SoylentNews

Kolie and I have started dividing up the work to finish dealing with the worst of the critical infrastructure problems. At this point, I have Apache, Perl, and mod_perl building in Docker, with a good chunk of rehash's dependencies now installing. It's going to be a fair bit of work since at this point, a lot of the mystery meat aspects of the backend need to be detangled and at least reproducibly reinstalled, but at least there's some actual hope at seeing this site actually get its infrastructure updated.

I expect I'll have more to write about next week in that regard.

I intended to have a main page post following last Saturday's post about SN's averted shutdown, but after three attempts of trying to write it and it basically kept coming out as a copy and paste of the last posts I've written, I'm going to put that aside for the moment. Instead of simply repeating the same thing over and over, I'm just going to write a quick summary of what's been done

I've spun up a new development Linode account, and kolie put together the skeleton of an ansible playbook. I'm going to start hammering on it more tomorrow. The intent is to create a full staging environment for every aspect of the site. The playbook will also let us easily be able to do development locally as it will perfectly match what we're doing in production. That way things like configuration updates or even rehash code updates can be tested, deployed, and easily rolled back.

The first target is to rebuild the nginx terminator, as well as to use Traefik to help handle routing and termination. I re-installed the SSL terminator last November so its exact configuration is known and easy to recreate. Each component of the stack is going to get documented both via a playbook a wiki page on GitHub. After this, we'll start migrating services one by one until we can fully decommission the current VMs.

This also has the advantage that we will have something resembling change management, disaster recovery, and not deal with some strange part of the stack breaking when a configuration is updated which is always a good thing. It also means doing a large overhaul to rehash at least moves into the realm of "theorically possible", up from "impossible".

I'll try to keep people apprised of how things are progressing here every few days. I have no idea how long any of this will take, and even after the infrastructure rebuild is done, there's still a lot more that has to follow.

So the discussions on backchannels have continued, and I have written a 7k word document essentially bullet pointing everything that needs to be done. It covers both the technical and business side of SoylentNews. This document is being reviewed right now, and I'll likely post a revised version of it in the near future if conversations continue to go well.

This is that this document is my personal plan on how SN might be revamped. It wasn't written with consultation of the staff.

It includes a full list of remaining technical issues, action items to redraft and revise the business plan to solve the single revenue stream issue, establishment of true site governance, and finally, a high level look at what replacing rehash will look like.

This plan also includes a specific items to determine how I can be legally disentangled from the infrastructure, as well as the requirements in allowing legal responsibility for SN, which includes ongoing maintenance and more, to not be a burden simply left at one persons feet.

This is largely codification what I've been saying and trying to repair for the last few months.

There's also the very open question on if there are enough people in the community who are interested in working in this. The impression I had on IRC was there wasn't. The backchannels discussions which happened because I was approached as a human, have convinced me an alternative might exist.

If there's significant community involvement to essentially renovate and relaunch the site (and I mean this is people actually doing it under a specific plan that we can agree to), then the largest problem in keeping SN online can be solved.

I'll write more on this in a post I hope to have out on Monday, but I'm not going to sit here and leave you all in silence and let rumors build up over the weekend.

An update: There has been serious conversations in back channels relating to ongoing SN operations from outside parties who are not current SN staff. It is possible the shutdown will be averted, but at this point, it will require signing a contract with the PBC to, at minimum, handle ongoing IT and support for the servers for a period of time, and to finish migration to deployment automation services.

Past that, a more serious discussion on how to migrate off rehash would have be worked out, although this doesn't need to be set in stone to stop dissolution.

I don't know if this will actually come through, and I don't want to build hope if there isn't any, but I would prefer an option that allows SN to continue.

I'm reading the comments, and here's my initial thoughts, I'll mull more as feedback comes i.:

Folks want AC posting to stay.

I'm personally not a fan, but frankly, I am willing to concede this point. It may become "Logged in users can post as AC" if you have high karma, or leave it as it is that ACs can post on journals, but not on the main page, but that's a more in-depth discussion. I may actually wait until after the site renovations are complete before addressing this; that means the backend has been updated to use less brittle infrastructure.

For now, the current status quo will continue, but I will continue to get feedback on what the final for of this will take. I may also just leave it for whomever replaces me, as I do wish to find someone to replace me.

Karma changes

I don't think I saw much objection to this. I wrote some comments explaining how karma works, but the short version is its a range from -25 to 50, with +3 points given when you submit a story, and then affected by moderation values. By and large, people don't downvote very often, especially on logged in accounts. This was a constant problem which is why we ended up going with 10 moderator points per day vs. the original lottery system. Shrinking the range might be enough to basically cause AC posts to automatically get tagged as -1 if there's just a stream of garbage coming out of the domain. That might be enough of a middle ground here.

Comment Deletion/Edit

My intent here was that for things like COVID misinformation and the like, it should be flat out deleted ala a subreddit. I wasn't clear about this in the original post however. I'll talk with the editors more about that on the side. As for an edit button, I'm not object to it, but it would be a time limited thing, and keep the original post and show a banner "This post was edited"

  - N

This week has been a dumpster fire, but I'll write more up about SN tomorrow, and more plans going forward. I'll try and draft things tonight on where we're going. Just wanted to post publicly that I am still working on things in the background.

Got to say, the green look on the site is actually *really* nice. If it was a few shades darker though, we'd be too close that the site that shall not be named.

So I finally got too fedup with the modern breakage that is called desktop environments on Linux, grabbed the source code to CDE, and compiled it. I *finally* have an environment that works with multimonitor without being complete crap. After a bit fiddling with the X defaults database, it's quite usable.

Imgur Proof (warning, high resolution)

Honestly, compared to MOST of the other DEs I've used, this is damn heaven at the moment. With a bit of work to get to support XDG groups, some app fixing, and a little polish, CDE probably could wipe the floor as far as usability goes.

Due to the length, editing has taken longer than usual and its still getting final tune ups. It's now scheduled to go live tomorrow at 10AM EST.

I've got the article nearly written up (working on the last sections now), and it weighs in close to 3k words. If you're a ham radio operator or have soldering skills, there's also a plea for help as I'm interesting in using AX.25 for future examples but I don't have the necessary equipment or resources to acquire it at this moment.

Feel free to look at the code here: https://github.com/SoylentNews/retromalware