On July 5th of 2014, SoylentNews was officially given approvals for its letters of incorporation as a Public Benefit Corporation.
This is a good opportunity to take stock of where we are. Read on past the fold for coverage of:
- Fundraising
- Site activity
- Folding@Home
- Journals of Spam Accounts
- Submit Stories
- Thank YOU
Fundraising: For the first half of 2019, the community came through with room to spare! Not only did we attain our goal of $2000, but we also received approximately $549.38 towards our stretch goal of $1000 more. I'll leave the current totals in the Site News slashbox for a few more days before resetting for fundraising for the second half of the year. Please feel free to Subscribe as any new amounts received will go toward our next funding period. In case you were wondering, we had about 100 subscriptions during this period with the largest amounts being $200(x2), $120, $100(x3), and $80; all the rest were for $50 or less. Though this is an all-volunteer organization, we do have to pay for servers, domain registrations, and a CPA to file our taxes, so these subscriptions are key to our being able to "keep the lights on". THANK-YOU!
Site activity: A quick look around the site reveals some interesting statistics. As of my writing this, our story count stands at 27,861 stories. To that, add the 4,178 journal entries that have been posted by the community. We currently have 858,117 comments posted. We have had, however, comparatively few comment moderations: 586,164. We have 8,225 registered users, too!
In case you did not see the follow-up story, we have not performed moderation bans for excess up/down moderations in well over a year. Any moderations by user1 of comments by user2 that exceed 4 per day are reviewed and are simply reversed if it is determined than a mod bomb or sockpuppet moderation is happening. This is in lieu of our implementing code that will automatically handle this in the future when our dev team can scrounge up some spare time to implement it and merge it in. I had my information incorrect in a story posted a while back and want to set the record straight. Remember, there are a few thousand other users on this site, it is not necessary for you to single-handedly moderate all the comments that need it; if it really is that bad or good, then surely someone else will share your perspective and be along before too long to do the same. And, if not, it is not the end of the world; this is a place to discuss stories; not to set the entire world on the right path. In other words: Login to the site and Use your mod points!
Folding@Home: This has not been mentioned in a while, but we do have a SoylentNews Folding@Home (F@H) team... currently ranked #231 in the world! (Based on current trends, we should be #230 within a couple days.) This is purely voluntary by members of the community who saw an opportunity, banded together, and just got things started. Hat tip to SirFinkus for the original impetus and early organizing that has helped us get to where we are today. The F@H client automatically takes advantage of idle time on your CPU/GPU. Once installed and set up, it requests a work unit, processes it, and return the results. These calculations help support research into fighting maladies such as Parkinson's disease.
Journals of Spam Accounts: We have observed accounts being created which have posted no comments, made no story submissions, performed no moderations, but have made postings of a commercial nature to their journal. These are currently blocked from appearing in the "Most Recent Journal Entries" slashbox that appears on the main page until the user has accumulated at least 10 Karma. This reduces their visibility to the casual reader of the site, but could be leveraged to help boost the search engine rankings of the affiliated enterprise.
Some numbers: Out of 4178 journal entries posted to SoylentNews since the beginning, 528 were posted by users who have less than 10 Karma. Of those 528 journal entries, only 26 have a Karma greater than zero. Further, the most recent journal posting from those 26 was in March of 2018 — well over a year ago.
My take on this is that the good name of SoylentNews is being used to advance the standing of commercial enterprises. We strive to be impartial in our coverage and have never taken any remuneration from any outside enterprise lest it give even the appearance of favoritism to what we publish on this site.
Rather than make an edict from on high, I prefer to hear what the community thinks. What, if anything, have I forgotten to look at? Is this even a problem? If it is a problem, what, if anything should be done about it? Require a minimum Karma of 10 to even post in a Journal?
Submit Stories: It is summer time in the northern hemisphere and most research facilities are running with reduced staffing so folks can take advantage of the weather. Also, most schools are on summer vacation, as well. The result is that much less research is performed now than would be during the normal school year. This period is sometimes referred to as the "Silly Season" where on-line publications (many of whom are also running with fewer staff) tend to run more fluff pieces. Please bear with us as we try to find and provide the community with stories of interest with an emphasis on STEM.
