SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
As someone who pays an inordinate amount of time pondering things, I noticed some recent milestones for SoylentNews and thought these might be of interest to the rest of the community. In round numbers we have:
- 20 Months since SoylentNews went live (on February 14th, 2014.)
- 20 Current staffers who keep things running.
-
200150 Subscribers.[*] - 5,900 Registered users.
- 8,400 Stories posted.
- 10,000 Stories submitted.
- 250,000 Comments posted (almost -- who will get it?)
- 166,770,000 page hits on the site (yes, 1/6 of a Billion!)
What started as a protest activity (The Slashcott) burgeoned into action in the form of taking a several-years-old, non-maintained code base and, through the alchemy of dedication and sleep deprivation, came to be known as SoylentNews. There were numerous site crashes and outages, but things gradually stabilized. We were incorporated (completed on July 4th, aptly enough). Other niceties started to make their way onto the site: moderation changes, User Interface (UI) enhancements, Unicode support, apache and mod-perl upgrades, and countless other behind-the-scenes tweaks and tunings to get things to where they are now.
Besides the main site, I would be remiss if I did not mention that we also have our own Wiki and an active Internet Relay Chat (IRC) community.
Most importantly, it is our community that drives us! Thank you for all the story submissions, for all the comments on those stories, and for your feedback on site improvement ideas.
[*] The original value of 200 for the number of subscribers was an estimate; the correct number was 150. Updated this story for posterity.
To those who have started or extended their subscription please accept our genuine and sincere thanks — we could NOT do it without you! -Ed.
(Score: 2) by M. Baranczak on Wednesday October 14 2015, @04:39PM
(Score: 5, Informative) by NCommander on Wednesday October 14 2015, @04:44PM
That's supposed to work ...
Can you check your email preferences and see what the setting of "Subscription Running Low" and "Subscription Expired" are? https://soylentnews.org/my/messages [soylentnews.org]
Still always moving
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 14 2015, @05:45PM
FWIW, it would also be good to put a closable banner up on the top of the main page for such users - start it 14 days before the subscription expires and then pop it up again at least once after the subscript has expired. Saves worry about ending up in the spam folder and some of us don't even use valid email addresses (mailinator, etc).
(Score: 1) by nitehawk214 on Wednesday October 14 2015, @06:56PM
Thanks for that, I had it set to "no messages" when my sub ran out.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 3, Insightful) by NCommander on Wednesday October 14 2015, @06:59PM
I think the bug is the default is set to off.
Still always moving
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday October 14 2015, @07:23PM
Maybe, mine ran out "awhile" ago and I don't remember getting a message.
(Score: 1) by nitehawk214 on Thursday October 15 2015, @01:03AM
Most of the things were default to off. The only site I have ever seen do that. :)
Kudos!
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 2) by NCommander on Saturday October 17 2015, @06:00PM
If memory serves, the defaults are the daily newsletter is set to on, and a few of the administrative stuff (i.e., if your password was reset). Seclevel 100 get a few additional ones on top of that like the stats email and such. The headache is there's no *actual* control panel for this, its either hardcoded, or uses the table schema to determine the default.
I'm guessing we hosed the subscription notification code when I ripped apart the codebase to upgrade it to Apache2. I'll have to test it and try and fix the bug; we'll probably change all users to get subscription notices by default (though changing user preferences always causes people to get annoyed :/)
Still always moving
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Wednesday October 14 2015, @07:40PM
I can confirm it did not work for me either.
Same issue. I have just renewed my subscription, which ran out at the end of September.
The settings for the email are:
Subscription Expired: E-mail
Subscription Running Low: E-mail
I successfully receive the daily digest.