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SoylentNews
Happy Holidays!
On behalf of the SoylentNews staff, we wish you safe and happy celebrations in the coming holiday season! 😀
I am also encouraging the editorial staff to post stories on a weekend/holiday schedule for Friday through Sunday (2021-12-24 UTC through 2021-12-26 UTC). Enjoy your well-deserved break!
COVID-19:
Let's face it, COVID-19 sucks. We've had to deal with lock-downs, masks, "Long Covid", and sadly the deaths and serious illness in our friends and loved ones. Did I say it sucks? To all who have suffered and struggled, please accept my genuine and heartfelt wishes for acceptance and peace. We can do our own part to mitigate the spread of this deadly disease. How deadly? Well over 800,000 people have died in the US so far, and 5.3 million have died worldwide.
Through all this we have tried to be a site where the community can come together to discuss things happening in the world today. We aim for a technical focus, but occasionally delve into other current events, too. A "known quantity" where we can have open, heart-felt discussions, all with a sense of humor strongly encouraged!
Fundraising:
We currently stand at $1510.49 (i.e. 43.2%) compared to our base fundraising goal of $3500.00 (for the 6-month period of 2021-07-01 to 2021-12-31).
We have 154 current subscribers. (WOW!) Thank You!
On 2021-12-16 we received a generous $100.00 subscription in memory of MichaelDavidCrawford (I still miss him and his positive attitude in the face of adversity!) That subscription was a great help; thank you! The large subscriptions are impressive, yes, but it's important to note we also received 12 other subscriptions so far this month that totaled $186.00. (These figures are gross amounts; they netted us $269.47 after processing fees.)
Want to help?
Click on our subscribe link and answer a few simple questions. (NB: we DO NOT directly handle the transaction; you may need to enable JavaScript for PayPal or Stripe). That's all there is to it. If you have any questions or problems, please reach out to admin (at) soylentnews.org (preferred) or IRC.
Editorial Staff Notes:
One of our editors reached a milestone of posting his 6,550th stories to our site. That's a LOT! Congratulations and thank you Fnord666! (Fnord has also been the cleaner of non-selected stories from our submissions queue for years).
And (belated) thanks and congratulating to janrinok for posting his 5,700th 5,738th story! You've been a backbone of this site; I doubt the site would still exist without your selfless contributions!
Many, may thanks, too, to chromas for processing stories and especially for maintaining his systemd bot which is used every day to: look up sources, format journal citations, and submit stories.
Neck and neck with mrpg they have each posted over 1,300 stories -- thanks so much!
Other Admin Activities:
Over this time, AudioGuy has toiled behind the scenes maintaining our certs, e-mail servers, and I don't-know-what-else to keep our systems up-and-running. And just last night the comment counts for our stories stopped updating. I tried "bouncing" our servers, but to no avail. At a loss of what else to do, I called up mechanicjay around midnight and asked for help. He was already trying to deal with a fire at work, and trying to put his kids to bed, but he made certain that before he went to bed that it was taken care of and we were in good shape!
Linode:
Just over a week ago we received a report of difficulties from a user when they tried to reset their soylentnews password. I'm so grateful to janrinok for his taking the lead on this situation and starting in tough with the user while we tried to sort things out. Nothing we tried on our end seemed to help. I then reported it to Linode (our hosting provider). We had an informative, polite, and professional phone conversation. Apparently, another user on our /16 was "behaving badly" (e.g. sending out spam). Linode discovered we got caught up in the block that Microsoft placed on that IP range. Linode worked with Microsoft to get us excluded from their too-wide-ranging block. All seems to have been resolved. Yay!
Folding@home:
Our Folding@home team just reached 3.1 BILLION points! At the time of this writing, we are ranked #391 in the world! (official but somewhat less readable stats.) Our team's efforts have helped advance research on Covid-19, Alzheimer's Disease, Parkinson's Disease, and others. Mind you, other participants include the likes of Apple, Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, HP, Dell, and many other multi-nationals! Congrats team!
Closing:
Yours in service --martyb
Buck Feta!
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 20 2021, @10:30PM (16 children)
I come to this place a lot, and have been since almost the beginning. I do almost everything as AC. Thank you all, the big and little contributors, for all that you do.
A close relative of mine died last night from COVID. It hurts pretty bad right now. I don't ask for any condolences or sympathies, but I wanted to second martyb's comment to encourage all to do what you can to mitigate this damn disease.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by martyb on Monday December 20 2021, @10:44PM
It's a privilege to serve and I've learned so much as a result!
I thank you for your kind words... VERY MUCH appreciated!
Lastly, so saddened to hear of your loss. May you find peace.
Wit is intellect, dancing. I'm too old to act my age. Life is too important to take myself seriously.
(Score: 2) by martyb on Tuesday December 21 2021, @02:39AM (14 children)
That's an understatement! You have comment #15 [soylentnews.org]!
=)
Wit is intellect, dancing. I'm too old to act my age. Life is too important to take myself seriously.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by shrewdsheep on Tuesday December 21 2021, @08:49AM (13 children)
Are you stalking comments made anonymously? Be admonished!
(Score: 1, Troll) by aristarchus on Tuesday December 21 2021, @10:00AM (12 children)
Pretty anonymous, if they can tag a post made more than seven years ago. IP address? Airtag? That poor AC is hosed!
