This is to inform you we *are* aware of a problem with the site.
Symptom: The "Most Recent Journal Entries" box that normally appears on the right-hand-side of the main page is currently not currently displaying.
We have tried a few things, but have had no luck so far. We will update this story when we know more.
Problem first became apparent at about 17:45 UTC today.
Workaround: Use Search to look at the most recent journal entries. Specifically:
We will update this story when we know more. I have done all I (martyb) know how; hopefully TheMightyBuzzard will show up before too long and get things straightened out.
[Update-TMB]: The local mysqld instances on both web frontends both decided to be On The Crack for some reason or other. The database itself running over on the db servers was just fine and a restart of mysqld (and bouncing of Apache/Varnish which has to be done whenever mysqld is restarted) on the web frontends put things back to normal.
The cause of mysqld's drug use is unknown and shall remain so unless it happens more than once.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Wednesday June 24 2020, @08:23PM (5 children)
My latest journal entry has quite a long title, and I edited the title today (from "Part 2", to ", Supplemental") which made it even longer. Not sure how close that was to 17:45 UTC. I would have thought it was earlier. It probably has nothing to do with it but I just wondered if the titles overflowed a maximum string length or something.
Anyway, good luck and thanks for all the great work on the site, guys!
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Wednesday June 24 2020, @08:33PM (4 children)
Just tried shortening the title, and removing the punctuation, to "Humanity Failed Supplemental" and the journal box didn't come back, so I guess it was either nothing to do with that, or whatever broke stayed broken. :)
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 3, Informative) by DECbot on Wednesday June 24 2020, @08:39PM (3 children)
Probably not you. I recall seeing your journal post as well as Takyon's journal post, Fake Noose II: Electric Boogaloo, in the slashbox.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 25 2020, @04:26AM (2 children)
But takyon's journal sucked racist southern donkey balls. Just saying.
(Score: 2) by DECbot on Thursday June 25 2020, @04:41AM
Not sure, I didn't read it. The title was curious to me as the members of the Hermitcraft Minecraft server [hermitcraft.com] played a version of tag this season they called "Tag 2: Electric Boogaloo." [fandom.com] The similarity was striking if only coincidental.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 25 2020, @12:18PM
It is a known fact that mysqld has a liberal bias.
Kill takyon's journal entry and very likely the things will go back to normal - until Runaway post in his journal, that is. (grin)
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 24 2020, @08:35PM (8 children)
Why is there so much?
(Score: 2) by DECbot on Wednesday June 24 2020, @08:37PM (7 children)
Apparently there's always that much spam, but it is filtered to just display users that have.... I don't remember specifically, but I think I saw once that they either have to have a positive karma or have posted a comment in a discussion.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 24 2020, @11:28PM (6 children)
You have to have some ridiculously low amount of karma, 5 IIRC. That amount is so low that a handful of comments and up mods would put you over that barrier. Even the most embarrassing of trolls seem to have higher than that around here.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 24 2020, @11:53PM (4 children)
Having super low karma, no comments and/or being newly registered and posting a journal right away really should just flag accounts for deletion.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Zinnia Zirconium on Thursday June 25 2020, @01:13AM (3 children)
I registered an account in good faith to start a journal right away, and I didn't know about the karma requirement until I searched the rehash source code on GitHub to find journal_sb_min_karma is set to 10. Thanks for not deleting me.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 25 2020, @02:03AM
You heard it here. Mod parent up to get her on the front page where she belongs. It is "informative," isn't it?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 25 2020, @01:41PM (1 child)
I think yours is the one that broke it. If you go via martyb's search, all of your entire paragraphs are links. If you go via your username, journals, click on collecting metadate etc, you get a journal entry that is properly formatted with discrete links.
Other users' journals are ok.
(Score: 4, Informative) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday June 25 2020, @01:47PM
Nobody's entry broke it or it wouldn't have started working again as soon as I bounced the mysqld instances on the web frontends.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday June 25 2020, @12:09AM
I think it's 10, otherwise Zinnia Zirconium's (new user with 7 karma) journal would show up. I only noticed it when I checked the link in the summary.
https://soylentnews.org/~Zinnia+Zirconium/journal/5557 [soylentnews.org]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by takyon on Wednesday June 24 2020, @08:43PM (13 children)
https://soylentnews.org/journal.pl?op=top [soylentnews.org]
No names under Top Recent Posters By Date, and Top Posters By Number of Entries.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 24 2020, @09:11PM (11 children)
I'm suspecting a content encoding issue. If I click on your last journal and reply, the journal text itself doesn't show up. Click on this spammer [soylentnews.org] and then go to their last journal entry and nothing shows.
