So, just a follow up. According to matt, we got around $2,000 USD right now in the PBC overnight, and there are still more payments processing. I paid the Linode bill this morning. So, funding problem: solved. We should be set for the foreseeable future as far as money goes!
Seriously guys, you stepped up, and I am thankful. Since I'm here, a quick update on what's going on: Right now, we're mostly just waiting for paperwork to go through as far as handing the site to a newly-created, not-for-profit. It's slow work and I'm not directly involved, but I've seen that there has been a fair number of articles on the subject so I'm pretty happy that everyone is aware of what's going on.
I could write more, but I think I'm going to keep this short and sweet for now. Once I have a final total, I'll post it.
- N
Addition: We have been asked if people can donate anonymously without having an account. The answer is "Yes". Click the subscription link and then make a gift subscription to another account (It defaults to NCommander but you can choose any account). Pay via stripe using an anonymous username.
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So, in the background, the owners of the PBC have been working with staff to get the site moved over to a new legal entity and continue operations. This process is moving slowly, but it is moving, with the expectation that we should be able to fully hand off SN in the next month or so. However, the PBC has burned through its cash reserves, and we have an overdue Linode bill as is for $268 USD. I could write more, but the tl;dr, without money, SN will disappear off the Internet.
Most of the subscriptions understandably stopped due to the uncertainty with site ownership and management. However, we're not able to pay the bills with the trickle coming in. At this point, everyone involved has agreed with and are working towards a solution to move SN to a not-for-profit and 501(c)3, but we do need the communities financial support to get there. If we can raise $500 USD via subscriptions, direct donations, or other means, that would keep the site up past May. As such, if you have let your subscription lapse, or otherwise are able to support SN, please do so now.
Any funds raises will be donated to the *new* NFP as soon as it is able to accept funds. We'll run an update if/when we reach our funding goal.
- NCommander
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In order to create a new company it is necessary to provide bylaws which state how that company will be governed. Draft 8 of the bylaws received one suggested change when it was presented to the community. However, there were a few problems that have been identified since Draft 8 was published in a Meta. One was the waiving of anonymity by anyone who wished to serve on the board. As the idea behind all seats on the board was that they should be elected by the community from volunteers in the community, and would periodically be replaced by subsequent volunteers and election, over time many of our community would have had their anonymity compromised. This was unpopular and made it difficult to envisage the long-term support of the community for such roles.
The board has, as a minimum, three members. The President, a Secretary and an Accountant. These posts must waive anonymity as their identities have to be declared at incorporation and periodically thereafter. There is no escaping this requirement. However, the Governance Committee was also formed from community members and they have not had to waive their right to anonymity. The solution to the problem is relatively straight forward. The board will be established to fill the 3 necessary posts by volunteers, and will be responsible for fulfilling the legal requirements that such posts require. The operational control will be vested in a new group (or committee if you insist) which will comprise of a board member, the Team Leaders and the 5 Community Representatives, and others with specialist knowledge where necessary, thus removing the need for these people to be identified. They can use their regular usernames. The Management Group will provide operational guidance to the board. The community will be represented by their chosen representatives who will be looking after their interests and they will have direct access to the board during all discussions and communications. The Management Group will not hold regular meetings as issues that need resolving occur frequently and irregularly. They will use email and IRC as we have always done, thus removing the burden of meetings that, no matter when they were scheduled, proved to inconvenient to many members to say the least and have taken lot of man hours that could have been more usefully spent.
To see us over the transition we need to have a set of bylaws (Draft 9) approved by the community. We have volunteers who will create a temporary board and community representatives, while we sort out policy and prepare for the election process so that the community can be involved in the election of all posts. This will be a temporary arrangement and the bylaws below - which are very heavily based upon Draft 8 which was provided by k0lie/replic8tor - can and will be changed over the next few months to reflect whatever is deemed to be the best arrangement for the long term.
Please remember that the bylaws are only concerned with the board and site governance. Policy matters, management of the site on a daily basis, etc are not part of the bylaws and you will all have your chance to give your views once the transition has taken place. I welcome your comments but I will repeat - these bylaws are temporary and can be changed over the coming months as people see fit. I am more concerned at the moment with getting something that will work and allow us to move forward rather than reflecting each and every nuance of our future operation.
Time is of the essence. Please make your comments promptly because as soon as we know that we have something that will work we would like to move on to incorporation.
I gratefully acknowledge and thank k0lie/replic8tor for Draft 8. To ease the problem of assessing the bylaws I can identify the following sections as having been edited to reflect what is possible rather than what might have been ideal under other circumstances.
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Many of you will have experienced the problems with the expired certificates. Unfortunately, our one remaining sysadmin is away from home until 1400 Monday (US time - tz unknown) and he has been away for a while.
We have requested NCommander and k0lie to assist. They have declined.
We all have real jobs and lives to live too and this is just one of those things.
Unfortunately it seems that the problem will continue for another 36 hours.
