SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Greetings, Soylentils. First of all, I want to thank you, the community, for the outpouring of support during these past few weeks. The participation has been amazing, and I'd like to personally thank each and every one of you for your help in a successful launch so far. Unfortunately, I can't thank every one of you individually. As of this writing, there are over 3500 registered users!
Now, we promised to be transparent, and we intend to deliver. Our first (and right now, only) all-hands staff meeting is at 1800 UTC on 2 March, and will be held on our IRC channels.
The staff will be holding the meeting on #Staff at irc.soylentnews.org. Only staff will be able to log into and speak on that channel. However, our IRC folks will be re-broadcasting this on the public channel, #Soylent. If you aren't familiar with IRC, please review Landon's recent post (we have a web client available as well). Many of our staff members will be monitoring both channels, and we will try to have the opportunity for questions. Conducting this meeting will be one of many learning experiences for us, so feel free to pipe up and say your piece.
Items on the agenda include a vision statement from our founder, an overview of staff organization from me(draft available here), general status update from each group, as well as proposals for future development. You may notice some missing names in the org chart. Please contact us at suggestions @ soylentnews dot. org if you are interested in volunteering or working here.
As always, thanks for being a part of this great community!
~mattie_p, general manager
(Score: 4, Informative) by mrcoolbp on Sunday March 02 2014, @05:14PM
I couldn't have said it better myself. However, the team values this sort of feedback and of course the goal is to use open-source, self-hosted things wherever possible in the future.
Also as to the fragmentation comments, this is a known inconvenience, part of the reason for this meeting in the first place as I understand.
Please continue to voice these concerns, as it is what contributes to the ongoing evolution of SoylentNews. Remember, this site is in it's infancy, and the direction it's headed seems to be along the lines of the discourse here.
Please stand by.
(Score:1^½, Radical)
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Marand on Monday March 03 2014, @02:04AM
If you do continue to use Google Docs for this, at least temporarily -- I understand the reasoning of needing something quick and convenient to get started -- you can just link to the exports, like Open4D did in a reply to me. It should satisfy all but the most anti-Google diehards.
He used https://docs.google.com/document/d/1doOI5O_VHEUjUd mqmSzwbf6UZwARjbLNqBM9PnkYiLQ/export?format=odt [google.com] as an example, but I tested with replacing the 'odt' with 'pdf' and that worked great as well, albeit without the added comments.
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Now that I've had a chance to look at the file itself, I'd like to make a suggestion about the advertising/adblockers issue:
Host your own advertisements!. Keep them in separate areas, sidebars, boxes, etc. like you would an embedded one, but host them yourself. Keep them (mostly) static, and keep the off-site javascript requirements for them as minimal as possible.
The primary problem with advertising sources, and the reason I block them, is that the current design with external advertisers is that you have to trust the advertisers to run executable code (javascript) on your computer. Not only does that enable the option of doing obnoxious things (animations, audio, etc.), but drive-by malware through adverts is an issue, and it's one that's mitigated by adblockers or strict NoScript settings.
I don't even run an adblocker, I just keep NoScript fairly strict, and I don't see 99% of advertisements because they all rely on javascript. I have no issue with your site generating revenue through advertising, but if you depend on me allowing advertisers to run code on my machine, I won't be seeing a single one.
Trust is hard to earn and easy to lose, and the advertisers are far into the negatives on that score. Why should they care if you get malware from their ads? They won't be held accountable and the viewers aren't the ones paying them.
(Score: 2) by mrcoolbp on Monday March 03 2014, @04:42AM
Thanks for this, I'll add it to my exponentially growing suggestions list. Please feel free to keep them coming in the direction of suggestions at soylentnews dot org.
(Score:1^½, Radical)