(Score: 2) by DECbot on Wednesday June 24 2020, @09:16PM (10 children)
Funny that it will render when looking at his journal but not while posting a reply.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 24 2020, @09:52PM (8 children)
Yet the spammers Japanese text doesn't render when looking at his journal. Wondering if not all the code properly handles unicode or if there's another encoding managed to get to the db? I always use iconv, utf-8 in & out with //TRANSLIT flag to fix funky text encodings. The worst web app I ever worked on was a rent-a-coder mess with different encodings for every table. windows codepage, latin-1, utf-8, big whatever... like Pokemon they were trying to collect them all and without any kind of input validation. The fun I used to have explaining crap like that to clients...
(Score: 5, Informative) by Mojibake Tengu on Wednesday June 24 2020, @10:29PM (7 children)
1. That spammer journal is Korean, not Japanese.
2. It is a true spammer, advertising a gambling site. I'd call that a soylent squatting.
3. Very invalid Korean really can break some Unicode implementations, as well as some other scripts can.
4. Future wave of emoji accepted to the next standard may be dangerous too.
5. I didn't broke it :]
Respect Authorities. Know your social status. Woke responsibly.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 24 2020, @11:09PM
Those pesky
JapaneseKoreans. This is SN's Perl Harbor!(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Wednesday June 24 2020, @11:58PM (5 children)
Drop unicode, and all will be well
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 25 2020, @03:33AM (4 children)
Monolingual illiterate uneducated non-edificated ignorant Americans. I will now say, "fuck you" in a non-English language, and you will not even know you have been insulted!
(Score: 2) by kazzie on Thursday June 25 2020, @09:15AM (1 child)
Though you don't need non-Latin characters to do that:
Twll din pob ast a phenci diawl ar ochr draw'r iwerydd!
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Thursday June 25 2020, @12:24PM
twll din fel ceg pot mwstard.
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 25 2020, @02:31PM
Ow! Ouch! Oh the pain! Stop it! Stop it now!! Pesky gnat.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday June 26 2020, @01:46PM
日本人は本当の誓いの言葉が必要.
"Americans are stupid" is weak.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 25 2020, @08:26AM
Exaeta's last journal "bye" doesn't render when posting a comment. I don't think the comment I posted in reply ended up going through either.
(Score: 2) by DECbot on Wednesday June 24 2020, @09:14PM
Interesting to note on that page, it is not parsing year for anything posted in 2020 even though the formatting for the year is still present. Not sure if that is important, but maybe it is a perl library thing?
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 4, Funny) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday June 24 2020, @08:48PM (9 children)
I was hiding in the server room, sneaking a smoke. I noticed one of the boxes with a label, "/dev/null" was unplugged. I plugged it in. Want me to unplug it?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 24 2020, @09:09PM (1 child)
You should know better than to smoke around all these flammable elements like Sodium and Fluorine...and probably Oxygen too, although a quick search didn't turn up a ref to an SN server by that name.
(Score: 4, Informative) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday June 25 2020, @01:32PM
Oxygen was our offsite backup server. We dropped it a while back for reasons I won't go into on the grounds of not wanting to officially shit talk a hosting company that did well by us until recently.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Informative) by DECbot on Wednesday June 24 2020, @09:22PM (1 child)
Just don't flip the "more magic [catb.org]" switch.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday June 25 2020, @01:25AM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 24 2020, @10:19PM (1 child)
Just pump the server bank power toggle really fast about 20 times. That primes the null bucket pathway to 0.0.0.0.
(Score: 2) by DECbot on Wednesday June 24 2020, @10:56PM
Make sure to disconnect the UPS batteries first otherwise your priming efforts will be wasted. Did you want to prime everything in the rack or just the UPS?
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 2) by Roo_Boy on Thursday June 25 2020, @12:53PM
Perhaps "/dev/wom" is full?
--- The S.I. prototype "Average Punter" is kept in a tube of inert gas in Geneva.
(Score: 3, Funny) by DannyB on Thursday June 25 2020, @03:26PM (1 child)
What about the worthy idea of making all of SN's servers be solar powered or wind powered?
