Re:Hacker News down, unwisely returning HTTP 200 for outage ...
by kgermino on Tuesday January 07, 2014 @04:52PM
(#7020249)
IIRC (I might search for it later) that was a spambot fix. Apparently it was fairly effective - I presume the bots were smart enough to find the 'login' link on the front page then register an account from there but not much else.
That's not how it is right now so I'm not sure if I am remembering it correctly.