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SoylentNews
Another year is almost behind us and I thought it would be useful to take a look at what we have accomplished up to this point.
For those who may be new-ish here, SoylentNews went live on 2014-02-17. Since then, we have:
- Reached 244th place in the world with our folding-at-home team.
- Had nearly 780 site subscriptions.
- Had over 2740 articles posted to journals.
- Signed up over 6,800 user nicks/accounts.
- Published over 20,000 stories.
- Received over 24,000 story submissions.
- Had over 403,000 comment moderations.
- Posted over 615,500 comments.
- Had nearly 9,200,000 hits (views) on stories.
All of this was provided with absolutely no advertising by a purely volunteer staff!
Please accept my sincere thanks to all of you who have subscribed and helped to keep the site up and running! We could not have done it without your support.
I must also report that we have just over 100 people who have accessed the site in the past month whose subscription has lapsed. It is easy enough to do -- I've let it happen, myself. So, please go to the subscription page to check/renew your subscription. Be aware that the preferred amount is the minimum for the selected duration; feel free to increase the amount (hint hint).
Oh, and I would be remiss in not thanking the staff here for their dedication and perseverance. Linode decided to open a new data center and we had to migrate our servers to the new location. We accomplished this with almost no downtime on the site, and only about a 30-minute hiccup on our IRC (Internet Relay Chat) server.
Because of performance degradation on our servers when loading highly-commented stories, we rolled out a new comment display system early in the year. It had several issues at the outset, but seems to have settled down quite nicely. We appreciate your patience, and constructive feedback reporting issues as they arose. It helped greatly in stomping out those bugs.
We have a bug-fix update to the site in the works... mostly minor things that are waiting on testing for release. We hope to roll those out in the next couple of weeks.
To all of you who have contributed to the site, in other words: to our community, thank-you! It has been a privilege to serve you this past year and I look forward to continuing to do so in the year to come. --martyb
(Score: 4, Insightful) by requerdanos on Friday December 29 2017, @09:28PM (7 children)
Congratulations, and keep up the great work.
This site (rather like devuan) has gone from some people shooting off at the mouth to a real, tangible thing in and of itself.
(A large difference being that devuan shot off their mouth for years, screwing around and making betas-not-releases, before anything stable enough to call a "release" ever appeared, while in contrast Soylentnews was a thing that stood on its own almost immediately, and continues to, because of maybe 75% your hard work and 25% our submitting and commenting.)
One thing... The "Sesame Street" children's television program has featured a grouping song that might be appropriate here ("one of these things is not like the others") [youtube.com] in helping to decide what things are part of a list (like a list of milestones for a website, for example) and what things are not.
Hint: I can hear the kids in the background shouting in unison "THAT FIRST ONE!"
But seriously, super job, and thank you for doing it.
(Score: 2) by Geezer on Friday December 29 2017, @09:37PM
Seconded.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 29 2017, @10:01PM (2 children)
Something I like to note is that while the green site has celebrated its 20th birthday, they still can't handle utf8.
Our devs had that going within 6 months.
.
FTFS: Signed up over 6,800 user nicks/accounts
That makes it sound like all of those were added this year.
"Reached 68000+ signups" or "Passed 68000 signups" would be a better description.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 29 2017, @10:12PM (1 child)
Now, that -would- be impressive.
s/68000/6800
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by kazzie on Saturday December 30 2017, @10:40AM
Motorola on the brain?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 29 2017, @11:26PM
And I was running ceres basically since beta2 came out.
Devuan was as stable as can be, just so long as you didn't need either gnome or kde which had some hard dbus, pulseaudio, loginkit, policykit, or systemd prerequisites which didn't have alternatives available.
Running e17, xfce (before it got hard systemd prereqs), or later lxde all neatly sidestepped those issues.
Furthermore the only issues I had with devuan were the same as debian/ubuntu, reliability issues with ext4 as the root filesystem which could end up corrupted under a variety of circumstances. ext2 or ext3 and the problem was solved.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday December 30 2017, @01:27AM (1 child)
Nah, more like vice versa, with like 95% of the staff credit going to the Eds. Without the comments we'd be nothing but an over engineered vanity blog.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 30 2017, @03:03AM
I like the effectiveness of the feedback loop:
Devs: Release
Users: Give feedback
Devs: Listen and tweak
Users: Give more feedback
Devs: Listen and re-tweak
All: Smiles everywhere
Even those doing the griping do a pretty constructive job of that, generally describing the flaw effectively.
If there's a site that's better at this, I haven't see that.
My favorite part is the Works in any browser|configuration thing.
I have high regard for those who appreciate the Degrades gracefully thing.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]