First the good news. I just received word that janrinok, our Editor-in-Chief, is finally out of the hospital and back in his own home! He is very tired and has severe restrictions on his activities but is otherwise in excellent spirits. He very much appreciated the kind thoughts and wishes expressed by the community in our prior stories. It will still be many weeks or months before he can resume his prior level of activities on SoylentNews, but hopes to pop in once in a while to "second" stories that are in the story queue. Please join me in welcoming him back home!
Next, the good news. In janrinok's absence, the other editors have stepped up to the challenge. I'd like to call out chromas, fnord666, mrpg, and takyon who have all freely given from their spare time to make sure we have a steady stream of stories appearing here. I even saw CoolHand pop in on occasion to second some stories! teamwork++
Then, I have to bring up the good news that our development and systems staff have kept this whole thing running so smoothly. Besides the site, there is e-mail, the wiki, our IRC server, and a goodly number of other processes and procedures that make this all happen. That they are largely invisible attests to how well they have things set up and running!
Lastly, the good news. This is what's known in the press as the "silly season". Summer in the Northern Hemisphere means most educational institutions are on break, so less research is done and reported. other ventures are closed or running on reduced staffing levels. In short, the amount of news to draw from is greatly diminished. Yet, even in that environment, the vast majority of the time finds us with a selection of stories in the submissions queue to draw from.
We recently hit a low spot where I combed the web for a couple quick stories I could submit, but that has been the exception rather than the rule. Generally, we look for stories that have some kind of tech-related angle to them. The community has spoken loud and clear that there are plenty of other sites to read about celebrities, politics, and religion. We make a slight nod to politics in so much as it affects technical areas or has large scale ramifications (e.g. a story about President Trump having a meeting with Russian president Vladimir Putin would fit that description). Even then we generally try to keep it down to one story per day.
That said, if you see a story on the 'net that catches your fancy, please send it in! Feel free to draw upon titles listed on our Storybot page, then pop onto IRC (Internet Relay Chat) and simply issue the command ~arthur $code where $code is taken from the second column on the Storybot page.
Community++
Whether you contribute by submitting a story, buying a subscription, writing in one's journal, moderating or making a comment, we continue to provide a place where people can discuss, share knowledge and perspectives, and maybe learn a thing or two, too!
--martyb
Related Stories
This is a followup to: SoylentNews Site Certificates Expiring... We ARE Working on It, But... [Updated]
and: Site Services Restored
Certs (Not Just a Breath Mint):
Thanks to the efforts of The Mighty Buzzard and NCommander we now have valid certs, issued by LetsEncrypt installed on all of our servers. Except that the IRC server needs to be bounced to make its cert active on the backup daemon, all should now be in effect. As in our original story, you can check our certificate status with these links:
https://crt.sh/?q=soylentnews.org
https://crt.sh/?q=%%25soylentnews.org
https://crt.sh/?q=sylnt.us
https://crt.sh/?q=%%25sylnt.us
Developers:
The past few days have brought into focus a situation that has been building for several months: We really only have a single person who is working on developing features for the site, The Mighty Buzzard. As with any large and on-going undertaking, this burden is taking its toll. I try to help out as I can, but as I am the primary QA/Test guy who is much better at the user-facing things than what all happens "under the covers", my abilities and assistance are limited. If you have any spare time and would like to lend a hand (and every bit helps), please reply in the comments or contact The Might Buzzard directly on IRC.
Community:
I recall in the early days of this site when things would fall over several times a day. That has largely become a thing of the past... to the point where it is unusual for any issues to appear on the site and the support services we maintain (email, wiki, IRC, etc.) The baseline code on which this site was founded (open-sourced, out-of-date, back-level, and non-functional) was not promising, but the staff managed to bludgeon it into shape and we now have a solid foundation. That it continues to run as smoothly as it has is a testament to our SysOps folk who toil largely in the background and just keep things working... as well as the continued care-and-feeding that TMB so generously provides. To all of you, please accept my heartfelt thanks and appreciation!
