Seems we've hit one of those rare days where circumstances have conspired to keep all the eds busy enough that the story queue ran dry, so I figured I'd go ahead and tell you lot about the upcoming December site update just so they have a little less time to fill now that a couple of them have appeared and started refilling the queue.
It's mostly just a minor bug-fix update, stuff I could get coded quickly and didn't require extensive testing that martyb doesn't have much time for right now, so don't get your hopes too high. Most of the good stuff is currently slated for spring of next year. Here's what we've currently got up on dev for testing with an expected release date of between Christmas and New Years Eve:
- Add an admin-configurable minimum karma requirement for a journal entry to show up in the Most Recent Journal Entries slashbox. Should eliminate having to see journal spam by folks who don't otherwise contribute anything to the site.
- Fixed the <spoiler> and a couple other unnoticed tags to work properly in journal entries.
- Removed the size limit on Editor Notes (the admin page ones, not the ones Eds add to the bottom of a story). Should make takyon happy.
- Put a link to the submission queue on the left sidebar.
- Fixed the spacing around <ol> and <ul> lists.
- Made chromas have to work harder to post comments with no apparent subject or text.
- Fixed an annoying bug in the admin interface that was trying to use a comment mode no longer in existence.
Like I said, not a whole lot there on account of us not having time to thoroughly test much what with the holidays coming up. Here's the list (using tinyurl due to a Rehash bug that will definitely make the Spring 2018 cut) of what we'd like to get done for this spring if you're curious though.
Them of you of the disposition to celebrate Christmas, have a merry one. Them of you who celebrate otherwise, happy whatever you're celebrating. Them of you who don't celebrate at all, have a happy rest of December.
[Ed note: I nudged the time this story was due to be released by just a few minutes so that it coincided with the beginning of the Winter Solstice in the northern hemisphere... and the Summer Solstice for those of you who are south of the equator. Maybe we can get the next release out at the start of the equinox (2018-03-20 @ 16:15:00 UTC). --martyb]
Related Stories
Yeah, so life has managed to delay our December Update until February. Things happen. The only change to what's in it is that I wrote up a simple plugin to syndicate content to Twitter, which is very much preferable to our current situation since we're pushing stories from a hacky little script on my desktop at the moment and I'd like to be able to boot Windows 7 for some vidya once in a while.
Downtime should be five minutes or less starting around 2:00AM UTC (an hour and forty minutes from now).
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 21 2017, @04:42PM (4 children)
that didn't give up and go all dead inside
merry xmas to you too
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 21 2017, @07:18PM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z11iBM7M3Fo [youtube.com]
Nothing left inside...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 21 2017, @07:31PM (2 children)
Slashdot is like a time capsule.
You dig it up in anticipation, but water has ingressed making it all damp and smelly. Worse everything inside is total junk because the people who buried it chose so poorly. Their values didn't age well.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by frojack on Thursday December 21 2017, @08:02PM (1 child)
So all you ACs left and came over here to make SN damp and smelly too?
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 21 2017, @11:51PM
Something something frojack, something grumble something. Something something closepin on nose mumble grumble.
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Thursday December 21 2017, @04:51PM (8 children)
You had some interesting (to me, at least) stories last week that you didn't run. I kept waiting for them to go into the queue, but they were passed over.
Perhaps that's something you could mine in leaner times. Or, you know, you could just stop ignoring interesting stories...
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday December 21 2017, @04:58PM (7 children)
If you find it interesting, and it's not in the submission list, you can put it there [soylentnews.org].
You don't even have to do any real work. Just come up with any headline, and slap 1 or more URLs into the main body. It's not substantially different than a bot submission since we would have to expand/fix it anyway.
If you're really into the story, and want to point something specific out, you can <blockquote> a couple of choice paragraphs. Submit as "Plain Old Text" so that you don't have to add <br> or <p> tags.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 21 2017, @05:06PM (6 children)
Errr, did I miss something? Pretty sure they meant the story was submitted but wasn't approved for publication. I too have seen this happen quite often, perhaps there should be a B-list article page with articles have an up/down mod for themselves. Get more than X upmods and the story hits the front page. No censorship here except for editors deciding what is allowed to be seen :P
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday December 21 2017, @05:20PM (3 children)
Whoops, I don't call it the queue. I call them the submission(s) list and story list/main page/front page/etc. but queue confuses me because it could be either one.
