SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
First the good news. I just received word that janrinok, our Editor-in-Chief, is finally out of the hospital and back in his own home! He is very tired and has severe restrictions on his activities but is otherwise in excellent spirits. He very much appreciated the kind thoughts and wishes expressed by the community in our prior stories. It will still be many weeks or months before he can resume his prior level of activities on SoylentNews, but hopes to pop in once in a while to "second" stories that are in the story queue. Please join me in welcoming him back home!
Next, the good news. In janrinok's absence, the other editors have stepped up to the challenge. I'd like to call out chromas, fnord666, mrpg, and takyon who have all freely given from their spare time to make sure we have a steady stream of stories appearing here. I even saw CoolHand pop in on occasion to second some stories! teamwork++
Then, I have to bring up the good news that our development and systems staff have kept this whole thing running so smoothly. Besides the site, there is e-mail, the wiki, our IRC server, and a goodly number of other processes and procedures that make this all happen. That they are largely invisible attests to how well they have things set up and running!
Lastly, the good news. This is what's known in the press as the "silly season". Summer in the Northern Hemisphere means most educational institutions are on break, so less research is done and reported. other ventures are closed or running on reduced staffing levels. In short, the amount of news to draw from is greatly diminished. Yet, even in that environment, the vast majority of the time finds us with a selection of stories in the submissions queue to draw from.
We recently hit a low spot where I combed the web for a couple quick stories I could submit, but that has been the exception rather than the rule. Generally, we look for stories that have some kind of tech-related angle to them. The community has spoken loud and clear that there are plenty of other sites to read about celebrities, politics, and religion. We make a slight nod to politics in so much as it affects technical areas or has large scale ramifications (e.g. a story about President Trump having a meeting with Russian president Vladimir Putin would fit that description). Even then we generally try to keep it down to one story per day.
That said, if you see a story on the 'net that catches your fancy, please send it in! Feel free to draw upon titles listed on our Storybot page, then pop onto IRC (Internet Relay Chat) and simply issue the command ~arthur $code where $code is taken from the second column on the Storybot page.
Community++
Whether you contribute by submitting a story, buying a subscription, writing in one's journal, moderating or making a comment, we continue to provide a place where people can discuss, share knowledge and perspectives, and maybe learn a thing or two, too!
--martyb
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday July 19 2018, @04:47AM (8 children)
Yes, I see it.
And... sorta asking:
- how can I, another S/N member, signal to him that some of specific traits of a particular submission worth extra love to have that submission retain its value and lose stench? I can't even "personal message" him**
- how can I signal to you, an editor, "You know? That submission has some real golden nuggets inside that pile of shit. Maybe it worth saving them".
I don't see much support in S/N as it is right now for the above. Maybe it exists, I'll be happy to stand corrected and explained how my/your/others feedback can be expressed for the purpose of a better editorial experience.
** No, IRC is not that. IRC is suited for chatting, that ancient mummified Greek is almost on an opposite-to-mine timezone.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 3, Informative) by martyb on Thursday July 19 2018, @12:26PM (7 children)
First off, I very much appreciate your level-headed comments and genuine interest in improving the site. I can tell from your UID that you've been with us since the beginning -- and are still here -- thanks!!!
As you're probably aware, but for completeness' sake, I'll point out that SoylentNews took as its starting point a years-old, non-maintained, non-functional, open-sourced version of slashcode, ostensibly the code used to run the other site. Well, maybe they had great plans, but didn't follow through consistently? I don't know. The fact remains, though, that they had put a version of something like the code that runs the other site up on a server for others to read, download, whatever. We've done the same, btw... except our stuff is what actually *is* running the site. =) You can find it on github [github.com].
One of the reasons for mentioning all that is that we also received the "firehose" code which provided a means for the community to up/down rank a story submission. Well, in the sense of: "was supposed to", "was intended to", and "may have worked at one point but they did not post that version to their repository". I recall many, many IRC comments with NCommander cursing about that code and ripping it out left and right so as to get down to a solid and stable base. It was a success insomuch as in the beginning the site would crash multiple times a day, and now downtime is almost entirely due to reboots for installing upgrades. Putting that firehose code (or something like it) back into the system is possible, but a major, and error-prone undertaking. As I mentioned earlier, we are basically down to one dev (TMB) for the site and such a large undertaking would compete with all the other change requests which are already on his plate. Quite frankly, I don't see it happening. Not that I think it is a bad idea, just the reality of the situation.Toss in sockpuppet accounts and it makes the value of such 'votes' questionable.
But back to the concept expressed (quite well, I might add!) about how to communicate to: the editors? Some ideas: (1) We're often not there, but pop into #editorial on IRC and call attention to a story in the queue and advocate for it however you'd like. I may not be there at that moment, but I've so far always read all scrollback of conversations appearing in that channel and have no intentions to stop. (2) Send me an e-mail. It's not made publicly available as part of the UI, but it is easy enough to figure it out as I am on staff so I have an account that is my nickname at soylentnews.org =) (3) Write a better story submission? I'm a bit leery about that, but nothing says you can't take the story idea, and submit a more level-headed story for the editors to peruse. (4) Join up as an editor and you can get the great pay and benefits available to all the staff, as well as the ability to munge up story submissions to make them more palatable for the community. I'm not entirely kidding on that last one. If you are interested, please please speak up!