Some numbers: we are approaching the 23,000th story posted; have recently passed 700,000 comments submitted; have had over 3,300 journal articles posted; and are on the cusp of having our 120th Poll!
Though all numbers are approximate and unofficial, it appears we surpassed our funding goal for the first half of the year ($3,000) with a net subscription tally of just over $3,250! I'll leave it to our treasurer to collate and post the official numbers. I'll leave the "Funding Goal" side bar as is for a week or so to commemorate this accomplishment. Do note that subscriptions are still being accepted and will count towards the second half of the year's funding needs.
Folding@Home: Not all of you may be aware, but our soylentnews team for Folding@Home is currently at 240th place... in the world! It started with a single story posted to this site. Just over four years ago, we were at 230,319th place! If you have any spare computes you would like to contribute, especially GPU-based, we'd love to have you sign up! Just reply in the comments and I'm sure someone will get back to you.
Whenever I write one of these stories, I always fear I'll have omitted someone or something important. Please accept my humble apologies if I have done so as there is no intent to slight any contributor.
To the community, I offer my thanks for your contributions to the site as well as your patience and understanding during the challenges of the past few days. Contributions are not just financial (though we wouldn't be here without them -- Thank You!), but also submitting stories and comments, and moderating comments, too! The community continues to impress me with your wide-ranging knowledge and expertise; I have learned much from the exchanges in the story comments!
Lastly, please keep janrinok (our Editor-in-Chief) in your thoughts and wishes while he undergoes a medical procedure and attendant recovery period. Best of luck JR!
--martyb
As you might recall, in an earlier story we noted that SoylentNews' Editor-in-Chief, janrinok, was scheduled for a medical procedure.
I have just received word that there were some (not totally unanticipated, but thought to be a very unlikely) complications and the expected 3 day hospital stay has now lasted over a week. In his own words:
No idea what will happen next is anybody's guess. My first objective is to be well enough to get home again but that looks like being the end of the week at the earliest.
He seemed to be in good spirits. In his inimitable style of humor, he noted the internet connection available to him in Hospital would lie in the bottom-most tier of our current poll!
I am torn in revealing personal details that were shared with me, and wish to not sound overly alarmist. I'll just leave here that I am reminded of a saying by Ralph Waldo Emerson "You cannot do a kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late."
JR has tirelessly (and tiredly, too) gone over and above in support of this site -- please keep him in your thoughts and, if you are of a mind to, your prayers. --martyb
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 18 2018, @12:24PM
We're thinking of you
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday July 18 2018, @02:29PM (6 children)
Glad you're out of the hospital, janrinok.
FYI in your absence all the editors voted that from now on Soylentils shall wear their underwear on top of their pants [youtube.com].
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 4, Funny) by takyon on Wednesday July 18 2018, @02:38PM (4 children)
What underwear?
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Touché) by martyb on Wednesday July 18 2018, @02:45PM (3 children)
What pants?
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday July 18 2018, @04:08PM (2 children)
You're both Scottish then?
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by mrpg on Wednesday July 18 2018, @05:11PM (1 child)
We're volunteers, we work from home. Some naked.
Some work form their daily job. Naked.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Wednesday July 18 2018, @07:05PM
> Some work form their daily job. Naked.
Didn't we just get a story about animal testing of chemicals? Why isn't Peta objecting to your being paid to test sunscreen ?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by AnonTechie on Wednesday July 18 2018, @08:45PM
Janrinok,
Please recuperate at the earliest. We hope you get back soon.
Albert Einstein - "Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
(Score: 3, Insightful) by c0lo on Wednesday July 18 2018, @03:04PM (19 children)
After we congratulate outselves... how about a honest discussion on what can be improved?
For instance: there were some aristarchus' submissions that were quite interesting to me at least. I would have simply loved to see a discussion on them. Heck, no, it wasn't to happen (not a problem for my expectations, after an age I got used to the idea the disappointment is part of life).