This is also a good opportunity to try your hand at submittting a story to SoylentNews. Please see the Submission Guidelines. If you have any questions, feel free to pop into the "#editorial" channel on IRC (Internet Relay Chat) and ask for help. As some of our staff may also be taking a vacation, there may not be someone there to immediately respond, so please bear with us. I well remember the thrill I felt when I first saw a story submission of mine accepted and posted to the site!
If the best you can do is submit a link, then do that. If you quote any text directly from the story, please enclose it in <blockquote> ... </blockquote> tags. Of course the closer the submission is to publication-ready, the less work is required of an editor, and the better chance that one of us will run with it. Most importantly, have fun and don't be afraid to try. We all had the experience of making our first story submission and are willing to help you get comfortable with the process, as others did with us.
Thank YOU: We are the little site that could. Splintered off from the non-listening corporate overlords at Slashdot, a bunch of PO'd folk got together and bludgeoned an out-of-date code base into a solid and responsive system. The community that has formed here... I regularly see people looking to find what they can give to the community rather than what they can take from it. We could not have done it without YOU. Providing story submissions. Writing comments and journal articles. Moderating comments. It is a group effort, and this is a group I am grateful to be a part of.
In addition, there is the unheralded work of a small staff who volunteer their time to (try) and keep everything up and running smoothly. For example, Linode (our webhosting provider) recently rebooted 5 of our servers to handle an exploit that was making the rounds. Thanks to the excellent design and implementation, the site kept right on running uninterrupted. There was a minor glitch this morning that a restart of varnishd took care of. And that was it. No muss, no fuss. I count myself most fortunate to be working with such capable and talented people who give so selflessly of themselves to keep this all running so smoothly.
It has been a privilege to serve this community over the past 5 years and it is my fervent hope that we have many more years to come!
Related Stories
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: 5, Insightful) by Snospar on Friday July 05 2019, @04:23PM (1 child)
I'll just take the opportunity to say "Thank You" to all the volunteers working away in the background keeping the site running and alive. I think I'm probably celebrating a year where I've never even bothered to visit the Green site (although it could be even longer). Who needs sponsored
advertsarticles from Dice when the real news for nerds is right here!Huge thanks to all the Soylent volunteers without whom this community (and this post) would not be possible.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by AnonTechie on Friday July 05 2019, @09:22PM
I heartily second that. Wish this site a very very happy birthday !!!
Albert Einstein - "Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
(Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Friday July 05 2019, @04:47PM (3 children)
Do journals get indexed by search engines? "nofollow" on the links?
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday July 05 2019, @04:57PM
So many search engines, so many algorithms, nofollow might help some of the time, but even Google changes their algorithms constantly and might start ignoring nofollow in some valuable areas when you're not paying attention.
Besides, SEO drones aren't often bright enough to realize that something like nofollow makes their efforts worthless...
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 05 2019, @05:39PM (1 child)
Is it still the Russian-Jewish plastic surgeons from New York City that are setting up the journal spam accounts?
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday July 06 2019, @12:22AM
No, they're makin too much money trafficking organs and underage prostitutes to care about your silly online Mongolian basket-weaving forum.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Friday July 05 2019, @04:54PM (5 children)
Sounds like you're starting to become a victim of SEO drones using the Journal function to boost their rankings.
The numbers you quote make it seem unlikely that you have been cracked by a fully automated bot, so anything you do to thwart the postings will likely meet with human level responses (i.e. Captcha probably won't help.)
To me, the way to "game" this problem would be to look at the differences between what you call legitimate Journal posters and illegitimate, establish a line which clearly "passes" the legitimate posters, and then I'd simply fail to serve Journal pages for accounts which have not met that threshold. Variables to consider might include karma, number of postings, number of moderations, and time-span of activities. My preferred method of squelching the illegitimate Journal postings would be to simply serve a "this account has not met the site criteria required to post journal entries" message and leave it at that - like all good search engine algorithms, your exact criteria can remain secret - as long as you're not hurting legitimate users I'd say: no harm, no foul.
