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As promised, here's the round-table discussion post that I said on Wednesday was coming. We have a long history at SoylentNews of listening and responding to our community; I genuinely hope that never changes. I also recognize that I may have ruffled some feathers in the last few weeks with original content postings so here's the best place to get this all out.
I am mindful of the community's support and goodwill; I don't want to squander any of it. Yes, there are times where my hand may be forced (e.g., DCMA takedowns). Still, I'm always a bit hesitant whenever I post on the main site for anything that isn't site update news or similar. I may be the de facto site leader, but I want my submissions to be treated like anyone else's — I want no favoritism. The editorial team does review my stories and signs off before they go live (unless it's an "emergency" situation such as the last time we blew up the site). However, as the saying goes, the buck stops with me.
SoylentNews accepts original content. I'm also aware that I've probably submitted the most original content so far (See "Previously", below for some examples). I'm grateful for the community's apparent acceptance of my submissions and the positive responses to them. What I don't know is if there is an undercurrent of displeasure with these. Maybe everyone thinks these are all fine. Then again, maybe somebody has an issue with them. Rather than assume anything, let's get it all out in the open.
What I want to cover in this round-table discussion is original content and having images in posts as well as topics such as yesterday's Live Show on Improving Your Security -- Wednesday June 3rd, 2020.
So, contributors and commenters to SoylentNews, get that Reply button hot and let me hear your feedback. As usual, either a member of staff or I will respond to your comments below,
73 de NCommander
Previously:
(2020-06-03) Live Show on Improving Your Security -- Wednesday June 3rd, 2020
(2020-05-24) Retrotech: The Novell NetWare Experience
(2020-05-14) Exploring Windows for Workgroups 3.11 - Early 90s Networking
(2020-05-10) Examining Windows 1.0 HELLO.C - 35 Years of Backwards Compatibility
(2020-05-15) Meta: Having a Chat about SoylentNews' Internet Relay Chat
(2018-10-25) My Time as an ICANN Fellow
(2017-10-09) soylentnews.org experiencing DNSSEC issues
(2017-04-20) Soylentnews.org is Moving to Gentoo...
(2017-04-17) SN Security Updates: CAA, LogJam, HTTP Method Disable, and 3DES
(2017-03-13) Xenix 2.2.3c Restoration: Xrossing The X (Part 4)
(Score: 5, Informative) by janrinok on Monday June 08 2020, @06:29PM
We have always encouraged original material provided that it meets all the other requirements that are expected of front page material.
The expected topics are the ones that we have always covered. So, if you have something that you have researched or even have a significant interest in and which fits into the topics that we usually cover (Business, Career & Education, Code, Digital Liberty, Hardware, Mobile (devices), OS, Science, Security, Software, Soylent. Techonomics etc) then by all means submit it as you would any other submission. However, like any other submission, we would expect it to contain supporting references for any claims that you rely on and not simply be your own personal views or opinions. You should be able to defend your submission to critical review and back up your own claims by either your own research or by references from a reputable source, or at least be able to sensibly and logically argue your findings to the community in the subsequent discussion. It would help us significantly if you clearly identify such submissions as 'Original Material' so that we can process them appropriately.
NCommander's articles are a very good example of what we would like to see. He has resurrected software that was obsolete many years ago, and he has looked at how it was developed, what design decisions appear to have been made, and their long-term implications etc. It fits into several of the topics that we cover and, as a result, it received a positive response from our community and generated a good discussion.
Original material submissions would usually have to be by a named member as it is very likely that the editorial staff would need to contact you to discuss the submission during its processing to make sure that we are representing your submission accurately, but if you are prepared to provide us with a contact method we can protect your identity when/if the submission is published.
But do not let what I have written dissuade you from making the submission - we can always help you to put your submission together into something that we can work with and which will interest some of our community and generate a discussion. We would all , manpower permitting, prefer to spend time helping someone put a submission together rather than have to rely on bots to find suitable material for our site.
If you want to express your own opinions or even insightful views on a topic but it is not something that you have researched or have specialist knowledge about, then that would be more appropriately placed in your own journal.
That is part of what we are discussing in this thread. However, the ability to include images or other media in submissions is built into the system although it is currently disabled for the wider community, partly because of security reasons but also for technical reasons. Currently we tend to use simple links to external sources where images are essential to explain the content under discussion
Other editors might - in fact, almost certainly will - have different views on this topic hence the discussion.