Things that are likelier to get deleted are politics, flamebait, dupes, old news items, non-news items like "What the Hell Is an Initial Coin Offering?", entertainment, soyvertisements, and items with factual inaccuracies (there's an ed note on the Ireland Apple tax story).
A firehose would be interesting. I also like the idea of an ultimate off-topic journal where comments about anything at all can be dumped. That could be done manually (make a new one every month for example).
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Thursday December 21 2017, @05:58PM (2 children)
Just don't do it like Slashdot does it. There, stories get hot on the firehose, and the editors post stories that don't and completely ignore the stories that got voted up.
If it gets voted up, then the readers want it. If the site's not for readers, who the heck is it for?
In the case of Slashdot, we know the answer to that: it's for the owners. Which carries notable weight in the list of reasons I ended up over here so often, paying for a subscription, etc.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 21 2017, @06:35PM (1 child)
You have forgotten what you are, your the food not the diner
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Thursday December 21 2017, @06:41PM
In these cases, I'm volunteer food, and if the diner is abusive, I will decline to volunteer as much, or at all, depending on the level of abuse.
Which, again, is part of how I ended up over here and posting a lot less on slashdot. Because they are not guided by the volunteer nature of the readership. Which probably also accounts for part of the significant loss of activity over there by other posters as well.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by edIII on Thursday December 21 2017, @09:02PM (1 child)
Um, I guess I'm lucky. All of my submissions are accepted, except one dupe, and one rejected. I pretty much assume that if I write the submission well it will be accepted. Fuck, they accepted that article about the bird hitting the plane.... :)
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 21 2017, @10:02PM
super useful for solving the problem, thanks
(Score: 3, Disagree) by drussell on Thursday December 21 2017, @04:58PM (7 children)
Good thought!
I had been trying to think of a way to limit those spam adverts, etc. but hadn't even considered using a minimum karma value before they'd show up on the main page. Brilliant! (... and DUH! for me...) :)
Keep up the good work!
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 21 2017, @06:14PM (6 children)
First they came for the spammers ...
(Score: 3, Touché) by maxwell demon on Thursday December 21 2017, @06:22PM (2 children)
First they came for the murderers …
Pro-tip: Not everything that fits the form also fits the content.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 22 2017, @12:41AM (1 child)
Yes but this is because first they came for the powerful and the evil is a phrase that has never been uttered in western history, you may also note that that poem does not start with first they came for the disabled and the mentally injured, which is what they actually did, most people are sociopaths and they hate people that inconvenience them or make them feel like they are not good people, gotta watch out for how it starts..
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Friday December 22 2017, @10:38PM
So you think spammers are good?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 3, Funny) by realDonaldTrump on Thursday December 21 2017, @11:06PM (2 children)
I don't know who they came for first. But they came after Ethanol-fueled with many, many down-mods. Because he's proud to be a white man. And they came after aristarchus, with many, many Spam mods. They rejected his stories, a lot of his stories. And some they accepted, but they hid them, they call it Held. So he thought they were running his stories, they didn't run them. He's a nut job or just has a low I.Q., so they pretend to accept his stories. I call it a shadow ban. They came after Sulla, they banned him from moderating. And he lost his Karma bonus. Because he's a true patriot. They came after fakefuck39, she can only tweet once a day. Because they gave her Negative Karma. And it's not easy to see her tweets, in a way they're hidden. With a Negative Score. I'll tell you, she's a nasty woman, she never, ever has anything nice to say. Especially about the folks who run the site. Who run SoylentNews. They don't like her tweets, they want to see her tweets, who can blame them for that? So they silenced her, they almost silenced her. That's not right, folks. I didn't say anything before, I'm saying it now.
Most importantly, they came after me. With Spam mods. Each one takes away 10 Karma, very hard to get that back. Karma falling very, very fast. And they reject my stories, some of my stories. Very important story I turned in yesterday, about our terrific Tax Cuts & Jobs Act, rejected very quickly! And now they're getting ready to take away my journal. Because my Karma isn't enough, they'll say. But really because it doesn't advance the Dem agenda. And because I'm a winner. I have an SMS shortcut and they don't. I know how to promote myself and they don't. And I signed the biggest Tax Cut in the history of the world. Which my folks in Congress have been working on for years. They're after me, believe me. And there will be no one left to tweet for you, the great American people. ONE TEAM, ONE PEOPLE, ONE AMERICAN FAMILY! 🇺🇸
(Score: 2) by drussell on Friday December 22 2017, @06:33AM (1 child)
Ok, now we KNOW you aren't the real Donald J. Trump!