If a squelched account should become legitimate by "bot" criteria, you might want to leave a human editor's flag on it to ensure that they're not just becoming legitimate by way of additional SPAM.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Gault.Drakkor on Friday July 05 2019, @06:10PM (3 children)
Suggestions:
1) Only those with positive karma, say 1-5, may create Journals (doesn't stop anybody, would just raise the spammers cost). Low threshold so that users with something to say can say it.
2) Only those accounts with karma above say 20, actually have journal entries displayed to non-signed in users/search-bots(display what JoeMerchant suggested). This should hopefully remove majority of SEO value.
3) Allow signed in users to moderate the base article/journal entry itself. Those that are marked as spam/ negative rating are only shown to signed in members with appropriate filters. Could also have journal entries moderated 5 shown to all regardless of account karma.
I would hope the first two would be easy to implement, yet get a fair bang for the buck in terms of increase cost to spammers. The last I can see as being desirable, but not easy/quick to implement.
Thank you all for SoylentNews.
(Score: 1) by RandomFactor on Friday July 05 2019, @09:10PM (2 children)
Not a fan of this one - There is already journal stalking going on.
В «Правде» нет известий, в «Известиях» нет правды
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Saturday July 06 2019, @11:05AM (1 child)
And for thresholding what's visible to you, only include moderations by people you've not foed, so that your foes can't influence what you see (either way).
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 1) by RandomFactor on Saturday July 06 2019, @12:04PM
Publicity is not effective if the stalkers are proud of it :-\
I had a similar idea to ignoring moderation of foed individuals, although I was thinking something more akin to a mute option that did this. Tying it to Foed might be simpler.
I'm assuming that moderations are tracked already, so it might be possible to do something there and it would be great to see something along those lines.
В «Правде» нет известий, в «Известиях» нет правды
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 05 2019, @07:44PM
Suppress links in journal posts for accounts with insufficient karma. That should kill the effectiveness of any SEO shenanigans.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Friday July 05 2019, @05:03PM
Spank you.
Spank you all! Spank you over an over and over again.
I spank you so much it hurts.
Spanks again.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Bot on Friday July 05 2019, @05:21PM
5 years already? Happy birthday!
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by Rupert Pupnick on Friday July 05 2019, @05:35PM
No, thank YOU!
(Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 05 2019, @06:12PM (9 children)
This site had so much potential, but it continues to run most stories a day later than Slashdot.
Maybe that's why 5 years later the number of users has only doubled from the initial rush to get low user ID numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 05 2019, @06:30PM
quantity has a quality all its own?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by hemocyanin on Friday July 05 2019, @07:15PM (3 children)
So quit looking at slashdot. Problem solved.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 05 2019, @07:38PM (2 children)
Or they could just stay at the other site and stop coming here.
Oh, and before I forget: Fuck Beta
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 07 2019, @12:34AM (1 child)
Which is apparently what the are doing. When will this site hit 10K users?
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Sunday July 07 2019, @10:31PM
Why does it matter? Soylent isn't selling anything. It's just a nice place to come when wasting time is on the menu.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by edIII on Friday July 05 2019, @08:34PM (3 children)
And???
My life isn't all that affected by a 24 hour delay in the news. Breaking news happens fast enough around here, and there isn't anything I could do with that extra 24 hours. Perhaps the only exceptions would be security vulnerability reports, but if 24 hours makes that big of a difference, I should be on mailing lists. Or in other words, I could be the one submitting the stories.
Which brings me to another point.... If you're seeing SN being "late" on stories then you are in a position to contribute. Or is bitching about it more rewarding for you?
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 2) by DavePolaschek on Saturday July 06 2019, @12:34PM
The only news story in the past week that I had to go searching for was what the heck was going on with Halle Berry being a mermaid. And it turned out the internet was confused and it was really Halle Bailey. So the delay around here seems to be working for me.
