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, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 10 2015, @12:29PM
t would be extremely valuable to communicate why an article is rejected (if the submitter is open to that), what we are looking for, etc.. I (and others) have brought this up before. Methods of implementing this have been discussed,
Email?
(Score: 4, Informative) by janrinok on Monday August 10 2015, @01:48PM
We tried that, and the response was NOT good. People complained that we were contacting them when they hadn't agreed to be contacted, or claiming that we were sending 'spam'. We could end up with our servers being placed on some blacklist or other and thus not being viewable by a significant proportion of our community. And of course it is of no use when an AC makes a submission.
I have on several occasions since taken a gamble and contacted a few submitters when I felt it was particularly justified and the response in these cases has always been positive. But, on balance, it was decided that it was not the route that we should be following.
If anyone wants to contact me on IRC and ask specific questions on their submission, I will do my best to answer and help them. I am on most days between 1500-2100 European time on the #editorial channel. If I am not there, just ask your question anyway and I will see it in the logs next time I log on. If you give me permission, I will look up your email address and will try to reply to you that way too.
(Score: 2) by ledow on Monday August 10 2015, @03:06PM
Is it just me that thinks that having to chase someone down on IRC to get feedback is unlikely to ever result in someone doing so?
The last thing I touched that did IRC was Opera and I haven't updated that in several years since they stripped all that kind of outdated technology out from it.
How about just changing the subject line to "Subject - REJECTED due to....." and then leaving it in the queue for another week. Those who were interested can fix it, or look it up. Those who don't care can see it's been rejected and skip over it.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by mrcoolbp on Monday August 10 2015, @03:20PM
Interesting idea, but we cannot edit the story until we actually 'post' it into the story queue. Really what we need is user-user messaging for the purpose of feedback from within slash itself, which has proven to be a large task for the dev team, though it is a relatively high priority on our list. Maybe I'll pester them about it.
(Score:1^½, Radical)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 10 2015, @03:28PM
What about making a "Rejected Stories" nexus? Then you could "post" the rejected stories there, with a comment on why it was rejected. You'd have to disable posting (other than by the editors) in that nexus.
As far as I understand, the nexus system is already implemented, right? So all that would have to implemented (if it isn't already possible) is the ability to restrict those who can post in that nexus to the editors.
(Score: 2) by mrcoolbp on Monday August 10 2015, @03:40PM
The nexus system still has some quirks. The way it works now, those stories would still show up on the main page. This is an intended behavior so that the main page shows everything. Of course people can filter out other nexuses in their preferences (like not showing stuff from the META nexus), but in the above idea you really want those stories hidden by default. I'm not saying the idea isn't good, but under the current implementation I don't think it would be ideal.
(Score:1^½, Radical)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 10 2015, @04:06PM
Well, if someone decides he wants to see rejected stories on his personalized version of the main page, it doesn't hurt, does it? You just would have to set as default that this Nexus is not shown at the main page (so users who didn't change that setting, as well as not logged-in users, will not get it on the front page).
(Score: 2) by mrcoolbp on Monday August 10 2015, @04:57PM
I don't think that's possible (not showing on main page by default, user has to 'un-show' from mainpage manually) under the current implementation.
(Score:1^½, Radical)
(Score: 2) by NCommander on Monday August 10 2015, @05:18PM
It is, but non-default nexuses are really out of the way. You'd have to know it existed to get there.
Still always moving
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Monday August 10 2015, @06:05PM
Well, some static text along the lines of
on an appropriate place should suffice, no?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by mrcoolbp on Tuesday August 11 2015, @09:57AM
Would throw off the acceptance tools we have now though (all stories would show as accepted)
(Score:1^½, Radical)
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Monday August 10 2015, @03:24PM
(Score: 2) by zafiro17 on Monday August 10 2015, @08:45PM
If you submit something to the queue at Pipedot.org and it gets rejected, you are given a reason by the editor (and the editor is required to put something down before rejecting it). I think that's a reasonable system. See for yourself: http://pipedot.org/pipe/history [pipedot.org]
The problem with community sites is that everyone is eager to be part of the reading/commenting community while writing and publishing articles is damned hard work. Tragedy of the commons. I'd volunteer myself if I had more time; I consider paying that yearly dues my contribution instead. Best I can do, at the moment! I was writing and publishing articles frequently at Pipedot for the better part of a year, and eventually burned out - just coming back after a many-month break. Finding good articles, writing them up and submitting them requires diligence and skill; not everyone has it or is willing to spend their time contributing that amount of effort.
I'll see if I can start submitting some stuff here, just to help out. Community sites don't last when the community is all hoping to be a free rider! (That said, there are other ways to contribute. If you're posting quality, interesting or insightful comments, you too are contributing to making this site the kind of place people will want to come and participate in). Good luck, Soylent!
Dad always thought laughter was the best medicine, which I guess is why several of us died of tuberculosis - Jack Handey
(Score: 3, Insightful) by mrcoolbp on Wednesday August 12 2015, @05:12AM
Thanks zafiro, it would be great to have your submissions/editing/etc. around these parts, but don't forget about pipedot, we have great respect for Bryan and what he has done for this community.
(Score:1^½, Radical)