Slashdotting

Slashdotting is an ordinary surge of genuinely interested human end user traffic due to a mention at slashdot.org - it is by no means the same as a bot attack or denial of service attack, and using one term to describe the other situation, is simply lying. Attacks using automated means intended to shut down user access to someone else's web site is a crime in most countries. Slashdotting is simply a consequence of web users clicking patterns which involves no automated attack mechanisms, e.g. MediaWiki bots written by Tim Starling and distributed only to his friends at "Wikimedia".