But then, I'm left to wonder:
- I learn we are putting a pressure on the editors to pick what submissions are "promoted" into publication. But we are rejecting the notion that the community may be involved somehow in the "publication" process? If so, why? Is it because we like tormenting some editors and stealing their personal life? Is it because the editors need to feel our gratitude more than the effort of editing? Is it because we trust the community would comment and would submit stories, but God forbid, it can't be trusted to be involved in the story promotion? Why?
- Ok, coming back where I started - those submission weren't approved. What could I do to recover the links to those stories? I go to aristarchus submission page [soylentnews.org] - nope, can't find them. I go to the API wiki page [soylentnews.org] - shit, that's no way I can get anything about submissions. And comments? Forget it, can't search the history, everything is centred on "what's NOW on the pipeline".
Yeah, cool, Google to the rescue, it worked [soylentnews.org]. This time. For how long, though?
- mmm... got me thinking. You see, the source code is open source and on git. How about the data? No, I don't care the email addresses, but who has the right to read the data that the community created? Is it Ok for that data not to be entirely accessible?
Feel free to think and post of other things that may be improved from your perspective.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday July 18 2018, @04:30PM
I am and have been a fan of the moderation system for, jeez, 20 years now. As the noose of censorship pulls tighter around our discursive necks in this trouble time, its value climbs.
And despite the political insanity of the world worming its way into the site a bit, I still read a good give-and-take from many viewpoints here; I don't know of any other place online where you get that.
That said, there's such a broad range in science and tech, you know, the stuff we like to think of ourselves as being primarily interested in, that it's quite difficult for any one of us to fully appreciate the import of technical subjects outside our own area of focus. It would be helpful if we could build up a library of links to primers that we can refer to, or even link to within story submissions. Sometimes TFAs themselves do a bit of that, but it's not consistent and they're not always that helpful. Perhaps our resident Soylentil experts could submit primers that they judge clear and correct; it could be a meta project post that floats along on the home page for a few months.
Having a primer on cybersecurity, say, at my fingertips would help a lot when trying to understand the news about the latest exploits. Likewise CRISPR-Cas9, quantum mechanics, etc.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 18 2018, @05:02PM (5 children)
He has a journal. A checkbox so that rejected subs automatically become journal entries may be useful? Since ari can't be bothered manually copying his submissions to text files and resubmitting as journal entries, I doubt he'd bother ticking a check box either.
It would be trivial to script a bot that scrapes his submissions and posts them to another account as journals. For that matter, it'd be easy to write something that scraped Google news for the 'alt-right' keyword, link an rcn to review ari's previous contributions and generate the kind of editorial that we all know and love. You C0lo could be the one to embrace the "libertardian fascist" within and finally #FreeAristarchus !!!
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Wednesday July 18 2018, @06:39PM (4 children)
(Waves hand) "These are not the aristarchus submissions you are looking for."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 18 2018, @07:23PM (3 children)
The hand waving is to be expected when someone tells you robot replacement is imminent.
I for one welcome our new robot overlords.
(Score: 2) by martyb on Thursday July 19 2018, @11:31AM (2 children)
I don't know where this meme about robots on the site doing story selection or somesuch came from, but I can attest it is utter bollocks. No such thing. Nada. Zilch. No way.
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 2) by realDonaldTrump on Sunday July 22 2018, @03:40PM (1 child)
There are Robots making Subs. Which you can see if you look at the Original Submission, so many say Robot or StoryBot. People don't know this, Bot is short for Robot. And people are saying @janrinok runs them. Or runs some of them. But he says "no," he says it's him and many people. But, when he was supposedly in the hospital, one of the Robots stopped. And he said it's not a person submitting stories. It's the Robot. Which sounds like, the Robot decides what stories to submit. It sounds like the Robot is selecting.
