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Over the weekend, Paul finished upgrading the site to the latest release of Slashcode, 14.08, which contains the usual slew of bug fixes, site improvements, and plenty else. I know this is late, but we had to do a fair bit of regression testing to make sure the biggest part of the update, UTF-8 support, didn't cause any regressions. Here's the short list:
In other visible changes, we've updated most of the images, and artwork this goaround to be somewhat more consistent, and to make the site itself have a slightly cleaner look and feel. Thanks to rand, mrcoolbp, and paulej72 for their efforts in this department.
In other news, its been somewhat hectic since we completed our incorporation, and are now moving towards getting the site towards self-sufficiency. Due to various administrative hiccups, combined with what ultimately became an ill-timed vacation on my part, we've still got a few minor business hangups before we can accept income and revenue, but everything will be resolved by Friday. As I noted above, our subscription code required an unexpectedly large amount of effort to get functional again due to missing components (which was not evident until we tied it into PayPal), but I'm pleased to note that everything promised got implemented in this update, we're just doing a final smoke test and business 1-2 before pushing the button.
I'd like to offer an apology on behalf of the staff, simply on the long period of time it has taken us to get our act together. For those who haven't realized it, SN is now six months old, and while we have made tremendous progress, none of us are able to work on SN full-time. Unfortunately, that means some things do fall by the wayside such as the long promised, and under-delivered moderation rework. As always, we welcome anyone to come by and volunteer time and effort to the cause; you can find all of the staff on IRC, and anyone is welcome to attend both our staff meetings, and the board meetings (with the next one scheduled for August 20th, at 23:00 UTC) are open to all.
Looking ahead, we've still got a few major things that need be solved relatively soon. The migration from Apache 1.3 -> 2.x is still a high-priority item, one that I think I'll be able to dedicate the necessary time and effort in the next month, which will mostly complete our list of "things we need to fix from golive". Looking ahead, I'm slowly developing a list of longer term objectives to fulfill in Slashcode; in no particular order, or promise of delivery:
- Full UTF-8 Support
- Subscriptions - Revamped and almost ready to go live
- Nexuses - Ready to go, still DEPWAIT wildcard SSL certificate
- Removal of the most annoying aspects of the lameass filter
- Two new themes, CSS fixes, and blockquote changes
- Removal of journal themes (it was half broken, and interfered with the new theming engine)
- Updated zoo, and topic logos, as well as touched up logo and favicon
- Improvement some of the more stupid error messages
- Backend upgrades and improvements performed during the weekend downtime
- File upload support for admins (no more wiki abuse!)
All things considered, a pretty large update! I've got more to talk about, but check back past the break for that.
So, a long announced, and long-delayed feature, I want to offer a round of applause to TheMightyBuzzard, who did most of the grunt work; Bytram, who did most of the sanity checking; and paulej72, who lost his sanity in getting UTF-8 full-functional in Slashcode with a massive merge that caused my brain to melt the first time I looked at it. This was a massive amount of work, but the site should no longer have those long-frustrating issues where characters randomly show up, or get mutated after you click Preview or Submit, something that was true on the other site as well. As part of the work on this, Slashcode was modified to be native UTF-8 or in other words we're not dong any sort of conversion to HTML entities or such, and four-bit unicode characters are also working as expected (contrary to what was previously reported). As part of this update, most of the annoying aspects of the lameass filter got ripped out as they were incompatible with unicode support, and mostly served to piss people off vs. serving any using spam prevention method.In other visible changes, we've updated most of the images, and artwork this goaround to be somewhat more consistent, and to make the site itself have a slightly cleaner look and feel. Thanks to rand, mrcoolbp, and paulej72 for their efforts in this department.
In other news, its been somewhat hectic since we completed our incorporation, and are now moving towards getting the site towards self-sufficiency. Due to various administrative hiccups, combined with what ultimately became an ill-timed vacation on my part, we've still got a few minor business hangups before we can accept income and revenue, but everything will be resolved by Friday. As I noted above, our subscription code required an unexpectedly large amount of effort to get functional again due to missing components (which was not evident until we tied it into PayPal), but I'm pleased to note that everything promised got implemented in this update, we're just doing a final smoke test and business 1-2 before pushing the button.
I'd like to offer an apology on behalf of the staff, simply on the long period of time it has taken us to get our act together. For those who haven't realized it, SN is now six months old, and while we have made tremendous progress, none of us are able to work on SN full-time. Unfortunately, that means some things do fall by the wayside such as the long promised, and under-delivered moderation rework. As always, we welcome anyone to come by and volunteer time and effort to the cause; you can find all of the staff on IRC, and anyone is welcome to attend both our staff meetings, and the board meetings (with the next one scheduled for August 20th, at 23:00 UTC) are open to all.