UPDATE: Audioguy has fixed the site. Thank you ag! Jan
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We are running very short of time for creating a new site. We have one member of staff who has already volunteered for a post on the Board; other staff are already busy with their existing roles. We are looking for an additional 2 community members who wish to serve on a temporary Board so that we can create a new company and purchase the data, domains and other assets from the current site. But perhaps I should explain a little further....
The Board should, as a minimum, consist of 3 people, A Chairman, a Secretary and the site's Accountant. These people will be named at the creation of the new company and will each assume one of those formal roles. There are implications to this. Firstly, the company data is not publicised widely but we can make no guarantee that it will always remain hidden from public view, either by a change in US law or by, for example, the action of an hacker. Therefore, any volunteers must be prepared to waive his/her anonymity although as things stand it should never actually be compromised. Secondly, this is a temporary post. The latest draft of Bylaws is a very good starting point but it has become apparent that they are not perfect. There will be changes required to the Bylaws and, when they have been changed and accepted by the Community, all posts on the Board must be filled by people who have been elected by the community. You could, of course, stand for election at that time if you so wish.
Currently, we are only looking at putting names to roles so that we can create a company. Your experience and skill level are not the most important aspects. We will employ an professional accountant to produce the annual formal account reporting and it will not simply be left to our own 'Accountant'. Rather, the role is one of providing checks and balances for any expenditure and the management of the site's accounting records.
How long the 'temporary' role will last is not something that we can currently forecast. But I would estimate it to be weeks or months rather than a long term responsibility.
I think any sensible person would agree that we cannot simply pass control of the site and finances to unknown people so we must limit applications from those who have held an account for at least 6 months and have contributed to the site. The staff will treat all applications as sensitive data and we will only refer to individuals by their user name in any discussions or at subsequent meetings. We will, of course, need to know your true identity and contact details for the creation of the new company.
This is a chance for us to move the site to a new start and to ensure that we can provide continuity of stories each day for everyone to enjoy. We will all be involved - Board, staff and community - in producing new policy documents that are a reasonable balance between discussions and freedom of speech. We are almost at our 10th birthday. Many people did not expect us to reach our 1st birthday. I would like to see the site looking forward to many more birthdays to come.
We can only achieve this with your help. The are approximately 250 unique accounts, excluding ACs, active on the site each week although not all commenting in stories. We are only looking for 2 volunteers.
If you wish to volunteer please send your email giving your username to admin@soylentnews.org with the word "volunteer" in the subject. All emails will be treated in the strictest confidence. Time is of the essence so please don't delay in contacting us should you wish to volunteer.
UPDATE: 31 Jan 2004: We have the volunteers that we need to create a new company, many thanks to them for stepping forward. However, if you feel that you have something to offer and you wish to volunteer also then please do so.
There is still some preparatory work to be done but I am doing that as quickly as I am able within my current time limitations.
Another point worth noting which may, or may not, be related is that the number of active accounts has gone over the 300 mark for the first time in many months. There are probably many more who are lurking or posting solely as AC.
janrinok
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Meeting Announcement: The next meeting of the SoylentNews governance committee is scheduled for Wednesday, January 10, 2024 at 21:00 UTC (4pm Eastern) in #governance on SoylentNews IRC. Logs of the meeting will be available afterwards for review, and minutes will be published when complete.
Minutes and agenda, and other governance committee information have a page on the SoylentNews Wiki at: https://wiki.staging.soylentnews.org/wiki/Governance
Expected topics include the formation of a new corporation and the peaceful transfer of assets. Committee members, you don't want to miss this one!
The community, welcome to observe and participate, is also encouraged to attend the meeting.
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Meeting Announcement: The next meeting of the SoylentNews governance committee is scheduled for Wednesday, January 3, 2024 at 21:00 UTC (4pm Eastern) in #governance on SoylentNews IRC. Logs of the meeting will be available afterwards for review, and minutes will be published when complete.
Minutes and agenda, and other governance committee information have a page on the SoylentNews Wiki at: https://wiki.staging.soylentnews.org/wiki/Governance
The community is welcome to observe and participate, and is encouraged to attend the meeting.
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Meeting Announcement: The next meeting of the SoylentNews governance committee is scheduled for Wednesday, December 20th, 2023 at 21:00 UTC (4pm Eastern) in #governance on SoylentNews IRC. Logs of the meeting will be available afterwards for review, and minutes will be published when complete.
Minutes and agenda, and other governance committee information are to be found on the SoylentNews Wiki at: https://wiki.staging.soylentnews.org/wiki/Governance
The community, welcome to observe and participate, is encouraged to attend the meeting.
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Meeting Announcement: The next meeting of the SoylentNews governance committee is scheduled for Wednesday, December 13th, 2023 at 21:00 UTC (4pm Eastern) in #governance on SoylentNews IRC. Logs of the meeting will be available afterwards for review, and minutes will be published when complete.