And now there's a Robot rejecting Subs. Because I got many messages that were the same. They weren't the same, the title of the Sub was different. But the rest of the message was the same. And I got 3 messages coming like that coming VERY QUICKLY, 2 coming at the same time, the same minute. One message came a minute earlier. Robots work very quickly, as everybody knows. And they do the same thing over and over. It looks like a Robot to me. Maybe it's a person that's spent too much time with Robots. And has become a lot like a Robot. If it's that it's terrible. Because for a person to look at 2 or 3 Subs in 1 minute, he's not looking at much.
And I tweeted to you -- to @martyb -- that it looks like a Robot. You tweeted back. But you didn't say anything about the Robot. Or how, supposedly, it's not a Robot. And now you say, there are no Robots. And you don't know why people are saying Robots. But it looks like Robots to me. And @janrinok -- who is one of the Editors -- said there are Robots.
(Score: 2) by realDonaldTrump on Sunday July 22 2018, @03:47PM
So many messages coming at the same time, and actually it was 3 at the same time. And another 1 minute before those.
(Score: 3, Informative) by martyb on Thursday July 19 2018, @03:48AM (10 children)
You asked some good questions; I'll do my best to answer them. Please be aware that this is solely from my perspective as an editor on SoylentNews -- I am not speaking for any other editor or SoylentNews as a whole.
First, some background. My strengths are in the realm of things technical. Chemistry, math, physics, astronomy, biology, computers and software... I have some background and interest in these areas. Some far more than others. Given time to write a few revisions, I can do a passable job in writing, too. (I'm a stickler when it comes to spelling and grammar!) By comparison, I am weak in the areas of social dynamics, politics (especially politics!)... people stuff. My current job (in sales) has helped me address that weakness to a great extent, but it is still far from my strong suit.
I looked up the submission you mentioned and (after some editing) pushed it out into the story queue. Thanks for bringing it to my attention!
NB: "promoting" a story has nothing to do with advertising; it is strictly a term we use to describe the action of taking a story from the story submissions queue and, after any editing, placing it in the story queue along with a date/time stamp for when it will be released onto the main site. An alternate term we use is "push" as in "pushing out a story"; same meaning, possibly a bit less erudite, certainly fewer letters to type.
I had accepted (ugh another term meaning "promoted" or "pushed!) some of Aristarchus' stories previously, and was soundly taken to task by the community. Well, once bitten twice shy... what happens after the third or fourth time? Yeah, I try not to go where I get burned. When I see "alt-right" in a story title or anything that looks like a political story, a little Robbie the Robot on my shoulder yells "Danger! Danger!"
I do not recall reading a submission of his which did not include an ad hominem attack. Not saying it doesn't happen, just that I don't recall seeing one. That's not how I live my life. One can disagree without being disagreeable. And if you don't agree, well you can just take you whiny-ass idea... ahem... see the difference? If I perceive any of that ilk in a story it's pretty much on its way to the crapper, unless it has some other, major, redeeming feature. Whereupon I make the effort to remove the offensive bit(s) before promoting the story. And can usually count on an ad hominem comment from the author complaining about the editing. Is that hornets nest something you would want to jump into at 10 pm after just getting home from a long day at work, can barely keep your eyes open, and know that the front page will go empty for a few/several hours if some stories are not found and pushed out, soon?
Oh, before I forget this point. Every registered user has access to a journal and can, if they so choose, post a story there. If they want, they can submit the exact same story as a story submission for the editors to review and consider for posting on the main site.
Complaining about story submissions not being accepted only makes the submitter look like a child. "Waaa! You hurt my feelings! It's not fair!" It certainly gains nothing as far as I am concerned about accepting that story or any future story by that submitter. Keep it up, and I'll be even less interested in looking at your submissions in the future. If you want to be treated like an adult, please act like one.
Okay, it's already well nigh midnight, so I'm going to have to wrap this up soon.
