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, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 14 2015, @08:39PM
I can purchase a subscription with Paypal, which I refuse to use on ideological grounds, or bitcoin, which I have never used and no matter how much I love soylent I wont start toying with a new currency just to subscribe.
Hell give me an address to send a money order to.
I would buy a subscription but apparently they don't want my money.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by bryan on Wednesday October 14 2015, @09:32PM
Interesting comments and story submissions are a far greater contribution than more hosting money (that only Linode sees anyway).
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday October 14 2015, @11:38PM
Hopefully I'll get us hooked up with the Stripe API by next year and have us able to process any CC without touching PayPal.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by ticho on Thursday October 15 2015, @07:12AM
That would be great, and I would definitely sub then. I'm having the same view towards paypal and bitcoin as the grandparent.
(Score: 2) by NCommander on Saturday October 17 2015, @06:04PM
None of us really like PayPal, but with the default subscription code we started with, it was the only method available out of the box (and as we found out, annoyingly incomplete). BitCoin was added after a talk with our CPA as it was highly indicated as a desirable feature, and then it kinda fell by the wayside. TMB is a hero for pushing through exceedingly boring and painful work on getting it all working.
Still always moving