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SoylentNews is people

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 zocalo on Wednesday March 12 2014, @08:28AM

    by zocalo (302) on Wednesday March 12 2014, @08:28AM (#15098)
    Yep, this is a highly likely outcome - imagine if this were applied with the US two-party political system, for instance; it would pretty much ensure that neither the Democrats or Republicans would ever get voted in. That's a nice thought, but hardly practical and you'd also end up with a winner that the least people actually wanted.

    Assuming the deal with "matt_" for the domain goes through then we have time, so why not a run off? There are, apparently, seven candidates, so we could have three rounds with the least popular two being eliminated each round, which should result in a choice that the majority are at least content with. Also, there should probably be a plan in place for if there is a dead heat, or even a three-way split, just in case.
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  • (Score: 3) by unitron on Wednesday March 12 2014, @08:51AM

    by unitron (70) on Wednesday March 12 2014, @08:51AM (#15110) Journal

    "...and you'd also end up with a winner that the least people actually wanted."

    When Perot took votes away from Bush the elder, we wound up with Clinton, even though he got less than 50% of the vote.

    A majority of the people who voted wanted someone other than Clinton.

    They just didn't want the same someone other than Clinton.

    But I bet a lot of them were in agreement about Clinton being their 3rd choice.

    So we already have the very real possibility of "a winner that the least people actually wanted".

    My method would also give a much more accurate view of how voters really feel about the various 3rd party candidates like Perot, Buchanan, and Nader.

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    • (Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Wednesday March 12 2014, @03:15PM

      by tangomargarine (667) on Wednesday March 12 2014, @03:15PM (#15313)

      But I bet a lot of them were in agreement about Clinton being their 3rd choice.

      Really? I would think it would go 1) the candidate you like (this is Soylent so I'm assuming for "most" of us it's third party), 2) the one of the main 2 parties that you hate less, 3) any other party that is relatively not-crazy. Wouldn't 1) the one you like, 2) the Big 2 you hate less, 3) The Other Guy be rather silly?

      (Personally, I'm tired of selecting the lesser evil so fuck voting for major parties until they get a good kick to the balls.)

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    • (Score: 2) by hankwang on Wednesday March 12 2014, @06:14PM

      by hankwang (100) on Wednesday March 12 2014, @06:14PM (#15423) Homepage

      So we already have the very real possibility of "a winner that the least people actually wanted".

      The US election system is beyond repair. But there are actually better ways to organize elections. Read my post on Approval Voting. Essentially, it is equivalent to leaving out the "0" option of your proposal.