(Score: 5, Informative) by janrinok on Tuesday December 21 2021, @02:32PM (8 children)
I don't know why you guys get so worried about this, I'm still using the same IP that I have used for years. But, just so you understand, this is taken from the code that CmdrTaco wrote all those many years ago, and is still in use in rehash today:
But, in addition to that, there are other advantages by having hashes of the actual IPs. One, is that we do not have to use save IP address in order to reconstruct a story that is older than a few weeks. Everything in the original slashcode and in rehash uses hashes in the database. But real IP addresses are erased after a couple of weeks. We don't need them so we don't keep them - we have the one-way hashes. CmdrTaco refers to them several times throughout the source code. If you are concerned about what we do - download the code from https://github.com/SoylentNews/rehash [github.com] and read it yourself. Search for the bits that you are worried about and see what is done and why.
We cannot track who you are in real life, nor do we want to. We simply don't care who you are. What purpose would that serve? What we have to do is maintain a database that allows every story that we have ever published to be reconstructed all the way from the submission to the latest moderation. We have to protect the site from the same DoS that CmdrTaco and his team had to do - only now there are more of them and they are much more powerful. And, just like CmdrTaco, we have to protect the site from those who would abuse it.
I am not interested in knowing who people are or where they live. My interest starts and stops at our servers.
(Score: 2, Informative) by shrewdsheep on Tuesday December 21 2021, @03:52PM (2 children)
You didn't get the initial point. From the behavior of the site it is clear that logged in messages are always connected to the user and can therefore be tracked even across IPs. The point is that editors should not engage in such tracking much as a doctor should not compute breast circumference from an MRI scan just because she can or, well, you name it (car analogy please, so the editors get it).
(Score: 4, Touché) by janrinok on Tuesday December 21 2021, @04:56PM (1 child)
The Whoosh is on you. The link given was the first AC to post on this site - it might not be, in fact almost certainly isn't, the same AC as the one who made the comment in this thread. All ACs are recorded as a single user. They are all Anonymous Coward and user # '1'. We cannot 'track' ACs because there is no data to be tracked which indicates an individual, unless they do something stupid to compromise themself. At comment #15 ( and we currently have over 1 200 000 comments in the db), the site wasn't even open to the community and we were still carrying out testing on the first system that was released. You are making accusations that are simply unfounded. If you don't understand how it works you are not very well placed to dictate what the administrators should and should not be doing.
I do not have access to the servers and I never see an IP address. An IP address might (assuming no VPNs or other security measures are being taken) help me identify where you are in the world - and I simply don't care. That information is of no interest to us.
Perhaps you would prefer it if we go back to the early 2000 version of the software where IPs were still being logged because, as CmdrTaco pointed out, nobody complained then.....
I am not interested in knowing who people are or where they live. My interest starts and stops at our servers.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 21 2021, @06:39PM
No. 1 baby!
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Tuesday December 21 2021, @07:57PM (3 children)
Unless you are aristarchus! Which I am. Or one of his dastardly alleged sockpuppets! Then we are on a mission to censor non-right wing views and philosophy. And to not have any sense of humour. Methinks, my dear janrinok, thou dost protest too much?
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Wednesday December 22 2021, @01:49AM (2 children)
You think far more of yourself than we do of you. We don't care who Aristarchus is in real life, or where he lives. We only care when Aristarchus "Or one of his dastardly alleged sockpuppets!", or anyone else for that matter, abuses the moderation system or attempts to prevent free discussion. And for that we only need to know which account is responsible for it.
I am not interested in knowing who people are or where they live. My interest starts and stops at our servers.
(Score: 1, Troll) by aristarchus on Wednesday December 22 2021, @10:21AM (1 child)
Don't really want to hash this out on a congratutory thread, but janrinock drew first bile!
The attempts to prevent free discussion are coming from INSIDE the editorial staff! Oh my Deus! May already be too late. I see moderation ban abuses all the time. Well, if you do not want fairly unbiased discussions, why don't you just say so?
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Wednesday December 22 2021, @11:15AM
I think that you'll find you raised the subject here https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?noupdate=1&sid=46677&page=1&cid=1206930#commentwrap [soylentnews.org].
But I agree with you - you picked a poor thread in which to post your usual whinges. So this is the end of this discussion.
I am not interested in knowing who people are or where they live. My interest starts and stops at our servers.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 22 2021, @12:48AM
So how does it calculate the interval between posts? I'd swear I've waited much longer than one minute and still get the "Slow Down Cowboy!" page. This goes back to slashdot as well. I remember way back in the day someone got the page up to "Slow Down Cowboy! It's been 43 minutes since you last posted a message!"
(Score: 2) by martyb on Tuesday December 21 2021, @03:02PM
Nothing so complicated! It was basically something like:
Those are just the story ID, comment ID, and user ID. Loaded the comment in my browser to confirm and posted that link to the site in my comment.
Wit is intellect, dancing. I'm too old to act my age. Life is too important to take myself seriously.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Tuesday December 21 2021, @03:08PM (1 child)
Er, that just happens to be the first AC comment - so AC must have made it!
I am not interested in knowing who people are or where they live. My interest starts and stops at our servers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 22 2021, @12:11AM
I'm Sparticus!