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 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)