SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
As you are all aware, we are in the middle of the dog days of summer. We get it, people are busy with work, family, and a plethora of other things. Some of our (volunteer) staff need a break too, so we are looking for a few good people, be they man, woman, child, animal, mineral or vegetable, to join our ranks and help spread the workload.
There are a number of ways to help out:
- Join us on our webchat IRC or, if you are new to IRC (I was only a year ago), check here for some tips on getting connected.
- Email mrcoolbp (or if you are sick of that guy any other staff member like janrinok will do; "nickname@soylentnews.org" works for any of us)
- Read the wiki page on "Getting Involved"
One thing that this site needs more than anything else to thrive is submissions.
We greatly appreciate all of our submitters. The submission queue is the lifeblood of SoylentNews, when it is empty, there is nothing to read, learn from, and argue about.
Takyon, Hugh Pickens, Phoenix666, and Arthur T. Knackerbracket come immediately to mind as people that we see submissions from a lot, and they present great submissions. However, consider that just one article a week from 25% of our registered users would give us more material than we can use, and yield a far greater variety of viewpoints, opinions, and stories. When you find something interesting, submit a story. Take a quick peek at our Submission Guidelines for some insight into best practices.
"But what do I submit?". Check out the RSSbot logs. Scroll down to 'today' and check out the links. This bot simply posts stories from various relevant sources in real-time by scraping RSS feeds (you can refresh the page and get more up-to-date stories).
A well crafted summary is preferred, but not an absolute necessity. Your summary doesn't have to be elaborate. It could be a copy/paste of the first paragraph or two from the article, but please, be sure to give us the link where you are getting the material.
I can only speak for myself, but I find the time spent working on SoylentNews and hanging around on IRC generally pretty relaxing. It is fun for me, and I appreciate that the community is an interesting place with people from many places, industries, and walks of life. It is a place where I come to learn, and read things I would otherwise never see.
Thanks to you all for helping build a great community, and we hope to see many new faces over the coming months.
--cmn32480
(Score: 2) by fliptop on Monday August 10 2015, @11:10AM
You have a valid point, no one wants to waste time putting together a submission if it's going to be rejected.
I took a look at the stories you've submitted that were accepted, and you seem to have about the same volume as me, once a week or so on average. Usually I find a story or two to submit when I log in and see the queue is low. However, the difference between us is only one of my story submissions was rejected (IIRC), and it was the 1st one I submitted when the site was brand new.
So for you it might help to know why your rejected stories weren't acceptable. Did you submit when the queue was full and there were a lot of other stories to choose from? Was your summary politically charged, or did it have more opinion than fact? A small tweak to your stories or format may be all that's needed.
To be oneself, and unafraid whether right or wrong, is more admirable than the easy cowardice of surrender to conformity
(Score: 4, Informative) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday August 10 2015, @02:10PM
That is one of the few things that'll get a story rejected in my experience. Report, don't proselytize; that's what the comments section is for. That and being a dupe, which is what mine usually get the chop for.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.