Failing that, what if the servers could be powered by incoming posts?
There should be an HTTP response code for Server Response May Be Slow Due To Being Solar Powered.
That would signal browsers to have more patients.
When trying to solve a problem don't ask who suffers from the problem, ask who profits from the problem.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Friday June 26 2020, @01:53PM
We don't need to go that far. Hook up Runaway (blowhard) to Azuma (biogas), and route through aristarchus (ignition source--sparks crazily perpetually in all directions) and patch in Arik as a regulator and you'll have sweet, clean power forever. SoylentNews is People, after all.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 24 2020, @09:14PM (1 child)
My last journal entry was a detailed exposition of how millennials are being oppressed by Anonymous Cowards, and it's disappeared. Conspiracy! Censorship!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 25 2020, @03:21AM
Censoir! Remove this meddlesome post!
(Score: 4, Funny) by NickM on Wednesday June 24 2020, @10:01PM (4 children)
I a master of typographic, grammatical and miscellaneous errors !
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 24 2020, @11:45PM (3 children)
I checked the slashcode regarding journals, it looks like The Mighty Buzzard isn't up to date on proper sanitizations.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Thursday June 25 2020, @02:55AM (1 child)
IIRC it's inherited [slash] code that TMB has been hacking, so it might not be his code you're seeing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 25 2020, @03:43AM
Yep, we need to know the lines in question so the right people git blame.
(Score: 4, Informative) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday June 25 2020, @01:35PM
You're mistaken. User data going into the DB is all in prepared statements that automatically sanitize everything as far as the DB is concerned and HTML sanitization is done at page rendering time.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Booga1 on Wednesday June 24 2020, @10:59PM (1 child)
I can't repro it, but I could have sworn I just saw my mod stat box telling me I had "6 moderation points left" when I know I should have only had one. I used the one and the box disappeared like it should, so it looks like it's being tracked properly, but might be displayed incorrectly.
Might be related since that's another box on the right. Mod points reset in a little bit, so I'll check again when that happens.
(Score: 2) by Booga1 on Thursday June 25 2020, @12:28AM
Definitely no repro. Mod point counter decremented as expected. Never mind!
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 24 2020, @11:39PM (3 children)
I emailed you guys last night and early this morning about some of the stuff I noticed. I don't think what I reported was likely to be reproducible but it sounded like The Mighty Buzzard was working to resolve whatever he could reproduce from my email and perhaps other emails he received. I was impressed to get a reply so quickly, within an hour or so early in the morning. It reminded me a bit of how Slashdot was back in the day when CmdrTaco would reply to pretty much every email he received, no matter how insignificant the request might be. I didn't agree with everything Slashdot did, but I really appreciated that CmdrTaco cared enough about the site's users to reply to pretty much everyone who contacted him. I see the same thing with SN's staff and I really appreciate it. I know I can be an ass at times in the comments but I really do appreciate the hard work by the admins around here. Thanks!
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday June 25 2020, @01:38PM (2 children)
Early in the morning is the best time to catch me lately. I like to spend the couple hours before the neighbors wake up enough to do noisy church remodeling sitting around drinking coffee and otherwise doing not much of anything.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Thursday June 25 2020, @08:08PM (1 child)
Early morning in what time zone?
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday June 25 2020, @09:21PM
Central. Humboldt, TN if you want to know specific sunrise/sunset times but I generally go by my 5A.M. alarm rather than those.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 24 2020, @11:44PM
I like that it just doesn't include the journals section rather than blowing a huge error on the screen or erroring out with a 500.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 25 2020, @12:23AM (7 children)
There are still no comments on exaeta's journal of resignation. Is this why the journals are missing?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 25 2020, @12:58AM (1 child)
There's no reason to mock someone who's already been driven away, Ari. It's bad form.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 25 2020, @05:47AM
Yeah, no need to sling insults at someone retreating to their safe space.
Oops.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 25 2020, @02:11AM (4 children)
He would be soooo maaaaad about Harley Davidson telling Tennessee racists to go fuck themselves :D
https://www.fox13memphis.com/news/local/harley-davidson-cuts-ties-with-west-tennessee-dealership/TX2Z4VOFPNB3TBBBTK6IR5PJ5U/ [fox13memphis.com]
I'm loving that corporate America is on the side of morality. Possibly for many corporations it is mostly about demographics and how the majority of consumers will not support racist institutions so they're doing the smart PR thing, but I don't really care.