Minutes and agenda, and other governance committee information are to be found on the SoylentNews Wiki at: https://wiki.staging.soylentnews.org/wiki/Governance
The community, welcome to observe and participate, is encouraged to attend the meeting.
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Meeting Announcement: The next meeting of the SoylentNews governance committee is scheduled for Tomorrow, Wednesday, December 6th, 2023 at 21:00 UTC (4pm Eastern) in #governance on SoylentNews IRC. Logs of the meeting will be available afterwards for review, and minutes will be published when complete.
Minutes and agenda, and other governance committee information are to be found on the SoylentNews Wiki at: https://wiki.staging.soylentnews.org/wiki/Governance
The community, welcome to observe and participate, is encouraged to attend the meeting.
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Meeting Announcement: The next meeting of the SoylentNews governance committee is scheduled for Tomorrow, Wednesday, November 29th, 2023 at 21:00 UTC (4pm Eastern) in #governance on SoylentNews IRC. Logs of the meeting will be available afterwards for review, and minutes will be published when complete.
Minutes and agenda, and other governance committee information are to be found on the SoylentNews Wiki at: https://wiki.staging.soylentnews.org/wiki/Governance
The community, welcome to observe and participate, is invited to the meeting.
Read more of this story at SoylentNews.
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Meeting Announcement: The next meeting of the SoylentNews governance committee is scheduled for Tomorrow, Wednesday, November 15th, 2023 at 21:00 UTC (4pm Eastern) in #governance on SoylentNews IRC. Logs of the meeting will be available afterwards for review, and minutes will be published when complete.
The agenda for the upcoming meeting will also be published when available. Minutes and agenda, and other governance committee information are to be found on the SoylentNews Wiki at: https://wiki.staging.soylentnews.org/wiki/Governance
Highlights expected in tomorrow's meeting are discussion of Draft 8 of the bylaws, and a statement from janrinok.
The community is welcome to observe and participate, and is invited to the meeting.
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Meeting Announcement: The next meeting of the SoylentNews governance committee is scheduled for Today, Wednesday, November 8th, 2023 at 21:00 UTC (4pm Eastern) in #governance on SoylentNews IRC. Logs of the meeting will be available afterwards for review, and minutes will be published when complete. Note that due to the time change back to standard tine, this will be 4pm eastern time where it previously fell at 5pm eastern.
The agenda for the upcoming meeting will also be published when available. Minutes and agenda, and other governance committee information are to be found on the SoylentNews Wiki at: https://wiki.staging.soylentnews.org/wiki/Governance
The community is welcome to observe and participate, and is invited to the meeting.
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Our certificates expire in a few hours time and there is nobody available to update them. You may see warnings in your browser. Please accept our apology.
UPDATE: We think that we have succesfully renewed the certificates - but if anyone encounters anything unusual please let us know either here or on IRC.
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Meeting Announcement: The next meeting of the SoylentNews governance committee is scheduled for Today, Wednesday, November 1st, 2023 at 21:00 UTC (5pm Eastern) in #governance on SoylentNews IRC. Logs of the meeting will be available afterwards for review, and minutes will be published when complete. This will be 5pm eastern time depending on your daylight saving time status.
The agenda for the upcoming meeting will also be published when available. Minutes and agenda, and other governance committee information are to be found on the SoylentNews Wiki at: https://wiki.staging.soylentnews.org/wiki/Governance
The community is welcome to observe and participate, and so is invited to the meeting.
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Meeting Announcement: The next meeting of the SoylentNews governance committee is scheduled for Today, Wednesday, October 25th, 2023 at 21:00 UTC in #governance on SoylentNews IRC. Logs of the meeting will be available afterwards for review, and minutes will be published when complete. This will be 5pm eastern time depending on your daylight saving time status.
The agenda for the upcoming meeting will also be published when available. Minutes and agenda, and other governance committee information are to be found on the SoylentNews Wiki at: https://wiki.staging.soylentnews.org/wiki/Governance
The community is welcome to observe and participate, and is invited to the meeting.
Read more of this story at SoylentNews.
Meeting Announcement: The next meeting of the SoylentNews governance committee is scheduled for Today, Wednesday, October 18th, 2023 at 21:00 UTC (5pm Eastern) in #governance on SoylentNews IRC. Logs of the meeting will be available afterwards for review, and minutes will be published when complete.
The agenda for the upcoming meeting will also be published when available. Minutes and agenda, and other governance committee information are to be found on the SoylentNews Wiki at: https://wiki.staging.soylentnews.org/wiki/Governance
The community is welcome to observe and participate--you are hereby invited to the meeting.
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Meeting Announcement: The next meeting of the SoylentNews governance committee is scheduled for Wednesday, October 11th, 2023 at 21:00 UTC (5pm Eastern) in #governance on SoylentNews IRC. Logs of the meeting will be available afterwards for review, and minutes will be published when complete. Please note the new day and time.
