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!