I must admit I giggled a little at HD joining this political/cultural fight against racist conservatives, the douche bags debating whether to boycott their favorite 30k motorcycle must be having a real hard time.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 25 2020, @02:26AM (3 children)
Are you saying exaeta is a biker? Or that Ari is? Don't mess with Ari, if he is a biker, because those guys don't use logic.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 25 2020, @02:31AM (2 children)
A deft unicycle performer and it's all declivity from there.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 25 2020, @03:34AM (1 child)
Who is this "Ari" of whom you speak?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 25 2020, @09:49AM
> Who is this "Ari" of whom you speak?
newbie or new shill spotted.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 25 2020, @10:43AM (2 children)
Thank goodness the journal box is back up, so that we can all be treated to what Runaway1936 thinks, or at least thinks he thinks, for some values of "thinking". I expect an Ari journal any hour now. exaeta, appearantly, got dinged for mod-bombing, and is leaving.
(Score: 3, Informative) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday June 25 2020, @01:41PM
Spam mod abuse. Mod-bombing doesn't carry any penalty except moderation reversal because we should be doing that on the servers instead of punishing users.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 25 2020, @06:19PM
Ooooohhhh
That makes so much more sense than the "people are doody heads" whining. Always the tantrum when any kind of consequences are implemented, and here I thought the motto of the rightwing was Personal Responsibility. He's been around too long to not know that spam mods are actually heavily punitive and should not be treated lightly.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 25 2020, @02:32PM (1 child)
No, the cause is known. You say exactly the cause above: "mysql".
You are using the toy database that should never be used for anything even remotely important.
Sadly, you also probably have no choice, because the soylent code probably assumes 'mysql'.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday June 25 2020, @06:47PM
Indeed it does but there's a DB plugin architecture that would allow for anything from flat files to whatever the trendy DB is these days. If we had a plugin for it written and if the solution offered clustering like mysql-cluster does that is.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 4, Funny) by DannyB on Thursday June 25 2020, @03:28PM (1 child)
Fortunately everything appears to be working prope
When trying to solve a problem don't ask who suffers from the problem, ask who profits from the problem.
(Score: 3, Funny) by leon_the_cat on Thursday June 25 2020, @06:03PM
They are unplugging the modules and singing daisy as we speak
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 25 2020, @04:41PM (1 child)
'Bout damn time.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday June 25 2020, @06:49PM
Right but it's near the end of the month so they're pro-rated pro-racist journal entries.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Lagg on Thursday June 25 2020, @10:17PM (3 children)
For the record, my journal entry was specifically designed to be linked as a citation to a specific person in a thread and the title of it reinforces this usecase. I thought this was just a thing the site did cause of overhead or some such.
Now I understand why someone from staff showed up there. I mean I pick on one of you. But slightly different situation. Sorry.
http://lagg.me [lagg.me] 🗿
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday June 26 2020, @02:23AM (2 children)
Was it me? Haven't read it yet.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Lagg on Friday June 26 2020, @03:50AM (1 child)
You wish your generic-libertarian-veil of nonsense was enough to get me to write an entire journal entry specifically for you man, but no. I said it wasn't staff related and literally the second word names who it was for.
My problems with the site aren't staff related besides personal issues with you cause I hate unnuanced nonsense. The actual issue that'll turn this into yet another conspiracy bigfoot generic clusterfuck site are the little shits that crawl around on here thinking they're going to be ignored cause they're used to the "don't feed the troll" logic and think it gives them permission to be the digital equivalents of people in trenchcoats jerking off publicly. The journal entry is a link for later to beat the individual in question over the head with until they stop playing victim and spreading their listicles of circular logic & aimless rhetoric flinging.
http://lagg.me [lagg.me] 🗿
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday June 26 2020, @05:21AM
Blah, it's got too many words if it's not about me. Or boobs.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 27 2020, @09:13AM
Have you thought about implementing a watchdog? Most problems you seem to have are fixed by restarting the process. That could be a quick setup with the right canary calls and PID checks. The watchdog daemon is very flexible and allows custom test/repair executables and can take stronger actions if necessary. Despite what many of the tutorials online say, you don't have to resort to STONITH if you use it, despite that being the original use case.