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:
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: 3, Informative) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday October 14 2015, @10:33PM
Yep, a short one in IRC shortly after you asked this. I opined that it's not a proper success until staff get paid; until then we're having to hope being on staff entertains the staffers enough to keep them staffing. For me, it does, but we've also had a fair amount of turnover. Not McDonalds levels, mind you, enough that we occasionally have to poke the community for a new volunteer or three though.
Speaking of, we could still use another perl dev. We got plenty of responses for the last call to arms but none of them followed through enough to even get a login. C'mon, folks, don't leave poor paulej72 with my strongly opinionated ass as his only minion.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.