So, COVID-19 (coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, whatever you call it) sucks a bit for your health but it turns out it sucks a lot for the economy. So we're extending any subscriptions that were going to expire before then out to June first (this may be extended a time or two depending on how well our savings hold up). Yeah, we know we're an extremely small cap entity and that's not going to make a whole lot of difference but it's something we felt we should do anyway for a couple reasons.
First, we as a corporation do not have paid employees. The only people we give money to are our hosts, our registrar, our CPA, and the revenooers. Which we're going to have to continue doing regardless and which we can currently afford to do for a month or two without dire risk of having to make infrastructure cutbacks. Putting money into us during this nonsense doesn't help much in directly putting food on someone's table or keeping jobs from going poof, so we'd prefer you guys put anything you were going to send us to work where it will help at least a tiny bit in keeping the businesses that your neighbors work at afloat. Which is to say, spend it locally.
Second, we're quite fond of the folks who've chosen to financially support the site and we don't want them to get dinged because of something that wasn't remotely their fault.
Now we're not shutting down the site's subscription functionality. If you feel a desire to contribute anyway, we're happy to oblige and we're not going to tell you that you can't. We're not the bosses of your wallets and it would mean extra work for me when I don't really have time to do much of anything code/admin-wise.
Also, we're only doing this automatically for current and new subscribers; we don't want to hit people who weren't interested with an unsolicited email about subscription expiration when we have to shut the extensions down. They may have quit subscribing or even frequenting the site and it's annoying as all get out to keep getting emails from sites you stopped doing business with on purpose. We're happy to handle it manually, though, if your subscription ended any time since the first of the year. Just drop a comment to this journal entry (NOT to THIS story!) and I'll take care of it as often as I have time (at least once a day).
That's all. We now return you to your regularly scheduled mix of discussion, debate, yelling at each other, and trolling.
(Oh, and you can still submit stories, too! Hint hint! --martyb)
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Tuesday April 21 2020, @08:12AM (1 child)
While I personally would prefer people to log in (because it makes the threads much easier to read) I can also recognise that some will want to post anonymously. They already get hit with a penalty for doing so. They cannot moderate, they don't have a journal, etc. But your moderation points are for you to use however you decide. If you think somebody is spamming - moderate it appropriately. Similarly, if you believe that they are trolling, moderate them as you wish. As long as you are prepared to justify your actions when/if someone else believes that you are misusing your mod points then everything will be fine.
But if anyone abuses their moderating privs then they must also be prepared for the consequences.
How long is a 'longtime' - a month? 6 months? A year or more? Why? What happens at this magical point in time that guarantees a user's comments will all be of a high standard? You do know that Ethanol Fueled (2792), 'Buzzard (18), Runaway1956 (2926), and khallow (3766), are all a longtime users who usually post under their own usernames too, don't you? (I plucked those names 'at random' of course from recent discussions that you have had - no offence intended to any individual.) Just because you don't agree with somebody doesn't mean they are automatically trolling.
The Community can already mod troll posts so that they cannot be seen - what are you suggesting we should do that is harsher? Hanging, burning at the stake, or perhaps the witches' ducking stool?
The problem is that everybody has their own idea of what is acceptable and what is not. The only fair way is to let the community decide what they want to view. We have enabled this by having moderation, a system of thresholds and the ability to remove topics from view at the individual level. I don't agree with many comments that members of our community have posted on our site - but I will defend their right to express themselves while at the same time moderating appropriately.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday April 21 2020, @02:04PM
*insert dumb Monty Python witch joke here*
My rights don't end where your fear begins.