SoylentNews

The Mighty Gewg has noted I am someone with an aberrant sense of right and wrong. Thanks for the complement, good sir. It is better to be the devil's advocate than a groupthinker.

Our IRC (http://irc.sylnt.us/) has a #comments channel that you can join to see an hourly feed of all new comments that appear in reply to SoylentNews stories.

This has been around for a while, but over the weekend a new feature was added to allow more personalized comment feeds.

Filtered feeds can be dispatched either as a PM to your nick or to a channel of your choosing. To dispatch to a channel you just need to make sure the exec bot resides in that channel (you can command it to join by visiting #soylent and typing "~join #mychannel").

There are two types of filters; cid and pattern

The cid filter is useful if you would like a feed of all responses in a specific comment thread. You simply add a filter that points to the parent comment cid and the bot will feed all child comments that appear.

Using a pattern filter enables you to feed comments that meet certain criteria. There are a number of fields you can match, and any new comment that matches the criteria in a filter will be output to the target nick/channel.

You can add multiple filters to track multiple cid's and/or comments that match multiple patterns.

The following commands can be performed in any channel where the exec bot resides:

~comments filter-add %id% %target% %cid%
~comments filter-add %id% %target% %field% %pattern%
~comments filter-delete %id%
~comments filter-list

%id% = unique name to identify filter (cannot contain spaces)
%target% = channel or nick to send filtered comments to
%cid% = SoylentNews comment id to track ("cid" parameter in uri)
%field% = any of user, uid, score, score_num, subject, title, comment_body (title refers to the story title)
%pattern% = regexp pattern for use with preg_match (surrounding #'s are added by the script)

examples:
- if you wanted a feed for all replies to this comment: http://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?sid=6634&cid=160651
you would use this command:

~comments filter-add my_test_filter #mychannel 160651

- if you wanted a feed with any comments that contain "systemd" you could use this command:

~comments filter-add systemd_filter_1 #mychannel comment_body systemd

and if you also wanted comments with "systemd" in the subject, add another filter:

~comments filter-add systemd_filter_2 #mychannel subject systemd

--
source (unlicensed): https://github.com/crutchy-/exec-irc-bot/blob/master/scripts/comment_feed.php

Here's another rejected submission, which in retrospect shows the submitter's bias a bit, and isn't really tech-related enough for the site. There are probably better examples of the impact of social media, although I don't think any are quite as sustained as these folks. It is interesting that the advocate for the child has only been recently appointed.

GungnirSniper [soylentnews.org] writes:

In one of the stranger stories that shows the effects of social media, a judge issued an arrest order Tuesday for a Florida woman, Heather Hironimus, who fled with her son to prevent his childhood circumcision. The unmarried parents of the boy, now 4, had previously signed a court-approved "parenting plan" that included the boy's circumcision. Potential surgeons have backed out after the mother's refuses consent or becoming the target of anti-circumcision protesters who side with her. [charlotteobserver.com]

An army of special interest groups opposed to circumcision has rallied behind the mom. With websites and local demonstrations, these so-called "intactivists" have closely followed the parents' yearlong battle over the boy, named Chase. [sun-sentinel.com] Neither the boy's mother nor father, Dennis Nebus, are Jewish. He has said he believes circumcision is "just the normal thing to do."

The intactivists have a website [chasesguardians.org] and a Facebook page [facebook.com] dedicated to their cause which allows them to coordinate messaging to doctors considering taking part. As one writer experienced, an intactivist followed her in the supermarket to question her opinions about the topic. [time.com]

The Centers for Disease Control recently came out in favor of circumcision [drugs.com] despite efforts by the Internet activists.

The attorney for the mother said he filed a motion to have a court-appointed guardian ad litem for the boy [local10.com] and is seeking to have a mental health professional evaluate the boy's "emotional state" to determine if circumcision is "something that would be advisable." He said the goal is to make sure the child "has an independent voice" and isn't caught up in his parents' squabble." "It's the boy who's really going to have to live the rest of his life with the decision."

Here's a recent rejected submission that I thought this was weekend-worthy, although in retrospect it's not particularly well written. It's a good sign it got rejected, since it means the editors are getting enough stuff to work with. :)

GungnirSniper [soylentnews.org] writes:

DNAinfo is reporting the elementary (typically ages 5-11) Public School 116 in the Manhattan neighborhood of Kips Bay is "abolishing traditional homework assignments and telling kids to play instead." [dnainfo.com] Jane Hsu, the school's principal, sent a letter to parents that states:

"The topic of homework has received a lot of attention lately, and the negative effects of homework have been well established."