The agenda for the upcoming meeting will also be published when available. Minutes and agenda, and other governance committee information are to be found on the SoylentNews Wiki at: https://wiki.staging.soylentnews.org/wiki/Governance
The community, as always, is welcome to observe and participate, and is, as always, invited to the meeting.
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Meeting Announcement: The next meeting of the SoylentNews governance committee is scheduled for Today: Friday, September 29th, 2023 at 20:30 UTC (1:30pm PDT, 4:30pm EDT) in #governance on SoylentNews IRC. Logs of the meeting will be available afterwards for review, and minutes will be published when complete.
The agenda for the upcoming meeting will also be published when available. Minutes and agenda, and other governance committee information are to be found on the SoylentNews Wiki at: https://wiki.staging.soylentnews.org/wiki/Governance
The community is always welcome to observe and participate, and is warmly invited to the meeting.
Read more of this story at SoylentNews.
Meeting Announcement: The next meeting of the SoylentNews governance committee is scheduled for Friday, September 22nd, 2023 at 20:30 UTC (1:30pm PDT, 4:30pm EDT) in #governance on SoylentNews IRC. Logs of the meeting will be available afterwards for review, and minutes will be published when available.
The agenda for the upcoming meeting will also be published when available. Minutes and agenda, and other governance committee information are to be found on the SoylentNews Wiki at: https://wiki.staging.soylentnews.org/wiki/Governance
You, the community, are always welcome to observe and participate, and you're invited to the meeting.
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Meeting Announcement: The next meeting of the SoylentNews governance committee will be Friday, September 1st, 2023 at 20:30 UTC (1:30pm PDT, 4:30pm EDT) in #governance on SoylentNews IRC. Logs of the meeting will be available afterwards for review, and minutes will be published when available.
The agenda for the upcoming meeting will also be published when available. Minutes and agenda, and other governance committee information are to be found on the SoylentNews Wiki at: https://wiki.staging.soylentnews.org/wiki/Governance
Our community is always encouraged to observe and participate, and is invited to the meeting. Hope to see you then!
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Meeting Announcement: The next meeting of the SoylentNews governance committee will be Friday, August 25th, 2023 at 20:30 UTC (1:30pm PDT, 4:30pm EDT) in #governance on SoylentNews IRC. Logs of the meeting will be available afterwards for review, and minutes will be published when available.
The agenda for the upcoming meeting will be published when available. In the meeting we plan to discuss mechanicjay's report on different entity types and the first draft of the bylaws, which was posted to janrinok's journal previously.
Minutes and agenda, and other governance committee information are to be found on the SoylentNews Wiki at: https://wiki.staging.soylentnews.org/wiki/Governance
Our community is encouraged to observe and participate, and is therefore invited to the meeting. SoylentNews is, after all, People!
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Meeting Announcement: The next meeting of the SoylentNews governance committee will be Friday, August 18th, 2023 at 20:30 UTC (1:30pm PDT, 4:30pm EDT) in #governance on SoylentNews IRC. Logs of the meeting will be available afterwards for review, and minutes will be published when available.
The agenda for the upcoming meeting will be confirmed pending confirmation of who will be attending. The SoylentNews PBC board has been invited to attend and clarify some things about the transition in structure. We also plan to work on the future bylaws of SoylentNews.
Minutes and agenda, and other governance committee information can be found on the SoylentNews Wiki at: https://wiki.staging.soylentnews.org/wiki/Governance
Per usual, the community is encouraged to observe and participate and is hereby invited to the meeting. SoylentNews is People!
Read more of this story at SoylentNews.
Meeting Announcement: The next meeting of the SoylentNews governance committee will be this coming Friday, August 11th, 2023 at 20:30 UTC (1:30pm PDT, 4:30pm EDT) in #governance on SoylentNews IRC. Logs of the meeting will be available afterwards for review, and minutes will be published when available.
The agenda for the upcoming meeting will come out within the next few days, 24 hours or more before the meeting. The agenda is expected to cover, at a minimum, actions arising from the previous meeting, such as exploring the formation of a new entity, and janrinok's report on management structure.
Minutes and agenda, and other governance committee information can be found on the SoylentNews Wiki at: https://wiki.staging.soylentnews.org/wiki/Governance
Call for experts: The committee is calling for experts with relevant knowledge of entity formation to attend the meeting. Their advice may be helpful to the committee and the greater community going forward and would be greatly appreciated.
As always, the community is welcome to observe and participate and is hereby invited to come and do both. SoylentNews is People!
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Greetings, Soylentils!
I am told by those who know, that 75% of the posters here are still from the original group of people that formed the community when we left Slashdot and created Soylent News. So some of you may remember me (Audioguy, #25) from that time.
Newer people may not know me, as I tend to be pretty quiet most of the time. Mostly I just read the news articles, and quietly do bits of sysadmin work in the background to keep the site up.
Only when I feel the core values of our community project are in danger, or its very existence is threatened, do I come out very publicly, and at such times I can be QUITE vocal.
Now is such a time.
I am about to do something which would not only have been uncontroversial, but normal here until the last six months. In the present climate it will probably piss a few people off.
