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: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Monday August 10 2015, @12:24PM
Well, technically you don't have to dev in a whole new automated system, although that would be cool. It would be almost as useful as an overall process to toss up a story once a month about non-winning stories and its comment time based on some kind of monthly mysql ugly select statement. Essentially all submissions would get accepted and posted, its just some of them show up immediately(ish) on the front page with the submitters name in lights as they always have, and somewhat inferior submissions show up late in the comments of a monthly giant anonymized post of all the stories that didn't make it that month.
"Welcome to the monthly submissions that didn't make it discussion post:
(insert submitted headlines here)"
I suppose there would be drama about spam and semi-spam. Is a press release from Intel a real story because "we" are probably going to be buying and using the chips in the press release sooner or later, or is it spam not worthy of inclusion even in the monthly list much less getting posted? Even more dramatic, if the story of the new chips is technologically interesting I'd give it a pass, but if its just marketing BS and not interesting then I'd ditch it, but what if its not well known that there is a technology angle?
I suppose if there was a really interesting story that got spiked for whatever reason, it would get found and discussed in the monthly as a form of feedback. Or maybe the stories that don't make it really are junk after all and nobody will comment. I guess there's one way to find out...