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: 5, Informative) by janrinok on Monday August 10 2015, @01:33PM
We are currently looking at alternative ways at providing feed back. The one that I prefer is simply a another page showing rejected submissions with a comment alongside explaining why they were rejected. Each rejected submission along with its comments from the editors will remain on the page for a period of time, say 3 days, and then simply be removed. It seems to my (non-site-programmer) perspective the easiest to implement. It doesn't require much more than another web page - and we serve plenty of those each day. The downsides are that it is essentially one-way communication, but that is better than we have a present. It is also open to the gaze of the whole community, and that alone might discourage some from making a submission for fear of 'public' rejection.
As for the most common reasons for rejection, I will say the following from my own personal viewpoint.
These are my personal views, I suspect other editors share most of them but will be able to add more suggestions as this discussion develops. The summer/holiday period is always a difficult one. Colleges and universities are empty. People are taking their holidays/vacations. Many are out making the most of some free time and spending time with families and friends. But, as I am sure you all realise, without the submissions we haven't got a site, or at least we haven't got a site that is any different from others on the 'net.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by inertnet on Monday August 10 2015, @01:51PM
The downsides are that it is essentially one-way communication
That would be good enough for me. Besides, you don't want to create a discussion platform where you have to keep spending your time explaining back and forth why decisions about submissions were made. That could chase moderators away.
(Score: 2) by inertnet on Monday August 10 2015, @02:54PM
moderators
Oops, I meant editors.
(Score: 2) by mrcoolbp on Monday August 10 2015, @03:25PM
Yes, I have seen this happen.
(Score:1^½, Radical)
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 10 2015, @02:09PM
What if the editors just had a shared user account called "Rejected_Submissions" and posted them to its Journal page?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 10 2015, @02:59PM
That sounds like a very good plan, with the exception of the 3 day limit. That's IMHO too short.