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posted by martyb on Friday March 06 2020, @01:00PM   Printer-friendly
from the alliteration++ dept.

I have a couple things to bring to the attention of the community concerning site funding and comment moderations. As always, if you are not interested in these matters, feel free to skip past this one; another story will be along shortly. Otherwise read beyond the fold for an update.

Finances:

A recent comment to a journal article about SoylentNews now having a privacy policy prompted me to pursue something that had been nagging at me for a long while.

In short, I have learned it costs more to run this site than I had estimated. We have actually been operating at a loss for the past couple years. I have, therefore, provided a revised fundraising goal of $3500.00 for the first half of this calendar year in the "Site News" slashbox (that appears on the right-hand-side of the main page).

I have been advised our current funds on hand can support the site for just six months.

For those who have been around for a while, it will come as no surprise to learn that I try to keep a handle on subscription income for this site. Further, I have been maintaining what we affectionately refer to here as the "Beg-O-Meter' that appears in the "Site News" slashbox. It provides a running tally of our financial goal for the period and how far along we are towards attaining that goal. Lastly, I have posted stories in the past apprising the community as to our progress towards those goals.

We are an entirely volunteer organization (no staff member has ever been paid anything for their work on SoylentNews). All funding for the site comes entirely from the community (we have never run advertisements and are strongly resistant to any suggestion to do so). The vast majority of our funding comes from subscriptions.

My prior estimates of $4000.00 per year were based on the only information I had available at that time. Our monthly web hosting costs ($260/month), the fact that we needed to file and pay taxes, and that we paid an accountant to prepare them. Twelve months at $260/month works out to $2160 per year. I reasoned a goal of $3000 for the year would give us about $840 for those other expenses... that should do it, right?

Apparently not.

Thanks to the above-referenced comment, I reached out to a member of our board of directors and inquired as to our financial status. In very short order I received a pile of PDF files. A separate file for each fiscal year's Profit and Loss Statement and a separate file for each year's Balance Sheet. It took a surprising amount of effort, but thanks to the concerted effort of a few staff members, these have been uploaded to our Wiki and can now be accessed through the SoylentNews Finance page.

A couple things bear explanation. You may notice that there are expenses associated with subscriptions. The amount of a subscription made to SoylentNews is a gross amount. From that, Stripe or PayPal charge a processing fee for each subscription. These fees do add up and amount to the aforementioned expense.

Also, why is a Delaware company paying Massachusetts state taxes? I reached out for an answer from a board member, and here is his reply:

We pay Massachusetts income tax (since we are not profitable, we pay the minimum amount of $456 each year, but if we ever become profitable, we will have to pay more) because we are physically located in MA (through me). A physical address was required to open our checking account with BoA[*], and for various other things. For example, we need a physical address to sign the engagement letter with our accountant every year. Note that we are not required to pay Delaware income tax because we are not physically located in DE. The tax that we pay to Delaware each year is technically a franchise tax that we pay for the privilege of being incorporated in Delaware (allowing us to be a Public Benefit Corporation, among other benefits).

[*] BoA - Bank of America.

I will keep the community appraised should I learn anything more.

Moderations:

We had had a discussion on the site a few months ago about moderation on the site. I have been pursuing a possible implementation of one of the suggestions raised there: adding a "-1 Ad Hominem" moderation. Discussion among staff has suggested we would need a counter moderation should a "-1 Ad Hominem" be perceived to have been in error. That wold mean the addition of a "+1 Not Ad Hominem" moderation, too. (In proper geek fashion, they nicely abbreviate to: "-1 AH" and "+1 NAH"!) There is more to its implementation than just adding these options to the moderation table; coding changes would also be needed. This, in turn, would require the modifications be submitted through GitHub as a pull request, then testing, and finally a rollout to the community. It is important to note that this would be on a trial basis! If it proves to NOT be workable, we need to be able to roll that back. This is easier said than done! The previous moderations will need to remain in the system (what's done is done) but future moderations must be able to be blocked... and the code is not designed for this at all.

It bears mentioning that our goal is to provide a forum for the community to comment on stories and to moderate those comments. We strive to be as hands-off about these matters as we reasonably can.

In short, this is mostly an announcement that AH moderations have not been forgotten, design work is in progress, and that when time and developer availability permits, we hope to be rolling this out for a test run. I would not expect anything to happen in the next month, but wanted to provide as much advance notice as to the intention as possible so as to encourage any feedback, discussion, etc. that could help inform our implementation.

<Note class="TMB">

s/next month/next few months/

Contractor woes (just because I technically can do everything doesn't mean it's always the wisest idea) wound up pushing move-in date on the church I've been remodeling back a couple months (end of April is what we're currently shooting for as a best case scenario) and I don't want anything hitting production servers that hasn't had at least two weeks worth of testing on our dev server after me calling it done, because I'm quite often wrong about that. The end of May is the soonest anything is likely to hit production servers, with some time in June being far more likely.

</Note>


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 06 2020, @06:10PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 06 2020, @06:10PM (#967568)

    Geekizoid was a parody-ish site run by Slashdot trolls. I don't remember all of the moderation choices. I believe four of the upmod options were Worthwhile, Intriguing, Troll, and Totally Gay. And I remember that two of the downmod options were Inciteful and Not Gay Enough. I distinctly remember getting a 24 hour IP ban once for picking up six Not Gay Enough mods.

    I also remember getting five first posts on Slashdot on one April Fools Day. All of them were modded up to +5 or close to it. It did wonders for the karma of my troll account.

    I miss when the trolls were actually clever and contributed to the culture of Slashdot rather than just APK spam and political crap. The cows guy and the app appers guy were pretty good but the trolling mostly turned to shit a long time ago. Even some of the more obnoxious crapflooding actually involved some effort like the numerous fiction stories involving Slashdot editors having relations with each other. I think that era ended when the GNAA spam took over and the crapflooding was more about quantity than being clever.

    Anyway, you could definitely have some fun with the moderation on April Fools Day. I wouldn't mind seeing first posts and other dumb but mostly harmless trolling get modded up that day. And troll should definitely be an upmod.