SoylentNews

The long and short of it is, there won't be one. We're pushing it until January due to me and PJ being occupied too much with holiday and Life stuff.

What you can look forward to:

• Moderation Rework

Not a final version and we haven't touched meta-moderation yet but this will cut down on the echo chamber effect, mod bombing, and lay some groundwork for combating spam as well.

• Input vs Output Wackiness

Currently if you put html entities in and hit preview they get transformed into literal characters. There's also wackiness if you try to put double quotes in a submission title. I hate this, you hate this, and it needed to stop so most of the code for it is already done and being tested on dev.

• RSS/Atom Feeds Moving to SSL

There is really no reason to have http links in the rss feed rather than https links, so they're changing. I'm also doing my best to get them to encode only the necessary characters and display properly but it seems like no two readers display the same.

• A Couple New Themes

Occasionally I get bored and do up a theme instead of actually working. This time around we have the VT100 and the OMG PWNIES themes. These are actually pretty easy to do. Feel free to mod and submit your own. All it takes is a custom stylesheet if you're okay with reusing existing favicons/logos.

• Support for Additional Tags

We're adding standard support for sub/sup/abbr/strike tags. We're also adding support for the custom tags sarc/sarcasm and two forms of a "user" tag.

• Additional Minor Bug Fixes

Bunch of minor bugs, some of which you would have never seen because they were on admin pages.

I think that's all but I'm not sure what the last one that went into our point release after the 14.12 update was.

Alright, time for confessions. I only post journals in an attempt to get Ethanol_fueled's journals off the front page. So here is my anti-Ethanol_fueled journal entry. Maybe, in a future when Soylent News is a self-respecting news aggregator, such measures will not be necessary. (And yes, I know, that at present they are futile.)

I just used my last moderation point to troll rate someone. OK, it was not someone, it was an asshole. Seriously, who are these people that in this day and age can keep spewing racism, sexism, and how they are metrically challenged in the organ department? Guns? F**king Cowards. If you need a gun to defend yourself, you are probably a criminal. Bad boyz? White Bad Boyz? KKK Boyz? You know, if you are an oath keeper, you are already a lying sack of it. Defend the Constitution? You do realize that this means you have to be able to read the Constitution first, so you know what it is you are defending? Else, perchance, you find yourself defending the Protocols of the Teutonic Knights! You know, Nazi shit?

Recently I came across a video of John Cleese explaining Fox News with the insight that you have to know at least enough to be right in order to know you are wrong, and this is exactly what conservatives are lacking. Ah, here it is! Now this is the problem, and it does point out how arguing with these people is really no use at all. Seriously? Cops saying they _are_ the cop that shot the kid? Are they actually saying that they are racist child-murderers? See: too stupid to know that they are stupid.

I think it is nice that Soylent News covers these terribly fascist events in American, if only for the edification of the rest of the world. But let not all these people who do in fact listen to Fox New think that somehow they are right, or even in the majority. Liberals have more guns that conservatives, and they are better shots, since they do not get all emotional about their targets.

So I am not saying that we kick out all the neo-conservatives and neo-liberals and neo-nazis, I am just saying that if you are one of those, expect no mercy from things like reality and logic and humanity, and ethics. We owe you nothing less.

<OfficialDevHat>
So, I'd given an estimate of "by this weekend" for crypto-currency payment processing. I was pretty close for not even having looked at it or picked a payment processor yet. It's looking like I'll finish Monday unless I find another 3-4 hours of coding in my brain today. I can't really speak to when it will deployed to prod afterwards.

