Update: 10 March 2014 20:20 UTC. Follow here for the latest.
Update: 10 March 2014 19:10 UTC.
At this point Barrabas reports he is exchanging email with the buyer but refuses to say anything. Until we hear from them, we have to hope for the best but plan for the worst. If this link goes down, please go to the linode site where we will regroup. We will use that link as a fallback if necessary.
Update: 10 March 2014 18:30 UTC.
Barrabas reports in IRC he has received funds for the site and has sold the domain name. The terms of this sale, as well as its buyer, have not been disclosed. We await additional information. If you have information on this, please contact us at admin @ soylentnews . org
Update: 10 March 2014 16:30 UTC.
Due to NCommander's personal involvement with the situation he is recusing himself from negotiations. I (Mattie_p) am currently working with the staff to figure out how to address this incident. We have posted a poll which is available and should show up shortly on the front page.
Original text:
We've been held hostage by John:
Working with NCommander
Am I The Bad Guy
Right now, I can't write a coherent response properly (I'm writing this from a Mac Store right now as some sort of response was necessary). Despite John's offer, we never used the Linode's he purchased for hosting slash, and the two services (forums and wiki) that were hosted on them were migrated. I had hoped that this would have been a private issue between me and John, to be handed by email with a proper agreement, but the site itself is now at risk.
Right now, I'm organizing a response with out staff now, but I won't be home for several hours so MrBluze is currently handling the crisis. He can hand off to mattie_p when he returns, or myself when I have proper net access again. John's offer does not reflect myself or any of the staff here, nor does he have what he says he has. The web server, dev server (fusion forge), and database were always hosted on Linode's on my personal account. John DID have access to the Linode account which was revoked when he left staff, but to my knowledge never had the root password or shell accounts on any of the boxes. That access was revoked. It is possible he has a copy of the database, I do not know for sure. He does not at this moment have access to any of the hardware powering the site. He does however control the DNS register and can possibly yank the site from under us. If that happens, I can send a mass email to every user account to inform them of what happened, and where we are now. We supposedly have until Friday until John drops everything in the trash unless someone pays him $2000 USD. As per the posts, I was willing to pay him, but I had some issue with the expenses as written (my emails are genuine, as is the email I received from John), but I'm currently in Asia, and have no practical way to send him a check until I return to the continental United States on Sunday; I informed John of this on IRC originally.
We're currently in scramble mode to try and organize a new name, and getting migrated as soon as possible. I was serious when I said I was done with the drama but it appears John isn't. I'm personally sorry to have to inflict this on the community, and if you wish to leave us, I shall not blame you in the slightest.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Hell_Rok on Monday March 10 2014, @11:37AM
I hope you get this all sorted out. I've been enjoying this place.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 10 2014, @02:31PM
I say we have them duke it out, a fistfight, like Solid Snake and Grey Fox. Or Solid Snake and Liquid Ocelot. And that fistfight must be on a cliff overlooking the ocean during sunset, with seagulls and cherry blossoms flying around and shit.
Then the winner could uppercut the loser into the ocean, and then the whole ocean would turn red because red is the color of blood and blood is the color of death. And letters could appear on screen, like "FATALITY." Those letters should also be red and perhaps orange to grab the spectators' attention.
That would be awesome.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Peristaltic on Monday March 10 2014, @05:35PM
Call me crazy, but for some reason, I'm visualizing the fight between Howard Wolowitz and Raj Koothrappali in the gym, or maybe the Karate match between Michael Scott and Dwight Schrute.
.
This whole thing is living proof of how so much of the time, people that are technically very bright end up, in the long term, working underneath technically incompetent management... or they slide into academia, and as PhD's torment the shit out of everyone underneath them- either with some idealistic justification, or without realizing that they're doing it.
.
Hell, I'm friends with an MD that is a genius in his field- he's boarded in emergency and internal medicine as well as in neurology- I mean multiple residencies and the whole 18 yards. While there is literally nobody I'd rather have working on me in the ER, in the every day management of his life, he manages to fuck up each and every endeavor he attempts, from picking and managing a nanny, to handling the rennovation of his house- He's ended up in court several times; he decides some ideal is correct, is unable/unwilling to compromise, then vacilitates between obstinately standing his ground on principal, and self-righteous indignation- and eventually feels that he's been "wronged" by everyone. He'll ask for help making decisions, then ignores any advice that doesn't match what he was planning on doing anyway. I sit back and watch the slow-motion train wreck unfold each time, then commiserate with him after the dust settles- I do not try to "fix" or counsel him about what he did wrong- after making *that* mistake twice, now I'm just there for the guy and listen to his woes.