As for opening up the DB for user access... we've got plenty of bandwidth available, but computes and I/O are much more dear. Some may recall the comment page redesign which was solely motivated by trying to reduce the amount of time (i.e. work: CPU cycles and I/O) required to produce a comments page. Opening up the entire DB would put that in jeopardy. Further, there are fields such as real_email where we keep the actual email address for a registered user. This is kept private unless the user expressly opts in to having it displayed. That's not gonna be made available, that's for sure. If someone were to attempt to scrape all the stories or comments or whatever on the site, it could so burden the systems that the entire site would suffer. Can you say [D]DoS? In my estimation, we may have already gone too far in that direction in what is already made available through our API. Inasmuch as there are other capabilities I wish I had access to in the API, I have been loathe to request same unless I had a very strong case for its addition. So far, I have not. IOW, beware unanticipated consequences. Oh, and our development team is basically just TMB atm, so don't count on much happening very quickly.
I apologize for the rambling... it's late and I need to get some sleep. I hope this has answered your questions and concerns. Remember, these are just from my perspective, and that may be subject to change, at any time, and without prior notice.
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday July 19 2018, @04:17AM
Yes, I understand the reaction and I didn't complain about it.
I used it as an example about "how good info can be lost forever from the S/N surface and become inaccessible, even if that info still exists inside the system".
I also used it as an example to illustrate that "involving community the submission-to-story promotion" (yes, no markedroid meaning here) may be able to lower the editorial effort and maybe avoid flaming the editor. Like in: if the community can be "blamed" for the submission-to-story promotion (as in "somehow asked and got back a positive answer"), nobody can afterwards blame the editor. For instance, suppose that somehow 20 users express the interest in discussing a submission - isn't there enough interest to promote it? No? How about if over 50 and, if less, return the story as a journal entry? If others aren't interested, then they can simply ignore the story.
Certain rules may or may not work, but if we don't even discuss (much less try) them, we'll never know.
Yes, I understand it. I'll point that:
a. still, a very rudimentary API exists, which means the potential to (ab)use the I/O and compute exists at this very moment. Has an abuse ever happen? What it does not exist: access to all categories of info.
b. with an API requiring an authenticated user, one can put a limit on the max frequency of "API calls/query" and the amount of info transferred/query. Advertise those conditions and I think it is unlikely the S/N members will abuse it.
There are quite a large number of technical approaches to impose/control reasonable access limits but still have a meaningful functionality provided by the API.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday July 19 2018, @04:47AM (8 children)
Yes, I see it.
And... sorta asking:
- how can I, another S/N member, signal to him that some of specific traits of a particular submission worth extra love to have that submission retain its value and lose stench? I can't even "personal message" him**
- how can I signal to you, an editor, "You know? That submission has some real golden nuggets inside that pile of shit. Maybe it worth saving them".
I don't see much support in S/N as it is right now for the above. Maybe it exists, I'll be happy to stand corrected and explained how my/your/others feedback can be expressed for the purpose of a better editorial experience.
** No, IRC is not that. IRC is suited for chatting, that ancient mummified Greek is almost on an opposite-to-mine timezone.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 3, Informative) by martyb on Thursday July 19 2018, @12:26PM (7 children)
First off, I very much appreciate your level-headed comments and genuine interest in improving the site. I can tell from your UID that you've been with us since the beginning -- and are still here -- thanks!!!
As you're probably aware, but for completeness' sake, I'll point out that SoylentNews took as its starting point a years-old, non-maintained, non-functional, open-sourced version of slashcode, ostensibly the code used to run the other site. Well, maybe they had great plans, but didn't follow through consistently? I don't know. The fact remains, though, that they had put a version of something like the code that runs the other site up on a server for others to read, download, whatever. We've done the same, btw... except our stuff is what actually *is* running the site. =) You can find it on github [github.com].
One of the reasons for mentioning all that is that we also received the "firehose" code which provided a means for the community to up/down rank a story submission. Well, in the sense of: "was supposed to", "was intended to", and "may have worked at one point but they did not post that version to their repository". I recall many, many IRC comments with NCommander cursing about that code and ripping it out left and right so as to get down to a solid and stable base. It was a success insomuch as in the beginning the site would crash multiple times a day, and now downtime is almost entirely due to reboots for installing upgrades. Putting that firehose code (or something like it) back into the system is possible, but a major, and error-prone undertaking. As I mentioned earlier, we are basically down to one dev (TMB) for the site and such a large undertaking would compete with all the other change requests which are already on his plate. Quite frankly, I don't see it happening. Not that I think it is a bad idea, just the reality of the situation.Toss in sockpuppet accounts and it makes the value of such 'votes' questionable.
