slashdot effect

n. 1. Also spelled /. effect ; what is said to have happened when a website
becoming virtually unreachable because too many people are hitting it after
the site was mentioned in an interesting article on the popular Slashdot
news service. The term is quite widely used by /. readers, including
variants like That site has been slashdotted again! 2. In a perhaps
inevitable generation, the term is being used to describe any similar effect
from being listed on a popular site. This would better be described as a
flash crowd. Differs from a DoS attack in being unintentional.