I am going to update the community on exactly what has been going on behind the scenes here.
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The date, time, and place for the upcoming SoylentNews PBC meeting mentioned in a previous meta post from Tuesday, July 25th were announced today:
More details:
The upcoming meeting will be to nominate one or more qualified candidates to serve on the Board. The PBC exists to define what and how SoylentNews will be and to enforce that vision. Ultimately the Board is responsible for the high-level oversight that ensures the bylaws are fulfilled. The purpose of the expansion is to include more voices from the community so they will be directly represented in the decision making [affecting] the community. The next meeting will be held over IRC and will be answering and addressing your questions and concerns from any of the comments posted in this article.
For further information, see the previous meta post.
Community participation is essential, so I hope we'll see as many of you there as possible.
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I wanted to post a reminder to the community that the SoylentNews PBC has it’s upcoming meeting at the end of July on the 31st ( #meeting on irc.sylnt.us @ 1:30 PDT - web access via https://irc.staging.soylentnews.org/ ). I believe that this event is the continuation and result of a very hard push by myself and others to bring about necessary changes to the management and structure of SoylentNews.
The upcoming meeting will be to nominate one or more qualified candidates to serve on the Board. The PBC exists to define what and how SoylentNews will be and to enforce that vision. Ultimately the Board is responsible for the high-level oversight that ensures the bylaws are fulfilled. The purpose of the expansion is to include more voices from the community so they will be directly represented in the decision making effecting the community. The next meeting will be held over IRC and will be answering and addressing your questions and concerns from any of the comments posted in this article.
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So, I know its been a bit quiet here, but we're working through getting through the last few items relating to cutting over to newer infrastructure. As such, its been working through the bug list, and there's one issue I want to get some feedback on.
Back in November when the infrastructure was upgraded to Ubuntu 22.04, a few users with older devices stopped being able to connect to SoylentNews. This confused me, since we've been using the same NGINX SSL termination setup that has been in use since at least 2016. Well, I finally found the root cause, and as it turns out, Canonical bumped up the minimum OpenSSL security level, which disabled several ciphers, and broke devices not supporting TLS 1.2 or later.
By testing the site with the SSL Labs site checker, it appears anything older than Android 4.0, or iOS 5 is broken. This mostly seems to be devices that are over a decade old at this point, and won't be able to browse the vast majority of sites on the Internet as is. We discussed this internally a bit, and I'm of the opinion that its not worth re-enabling the older ciphers to allow these devices to reconnect, especially since we're working to modernize the stack, and get it as up to date as we can get it. I also believe we had very few users who were actually affected by this, however, as the editors did get a few emails about SN breaking after the site upgrade, I wanted to poll the community, and make sure this is not a more widespread issue than initially believed.
Ultimately, this is going to be part of a broader discussion on what we will and won't support on SoylentNews going forward, and this seems as good of place as any to get the ball rolling.
~ NCommander
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So, just keeping some updates here.
Infrastructure wise, we've got all the base Docker images, and compose files put together to the point that it's fairly easy to simply run "docker compose up", and get a working rehash installation with the infrastructure playbook. We've got it working on staging.soylentnews.org, albeit with some hiccups.
This also includes all auxiliary services needed for both sides, as well as things like IRC server and necessary bots are included. I had to spend quite a few hours dealing with the remains of the MySQL cluster install, but I managed to recover the soylentdev database from the NDB backups I took before decommissioning the old cluster. Dev.soylentnews.org is back online as of writing.
mechanicjay has set a PR for getting rehash running on Apache 2.4, which I've spent some time getting working in a Docker branch, but haven't reviewed in-depth. I've mostly been working on getting everything else rebuilt as is before introducing a potentially unstable update into the stack. My understanding is there's some dependency problems, but just getting index.pl and such rendering is a big step forward.
So in short, the technical aspects of the site are at least getting worked on. I'll cover the business side of it below the fold.
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Progress is definitely being made, and the different paths are converging. We are not there yet, and there are probably still some significant hurdles to be overcome. There are 3 sides involved, the Board, kolie/replic8tor and the existing staff. NCommander (as the only Board member active on this site) is continuing with his work to containerise everything on the Linode servers. However, for the time being the Rehash repo doesn't always match up with what is actually running the site today. He has an end date in sight and kolie believes that he will 'probably' leave the community at some point, as yet undetermined.
The remaining 2 parties are in frequent discussion. The differences in approach are being identified and compromises on both sides being made where necessary. Yesterday (Tues 13 Jun) a bug appeared on the user comment preferences page. Why it suddenly appeared is anybody's guess. But both kolie and the sysop team set to together to try to resolve it. What became apparent during that session, which will probably resume some time today, is that both sides could better understand the other's position. I will not go into details of where compromises have been made as I do not think that is constructive at this stage - but they are being made. There is a recognition that some of the staff have perfectly acceptable reasons for having shell access to complete their normal voluntary roles, despite NCommander's statement to the contrary.