But back to the concept expressed (quite well, I might add!) about how to communicate to: the editors? Some ideas: (1) We're often not there, but pop into #editorial on IRC and call attention to a story in the queue and advocate for it however you'd like. I may not be there at that moment, but I've so far always read all scrollback of conversations appearing in that channel and have no intentions to stop. (2) Send me an e-mail. It's not made publicly available as part of the UI, but it is easy enough to figure it out as I am on staff so I have an account that is my nickname at soylentnews.org =) (3) Write a better story submission? I'm a bit leery about that, but nothing says you can't take the story idea, and submit a more level-headed story for the editors to peruse. (4) Join up as an editor and you can get the great pay and benefits available to all the staff, as well as the ability to munge up story submissions to make them more palatable for the community. I'm not entirely kidding on that last one. If you are interested, please please speak up!
I think this was in your other comment, but I'm trying to bring the comment thread back together. As for accessing past story submissions, you can already do that. Yup! See the "Subs Queue" entry in the "Navigation" slashbox that appears in the upper left-hand side (LHS) of the main page? Click that. Now you are presented with a list of all the stories that are currently pending in the story submissions queue. If you look at the link for each story, you should notice that there is a pattern going on. What if I pointed out that the "&title=..." parameter is optional? And that the subid is a unique, monotonically increasing value given to each story submission, so the larger the number the later the submission. Enjoy!
You are correct in your assessment that there is no private, user-to-user messaging on the site. As useful as it might be in this case, and I do not deny its usefulness, I think you can quickly see how such a system could be abused. Not just in a spam context, either. Best I can suggest is to post a comment on a story in his journal, or reply to a comment of his, mark in the subject that it is OT, and offer your viewpoints that way. Yes, it is far from perfect, but it's what we got, and it is self-limiting against abuse in its own way.
Okay, that was all stream-of-consciousness in a reply. I apologize if I wandered around, but I hope I addressed all the main issues. Thank-you for the genuine and meaningful discussion!
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday July 19 2018, @01:37PM (1 child)
You know firehose is one possible solution, but not the only one.
Now, that's an effing yuuge problem.
Perl - jamais couche avec.
How popular would be the idea of some modules in PHP? (and I think of well-written, maintainable ones)
Actually... those are some good ones. Thanks! I don't particularly enjoy (1) and can't afford (4) but... yeah... Thanks.
Mmmm... OK, thanks again. I'll note this runs a bit astray with the idea of "conserving compute and IO" - I'd be looking to those submission one by one, loading each page including the "layouting markup" and navigational structures, when I'd only need content. If I'd ne using (as responsible as possible) a Web-page scrapper for it, I'll finish in discarding lotsa bytes that would not need to be transmitted in the first place.
With the DB structure and if well-written PHP is acceptable, I'd maybe try to implement an API with text/JSON responses to balance a bit the CPU/IO vs bandwidth.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by martyb on Thursday July 19 2018, @05:49PM
Agreed that the firehose is but one possibility, but just wanted to point out that if you had that in mind, it is FAR from a trivial undertaking to get that back into working shape.
As for PHP, I doubt that would go over well. It's not my call, of course, and if you think you can make a good case for it, please feel free. Just trying to set the right expectations so you don't get your hopes up unnecessarily.
The biggest problem I've had with Perl is the incredibly rich assortment of two-character combinations of punctuation (e.g. "$_") to refer to different, umm, "assemblages" of data... array, hash, positional parameter, etc. That, and there are so many different ways to do the same thing that one could see three different chunks of wildly different-looking pieces of code that would implement the same thing. In my experience with other languages (e.g. C, FORTRAN, etc.)), there are certain, shall I say, 'canonical' ways to do certain things, and once you've figured it out, and see a certain layout of code (i.e. syntax) it is clear what the intended semantics are. I find that more difficult in Perl. But, if you stick with the relatively basic stuff, it's pretty easy to pick up on. At least I found it so.
