Another year is almost behind us and I thought it would be useful to take a look at what we have accomplished up to this point.
For those who may be new-ish here, SoylentNews went live on 2014-02-17. Since then, we have:
- Reached 244th place in the world with our folding-at-home team.
- Had nearly 780 site subscriptions.
- Had over 2740 articles posted to journals.
- Signed up over 6,800 user nicks/accounts.
- Published over 20,000 stories.
- Received over 24,000 story submissions.
- Had over 403,000 comment moderations.
- Posted over 615,500 comments.
- Had nearly 9,200,000 hits (views) on stories.
All of this was provided with absolutely no advertising by a purely volunteer staff!
Please accept my sincere thanks to all of you who have subscribed and helped to keep the site up and running! We could not have done it without your support.
I must also report that we have just over 100 people who have accessed the site in the past month whose subscription has lapsed. It is easy enough to do -- I've let it happen, myself. So, please go to the subscription page to check/renew your subscription. Be aware that the preferred amount is the minimum for the selected duration; feel free to increase the amount (hint hint).
Oh, and I would be remiss in not thanking the staff here for their dedication and perseverance. Linode decided to open a new data center and we had to migrate our servers to the new location. We accomplished this with almost no downtime on the site, and only about a 30-minute hiccup on our IRC (Internet Relay Chat) server.
Because of performance degradation on our servers when loading highly-commented stories, we rolled out a new comment display system early in the year. It had several issues at the outset, but seems to have settled down quite nicely. We appreciate your patience, and constructive feedback reporting issues as they arose. It helped greatly in stomping out those bugs.
We have a bug-fix update to the site in the works... mostly minor things that are waiting on testing for release. We hope to roll those out in the next couple of weeks.
To all of you who have contributed to the site, in other words: to our community, thank-you! It has been a privilege to serve you this past year and I look forward to continuing to do so in the year to come. --martyb
Related Stories
Nearly two months ago, we received notice from Linode (which hosts the servers for SoylentNews) that they would be migrating our servers to a new data center in Dallas, TX. Our systems would gradually be scheduled for migration. We could either accept their scheduled date/time or trigger a manual migration. In theory, this should be a no-worry activity as we have redundancy on almost all of our servers and processes. But in practice, that is not always the case. Rather than take our chances, we were proactive and manually performed migrations as they became possible.
We had a couple hiccups with one server, but with NCommander, TMB, PJ on hand (among others), we were able to get that one straightened out with only limited impact to the site. We also lost access to our IRC server for about 20 minutes when that server was migrated.
So, with that backdrop, I'm pleased to announce that we completed the migration of our last Linode (hydrogen) to the new data center in Dallas this morning! Shoutout to TheMightyBuzzard for tweaking our load balancer to facilitate the migration, and for being on hand had things gone sideways.
Don't worry; they'll make more.
[Editor's preface: SoylentNews has a Folding@Home team (#230319) As of this writing, SoylentNews.org is ranked at number 210 in the entire world! My current Core 2 Duo laptop would do little to support the effort compute-wise, so I assist as best I can by cheerleading, communicating our team's progress, and similar activities. We have a channel on our IRC (Internet Relay Chat) server "#folding" where there is sporadic discussion about progress. Check out the list of previous stories at the bottom of this story... to get involved, just mention it in the comments and come join our team!
If you are wondering what in the world F@H is, Wikipedia has a nice summary of Folding@Home . And, of course, there is F@H's "About" page, too. --martyb]
Intro:
If you are a Folding@Home (F@H) contributor, you may have noticed that you aren't getting your normal allotment of work units. It appears to have started some time Friday, March 13. The root cause? Schools shutting down around the United States.
Looking for Work [Units]:
Kids are scared (some more, some less) of the Coronavirus, they read something somewhere about efforts such as F@H that are working on curing various diseases. Those kid's gaming rigs are exactly what F@H and other similar research groups need. And, some of these kids have machines that most of us would envy! A well-built gaming machine is simply awesome!
https://foldingforum.org/viewforum.php?f=61
That forum is filled with "newbs" trying to figure out how to set up F@H on their machines, and then complaining that they can't get a work unit.
This post, specifically, explains that the huge influx of volunteers has depleted the available work units. https://foldingforum.org/viewtopic.php?f=24&t=32424 Apparently, on Friday, the staff filled the WU servers' caches with the normal weekend's amount of WU's and they were gone by early Saturday morning. Someone volunteered to work on Saturday to refill the caches, which were promptly emptied out again.
One of the posts on the F@H forum suggests that F@H has about 4 times the number of folders that it had a week ago.
What to do?
If you find yourself unable to download a WU, take a look at the log. You will probably find complaints,
"No WUs available for this configuration" and/or "Port 8080 unreachable, trying port 80" and/or "no http service available".
Those and more are all related to the fact that the servers are being hammered by half a zillion school kids who are looking for something useful to do with their time, and their computers.
Be patient, and just let your client work through it. It will eventually download a work unit, crunch it, and return it.