There is a problem with communication still. I do not think that this is obstructive but represents a different appreciation of the problems we face and what information we each seek from the other. It is not yet overcome but things are slowly getting better. As I speak, there is no increased risk to the safety of your personal information, and that should not change in the future. We have to take statements at face value and accept what is being said to a certain degree, and we are still being wary of what each other means by specific statements. The usual openness of this site and its community is not something that everyone understands at first, and we each come with very different experiences and backgrounds.
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SoylentNews PBC had a proper business meeting on Friday, to discuss events since the shutdown notice was posted.
This meeting was attended by myself, Matt Angel, and kolie. I was on the phone for about two hours, combined with multiple follow ups in DMs.
Let's get the good news out first.
SN PBC has agreed to continue operations for SoylentNews.
We also had a very long extended discussion on what the future may look like and some points brought up by staff or members of the community were discussed.
Let's cover all the major points below.
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Last night, Linode restarted beryllium, the chat server, to do emergency maintenance on the host. At the time, I was doing work on creating the new staging and development environment and didn't think much of it at the time at 3am. Not long after, I got notification that the machine was restarting. I went to sleep, and put it out of my mind. What I didn't notice, since this is the first unexpected reboot in awhile was that there was no startup script for the IRCd, due to the migration from CentOS 6 to Ubuntu 22.04. I got messages via Discord and SMS around 2PM EST (that is to say 12 hours later) that the IRC was down, so I got back home as quickly as possible and got it restarted.
I will add "getting someone else beside me onto the backend" on the things to do in the very short term.
~ NCommander
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We have no access to the servers any more. We can't fix things. There is no IRC - so you cannot submit things via the upstart bot. So...
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Can someone please return some sanity to the current situation? We are prepared to keep the site going until you have negotiated the future - just let us get on with today.
We will process the stories that are currently in the submission queue but they will become more out of date as time passes.
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Our IRC server has disappeared. We are not sure of the reason yet but we will keep you informed. Lets not jump to any hasty conclusions. It will affect how we manage the site but we will let you know how to restore some kind of IRC access shortly.
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I'm going to simply write this quickly now. I have had very long discussions with a member of the community known as kolie who has been negotiating to try and keep SN operational, and help provide a realistic plan for both rebuilding the site, and migration. I was approached after the shutdown post was put up via public contact information. He has offered help in the form of hosting, capital, and helping coding a replacement for rehash. He has convinced me that there are enough people in the community that it might be possible to pay down the technical debt.
I was asked to formally take the gun off SN's head, since it doesn't help recruit volunteers if there's a death sentence.
I am more than a little reluctance to do this, simply on the basis that there has been a long history on this site of saying "we'll do X", and then X never happens. The situation was also discussed prior with Matt, and quite a few other people before I finally made the decision after it became clear to me that the situation had become completely untenable. I spent weeks looking for an alternative before I finally resided myself that there were no other viable options. But sometimes you can be wrong, and sometimes you can get outside help.
One of my cited reasons for shutting down SN was that calls for help were left unanswered. However, said call finally got answered and came at the 11th hour, and as an unsolicited DM by someone who wanted to see the site go on. We have been discussing this at length since Monday, in a conversation that at this point has been longer than everything said in a private, staff channel for the last six months. So, I accept the possibility I can be wrong. More specifically, I hope I am wrong.
So, ultimately, I will put my faith in someone I have never met before. It might be absurd sounding, but that is ultimately how SN started. A bunch of people who never met coming together to make a replacement for Slashdot. I will take steps to keep SN going past the 30th. This may involve the legal entity changing, as the PBC already voted to dissolve itself. I will write more on this next week, since frankly, I need time to sit back and reflect. I also need to write some emails.
The staff have told me that they will not work with me going forward. For my part, the feeling is mutual.
There are also the facts that I listed in the shutdown letter. SN's codebase is effectively unmaintained since the departure of TMB. I've already discussed the state of infrastructure to death, but there's an objective truth here: SN's VMs were exposed to the open Internet on end-of-life operating systems for years and the database cluster had been in an extended failure with corrupted log tables. As I see it, the staff allowed SN to degrade to the point that it was about to entirely fail. As I understand it, they see me as acting rashly and irresponsibly in attempting to address the situation. I freely admitted I could have done better.
At the end of the day, the only worse outcome than a volunteer shutdown is one where the site is either compromised, or lost in a crash. SN was one hard shutdown from an unrecoverable cluster failure.
That is not a viable state of affairs. That is a liability nightmare that at the end of the day the PBC is responsible for, which was the basis on which I intervened.
Finally, I'm only still here because SN has never been able to accommodate people leaving, especially as no one has historically been willing to take over legal responsibility for the operation of the site. I resigned three years ago. SN needs actual governance by people who can ultimately say that Z, Y, and X need to be done, and have the ability to either have it done, or can help raise the money to help get it done.
So, I guess we'll see if miracles happen twice.