That post was almost coherent and even mostly spelled correctly!
Can't possibly be the real deal! :)
(Score: 2) by realDonaldTrump on Sunday December 24 2017, @11:04PM
Grammar Nazis are the worst kind of Nazi. Except for spelling Nazis. What I meant was the moderators & administrators DON'T want to see tweets from fakefuck39.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 21 2017, @05:15PM (3 children)
Where the
D I C K
N I G G E R S
at?
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 21 2017, @05:21PM
Uranus
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 21 2017, @08:55PM (1 child)
They are in China churning out blue LEDs for your Niggmas presents. :P
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 21 2017, @10:09PM
Joyous Nigger Kwanzaa Bitch!!
(Score: 5, Insightful) by looorg on Thursday December 21 2017, @06:13PM
I approve of this. It will save me many clicks every day.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Zinho on Thursday December 21 2017, @07:15PM (3 children)
I'd like to see a clear way to submit poll ideas, in addition to the article submission page.
When I submitted the poll idea that's currently in the "pending submissions" queue I couldn't find options for suggesting a new poll topic. A full page template similar to the article submission page would be great, but even adding "Poll" to the list of topics on the submission form would work to set a poll submission apart from the news articles.
Apologies if there is a form already and I simply wasn't able to find it. For what it's worth, places where I would expect a link for such a template to live would include:
I looked all those places, so if it exists perhaps it could use some more links pointing to it?
Thanks!
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin
(Score: 2) by martyb on Thursday December 21 2017, @10:37PM
Creating a new form for submitting poll ideas is a non-trivial undertaking... there's a lot of stuff behind the scenes that would likely require a good deal of work. Off the top of my head: creating a new template, adding it to the site installation, possibly new table/columns in the DB, validation/verification code, and I'm sure there's more. :(
With that out of the way, your suggestion for a different topic, OTOH, is a brilliant idea! Would still require adding a vlue to a column in the DB, and changes to a few templates, but I'd say it's an order of magnitude less difficult (assuming I am not missing anything.)
Sadly, it's too late in the process to add that into the December update, but will definitely keep it in mind for the March(-ish) update!!
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 2) by realDonaldTrump on Thursday December 21 2017, @11:18PM (1 child)
Is it hard to do a check mark, the box with the check mark or with no check mark? ☑ To say it's for a poll, or not for a poll. I'm sure there's a lot of cyber to the site. If you think about it, it's totally cyber, 100%. With EMAILS and everything. Which, you have to be Einstein to understand some of that. Albert Einstein.
I love the polls here, they are very fair. And you can do a write-in. Which I do, a lot. I'm not even from Alabama, but I do a lot of write-ins. Maybe we can use the SoylentNews cyber to do our elections. I'm going to ask Kris about that one.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Yog-Yogguth on Friday December 22 2017, @12:33AM
You veer out of character when you say something sensible instead of playing Hillary in drag like you do in real life :3
Bite harder Ouroboros, bite! tails.boum.org/ linux USB CD secure desktop IRC *crypt tor (not endorsements (XKeyScore))
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 21 2017, @07:16PM (10 children)
Can we get a bit more room in the subject line for comments?, maybe at least SMS length or something?
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 21 2017, @08:00PM (9 children)
It might be nice if the super intelligent coders of SHIT STAIN NEWS could code a fix to stop the subject line from being truncated when "Re:" is prefixed. Sadly such a simple fix is beneath their highly advanced rockstar coding skillz.
(Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 21 2017, @08:07PM (2 children)
cocks in the land.
(Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 21 2017, @08:09PM (1 child)
cock in hand.
(Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 21 2017, @08:37PM
mmmmmmmmmm cock.
8======D-~. .
(Score: 2) by edIII on Thursday December 21 2017, @09:04PM (3 children)
Sounds like you have them skills. Care to participate and contribute?
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 21 2017, @10:06PM (1 child)
No.
I would much rather see this site utterly destroyed and irrevocably erased from history.
Die, SoylentNews, Die.
(Score: 1) by Sulla on Thursday December 21 2017, @11:32PM
At a loss here, did you lose your job with Correct The Record and take a position with Dice?