Official Statement:
Straight from the F@H project: Coronavirus – What we're doing and how you can help in simple terms – Folding@home
(Score: 2) by mrpg on Friday December 29 2017, @08:15PM
Thanks to everyone reading, submitting and working on the site.
First post!
(Score: 4, Insightful) by requerdanos on Friday December 29 2017, @09:28PM (7 children)
Congratulations, and keep up the great work.
This site (rather like devuan) has gone from some people shooting off at the mouth to a real, tangible thing in and of itself.
(A large difference being that devuan shot off their mouth for years, screwing around and making betas-not-releases, before anything stable enough to call a "release" ever appeared, while in contrast Soylentnews was a thing that stood on its own almost immediately, and continues to, because of maybe 75% your hard work and 25% our submitting and commenting.)
One thing... The "Sesame Street" children's television program has featured a grouping song that might be appropriate here ("one of these things is not like the others") [youtube.com] in helping to decide what things are part of a list (like a list of milestones for a website, for example) and what things are not.
Hint: I can hear the kids in the background shouting in unison "THAT FIRST ONE!"
But seriously, super job, and thank you for doing it.
(Score: 2) by Geezer on Friday December 29 2017, @09:37PM
Seconded.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 29 2017, @10:01PM (2 children)
Something I like to note is that while the green site has celebrated its 20th birthday, they still can't handle utf8.
Our devs had that going within 6 months.
.
FTFS: Signed up over 6,800 user nicks/accounts
That makes it sound like all of those were added this year.
"Reached 68000+ signups" or "Passed 68000 signups" would be a better description.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 29 2017, @10:12PM (1 child)
Now, that -would- be impressive.
s/68000/6800
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by kazzie on Saturday December 30 2017, @10:40AM
Motorola on the brain?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 29 2017, @11:26PM
And I was running ceres basically since beta2 came out.
Devuan was as stable as can be, just so long as you didn't need either gnome or kde which had some hard dbus, pulseaudio, loginkit, policykit, or systemd prerequisites which didn't have alternatives available.
Running e17, xfce (before it got hard systemd prereqs), or later lxde all neatly sidestepped those issues.
Furthermore the only issues I had with devuan were the same as debian/ubuntu, reliability issues with ext4 as the root filesystem which could end up corrupted under a variety of circumstances. ext2 or ext3 and the problem was solved.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday December 30 2017, @01:27AM (1 child)
Nah, more like vice versa, with like 95% of the staff credit going to the Eds. Without the comments we'd be nothing but an over engineered vanity blog.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 30 2017, @03:03AM
I like the effectiveness of the feedback loop:
Devs: Release
Users: Give feedback
Devs: Listen and tweak
Users: Give more feedback
Devs: Listen and re-tweak
All: Smiles everywhere
Even those doing the griping do a pretty constructive job of that, generally describing the flaw effectively.
If there's a site that's better at this, I haven't see that.
My favorite part is the Works in any browser|configuration thing.
I have high regard for those who appreciate the Degrades gracefully thing.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 5, Interesting) by fyngyrz on Friday December 29 2017, @09:49PM (6 children)
How about you add a line at the top of the user page, right under...
"This page was generated by a Horde of Underpaid Soylents for fyngyrz (6567)."
...that says either:
Current Subscriber 😎 N days remaining
...or...
Not a subscriber 👽 Subscribe Here [soylentnews.org]
Or other similarly obvious and vaguely encouraging nomenclature.
Large, bold and prominent.
...that way we'll know, and you'll have you re-subscription immediately like-minded users see it needs to be done. Or in other words, me. :)
Don't make the user work to figure this out. Make sure they know.
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Friday December 29 2017, @09:55PM (5 children)
Another thing... I really like the funny "page was generated by a murder of Those Who Guard The Wall for fyngyrz" line... because it often comes out funny.
You might consider two thing on that one:
First, provide an interface where we can make suggestions, and you can approve them, for more components of that line, so it gets even more widely funny.
Second, do the same for the subscriber line. Make it funny and let us help you do that.
Know why? Because I always read that line to see what silliness it's promoting, and I think that'd make the subscriber info similarly interesting.
And if you're not a subscriber... just "not a subscriber as I described in the parent." A tiny, tiny little benefit.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 29 2017, @10:09PM (3 children)
Sounds like you're talking about a group [google.com] of really smart birds. [google.com]
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Informative) by fyngyrz on Friday December 29 2017, @10:33PM (2 children)
Sorry, pop culture humor:
In the HBO production "Game of Thrones", those who guard the wall of ice that protects the realm from things that lurk in the far north wear black. Because they wear black, they are known to those north of the wall as "crows." It's an unkind appellation, in general.
So yes, crows. But not really crows. Not that smart, either. Mostly the banished, criminals and reprobates.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 29 2017, @10:44PM
Heh. OK, then.
(It's easy to spot the guy who dropped out of the consumer culture in 2009 when his NTSC equipment became obsolete.)
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by captain normal on Saturday December 30 2017, @02:50AM
Actually for bird brains, Crows are pretty damn smart. I watched a flock of them run a Red-Shouldered hawk out of a tall eucalyptus this afternoon.
