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) by hubie on Monday August 10 2015, @02:38PM
I think the first story I submitted when the site was pretty young was rejected. It was a technical topic that wasn't (as far as I knew) posted anywhere else.
Some of the other people who've posted mentioned that their posts were rejected not long after the site started. Perhaps the editors were different then and they had different ideas of what was appropriate.
(Score: 2) by cmn32480 on Monday August 10 2015, @03:16PM
There have been a significant number of editors since the site went live.
On the editorial side, we are able to see who is in a story, and the list got so long (20 names +/-) at the bottom of the page that it was actually coded into the Rehash update to make the list dynamic.
The current editors are not the same group that were here when the site started in early 2014, and we are looking for a few people to help as the number of active editors has dwindled to about 5 or 6.
"It's a dog eat dog world, and I'm wearing Milkbone underwear" - Norm Peterson
(Score: 3, Informative) by LaminatorX on Monday August 10 2015, @08:47PM
I think I am the only editor who has been on the team since launch. Janrinok is the lone survivor of the second batch. A couple of other staffers like MrCoolBP pitch in when they can.