Founder and editor-in-chief Rob Malda, better known as CmdrTaco, has resigned from Slashdot.
“After 14 years and over 15,000 stories posted, it’s finally time for me to say Good-Bye to Slashdot. I created this place with my best friends in a run down house while still in college. Since then it has grown to be read by more than a million people, and has served Billions and Billions of Pages (yes, in my head I hear the voice). During my tenure I have done my best to keep Slashdot firmly grounded in its origins, but now it’s time for someone else to come aboard and find the *future*“, CmdrTaco posted on Slashdot.
Slashdot began when Rob Malda and Jeff Bates created it while undergraduates of Hop College. Eventually the site wound up in the hands of VA Linux Systems, where Malda ran it out of the SourceForge Inc. office in Dexter, Michigan. Though Malda has held numerous titles and roles over the years, he’s stated that his main role was just to “Make Slashdot Great“.
For those hoping that CmdrTaco would be sticking around in some capacity, he’s not. Essentially after he uploaded his resignation post to Slashdot, he lost his ability to post anything further. He states that’ll he’ll submit stories form time-to-time, but there is no guarantee they’ll make the cut.
“As part of my resignation, after this story appears I will lose the ability to post. For me, this is the most bitter pill to swallow. Posting stories has always been my favorite part of the job. I created Slashdot to share these stories with my friends from IRC and school. It was never ‘work’. Now I will have to go cold turkey. I’m walking away from the soapbox I built. I wish I could continue to post stories forever, but those closest to me know that if I maintained the ability to post, I’d never move on. I’ll continue to read Slashdot and hopefully my occasional story submissions will make the cut. My old mantra: News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters still holds true here today. Nobody does it better.”
During his tenure CmdrTaco has seen some amazing events cross the front page of Slashdot. “The explosion of Linux. The rise of Google. The return of Apple. The Dot Com Bubble. The DMCA. 9/11. Wars. Elections. Numerous successful Shuttle Launches and one Disaster. Scientific Breakthroughs galore. Cool toys. Web2.0! Social Networking. Blogging! Podcasting! Micro-Blogging! The Lord of the Rings being filmed and an entire trilogy of new Star Wars.” But the most important to him was his proposal to his longtime girlfriend Kathleen Fent, which he did via the front page of Slashdot on February 14th, 2002.
It’s pretty fitting that CmdrTaco ended his last post as editor-in-chief with the line “thanks to every Slashdot reader for giving me your time all these years. I hope I’ve wasted it efficiently and enjoyably.”
It’s unclear at this time who will be named the new editor-in-chief, but they will no doubt have some big shoes to fill.