When life isn't going right, go left.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 30 2017, @07:21AM
Another thing... I really like the funny "page was generated by a murder of Those Who Guard The Wall for fyngyrz" line... because it often comes out funny.
I'd like to know the origin of that function from the other site. It's probably lost in time and/or they won't say. It'd be great for signalling if nothing else. It reminds me very much of the extra script I had running on a mainframe back in the early 80s. At the time I found there was a race condition in the login, so if one got lucky with timing one could exploit it and bypass the password login completely for any account. I also found that adding an autorun script for authentication was not vulnerable to that. However, to prevent shoulder surfing, which was common then, I had it print a more or less nonsense line very similar to those. Each sentence countained a unit, number, adjective, and a noun which if you knew the formula resulted in a one-off password for that session.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 30 2017, @12:13AM (7 children)
Thank you for giving us the homely feeling back of the "Green Site" of 1998. Seriously, not being sarcastic at all. 真的!
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Kell on Saturday December 30 2017, @01:26AM (6 children)
It still amazes me at how well our small scrappy upstart news site has thrived, given that it was forged from the sheer burning ire of being treated like an audience by those who claimed to be our peers. And I say "our small scrappy site" because unlike almost every other website, I feel like Soylent really does belong to the users. Yes, I'm a subscriber, but I'm also a regular commenter and moderator. We helped build this community in ways which the green site no longer appreciates.
Soylent News is my homepage. That would look good on a shirt.
Scientists ask questions. Engineers solve problems.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 30 2017, @06:09AM (1 child)
We have shirts? Where?
(Score: 2) by martyb on Sunday December 31 2017, @01:31PM
Yes!
In fact, we have T-shirts, coffee mugs, hats, and more at: https://www.zazzle.com/soylentnews* [zazzle.com] (NOTE: DO leave the asterisk at the end of the URL as it provides a slightly better return / reduced overhead cost for us.
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 2) by AnonTechie on Saturday December 30 2017, @09:23AM
Seconded ...
Albert Einstein - "Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 30 2017, @02:11PM (2 children)
"I'm also a regular commenter and moderator"
You say that like you're proud of it. Exactly what the world needs: more moderating. More self-censorship.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 30 2017, @08:28PM
> Exactly what the world needs: more moderating. More self-censorship.
If you're moderating yourself, you're doing it wrong. If you moderate others, it's no longer self-censorship.
And despite occasional whining from aristarchus, I see no evidence of anyone being particularly restrained with their opinions on this site. Just ask The Mighty
BastardBuzzmaster.(Score: 2) by Kell on Wednesday January 03 2018, @07:56AM
Why yes, I am proud of moderating. I take great pleasure from finding smart and funny comments and promoting them that others may find them more easily.
Scientists ask questions. Engineers solve problems.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 30 2017, @03:59AM (2 children)
Can someone search the database for how many comments included the word jew that were then downmodded? And where (geographical location) did the downmods come from? Where were the accounts registered from that downmodded every comment containing the word jew?
And one more question for the audience: How do websites protect themselves against jewish propaganda?
(Score: 3, Informative) by requerdanos on Saturday December 30 2017, @04:34AM (1 child)
You seem very bothered by community comment moderation.
Websites protect themselves from both pro and anti whatever-ism propaganda primarily by means of community comment moderation. It's imperfect but very, very effective. You're welcome.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 30 2017, @01:54PM
You seem to comment on the internet person writing a comment instead of the comment itself. Good goyim do that. They remove all thinking and take everything as "spreading democracy" until a democracy they do not approve of. Our Democracy, it should be. Our Moderation it should be. All communities everywhere are either under attack, or compromised by evil blood-thirsty khazarian jews.
There is no community. It is jewish propaganda, exactly what the above comment writes about and questions as to how to protect against such evil. Spies are real and they are here, moderating stuff and calling it "community moderation". It makes me sick. The attack on our freedom and lives is real and sophisticated.
There is no authority of democracy when that democracy is compromised as hell.
Look for "gentle person's guide to forum spies"
https://www.blindlight.org/index.php/all-psyops/item/164-the-gentle-person-s-guide-to-forum-spies-spooks-feds-etc [blindlight.org]
(Score: 2, Funny) by The Vocal Minority on Saturday December 30 2017, @04:30AM (1 child)
Thank you to everyone for keeping this site going and providing interesting stories and commentary (and the occasional anti-Semitic troll). Happy new year!
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 30 2017, @02:04PM
Good job redefining words.
Anti-semite is someone who is against "semites". Semites are people of Arab descent. Khazarian jews are not arabs. Khazarian jews are caucasian. They came from Khazaria, now part of Georgia. Anti-semitism is anti-arab and you will find lots of anti-semitism in Israel. Israelis hate arabs and took their land and exterminated them. Israelis are the most racist people on the planet. Anti-semitism is wrong. Anti-jew is the right thing to do.
Trolls are not anti-arabs usually. Trolls do not believe what they write. They create chaos in internet forums for their own enjoyment.
Happy fucking new year indeed, jew. May this be your last.