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: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 10 2015, @12:06PM
You guys are doing a great job. This is an invaluable news source for nerds, but:
1. Fix the user interface. It's improving but oh so slowly!
2. Fix the feedback for submitters.
I know that Slashdot 2.0 was a piece of sh!t, but that doesn't mean that your user interface doesn't suck too. It sucks, ok? Fix the colors, improve the interactivity, fix the feedback, as mentioned above.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 10 2015, @03:09PM
If you log in, you have a wide selection of colour schemes to choose from. So if you don't like the colour, just get an account (or if you have an account, log in) and select the colours you like.
Having said that, maybe it would make sense to give ACs the ability to select the colour scheme, storing the selection in a cookie (but in that case, please don't try to set that cookie unless someone explicitly asks for a changed colour scheme). Indeed, a cookie based scheme selection might make sense even for logged-in users, because they might prefer different styles on different computers/devices.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 10 2015, @09:46PM
Fix the colors
The AC gave you 1 solution for colors.
There is another Soylentil who has as his sig a color suggestion.
(...and even without a S/N signup, you can make changes to a page's appearance using a browser extension called Greasemonkey.) [mozilla.org]
...and the colors that I see are black text on a white background.
I also don't have sidebars narrowing the main content.
(I use an AdBlock filter of *.css)
Fix the user interface
I have only 2 big gripes:
1) Support for the {quote} pseudo-tag is in a stylesheet along with all the other stuff.
(This pseudo-tag wasn't even necessary except that some Soylentils are too lazy to type the 5 letters block--or are too ignorant to know that {quote} isn't a legit HTML tag.)
2) Long ago, the fold-long-URLs-at-the-right-margin thing was moved out of HTML and into that same large stylesheet.
If those 2 items were in their own (small) stylesheet, I would be very happy.
The only other (minor) gripe I have with the HTML-only view I see is that Reply to This and Parent are stacked instead of side-by-side and add extra vertical whitespace.
-- gewg_
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 11 2015, @01:45AM
The site still renders poorly on mobile devices. That has never been fixed.