Maybe you want to direct your web questions to the web developer.

The whole Gawker family of sites recently had a redesign that made its pages load via JavaScript (more specifically AJAX), just like we do here.  The problem with this is that the URL doesn't change when you click a link that loads the page via AJAX, or you'd be sent to a different page and have to reload everything.  But because of this, if people just copy the URL, then it's going to link to the root of the URL and not the AJAX loaded content.

In order to allow linking, the URL can change without reloading the page by appending a hash tag - # - to the end of the URL.  A hash-bang - #! - is commonly used to indicate dynamically loaded content. Designed properly, you can detect if this is the case in JavaScript, and load the content upon page load.

The problem is, the developers apparently suck, and it fails.  At least, in some browsers and some OS or whatever.  It doesn't work for me on Linux with Opera or Firefox.  I would have said something before, but I just assumed it was an Opera-only issue.

But there's a workaround

Just remove the hashbang.  The only reason it's there is that the URL can't change to the direct link if it's going to be loaded via AJAX.  Remove the hashband and it goes directly to the page you want.  This also works here, if you were wondering.  While this site actually will load the content if you link to the hashbanged URL, remove it and you can go directly to the page without loading the main page first.

On a side note, I don't know why they made their main link URLs the hashbang URLs (hover over a link and you see it).  That's just moronic, because that means the site is completely broken without JavaScript enabled because if someone copies the link, it'll be the dynamic one which is probably less preferable (apparently on the no JavaScript thing, it falls back.  I guess it dynamically changes the URLs onload with JavaScript which is just weird). on inspection, I was on the Canadian site, which apparently has the old design.  The new design doesn't work at all without JavaScript.

So if you just want the old version, you could go to ca.kotaku.com

Okay, I've been playing around with this, and it seems as though I was being directed to ca.kotaku.com, to which my hashbang point applied.

However, on the new site which I can now get to, it seems to be rather horrendously designed.  If you don't have JavaScript enabled, even if you go to the direct story link it doesn't display anything because it redirects you to the hashbang link.  What kind of monstrously idiotic meeting from which this arose, I don't know.

Not everyone, no.  Until just now, any Kotaku I've clicked has gone to ca.kotaku.com and consequently not worked until I changed the link.  And if it doesn't redirect, it won't work for anyone with JavaScript disabled.