Ceterum censeo Sinae esse delendam
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 22 2017, @12:09AM
No because I only sound like I have skills, by pure osmosis from being around computers and developers for so long, I have considered volunteering to mod/move stories along but that would require me to register an account and I learned that lesson in 98/99 with my slashdot account. I think I logged in maybe twice and just posted AC otherwise, and despite the large number of books I own on perl, ruby, C,C++, lisp and a variety of other languages, I am a terrible programmer that would have a good day if I made a for loop work, so no
(Score: 2) by martyb on Thursday December 21 2017, @11:16PM (1 child)
Slightly paraphrasing the parent comment:
That has bugged me from my days way back in the beginning of Slashdot. Unless I missed something, the fix should only be a minor change to one template: edit_comment;comments;default so I tried implementing it on our dev server.
The template has a hardcoded value of "50" for the length of the text entry field for entering the Subject of a new comment. Reducing that to "46" should provide room for "Re: " to be prepended and still fit in the 50-char field.
May need to visit other templates to handle Top-Level Comments (TLCs) to a posting to a Journal and/or to a Poll.
I implemented an ad-hoc change on dev [soylentnews.org] using the template editor... feel free to try it out.
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 22 2017, @12:18AM
I see what you are saying about the re.. but my subject was the max the comment would allow and maybe I miss my count but that is 42 including the white space, so ok maybe it is a hard problem, screw you commander taco!
(Score: 4, Insightful) by edIII on Thursday December 21 2017, @09:05PM (1 child)
Thanks again for all the great work you guys do.
Thank you TMB for helping make this a great place that is run well.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 2) by Yog-Yogguth on Friday December 22 2017, @12:40AM
Thanks from me as well.
Bite harder Ouroboros, bite! tails.boum.org/ linux USB CD secure desktop IRC *crypt tor (not endorsements (XKeyScore))
(Score: 2) by Corelli's A on Thursday December 21 2017, @09:16PM (5 children)
What's a "chroma"?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 21 2017, @10:20PM
https://soylentnews.org/~chromas/ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Funny) by chromas on Friday December 22 2017, @12:16AM (2 children)
He's pointing loudly at me because of my invalid yet accepted comment Subjects. :)
(Score: 2) by Corelli's A on Friday December 22 2017, @01:46AM (1 child)
(slaps forehead) Clearly I don't pay enough attention to usernames. As penance, I shall now pour myself another scotch.
(Score: 2) by chromas on Friday December 22 2017, @12:15PM
No, sir! That is not good enough. I sentence you to two scotches!
(Score: 2) by mrpg on Friday December 22 2017, @12:28AM
https://dev.soylentnews.org/meta/article.pl?sid=17/12/14/1835254 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by inertnet on Thursday December 21 2017, @09:55PM (3 children)
I have a simple request. A long time ago I knew how to use the "auto-link URL" feature, but I forgot and can't find an explanation anywhere.
Could you please expand the "[URL:http://example.com/] will auto-link a URL" explanation a bit more, to show how to include a name for the URL?
(Score: 2) by martyb on Friday December 22 2017, @12:18AM (2 children)
That's an excellent question! I normally just hard-code the HTML anyway, so I'll have to play with that construct. Let's see how this works:
Becomes: https://soylentnews.org/~inertnet/ [soylentnews.org]
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 2) by inertnet on Friday December 22 2017, @09:26AM (1 child)
Ah, I didn't realize that you can just use an href tag, because it's not among the list of allowed HTML.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday December 22 2017, @04:18PM
It's disguised as the "a" tag.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1) by noyou on Friday December 22 2017, @06:05AM (2 children)
Can everyone now see my email if I am logged in ? Don't make me regret doing this instantly also seriously there is no contact for the site? I mean I can go complain on IRC or here or whatever but it's sketchy to have no contact email
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 22 2017, @10:47AM
Well, not 'anyone' clearly. At least for a evil, lurking anonymous visitor, your email address is hidden. I don't know about the logged-in evil visitors though.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday December 22 2017, @04:14PM
Not unless you specifically go in and set it to. Default shows nothing.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 22 2017, @06:24AM (1 child)
fixing the awful layout of SoylentNews on mobile browsers?
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday December 22 2017, @04:15PM
We've got a proposed fix submitted but it was on an old version of the templates, so it's going to take a lot of tweaking to make work.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.