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from the i-am-so-fucking-sick-of-this-drama dept.
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 John DID have access to the Linode account which was revoked when he left staff, but to my knowledge never had the root password or shell accounts on any of the boxes. That access was revoked.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: 2, Interesting) by halcyon1234 on Monday March 10 2014, @01:18PM
So my first experience within 5 seconds of using the site is a gigantic yellow "FUCK YOU" noscript tag that tells me that they can't generate a plaintext tree of comments without javascript.
To repeat: THEY CANNOT GENERATE A PLAINTEXT TREE OF COMMENTS WITHOUT JAVASCRIPT!
ffs
Original Submission [thedailywtf.com]
(Score: 2, Interesting) by fnj on Monday March 10 2014, @01:29PM
With all due respect, stuff the attitude. Pipedot clearly intends to do script and not-script side-by-side, and when it's ready everyone can pick the version they prefer. I happen to be a champion of non-javascript web pages, but I couldn't do my banking and a lot of other things without it.
Rather than run down a valuable site, if javascript is your boogey man why don't you make a spotless pure greaterthandot.org?
(Score: 2, Insightful) by mcgrew on Monday March 10 2014, @03:53PM
With all due respect, stuff the attitude. Pipedot clearly intends to do script and not-script side-by-side, and when it's ready everyone can pick the version they prefer.
I think his attitude was completely warranted. If you're going to have both script and noscript it's just retarded to do script first. And it's a shitty site written by a shitty coder that won't let javascript fail gracefully. I used javascript some in my old Quake site, but if your javascript was disabled you'd never know there was any javascript at all unless you looked at the page source.
It isn't rocket surgery. The guy is clearly incompetent. Unfortunately he's far from alone, some idiots have javascrip-only links! Stupidity abounds.
"Nobody knows everything about anything." — Dr Jerry Morton, Journey to Madness
(Score: 3, Interesting) by GungnirSniper on Monday March 10 2014, @11:39PM
When you are linking to your own personal site that isn't exactly pretty [mcgrewbooks.com] I'm not sure you're the best person to call a web programmer incompetent. You're even calling an HTML page as a JS file:
As near as I can tell, both Soylent and Pipedot are being programmed for free in people's spare time, and should be judged accordingly.
Tips for better submissions to help our site grow. [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Tuesday March 11 2014, @02:49PM
It wasn't designed to be pretty, it was designed to be functional. The very first rule of design is form follows function and it doesn't matter if it's a physical device, a program, or a web page.
And there's what's known as the KISS principle: "Keep it simple, stupid."
"Nobody knows everything about anything." — Dr Jerry Morton, Journey to Madness
(Score: 1) by Reziac on Tuesday March 11 2014, @03:30AM
That was my gripe too... why do I have to turn on JS just to read comments? Pipedot has potential too, and it certainly doesn't hurt to have more community options, but why turn away some would-be users at the door??
I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and speculate that whatever code he's using didn't originally provide for noscript use, but I certainly hope it start working soon.
(At which point maybe the moderation dropdowns will actually do something... in SM, I don't see any way to apply them.)
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Geotti on Monday March 10 2014, @01:41PM
He cannot generate a plaintext tree of comments without javascript yet!
FTFY. I hope you see what the issue is now.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 10 2014, @01:47PM
No anonymous posting too. Fuck pipedot. I'd go back to Slashdot first.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 10 2014, @03:47PM
Ohhh, that (no anonymous comments) is a bit of a showstopper. Too bad -- I was getting excited for a minute, as the site and article selection looked good.
But without free commenting, they're not going to move past the 3 or 4 comment totals they're showing now.
What a clusterfuck we have. Might as well see what Slash is up to.