SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
As you are all aware, we are in the middle of the dog days of summer. We get it, people are busy with work, family, and a plethora of other things. Some of our (volunteer) staff need a break too, so we are looking for a few good people, be they man, woman, child, animal, mineral or vegetable, to join our ranks and help spread the workload.
There are a number of ways to help out:
- Join us on our webchat IRC or, if you are new to IRC (I was only a year ago), check here for some tips on getting connected.
- Email mrcoolbp (or if you are sick of that guy any other staff member like janrinok will do; "nickname@soylentnews.org" works for any of us)
- Read the wiki page on "Getting Involved"
One thing that this site needs more than anything else to thrive is submissions.
We greatly appreciate all of our submitters. The submission queue is the lifeblood of SoylentNews, when it is empty, there is nothing to read, learn from, and argue about.
Takyon, Hugh Pickens, Phoenix666, and Arthur T. Knackerbracket come immediately to mind as people that we see submissions from a lot, and they present great submissions. However, consider that just one article a week from 25% of our registered users would give us more material than we can use, and yield a far greater variety of viewpoints, opinions, and stories. When you find something interesting, submit a story. Take a quick peek at our Submission Guidelines for some insight into best practices.
"But what do I submit?". Check out the RSSbot logs. Scroll down to 'today' and check out the links. This bot simply posts stories from various relevant sources in real-time by scraping RSS feeds (you can refresh the page and get more up-to-date stories).
A well crafted summary is preferred, but not an absolute necessity. Your summary doesn't have to be elaborate. It could be a copy/paste of the first paragraph or two from the article, but please, be sure to give us the link where you are getting the material.
I can only speak for myself, but I find the time spent working on SoylentNews and hanging around on IRC generally pretty relaxing. It is fun for me, and I appreciate that the community is an interesting place with people from many places, industries, and walks of life. It is a place where I come to learn, and read things I would otherwise never see.
Thanks to you all for helping build a great community, and we hope to see many new faces over the coming months.
--cmn32480
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 10 2015, @11:37AM
Now mendax, show us on the web browser where that other site touched you.
(Score: 2) by mendax on Monday August 10 2015, @05:25PM
Well, hmmm.... no browser ever diddled me.... but my ass sphincter gets as tight as Ebeneezer Scrooge when I go to a web site and it plays god damned video ads automatically. I don't mind ads all that much, but I hate ads that play that you can't shut off. The unmentionable site slashed and diced any lingering goodwill I had toward it after that shit started happening. Having said that, the New York Times web site does that as well, or used to until I disabled Flash. However, that venerable newspaper can be forgiven. Its content is worth a dozen unmentionables.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 11 2015, @02:38AM
...go to a web site and it plays god damned video ads automatically.
My very simpleminded fix for Flash movie-ads is simple. I have an older version of Flash that has been timed out by Firefox -- the only flash videos that play are ones that I allow.
Now, cue all the dire warnings about threats that can attack my Windows system through an old version of Flash...