These guys, especially the AI student, are cast from the same mold. When I read:
...I see the same thing- A tremendous impedance mis-match between intellect and self-awareness/emotional IQ.
The petulant, pouting, lack of self-awarness is typical: He'll do great in academia, but God help him if he moves into industry without someone to buffer between him and the suits.
After working as a consultant for IBM for a number of years, I decided to earn a PhD- I got as far as an MS, but after observing similar behavior from 75% of the PhD's I worked with, I bailed. Ironically, I now manage the IT department of that large university; my two bosses are MD/PhDs, and I spend about a third of my time buffering: 1)them from each other 2)my staff from them 3)them from the university system's IT director.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by edIII on Monday March 10 2014, @06:45PM
You see, this makes me angry at several levels:
1) Slashdot was never about nerds. It was inclusive of all people from the start really, and a quantum scientist was just as welcome as the car buff who had 3 decades of automotive experience. That whole news for nerds thing was just a tagline somebody thought up.
2) The people that think we are crybabies (I'm decidedly not), completely miss a much larger, and far more important point, that quite frankly, is very fucking important outside of Slashdot-Soylent.
3) It's not possible to be an outcast from the Slashdot-Soylent community. Only you can make yourself this way.
That point?
We're not a fucking audience. We're not fucking lazy eyeballs that go someplace to dreamily consume content without thought, while taking in peripheral advertisements, and becoming some statistics that marketers pore over like we're cattle. I didn't leave Slashdot because I was petulant about some Javascript, or a new interface.
I left Slashdot because the foundation of the community was crumbling to the extent we could not do what we do best on Slashdot. Honest-to-god dialogue and sophisticated discourse on so many different subjects. Slashdot was one of the only websites where I could hear straight from highly intelligent and skilled people from various disciplines. Unlike research papers, and those articles being linked to, these people had a knack for really explaining something.
I learned things at Slashdot. Until it became clear that the owners wanted to destroy the very parts of it that were valuable by watering down the site and further monetizing it
That's not something you can do with us. We are all very aware people when it comes to how the world exploits us, and attempts to turn us into dreamy audience members, that are really drooling little mice in some experiment.
Some of us may have the emotional IQ of a ADHD turnip, but that is the exception, not the rule. There is always a hot button to set us all off. Mine is the greedy fucking bankers and Wall Street, and I know I can sound like a nut bag talking about them, but.. yeah.. that's my thing.
What we all want is a place to go where we can just talk and learn from each other. Slashdot dropped the ball, BIG TIME. I don't care if where I go has a bunch of javascript or whatever. Just stop inserting 11 trackers and social media widgets, or designing pages to optimize advertisements. Gives us the tools we need to talk. That's it.
It's an absolute fucking shame that we couldn't all get together and prove our detractors wrong and create a new site in which we contributed valuable insights and interesting thoughts.
If I wasn't so god damned poor and burned out right now I would pay the $2000 myself and take on Soylent. I have experience running infrastructure like that, and it kills me that I just don't have the means.
Why this devolved into some sort of emotional catfight between a bunch of 11-year old girls....
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 1) by Peristaltic on Monday March 10 2014, @07:24PM
That's my story as well.
I think that there are enough folks interested, that even though God knows to whom the petulant AI "scientist"(when I see some pubs I'll believe him) sold the domain, it's early enough, that even if they have to get a new domain, this thing will probably be successful if the original devs (and the ex-slashdotters) stick to it. Have faith.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 10 2014, @03:35PM
Don't worry. I heard there is another site similar to SoylentNews. I believe it is called SlashDot.
(Score: 5, Funny) by Scruffy on Monday March 10 2014, @05:54PM
1087 is a lucky prime.
(Score: 2) by davester666 on Monday March 10 2014, @06:46PM
Only it is getting a crappy new interface...