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posted by mattie_p on Wednesday March 12 2014, @06:00AM   Printer-friendly
from the knock-on-wood dept.

I promised that we, the staff, would provide a quick status report after all the drama on Monday. The site issues today delayed that, and I thank juggs in IRC for reminding me of my promise. We've been very transparent and we want to continue that trend. Most of the comments we've seen have been encouraging of this method. However, we hope the transparency will result in less drama and in more productivity in the future.

On Tuesday, 4 March 2014, Barrabas, the "Man Behind the Curtain" resigned from his position. In his resignation, he retained ownership of the domain Soylentnews.org and associated domain registrations, as well as certain accounts on linode.com, our host. (See our article on backup plans.) Read more inside.

There were some negotiations between Barrabas and NCommander regarding compensation for money invested by Barrabas as part of the transfer of authority, along with the linodes and the domain names. Those negotiations broke down, resulting in a situation that became public on Monday, 10 March. Barrabas decided to sell his entire interest in the site. While the staff decided to create a poll to figure out which way to proceed (we were completely divided on what to do) an individual member of the site stepped up to purchase those rights from Barrabas.

That individual is known on IRC as matt_. Despite the similarity in name, he is not me. I've offered to let him introduce himself on his own schedule. For now, we are working with him to ensure all of the accounts and technical transactions are being transferred. As of right now, we believe the site is secure, he is a standup guy, and we can all move on with our lives.

However, there is such a thing as being over-zealous, and making decisions too rapidly. Today we decided to take down the linodes that Barrabas had set up. What we did not know was that those linodes contained our DNS zone records. Taking those boxes down took down our DNS records and therefore the site. Slashcode can be a little tricky, and one of its dependencies is DNS. So when we took down DNS, we took down slash on the linode as well. This was bad. We managed to get it working again, and created an incident log that provides some details to those interested. This also describes a second related incident, tied to taking down DNS.

As a result of this, we are making some changes in the way we conduct ourselves. I have asked the unit chiefs to be more proactive and less reactive. The first part of this (step 0, actually) is creating documentation of each unit. Our Team Pages link on the wiki leads to each of our 5 major groups right now. Please check out each of them for more details on what needs to be done and how to help, if you are interested.

We are currently having our poll on the future status of our IRC network, and within 24 hours we are going to launch a new poll to select our final site name (or so we hope). We have 7 candidate names (including SoylentNews). We are going to hold our initial round with all of them. If one name earns 50% + 1 vote, that name wins. If that doesn't happen in a particular round, we take the names that are within 5% of the leading candidate to the next round. If no other name is within 5 percentage points, we will take the top 2 names for the final event. Finally, look forward to updates from each of our major units regarding their work in progress and their current status over the next few days.

This is a learning experience for all of us, and we hope that the drama can decrease so that the community can grow together. Thanks for reading! ~mattie_p

 
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  • (Score: 2) by TheRaven on Wednesday March 12 2014, @08:23AM

    by TheRaven (270) on Wednesday March 12 2014, @08:23AM (#15096) Journal

    Having a paid subscription is likely to make non-profit status difficult. A non-profit must demonstrate a community that it serves, and 'the community of people who pay money to the non-profit' is not one that is likely to be accepted in any jurisdiction.

    The main benefit of a US non-profit is the tax status of donations, but they're also quite difficult (and not that cheap) to set up. You might also consider something like a UK Community Interest Company, which is a lot cheaper and could have been done during the Slashcot if the people running this place had had something that could be mistaken in a poor light for a plan.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 12 2014, @08:33AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 12 2014, @08:33AM (#15099)

    You might also consider something like a UK Community Interest Company, which is a lot cheaper and could have been done during the Slashcot if the people running this place had had something that could be mistaken in a poor light for a plan.

    They had a plan, fairly straightforward and explicitly involivng for-profit motives, but it was there. And where were _you_ during the Slashcot, making people aware that they could start an organisation in some (to all relevant staff) foreign country under better conditions than doing so (altough they didn't even want to do that) in the US.

    s'all, just wanted to call bullshit on your comment ^^

  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by unitron on Wednesday March 12 2014, @08:38AM

    by unitron (70) on Wednesday March 12 2014, @08:38AM (#15102) Journal

    How about we just go ahead and blame me for not making the Slashcott long enough to begin with and let these guys off the hook for not being able to cram all the miracles in before the artificial deadline.

    God may have managed to go from nothing to finished product in only 6 days, but he had eternity to pre-plan it, and for all we know, there were other, earlier attempts He never gets around to mentioning.

    Going from none of them knowing each other and having no idea they'd need to do such a thing the day before to jumping in on the 6th or 7th and having it as far as they did by the 17th is pretty impressive from where I'm standing.

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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by quadrox on Wednesday March 12 2014, @08:39AM

    by quadrox (315) on Wednesday March 12 2014, @08:39AM (#15105)

    Having a paid subscription is likely to make non-profit status difficult. A non-profit must demonstrate a community that it serves, and 'the community of people who pay money to the non-profit' is not one that is likely to be accepted in any jurisdiction.

    Without being a lawyer I would like to call bullshit. Most hobby club/associations have membership fees but are still considered non-profit organisation. A non-profit may earn money and take payments from members - as long as the money is used for the purposes that the organisation was founded for.

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by stderr on Wednesday March 12 2014, @09:39AM

    by stderr (11) on Wednesday March 12 2014, @09:39AM (#15128) Journal

    Having a paid subscription is likely to make non-profit status difficult.

    It seems to work for both EFF [eff.org] and FSF [fsf.org]. They're both 501(c)(3) non-profits and according to my bank statements, they withdraw money from my account every month.

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    • (Score: 2) by Open4D on Wednesday March 12 2014, @10:23AM

      by Open4D (371) on Wednesday March 12 2014, @10:23AM (#15148) Journal

      Yes, a better way of putting it in my view would have been: we need to make sure we choose a structure that doesn't preclude paid subscriptions.

      I certainly support TheRaven's suggestion of considering non-US structures, if the US ones aren't the best fit.

      And I am sympathetic to quadrox's argument that getting some legally recognized structure set up is a priority. For example, has any legal advice been taken about the choice of the site name? The advice might well depend on the legal status of the organization. It would be good to be reassured on this point before the vote. (The name of the organization doesn't need to be the same as the name of the site. "The Foundation For Geek News Discussion" or something would be fine IMHO.)