I think this was in your other comment, but I'm trying to bring the comment thread back together. As for accessing past story submissions, you can already do that. Yup! See the "Subs Queue" entry in the "Navigation" slashbox that appears in the upper left-hand side (LHS) of the main page? Click that. Now you are presented with a list of all the stories that are currently pending in the story submissions queue. If you look at the link for each story, you should notice that there is a pattern going on. What if I pointed out that the "&title=..." parameter is optional? And that the subid is a unique, monotonically increasing value given to each story submission, so the larger the number the later the submission. Enjoy!
You are correct in your assessment that there is no private, user-to-user messaging on the site. As useful as it might be in this case, and I do not deny its usefulness, I think you can quickly see how such a system could be abused. Not just in a spam context, either. Best I can suggest is to post a comment on a story in his journal, or reply to a comment of his, mark in the subject that it is OT, and offer your viewpoints that way. Yes, it is far from perfect, but it's what we got, and it is self-limiting against abuse in its own way.
Okay, that was all stream-of-consciousness in a reply. I apologize if I wandered around, but I hope I addressed all the main issues. Thank-you for the genuine and meaningful discussion!
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday July 19 2018, @01:37PM (1 child)
You know firehose is one possible solution, but not the only one.
Now, that's an effing yuuge problem.
Perl - jamais couche avec.
How popular would be the idea of some modules in PHP? (and I think of well-written, maintainable ones)
Actually... those are some good ones. Thanks! I don't particularly enjoy (1) and can't afford (4) but... yeah... Thanks.
Mmmm... OK, thanks again. I'll note this runs a bit astray with the idea of "conserving compute and IO" - I'd be looking to those submission one by one, loading each page including the "layouting markup" and navigational structures, when I'd only need content. If I'd ne using (as responsible as possible) a Web-page scrapper for it, I'll finish in discarding lotsa bytes that would not need to be transmitted in the first place.
With the DB structure and if well-written PHP is acceptable, I'd maybe try to implement an API with text/JSON responses to balance a bit the CPU/IO vs bandwidth.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by martyb on Thursday July 19 2018, @05:49PM
Agreed that the firehose is but one possibility, but just wanted to point out that if you had that in mind, it is FAR from a trivial undertaking to get that back into working shape.
As for PHP, I doubt that would go over well. It's not my call, of course, and if you think you can make a good case for it, please feel free. Just trying to set the right expectations so you don't get your hopes up unnecessarily.
The biggest problem I've had with Perl is the incredibly rich assortment of two-character combinations of punctuation (e.g. "$_") to refer to different, umm, "assemblages" of data... array, hash, positional parameter, etc. That, and there are so many different ways to do the same thing that one could see three different chunks of wildly different-looking pieces of code that would implement the same thing. In my experience with other languages (e.g. C, FORTRAN, etc.)), there are certain, shall I say, 'canonical' ways to do certain things, and once you've figured it out, and see a certain layout of code (i.e. syntax) it is clear what the intended semantics are. I find that more difficult in Perl. But, if you stick with the relatively basic stuff, it's pretty easy to pick up on. At least I found it so.
As for (1)..(4), you're welcome!
Lastly, that is part of the site code that is naturally exposed to dog+world. You may have noticed how I couched my phrasing in terms sufficient to discern a technique to achieve your apparent goal, without posting a clear POC that someone could cut-n-paste. Sometimes, obscurity is a good thing. I mean, you were looking at the list of submissions and did not see that opportunity. We'd like to keep it that way, without having to do backflips in the code to monitor/filter such kinds of access. If/when it becomes a problem, we'll certainly look to stepping things up, but for now there's no need to make additional work on the people here. As long as you are judicious in your retrievals (like, say, keep it to one query every second or two; pulled out my posterior) it will just fit in with our normal traffic. Now, if you want all of the nearly 28K story submissions, then that's another thing altogether. It may be worthwhile to code up a couple more API methods to retrieve what you are looking for. I dunno, would need a more specific idea of what you are looking to achieve. Btw, if you do go down the scraping route, a text based browser can be mighty helpful. Check out something like Lynx, feed its output through AWK, and you should be most of the way there. =)
Hope this has been helpful!
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 2) by DavePolaschek on Thursday July 19 2018, @02:58PM (4 children)
Is there a way to see the backlog? Personally, my plate is full enough (today) that I won't be helping out (today) but not being able to see what's on the list lessens the chance of me ever being able to help. At some point, I'll retire, and end up looking for other things to do than work (or wait for "p4 sync -f" to complete while reading SN), and if there are things that have grabbed my attention, they're more likely to get looked at.
(Score: 3, Informative) by martyb on Thursday July 19 2018, @05:26PM (3 children)
On the main page, on the left-hand side (LHS) there should be a SlashBox (that's what it's called, really) titled "SoylentNews" under which there are links to "Twitter", "IRC", "Wiki", "Who's Who?", Bug List", and "Dev Server".
You want the Bug List [github.com] link. =)
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 2) by DavePolaschek on Thursday July 19 2018, @11:55PM (2 children)
I pretty much always view from iOS, and don’t see anything to the left of the articles. But I’ve also selected "simple design" and "low bandwidth".
Ahh. Site news is on the upper right in my view, and if I follow the "Get Involved" I can find the bug list, but it requires logging in to github first to see the list. The link you provided actually will show me the list without having to log in first, which is what I was hoping for. I’ll look at it more closely later. Thanks!
(Score: 2) by martyb on Friday July 20 2018, @11:17AM (1 child)
Hadn't thought of different 'layout' options with "simple design" and "low bandwidth", etc. Thanks for the reminder! And, so glad that link works out for you..too!
community++
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 2) by DavePolaschek on Monday July 23 2018, @01:28PM
You're welcome. Reading on my iPhone (or iPad) mostly via cellular exposes me to interesting corner cases sometimes.