SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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
(Score: 2) by mrbluze on Wednesday March 12 2014, @08:44AM
Thank you for the encouraging words. But on name change, there are two things to say: Firstly it was promised from the outset that the site name would be determined by the community, and the longer this is left the more the result is likely to be fixed to the current name, which not everyone likes for a variety of reasons. Secondly if we have safety in the knowledge that the soylentnews domain name remains in the community's hands,there is nothing at all to fear from a name change - we just do a permanent redirect. It is arguably easier to market other names which may also have more obvious appeal to the people who are here and those that are to come. Names are very important, and although names such as xkcd have become household names in geek land it is easier for easily spelt and easily pronounced names to get traction. I don't mind what we call ourselves but this process will mean we can get to serious work in branding and marketing the project and diffrrentiating ourselves from the other(s) more fully.
Do it yourself, 'cause no one else will do it yourself.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by WizardFusion on Wednesday March 12 2014, @10:32AM
I have to disagree on the name being important. A name is not the be-all-and-en-all of the site. The community and the comments are this sites life. The name is secondary. I am not saying I like SoylentNews, nor am I saying it shouldn't be changed, I just think we shouldn't get hung up on it.
(Score: 2) by Open4D on Wednesday March 12 2014, @10:38AM
I'd like to re-iterate the thanks.
And I agree, it's okay for people (me included) to be happy with "Soylent News". But as long as the vote includes that as an option, I can't see any strong argument against having the vote.
One thing I would point out, it's quite common in these slashcode polls to see comments like "I voted X, but having seen the above comments I now think Y". Is there a case for having a proper discussion first? And the wording of the vote should make direct reference to that discussion?
(Score: 2) by mrbluze on Wednesday March 12 2014, @10:46AM
The poll is being used as a guide. I would say if there is some kind of overwhelming choice, and the same is reflected in comments and chatter, then that makes it a pretty easy decision. If it's all a mess and full of controversy then we have to go back to the drawing board.
Do it yourself, 'cause no one else will do it yourself.