~ NCommander
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This is a post that I have suspected that I was going to have to write since late December last year.
You will now know that SoylentNews.org is closing down on 30 June but things have not been standing still behind the scenes since we first became aware of NCommander's decision at the end of last week. In fact, it has been a very busy weekend.
A small group of existing staff are looking at alternative possibilities for a 'replacement' site to keep the flow of stories going and allowing discussions to continue. This is a big task, especially in the 38 days remaining in which to try to achieve it. There are several possibilities which spring to mind, Pipedot for example. I have reached out to Bryan but have not yet received a response. However, things as not as straightforward as they seem. The pipecode is written in Php-5 which some of you will realise is no longer supported. We do not want to become dependant on old software which cannot be maintained into the future; that lesson has been taken aboard and reinforced by NCommander's explanation regarding his decision announced today. There are other options but at the moment it is still a search for what is available out there today which also appears maintainable into the future.
But the first thing we need to know is "Is there still sufficient interest in having a discussion site such as ours?" Do you, the community, still want to have your daily dose of stories and the ability to exchange views with many others on this site? Are there any community members who would be willing to join us in trying to establish such a site? Your views are crucial to everything that we do over the coming days and weeks. So please let us know what you think about whether a site is still required with all the alternative technology available today that simply didn't exist 9 years ago. What form should a new site take? What changes to how we operate are essential for you to continue to remain interested in the future site?
Of course, it cannot be a mirror image of what we have today - which many will see as a good thing! But I hope that we would be able to transfer existing accounts, usernames and passwords directly to any new site that we create. We would also have to start with a relatively simple site and build on that over time.
At the end of the day we would have to restart the voluntary subscriptions but not immediately. We can raise some funds to see us get established without the requirement of a financial commitment from the community. Subscriptions were always sufficient in the past and I don't see why that would not be the case in the future too. The fact that we currently have enough to keep this site going until next year bears witness to that. We have also found that we can significantly reduce our running costs based on our current community rather than being ready for a major stream of new members which never materialises. I have no grandiose ideas of becoming a huge site employing our own journalists but just a community that enjoys the discussions as we have been doing for several years. Nevertheless, we would also be trying to build on our existing community which is beginning to happen on this site now that things have settled down.
So don't hold back - let us know what you think.
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This is the post I never thought I would have to make. I am also writing this post on behalf of SoylentNews PBC, the legal owner of SoylentNews, and not as a member of the staff or the community.
SoylentNews is going to shut down operations on June 30th.
This wasn't an easy decision to come to, and it's ultimately the culmination of a lot of factors, some which were in my control, and some that weren't. A large part boils down to critical maintenance to the site not properly being performed for a very long time. To pay back the mountain of technical debt we've built up, it would require relaunching the site from scratch.
I'll discuss this more in depth below, but I can't personally justify the time any more, especially due to the negative impact that SN is having on my personal life.
Before we shut down, at least for the foreseeable future, I'm going to outline the situation as I see it, my own personal responsibility, and what happens next.
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On the 12 February 2014, SoylentNews published its first 'official' discussion wittily entitled "Welcome to SoylentNews!"
There were 23 comments to that story but that belies the incredible effort made by a small team of enthusiasts who were determined to create and manage a site that lived up to their own expectations of how a site should behave. There are no advertisements and we are not beholden to any corporate group or business interest. All the support is still completely voluntary. We have also committed ourselves to reaching at least the 10 year birthday celebration too.
In the first story, a certain NCommander made the following remark:
Now that we're here, we hope to have made the wait worth it, but we depend on everyone in the community. To make this site a success, we depend on each and every single user even if its just from passing word of mouth. Remember, every single user can submit stories, moderate, and contribute to discussions all at the same time, and that's what makes us unique. May I be the first to welcome you to your new home.
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Some of you may have seen the claims in certain journals that SoylentNews is blocking new accounts. I have been looking at the actual figures for accounts created during December 2022.
A total of 2198 accounts have been successfully created during December. Unfortunately the vast majority of these were created by a bot and they will never become active because the bot does not have access to the email addresses being quoted. The email address is required so that the initial password can be issued. The site is designed to handle a much larger number of accounts and at a far greater rate than the bot is using. This causes us no problems whatsoever. It must be keeping somebody amused though. I think it would be nice to have some form of 'captcha' (NOT Google's fire hydrant, bicycle, bus and pedestrian crossing counter!!!) to prevent bots such as these.
It is possible, indeed likely, that there will be a small number of genuine accounts buried in there somewhere but it is difficult to identify them until they become active.
In those accounts we have successfully identified 28 attempts at creating sock-puppets which have been disabled automatically. This gives 1.27% of all attempts to create an new account are blocked, which is significantly less that the the claim that 'all new accounts' are being blocked.
The latest UID to be created is 22820.
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Many of you are frustrated, as am I, by the bugs that are currently present in the system and wondering why they are not being fixed. I am now in a position to perhaps shed a little bit of light onto the reasons we are where we are...
