes down"). The consequences are the same as those of a denial of service attack, although, commonly, it is said that then the site has been slashed, or that it has broke down due to the Slash effect. This usually happens with personal pages hosted on servers with little available bandwidth.
These effects lasted around 2 or 3 days, as new news was published and old news was forgotten. Most visitors only read the news that appeared on the front page; therefore, once the news is archived, the rate of visits drops and usually remains practically the same as before. Sometimes it can be slightly higher, as web browsers will index the page along with the discussion on Barrapunto, if they haven't already.
These terms originate from the same effect that occurs on Slashdot, the original site that Barrapunto was inspired by, although the volume of traffic generated by a "Slashdot effect" is much more important due to the large number of users from Slashdot compared to a more local community like Barrapunto.
Criticism of Barrapunto
Barrapunto was the subject of various criticisms[citation needed]:
- Inconformity with the selection of news: some users complain that news is less interesting than some that are left in the shipment queue. This could be linked to the recent discussion of different types of editorial control: having a number of users with privileges to highlight news, against the model in which users vote the news for their release to cover.
- The delay in publishing many news: from this criticism the moderators have defended themselves arguing that the main objective of Barrapoint is to generate debate around the news and not to be the first to talk about them.
- Too many trolls: in Barrapoint no comment is deleted, this, coupled with the great popularity of the site, makes there a considerable amount of comments troll. This is resolved with the correct use of moderation and thresholds, but many times because of these comments the discussions degenerate excessively in issues.
- Sectarismo: Some users often complain about a supposed radicalization of the community of Barrapoint, especially on topics such as free software vs. proprietary software, supporters of one or another Linux distribution, copyright management, among others. These polemics, however, are consubstantial to any open publication forum, and have not varied substantially since the beginning of the weblog, as the complaints have not changed.
- Restrictive measures: in order to promote constructive comments and discourage trolls, the default threshold of anonymous comments was changed, making them less visible at the beginning. In addition, users registered with negative karma do not reflect the update of their cover log, although they can continue to publish them without hindrance, despite which critics consider that it significantly limits their visibility to both users and search engines. Their defenders argue that these changes stimulate registration and constructive participation.
News Covers
Throughout the years that it has been active, Barrapunto has covered news of great interest to many readers, such as the Madrid attacks of 2004 (11 M), or about professional opportunities for the Computer Engineering career.
End of site
In a section titled "A very slow goodbye", Xataka in 2017 said that the cover of Barrapunto showed content from 42 and more days ago.
In August 2019, the website stopped responding to user visits.