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SoylentNews is people

posted by cmn32480 on Tuesday November 15 2016, @02:00AM   Printer-friendly
from the editorial-staff-is-getting-TIRED dept.

I will put this to you, the community, in a very straight, simple (hopefully understandable) way.

The editorial staff is a small, hardworking group. There are currently about 5 of us that are actively pushing stories out on a regular basis, and we need help.

We humbly come to you, the community, to solicit for a volunteer or two. We will provide all the necessary training, at a cost of just 3 easy payments of $999.99US, or entirely free if you apply before 1 Apr 2099.

For that pittance, you can expect to learn:

  • The editing process
  • How to get onto the bouncer for IRC
  • The best ways to abuse The Mighty Buzzard
  • The secret staff handshake
  • How to be abused, and learn to like it
  • How to deal with having your name in lights
  • and much much more!

In all seriousness, we all are busy and have lives. So do you, and we get that, but for this community to continue to thrive, we need a little fresh blood on the editorial staff. Some of us have been at this since the site went live almost 3 years ago (janrinok and martyb have posted over 3000 articles EACH). To put it in perspective, the site has only run about 14,500. Some of us came on almost a year later, but like any organization, there has been attrition, and we need to replenish.

We are starting to see some of the tell-tale signs of burnout, and to avoid that, we need your help.

If you are interested, please feel free to reach out in the comments below, via email ([nick] at soylentnews dot org), or hit us on IRC. If we aren't there (we all LOOK like we are logged in all the time due to the bouncer, but we may not actually be there), /join #editorial and leave a message — we will get back to you.

Remember, it isn't all doom and gloom! Working on staff, you will be on a team with a fantastic group of REALLY smart (myself excluded) people. I can honestly say I have made some really good friends from this experience, and I've even gotten to meet one of the guys in meat space. It is something that I am truly glad I took advantage of when the opportunity came around.

Thanks for listening, and with a little luck, we will see one or two of you pretty soon.

Live Long and Prosper,

-cmn32480

[TMB Note: Seriously. You really don't want me having to pick stories.]

[Update: see this comment below if you've expressed interest in volunteering.

 
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  • (Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Monday November 14 2016, @03:14PM

    by bzipitidoo (4388) on Monday November 14 2016, @03:14PM (#426552) Journal

    > we all are busy and have lives. So do you

    So true. I have very little free time, and carving out just 3 hours out of a week would be hard. What's the minimum time commitment you think an editor must make?

    Need more submissions too? I've long wondered whether Computer Science and especially algorithms could be covered more. Very occasionally there's a programming language story that sparks a fun debate about that subject.

    Now, as to editing: Through his blundering, my elderly father showed me some serious deficiencies in text editors. (Holy war over editors, anyone? vi vs emacs, pfft. FYI, I have him using Leafpad right now.) Select All is too powerful. I've trained him to Select All and Copy, then Paste in another window, and he keeps screwing that up. Most of the keys one could hit after a Select All operation aren't merely wrong, they're majorly destructively wrong, and I've concluded that's a flaw in text editor design. One very, very seldom wants to replace all text with a single letter. If he tries to type ctrl-c for copy, and doesn't hit the control key first, he just replaced everything with a 'c'. The text stays selected after the copy operation, so at any time over the next several hours of viewing, one keypress can wipe out the entire document. Then, when he closes the editor window, it has the cheek to scare him that he is about to lose all his changes, and would he like to save first? He'll fearfully click "yes", not understanding that he just saved a single letter over the text document he was using. I've had to back his text documents up to be able to recover from that.

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  • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Monday November 14 2016, @03:30PM

    by Phoenix666 (552) on Monday November 14 2016, @03:30PM (#426556) Journal

    Need more submissions too? I've long wondered whether Computer Science and especially algorithms could be covered more. Very occasionally there's a programming language story that sparks a fun debate about that subject.

    Yes, please. CompSci and algorithms would be great.

    --
    Washington DC delenda est.
  • (Score: 2) by Pino P on Monday November 14 2016, @04:11PM

    by Pino P (4721) on Monday November 14 2016, @04:11PM (#426574) Journal

    I just tried in Mousepad: Ctrl+A, c, Ctrl+Z, and the document is restored to how it was before c was pressed. Ctrl+A in a graphical text editor was more dangerous back in the day when we had one level of undo, and the second was to undo the undo itself.