Friday, November 08, 2013

A Server By Any Other Name

Not too long ago, we said that we wanted to find a way to thank everyone who helps us meet our reddit daily gold goal. As you may know, reddit runs on many hundreds of servers - you can see a bit of this by loading up reddit.com and looking in the far lower right corner and mousing over the “pi” symbol (a reference to one of the greatest cringe-worthy early movies about the internet). This will cause some data to appear about what server rendered that page:

The far-lower-right of your reddit.com window

As a small token of thanks, every day we exceed our gold goal, we will let everyone who bought gold or gilded someone band together to pick a name for one of our servers. To kick things off, we solicited a few server name suggestions from current gold members, and named the first few servers in this resplendent server naming ceremony:


Going forward, we’ve created a special subreddit for naming servers at /r/NameAServer. We’re still working out some of the kinks, but it’s been running all right for a couple nights now, so here’s how it works:

Click here to buy reddit gold

Each night, if we reach 100% of our daily reddit golden goal, everyone who bought or gave gold that day will be invited to a special thread in /r/NameAServer to submit nominations, curate suggestions, and collectively decide on a name. These names will go into a naming queue and every time a new server is brought online, it shall have a name from that queue bestowed upon it.

Over time, as the servers are named, you will be able to see these names show up in the page rendering data on the bottom, and you can also show off your named server to your friends/mother (or name them after your friends/mother).

Finally, we’ve released another gold feature - remember what links you’ve visited across computers: never click a link twice again! If you visit a link on one computer, it’ll show up purple across your other computers. Handy for those of us who use reddit while at work!

As the holiday season approaches, we want to thank all of you for continuing to support reddit. Lastly, don't forget to sign up for redditgifts Secret Santa! Last year in 2012 we set a Guinness World Record with over 44,000 people across 130 countries to participate in the largest Secret Santa Gift Exchange. Let's crush that record this year!

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