As for (1)..(4), you're welcome!
Lastly, that is part of the site code that is naturally exposed to dog+world. You may have noticed how I couched my phrasing in terms sufficient to discern a technique to achieve your apparent goal, without posting a clear POC that someone could cut-n-paste. Sometimes, obscurity is a good thing. I mean, you were looking at the list of submissions and did not see that opportunity. We'd like to keep it that way, without having to do backflips in the code to monitor/filter such kinds of access. If/when it becomes a problem, we'll certainly look to stepping things up, but for now there's no need to make additional work on the people here. As long as you are judicious in your retrievals (like, say, keep it to one query every second or two; pulled out my posterior) it will just fit in with our normal traffic. Now, if you want all of the nearly 28K story submissions, then that's another thing altogether. It may be worthwhile to code up a couple more API methods to retrieve what you are looking for. I dunno, would need a more specific idea of what you are looking to achieve. Btw, if you do go down the scraping route, a text based browser can be mighty helpful. Check out something like Lynx, feed its output through AWK, and you should be most of the way there. =)
Hope this has been helpful!
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 2) by DavePolaschek on Thursday July 19 2018, @02:58PM (4 children)
Is there a way to see the backlog? Personally, my plate is full enough (today) that I won't be helping out (today) but not being able to see what's on the list lessens the chance of me ever being able to help. At some point, I'll retire, and end up looking for other things to do than work (or wait for "p4 sync -f" to complete while reading SN), and if there are things that have grabbed my attention, they're more likely to get looked at.
(Score: 3, Informative) by martyb on Thursday July 19 2018, @05:26PM (3 children)
On the main page, on the left-hand side (LHS) there should be a SlashBox (that's what it's called, really) titled "SoylentNews" under which there are links to "Twitter", "IRC", "Wiki", "Who's Who?", Bug List", and "Dev Server".
You want the Bug List [github.com] link. =)
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 2) by DavePolaschek on Thursday July 19 2018, @11:55PM (2 children)
I pretty much always view from iOS, and don’t see anything to the left of the articles. But I’ve also selected "simple design" and "low bandwidth".
Ahh. Site news is on the upper right in my view, and if I follow the "Get Involved" I can find the bug list, but it requires logging in to github first to see the list. The link you provided actually will show me the list without having to log in first, which is what I was hoping for. I’ll look at it more closely later. Thanks!
(Score: 2) by martyb on Friday July 20 2018, @11:17AM (1 child)
Hadn't thought of different 'layout' options with "simple design" and "low bandwidth", etc. Thanks for the reminder! And, so glad that link works out for you..too!
community++
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 2) by DavePolaschek on Monday July 23 2018, @01:28PM
You're welcome. Reading on my iPhone (or iPad) mostly via cellular exposes me to interesting corner cases sometimes.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 19 2018, @11:54PM
The S/N search engine has a Submissions-only filter.
You can also filter by last-date-first.
You can also skip over the last N submissions.
(Not seeing that last thing on the PoS Windoze/Internet Exploder system I'm using here.
IIRC, that's &start=30 when using the Address Bar.)
https://soylentnews.org/search.pl?op=submissions&sort=2&query=aristarchus [soylentnews.org]
OriginalOwner_ [tinyurl.com] (Away from home computer)
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday July 18 2018, @04:40PM
Hope you recover quickly.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Wednesday July 18 2018, @06:41PM
Delighted to hear you're "out." :)
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Thursday July 19 2018, @02:09AM (1 child)
What sex are you now?
:)
Get well quickly...before the END OF THE WORLD, sometime Monday around 1:45 pm. Ish.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 19 2018, @04:12AM
Schrödonger's gender