Looking ahead, we've still got a few major things that need be solved relatively soon. The migration from Apache 1.3 -> 2.x is still a high-priority item, one that I think I'll be able to dedicate the necessary time and effort in the next month, which will mostly complete our list of "things we need to fix from golive". Looking ahead, I'm slowly developing a list of longer term objectives to fulfill in Slashcode; in no particular order, or promise of delivery:
- Subslash support (basically our version of subreddits)
- More advanced filtering options for the main page for customization
- Overhauling journals to be more usable as a blogging platform
- Article rating system
- Renaming slashcode
- Revamped voting system
- Bidrectional NNTP gateway
- i10n and i18n of slashcode (a LOT of our userbase is international, and I won't mind working with someone who'd be interesting in SoylentNews in second language)
- RSS Reader Functionality (have your favorite RSS/Atom feeds show up as part of "your" homepage)
As I've stressed before, time and again, this site exists for the community, so if you've got some ideas, post them below, and let us hear about it!
On the business side of things, I'm working on drafting a "longer-term" plan, hopefully ready to present something this week, or early next week, which lays down a specific "here's what we are going to do" plan, and then let you guys think it over, poke it with a stick, then call me an idiot, and have me do it again; as far as running a site, its been a pretty successful model thus far :-)
Expect one or two more "meta" posts in the next few days, and until then, let me know your thoughts below
~ NCommander
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Site Update: Slashcode 14.08 - Now With UTF-8 Support (And Other News)
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Today is National Existential Ennui Awareness Day.
(Score: 1) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 18 2014, @08:32PM
キャンペーンおよび追加情報
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★受注締め切りから2営業日以降の着日指定が可能になりました★ ■（月～土曜日の9AMで受注を締め切らせて頂いております。日曜日は休業）■ ■冷蔵と常温商品を一緒にご購入された場合、全て冷蔵で同梱発送いたします■ ・ヤマト運輸指定の時間指定の利用が可能です。 ※ 一部の地域に関して、時間指定がご利用になれない場合や、発送が3営業日以降の到着となる場合がございます。 ・成城石井が販売し、amazonの倉庫から発送する商品と一緒にお届けする事は出来ません。 詳細はこちら (細則もこちらからご覧いただけます)
＝ 7000円以上お買い上げ頂きますと、送料が全国無料となります。 ＝ ★ ご好評に付き継続中！ ★■成城石井が販売し、amazonの倉庫より発送する商品は対象外となりますので、ご注意ください。■■送料無料キャンペーンは、予告無く終了する場合がございますので、ご了承ください。■ 詳細はこちら (細則もこちらからご覧いただけます)
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カテゴリー：ドリンク
(Score: 2) by mechanicjay on Monday August 18 2014, @08:43PM
Damn Unicoders...
My VMS box beat up your Windows box.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 18 2014, @08:46PM
ಠ_ಠ
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Monday August 18 2014, @11:38PM
Way better than Unibombers ;)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 19 2014, @04:14PM
Too late ;-þ
But we now can use real smilies! 😜
And of course, we've finally arrived in the internet, which, as everyone knows, is all about cat images. 😸
(Score: 1) by cosurgi on Monday August 18 2014, @08:45PM
is that spam? Or just copy paste from Chinese amazon page?
#
#\ @ ? [adom.de] Colonize Mars [kozicki.pl]
#
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 18 2014, @08:46PM
It's Japanese.
(Score: 1) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 18 2014, @08:48PM
くそくらえ!
(Score: 2) by Random2 on Monday August 18 2014, @09:32PM
It's an add for "California Pomegranate juice" in Japanese (apparently a great gift!)
Normally spam but a useful test of the unicode. One in Chinese and Korean would probably also be good.
Good job devs, and keep it up!
If only I registered 3 users earlier....
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 20 2014, @07:26AM
An add? Not a subtract?
(Score: 5, Funny) by Bot on Monday August 18 2014, @08:55PM
The only redeeming quality of your frankly predictable post is that I found a new smiley ッ
Account abandoned.
(Score: 1) by Lunix Nutcase on Monday August 18 2014, @08:58PM
That's not a smiley.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Bot on Monday August 18 2014, @09:08PM
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by tathra on Tuesday August 19 2014, @01:11AM
へへ
のの
も
へ
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 18 2014, @10:22PM
( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 19 2014, @12:00AM
我不相信！
(Score: 2) by shortscreen on Tuesday August 19 2014, @05:59AM
ACさんのホバークラフトでうなぎが多い。
(Score: 1) by Kunasou on Tuesday August 19 2014, @10:32PM
すごう！！ でも ７０００円。。。
UTF-8 support good news :)