SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
In the beginning, pop culture wiki TV Tropes licensed its content with the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license for free content.
When Google pulled out its AdSense revenue because of... let's call it NSFW fan fiction, TV Tropes changed its guidelines to forbid tropes about mature content. In response to this move, two forks were eventually created. The admins disliked this move so much that they changed its license notice to the Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike version, despite their site not having requested copyright rights from their users. Only later they added a clause to their Terms of use page requiring all contributors to grant the site irrevocable, exclusive ownership of their edits.
I suppose the morale of the story is, if you contributed to TV Tropes before summer 2012, you should know they're distributing your content under a license that you didn't give them permission to use.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by NCommander on Thursday May 15 2014, @11:42PM
I'm a long-time reader of TVTropes (and occasional) editor, and I must have completely missed the relicensing (I do know current edits were CC). I do remember the backblast from them removing specific works and tropes due to the Google AdSense SNAFU, and I was pissed as hell about that; part of the reason I stuck around was due to the backtreading.
I actually debated on having content licensed CC during golive, and again when I took over the site, but it never happened. I might readdress this for story content itself, but this ship has sailed as far as comments go.
I've tinkered with the idea of creating a Slash->NNTP protocol, and then allowing SoylentNews be seeded across USENET; in many ways, our post database is like USENET, that posts are responsible and own what they post, and if it works for USENET, it works for us.
Still always moving
(Score: 2) by Angry Jesus on Thursday May 15 2014, @11:59PM
> I've tinkered with the idea of creating a Slash->NNTP protocol
Kind of like s'quote? [squte.com]
I wish every webforum was a front-end to a usenet newsgroup.
Yesterday I went to use dejanews for the first time in at least year and was stunned at how craptastic google has made that interface. So much wrong over there, I bet the guys working on it have never even posted to usenet.
(Score: 2) by NCommander on Friday May 16 2014, @12:33AM
Exactly like that.
Slash itself is well suited for this, especially since we allow anonymous posting. I actually discussed how we could do it at length with audioguy on IRC, and while it will be a shitton of work, its something I'd personally love to see. No idea on when though
Still always moving
(Score: 2) by Open4D on Friday May 16 2014, @10:31AM
I think [soylentnews.org] it would be good to do so.
The ship has sailed as far as existing comments go. But I think it would be worth transitioning to CC for future comments.
When changing terms & conditions like that, out of politeness I'd try to make the change very clear, with emails, notifications, "click here to confirm your agreement", etc.. I think the change could be done at any time, but it might be worth considering doing it at the same time as the site's name changes (if "Soylent" doesn't emerge as the winning name).
(Score: 2) by Jaruzel on Friday May 16 2014, @03:46PM
I've tinkered with the idea of creating a Slash->NNTP protocol, and then allowing SoylentNews be seeded across USENET
There's a guy called RS Wood over on comp.misc [google.com] USENET who seems to have a script running that auto posts articles from pipedot and other places into the group. Maybe you could ask him to add SN to the roster?
-Jar
This is my opinion, there are many others, but this one is mine.
(Score: 2) by NCommander on Friday May 16 2014, @08:22PM
If we did this, it would be bi-directional, with full intergeneration (i.e., people signed into news/nntp.soylentnews.org could post with their own UID). If we go really geeky, we could even do moderation via control messages :-)
Still always moving
(Score: 2) by tdk on Saturday May 17 2014, @02:02PM
NoCem [cm.org] already exists as a way of posting moderation messages
Take back your internet [squte.com]
(Score: 2) by tdk on Friday May 16 2014, @09:16PM
If you do this, you have to decide whether to import Usenet posts back to SN.
If you do, there's going to be a lot of spam and you may have to beef up your moderation - eg allow anyone to moderate at any time.
If you don't, you'll get a lot of flak from Usenetters and will be missing out on a lot of useful posts.
If you followed [squte.com] the threads [squte.com] on slashdot vs usenet [squte.com]
you'll know I think it's better to build a new backend instead of usenet, but meanwhile the more web sites mirror to usenet the more likely it is to last as a kind of open database/protocol for distributed web forums.
Take back your internet [squte.com]
(Score: 2) by NCommander on Friday May 16 2014, @09:31PM
In my very rough ideas on how we'd do this, users who are logged into our NNTP server (using the slash username/password) would be auto-posted to the site as a logged in user, while everyone else will come in as AC (we'd import headers and display them as well).
My thought here is to write the site out as a series of UUCP USENET batchfiles (the fileformat is simple), and just import straight into INN which means that slashcode would essentially operate as a second server to INN which in turn can be fed to the rest of USENET in a predictable matter.
In USENET terms, the SN feeds would be moderated, so every post would turn into an email which slashd can process one by one, and run them through spam-assassin; unautheticated posts from USENET that fail spamassassin will just be discarded silently; posts that pass will be passed back into slashd, and installed into the database, then echoed back into INN as described above. Our posts will have plenty of metadata allowing people to re-create the database from scratch if we ever have to close our doors (we could probably use some control message magic to make moderation scores appear as X-Headers, and then cancel out the old posts in the feed. This might cause issues w/ some news readers as not many of them implement Replaces/Supersedes very well).
Still always moving