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We are aware of several bugs in the system at the moment, including the lack of a journal index on the front page, and the failure to update modpoints daily. Thank you to all of those bringing them to our attention. Please continue to do so as you may be the first person to see something going wrong.
Unfortunately, NCommander is currently unavailable to fix these immediately but he is aware of them. He is occupied with real world issues and currently has a very limited internet connection. He will fix them as soon as is possible and we ask that you be patient. It is less than ideal but unfortunately we have no other option.
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Well, it's been a bit of time since the last time I posted, and well, I had to think a fair bit on the comments I received. It's become very clear that while I'm still willing to at least help in technical matters, the effort to reforge SN is much higher than I expected. In addition, given the, shall we say, lukewarm response I got to my posts and journal entries, well, I'm clearly not the right person for the job.
I think at this point, it's time to figure out who is going to lead SN going forward. After my de facto stepping down in 2020, the site has, for want of a better word, been a bit listless. At the moment, no one on staff really has the cycles to take that position on. A few people have expressed interest in the position, and I've talked with Matt, who is co-owner of the site about this. By and large, whoever fills the seat will have to figure out what, if anything, needs to change in regards to moderation policy, content, and more.
If you're interested in potentially fulfilling the role, drop me an email at michael -at- casadevall.pro, with the subject of "SN Project Leader", and include the following:
I'll leave this call for candidates open until December 14th, at which point Matt and I will go through, and figure out our short list, I'll talk to editors, and solicit more comments from the community. I'm hoping to announce a successor in early January, and formalize the transition sometime in February, which will be the site's 9th anniversary.
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So, to say the last week has been a dumpster fire is drastically underselling what I've been through. This, combined with having to put things in place to migrate off Twitter, and otherwise deal with all the fallout of that hot mess has, to put it frankly, put free time at something of a premium, hence why this post took so long. For those who missed it, I did fairly long overhaul of our backend, upgrading boxes from Ubuntu 14.04, and rebuilding and replacing others.
At the moment, the site is mostly working, with two exceptions, site search is still down, and IRC is still down. Deucalion has taken up the task of rebuilding the IRCd on modern server software, so it's time to lay down the road going forward past this point.
Read past the fold for more information ...
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Alright, I've literally been at it for seven hours. Here's what done, here's what needs to done, and if you find something broken, let me know.
Here's what's going to happen sometime tonight or tomorrow
There's likely a lot of things still broken. if you find something broken, leave it in the comments. I'll get to it in the next day. At least we're not on 8 year old software anymore. Current plan after taking care of the above, going to find a good host (probably Fastmail) for editor emails, I do have the backups of everyone inbox should they want it. This has been, very much an exercise in pain. If you want to support me directly: Patreon for recurring, or Ko-fi for one time.
I'll be back in a few hours to work on this more. We raised another $560 USD for charity, and I hope folks had a great time. The next parts I need to just do, so the next stream will likely involve dealing with getting rehash to run in Docker.
~ NCommander
Update - 2022/11/12: DNS resolved, and at least site outbound email should work now
Update - 2022/11/13: Site outbound email is actually working now
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So, quick update here. The site was down for most of the night because the database cluster shot itself in the head. I had restarted a machine to install updates, and this caused the backend cluster to entire to entirely loose its mind. Unfortunately, I didn't have a manual dump of the database made, just a VM snapshot, since, well, I wasn't tinkering with it directly. I've mostly been trying to patch things to the point that I can sleep, and leaving things down like IRC and email which need to be seriously overhauled before they can go back up.
As far as damages go, it looks like we lost 10 or so days of messages, which uh, sucks for multiple reasons. We're currently on ##soylentnews on Libera.Chat while I pull bits of the site out of the flames, but I'm at the point that if I don't sleep, I will make things worse. Corruption in the production database is very much not what I wanted, and we're very much in limp mode for the moment. I'm going to let staff handle IRC and comments while I sleep, and then I'll post another update when I'm awake.
See you in a few hours
~ NCommander
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It's been a long while since I wrote one of these, and well, to say things are depressing is very much an understatement. It's been over eight years since we first went online, and the world has literally changed several times over. Presidential elections, a global pandemic, war in Europe, and well, we've been here through it all. It's a testament to our staying power that SN has remained online through it all, as a volunteer and community driven project.
That's not to say it's all been good news though ...
About two years ago, I de-facto resigned from the project after internal conflicts, and SoylentNews has slowly been rotting to death. To say the state of the backend is bad is very much an understatement. I found the SN emails were on spam blocklists, and well, I won't even talk about the state of the software ATM. It's holding together mostly out of the sheer amount of overengineering, and good intentions. The last major overhaul was I did when the site was migrated to rehash 7 years ago ... yeah it's been awhile ...
At this point, I think we need to talk about where we're going, because its either going to be long slow painful death, an execution, or an attempted comeback tour. This is your host NCommander, and today, we're going to look towards the future ...
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