SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Exactly one year ago SoylentNews published its very first story: Welcome to SoylentNews!
And what a year it's been!
It all started with a posting at slashdot where an editor claimed they had "listened to their audience" about complaints about the new Beta version of the site that was being rolled out. Many noted that any changes were cosmetic — that it was the community that made that site what it was. And, in inimical nerd fashion, a "SlashCott" was scheduled from February 10-17 wherein the participants pledged to not visit /. for one whole week.
Others took a more active role. The source code for /. was originally made open source and was available on the internet. Sadly, that code had not been maintained and was several years out of date. Some intrepid souls labored long and hard to locate servers, coordinate activities, and get the code knocked into shape. The goal was to create an alternative site that was free from the manipulations of a corporate overlord.
That first story signified a major accomplishment, but the site was still unstable and many features were incomplete, non-functional, or just plain ugly. Many more days of implementation, debugging, and testing were to follow culminating with SN going live to the world on February 17, 2014: Welcome to the World of Tomorrow... Today!.
Much has happened since that nascent story first graced the 'net. There have been changes in our all-volunteer staff. We had votes for the name of the site. We implemented UTF-8 support so stories and comments can include any valid character. We incorporated as a Public Benefit Corporation — on USA's Independence Day no less! We have an on-line store where you can buy SoylentNews Swag. You can subscribe and help support our site.
By the numbers: Over 5000 accounts have been registered and nearly 5000 stories have been posted to the site. Each story is read from 500-2000 times by logged-in users, and approximately 10 times as many Anonymous Cowards. More importantly, nearly 150,000 comments have been posted by you, our community.
Today, we have a small but dedicated group of volunteers who keep the site running. They keep the OS up-to-date on our servers, maintain our Wiki, e-mail, and IRC channels. They add features and fix bugs in the SN code base. Others edit and publish stories to appear on the site. We have a Board of Directors who take care of the legal sides of things. A treasurer who follows the finances. And there are still others who help in a non-technical, but just as necessary capacity in keeping the site humming along.
So, hats off to all who have helped build this site to what it is today!
(Score: 4, Insightful) by janrinok on Thursday February 12 2015, @08:22AM
Many thanks to all of those who have taken part in this project - and congratulations on all that has been achieved in the past year. Many of those who were part of the initial period - when every day brought another challenge or a seemingly insurmountable problem to face - have now, for various reasons, moved on to other things. But together in the end, we did it. And I use the word 'we' intentionally, for it is the community that has stuck with this project through thick and thin, or the more recent arrivals bringing fresh blood and enthusiasm, that have made it so rewarding to me personally.
I will confess to having had moments when I have asked myself whether it is worthwhile. The weekends when there are not enough stories to fill the queue and I have other people who want some of my time and would prefer that I switch off the computer. And then along comes one of those stories that receives thousands of hits and hundreds of comments and I get my answer immediately. Worthwhile? Of course, it is! So, a big thank-you to all of you for that.
Congratulations all around - and here's to the next year!
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 Thursday February 12 2015, @10:51PM
Yes congrats.
Build a site for people. Run it the way /. did!
Due to excessive bad posting from this IP or Subnet, anonymous comment posting has temporarily been disabled. You can still login to post. However, if bad posting continues from your IP or Subnet that privilege could be revoked as well. If it's you, consider this a chance to sit in the timeout corner or login and improve your posting. If it's someone else, this is a chance to hunt them down. If you think this is unfair, please email admin@soylentnews.org with your MD5'd IPID and SubnetID, which are "xxxxxxxxxxxx" and "yyyyyyyyyyyyyy".
(Score: 4, Informative) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday February 12 2015, @11:05PM
Troll less maybe? That's an entirely automated bit of legacy slashcode and goes by the number of posts of yours that get modded Troll as AC. Complain all you like but you've only yourself to blame unless they're unjustified mods.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.