The skinny of it is I went through two other payment processors before settling on Bitpay. It would have been nice to accept litecoin and dodgecoin as well as bitcoin but some payment processor who shall remain nameless had a dev environment that did not mirror their prod environment and all the documentation for the API was for their dev environment, so I killed with fire all nine or ten hours of coding I'd done to process payments with them and went back to looking for another processor. Maybe one of these days they'll update and bring some sanity to their system and you lot will be able to use litecoin and dodgecoin here. Until then, bitcoin payments via Bitpay are currently working from my dev environment but in need of some finishing touches and testing before being deployed for you lot to use.
</OfficialDevHat>

<PrivateCitizenHat>
A quick word about Bitpay. If you ever want to receive USD when being sent BTC, I personally highly recommend using them. Aside from test.bitpay.com not being mentioned in the docs at the time, they were bloody brilliant to code against. As a random code monkey on the Internet, they have my resounding personal endorsement.
</PrivateCitizenHat>

OK, my contributions of late seem to be more complaining than anything. I really try not to smite idiots with negmod points, seriously! But I do hang on to the last few mod points, just in case a late-breaking egregious post should be made. And here is my latest complaint. Mod points come with a nice notification, and even some direction to proper usage. That is all well and good. There also is a date and time of expiration for said mod points. But my expiration time always seems to be an hour off. I am assuming this time is changed to local 24-hour format, no problem. Perhaps Slashcode is unaware that not all time-zones practice Daylight Savings? Or perhaps I am not where I think I am. I guess I could just remember, for Soylent News Mod points, that 18:05 is not 6:05 local time, but in fact 5:05. Wait, is it leap ahead, or fall back, if you do not have Daylight Saving Time? (And what fools think we can save daylight? If we could, the whole solar power at night thing would already be solved.)

Any way, it is probably better that I lose mod points before I can use them in nasty ways. Live long and prosper, whatever time matrix you find yourself in.

So, mod-bombing is becoming a problem. Where mod-bombing is defined as blowing a bunch of moderator points on one person's comments in pursuit of a personal vendetta. I think we're pretty much all in agreement that this type of behavior is NOT what the moderation system was designed to do and can't be allowed to continue.

So, I, personally, not anyone else on staff or the site as a whole, would like some input to use to further refine or outright change my opinion on how to deal with the matter. Bear in mind that I am not the person who gets to decide this, just the guy who would likely be coding it up.

At the moment my favorite idea is that after N downmods from person A to comments made by person B, person A be presented with a page offering them the choice of removing all their moderations from this set of modpoints or to continue on with the knowledge that an admin WILL be checking their moderations for today with the possible consequences of reversal of their moderations and their ineligibility to receive mod points again for a number of days ranging from 1 through infinity.

What say you, SN?

This text should be RTL if overrides are not stripped out.

Once in a long while, I post something that is beyond the ken of mere mortals. Unfortunately, mere mortals take this as a disagreement of opinion. But in fact, it is not. I am right, and they are wrong. You may think I am being conceited in this, but I assure you, I have grounds for my position.

So I am wondering why, in the grande scale of things, I am disturbed when some ill-advised comment of mine is appropriately modded down. Yes, I probably had it coming. Yes, it is probably justified. And if I had just waited half a day, this would not have happened. But can't you see that I have gone from a karma rating of 50 to just a paltry 49!! Oh, really, not a big deal. We are all after the same thing here (except for those libertarian free market fucks that are trying to pump the site for all it's worth and then sell us out down the river to some corporation niced.).

Yes, I mod down posts, especially if they are ethanol fueled and full of racism, misogyny, and ignorance of too many categories to be categorized. Or Republican. We need to stand up for reason, science, evidencem and logical thinking. Any religious stuff is right out, and any libertarian/Republican economic ideology is on the same level. No bias, no prejudice, just that bullshit needs to be called bullshit, and not allowed to pass as polite conversation.

We are the last best place on the internet. We are People, we are soylent. We have to act like people, people who can think, reason, argue according to the rules of logic. That is all I ask. I hope it is not too much.

This is a generic journal entry posted entirely so that you can tell me I'm awesome, call me a dick, or impart useful information since SN lacks a messaging feature and I'm not giving out my email address.