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As promised, here's the round-table discussion post that I said on Wednesday was coming. We have a long history at SoylentNews of listening and responding to our community; I genuinely hope that never changes. I also recognize that I may have ruffled some feathers in the last few weeks with original content postings so here's the best place to get this all out.
I am mindful of the community's support and goodwill; I don't want to squander any of it. Yes, there are times where my hand may be forced (e.g., DCMA takedowns). Still, I'm always a bit hesitant whenever I post on the main site for anything that isn't site update news or similar. I may be the de facto site leader, but I want my submissions to be treated like anyone else's — I want no favoritism. The editorial team does review my stories and signs off before they go live (unless it's an "emergency" situation such as the last time we blew up the site). However, as the saying goes, the buck stops with me.
SoylentNews accepts original content. I'm also aware that I've probably submitted the most original content so far (See "Previously", below for some examples). I'm grateful for the community's apparent acceptance of my submissions and the positive responses to them. What I don't know is if there is an undercurrent of displeasure with these. Maybe everyone thinks these are all fine. Then again, maybe somebody has an issue with them. Rather than assume anything, let's get it all out in the open.
What I want to cover in this round-table discussion is original content and having images in posts as well as topics such as yesterday's Live Show on Improving Your Security -- Wednesday June 3rd, 2020.
So, contributors and commenters to SoylentNews, get that Reply button hot and let me hear your feedback. As usual, either a member of staff or I will respond to your comments below,
73 de NCommander
Previously:
(2020-06-03) Live Show on Improving Your Security -- Wednesday June 3rd, 2020
(2020-05-24) Retrotech: The Novell NetWare Experience
(2020-05-14) Exploring Windows for Workgroups 3.11 - Early 90s Networking
(2020-05-10) Examining Windows 1.0 HELLO.C - 35 Years of Backwards Compatibility
(2020-05-15) Meta: Having a Chat about SoylentNews' Internet Relay Chat
(2018-10-25) My Time as an ICANN Fellow
(2017-10-09) soylentnews.org experiencing DNSSEC issues
(2017-04-20) Soylentnews.org is Moving to Gentoo...
(2017-04-17) SN Security Updates: CAA, LogJam, HTTP Method Disable, and 3DES
(2017-03-13) Xenix 2.2.3c Restoration: Xrossing The X (Part 4)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 08 2020, @08:27PM (10 children)
Images should be limited to original content only, with strong editorial applied. I.E. never in journals, comments or the summary articles.
As an aggregator SN is mostly about summary, hyperlink and commentary, for that pics are totally NOT necessary. If the summary and comments pique my interest of course a trip to TFA is likely, where original authors intended impact of pics is more appropriate.
Agree that pics/diagrams are absolutely required for the STEM content we expect to see in original content here on SN, where a hyperlink to an image store loses out on inline images. Would therefore support more people being given rights to post pics, as long as aforementioned editorial load is given and okay for eds.
One question. Does this mean subs queue would have pics, or are image laden articles handled differently?
(Score: 1) by Maddog on Tuesday June 09 2020, @06:29PM
Totally agree regarding images: limit to original content only, strong editorial approval, and never in journals or comments.
The last thing this site needs is memes. Go elsewhere for them. Text forces individuals to "put words to paper" and think!
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Tuesday June 09 2020, @09:40PM (8 children)
Perhaps allow only SVG images? They'd blend right in with allowable HTML tags.
And as for what's needed for STEM content: mathematical notation. Perhaps allow mathml or even (if absolutely necessary) mathjax. Using images for math is *not* OK.
I would like to present a few category-theoretic diagrams here from time to time.
-- hendrik
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday June 10 2020, @12:04AM (7 children)
I'd love to but you have no idea how enormous an ask that is.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 10 2020, @05:24AM (6 children)
I've looked at adding MathML to the rehash code. The problem I ran into is that the tag balancing and other code doesn't behave the way I thought it should with test inputs when I ripped it out into its own file. However, if you wanted my basic idea, it is made easier because the MathML elements are only valid within a "math" element. Roughly, your tag balancing code checks the markup as if the data between the start and end math tags didn't exist, and then run a dedicated math balancer against the code between the start and end math tags. Thus you separate concerns. Without MathML, the slowdown should be minimal and the attack surface identical to the present. With MathML, the new system only has to worry about the MathML itself without worry of interacting with the rest of the comment.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday June 10 2020, @05:40AM (2 children)
Consider a missing </math> tag and the difficulties getting it put in the right place in the balanceTags sub. Further consider that we couldn't just ignore anything inside <math> tags because of all the unicode hilarity that would rapidly ensue. Plenty of our processing that we do is straight up text processing rather than html processing and would also need to be done to anything inside <math> tags. And there would be exceptions needing carved out.
Man, this is going to give me nightmares but it's late and I'm going to bed anyway.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 10 2020, @08:11AM (1 child)
Fair enough and, to be clear, I'm not volunteering you for it. I was just putting my thoughts down in case it was helpful to you or others who felt like tackling it. If you genuinely don't care or are not in the mood, you might want to skip to the last two paragraphs for the humor.
But to your points, a missing closing math tag could be handled two ways. The first is according to the standard. If you hit any HTML tag outside a token or HTML annotation, put the close there. If it errors, it errors. They should have fixed it in the first place.
Even easier, you'd have to regex the thing looking for math tags to determine your code path or at the split, so reject it at that stage if a closing math is missing or your splits your indexes > 0 don't split after splitting on the opening tag or however tickles the implementer's fancy.
Before and after the balancing part would mostly look the same, as it is mostly just the processing of tags and sanitizing the MathML specific part that is different in the case of MathML. The server could still check for too many combining characters, or whatever else it looks for, as MathML still has to conform to the XML and HTML. There are plenty of pitfalls for MathML, many you probably haven't thought of and an order of magnitude more I haven't thought of, but a missing closing math tag isn't really one of them.
If you've made it this far, I've got a project you might want to do that might help this along and take it off your plate. Make a bot that scans the firehose of comments, and every time a user other than yourself or itself uses the term "MathML" have it post the following text as a reply, but be sure to change that first link to a comment I'm sure already exists somewhere.
Now that I think of it, maybe that last one should link to your payment processor of choice. Depending on the number of trailing zeros, it could be quite helpful in getting it done after all.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday June 10 2020, @11:40AM
Yeah, I ain't saying it couldn't be done, just that it'd be a lot of work.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Thursday June 11 2020, @03:46PM (2 children)
Tag balancing? I don't understand the problem. Can't you just reject any posts with math tags that aren't already balanced? Isn't mathml just properly balanced XML?
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 11 2020, @10:41PM (1 child)
MathML in HTML allows implicit closing as you go out of scope. But even if you wanted to enforce explicit closing, the tag blanacer still has to check everything is closed in proper scope and that requires quite a bit of work. You'd also have to do the various bits of sanitation on the MathML, which includes entity references, Unicode silliness, href and other dangerous attribute removal, safe Content/Presentation markup separation, annotation sanitizing, etc. And you have to do that without adversely affecting posts without MathML or increasing your profiling results too much.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday June 12 2020, @03:59PM
Yup. And the current order of operations would make that necessary in many different places in the order of execution and source files alike. We're just not geared to handle a second markup language at the moment, though I'd most definitely leave room for a third, fourth, Nth to be easily added later if I end up adding a second.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.