"They include: children’s frustration and exhaustion, lack of time for other activities and family time and, sadly for many, loss of interest in learning."

"In fact, you may be surprised to learn that there have been a variety of studies conducted on the effects of homework in the elementary grades and not one of them could provide any evidence that directly links traditional homework practices with current, or even future, academic success."

Instead of traditional homework such as math problems, they are giving the students menus of ideas that such as visiting a park with a friend, playing chess with a parent, conversations with relatives, unstructured reading, writing a poem about snow, or measuring the perimeter of a household object. The activities have a time requirement of only 20 minutes, and do not require a successful completion, only an attempt.

As one may guess, the concept was not universally embraced. [dnainfo.com] Joe Fiordaliso, president of Community Education Council for District 3 said:

"Here's an analogy: my kids are taking piano lessons," Fiordaliso said. "If they don't practice in between lessons, how are they going to advance beyond Yankee Doodle and ever think about playing something by Chopin?"

Some parents have started spending time fill out their child's education by creating their own assignments. Another parent notes:

"I give him extra work, though. I go to Barnes & Nobles and give him my own homework."

Perhaps getting the parents more involved was part of the idea all along. A further statement from the principal said:

"We are creating opportunities for students and their families to engage in activities that research has proven to benefit academic and social-emotional success in the elementary grades. We look forward to seeing the positive impact our newly-designed homework options will have on our students and their families."

No word if "Hello World" was part of the assignment menus.

Oh how I loathe the feeling of not knowing something that in my mind should be easy to figure out, yet, still eludes me.

So the other day (06MAR2015) I decided to try SoylentNews IRC, and enjoyed the experience. Knowing there was site maintenance on the 7th I didn't log into anything SN related through the weekend. Since yesterday SN IRC has been failing for me with a timeout or an out right connection refusal.

Am I missing something obvious here? Did Carbon survive the maintenance window? I guess I was expecting something posted to the Site Down Time article regarding success failure of the maintenance.

There was a provocative SoylentNews' Michael Brown Shooting Discussions: Six Months Later story that showed up earlier today.

I've been reading through the comments, and I've noticed that a lot of perfectly fine comments have been incorrectly modded down.

For the good of the community and for freedom of expression, the comments linked to below should be modded up:

• https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?sid=6450&cid=154929 [soylentnews.org]
• https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?sid=6450&cid=154988 [soylentnews.org]
• https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?sid=6450&cid=155015 [soylentnews.org]
• https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?sid=6450&cid=154907 [soylentnews.org]
• https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?sid=6450&cid=155043 [soylentnews.org]
• https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?sid=6450&cid=154871 [soylentnews.org]
• https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?sid=6450&cid=154900 [soylentnews.org]

We really need to find a way to better avoid abusive mis-moderation like that. Even with the recent changes, we still have people severely abusing the "Troll" mod, as evident from how those comments were incorrectly moderated.

There needs to be some way to prevent such mis-moderation from happening in the first place. When that fails, there needs to be some way of correcting them faster, as well as punishing those who engaged in such abuse.

This editor thinks about things... usually does not reach a conclusion.

Every so often an important story happens, or there are no usable submissions and an editor might elect to circumvent the normal process and set their own story for release. This goes against the normal submissions process, it is not something that happens very often. Site news is the exception to this for obvious reasons.

On the occasions we have released a story as described above -- not waiting for a submission -- there has been no complaints that I am aware of.

Honestly, I do not rush to start releasing my own stories, or to make submissions. Organic and original submissions are far better and what I really want to see more of.

What are your opinions on editors finding and releasing stories this way more often? Especially when it comes to 'breaking news', but more generally also.

[This journal entry is just that, it is not an official SoylentNews RFC or endorsed by any of the staff.]

been mucking around with a little website thing intended to be sort of similar to SoylentNews/Pipedot/etc

it's written in php and is intended to be very simple

site (not yet fully functional) is here: http://news.my.to/

sample story with a bunch of nested test comments here: http://news.my.to/story/1

code for site is here: https://github.com/crutchy-/exec-irc-bot/tree/master/website/news.my.to

so far it has basic rewrite rules, templating for html, uses pdo, no classes (procedural only)

code is unlicensed (https://github.com/crutchy-/exec-irc-bot/blob/master/unlicense.txt)

had a go at making a simple pastebin. nothing fancy (no context highlighting, line numbers, etc)

http://paste.my.to/

similarish workings to the url shortener

had a go at making a url shortener. very basic but seems to work

http://o.my.to/

you can also use it from soylent irc with the command "~shorten %url%" (must be identified with nickserv)