(Score: 2) by Common Joe on Saturday July 06 2019, @01:44PM (1 child)
Comments like this have floated around here for years by Anonymous Cowards. The people with familiar names all say the same thing you do. I think the AC is just trolling. I'm curious to know why he trolls since I've never seen anyone with a name I recognize say, "Hey, I could do with faster, less accurate news like almost every other website on the Internet."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 07 2019, @12:21AM
Speed has little bearing on accuracy if we're merely using other sites' news.
I used to contribute here, but then I'd see my stories routinely beaten to the punch by Slashdot and gave up. It's clear this site is just a vanity project and has no intention of being a better, faster version of Slashdot. Sad!
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday July 05 2019, @06:20PM
I hate inventory day(s) - and the more days it takes, the more I hate it. Just put me down for vacation.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 05 2019, @07:58PM (3 children)
Any ideas about how to thwart the efforts of sock puppets?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 05 2019, @08:23PM (1 child)
Create more artificially intelligent Bot users.
(Score: 1) by DECbot on Saturday July 06 2019, @04:36AM
While I don't know how Bot feels, I certainly take offense you insensitive clod. There's nothing artificial about my intelligence. I'm a natural brunette.
Background:
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 4, Funny) by edIII on Friday July 05 2019, @08:37PM
1) Break their hands.
2) Take scissors to their socks.
3) Become a 3rd party, infiltrate the relationship between left and right sock puppets, and sell them weapons to fight each other.
Granted the last one is from watching Looney Toons, but #1 or #2 are probably the most effective.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 1) by RandomFactor on Friday July 05 2019, @09:44PM
Wood or silverware?
В «Правде» нет известий, в «Известиях» нет правды
(Score: 4, Informative) by corey on Friday July 05 2019, @10:49PM (4 children)
First a big thanks to everyone running this site.
My suggestion: can you make a mobile view? Firefox on Android is not that great. Tolerable but some text is big, some is tiny. Always need to zoom here and there. Then entering text seems difficult. It would cap off a great site to use.
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday July 06 2019, @12:28AM (2 children)
Aww hell naw. Nothing pisses me off more than a mobile version of a site. I dont want to visit SN on my phone and get some crippled half-ass version of the site. If you have an Android phon then zoom in. Fucker.
(Score: 2) by corey on Saturday July 06 2019, @04:19AM
Can you articulate what you mean by half ass and crippled? Probably would be good for everyone else because then you wouldn't be as able to comment with such insightful remarks.
Suggestion for you is to view the non mobile version if you so choose.
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Saturday July 06 2019, @11:14AM
I believe that sort of language is deprecated these days. The more PC description for mobile sites would be a "differently-abled ass-challenged version."
(Score: 2) by DavePolaschek on Saturday July 06 2019, @12:57PM
Works pretty well on Safari on iPad. It’s kinda painful on iPhone, but usable with zooming. The only thing missing AFAICT, is some viewport related stuff [tedunangst.com] that behaves non-intuitively.
(Score: 2) by edIII on Friday July 05 2019, @11:40PM
I wanted to say thank you to everyone that helps make this site what it is. The editors and sysadmins are greatly appreciated.
Kudos to all of you, except TMB.
(TMB wants alcohol and fishing gear, in that order, IIRC)
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 3, Informative) by pbnjoe on Saturday July 06 2019, @01:12AM
Happy incorporation anniversary, and thanks to all the people who spent so much time and energy (and cash) to make this site what it is and maintain it. Hard to believe it's been around five and a half years since I read rumblings of a new site being made.
By the way, that must mean that this is around the fifth anniversary of the !sn DuckDuckGo bang which I submitted back then and have used since. To mark the occasion, I've just submitted !soylentnews, since people might not guess !sn. :)
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Saturday July 06 2019, @05:39AM (1 child)
Add a new variable. Maybe call it Parma, it counts positive mods only.
Can't post a journal until you have +20 Parma. Posting a journal costs you 10 Parma.
or
The ability to mod journals spam might work, with same results as any other spam mod.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 2) by kazzie on Saturday July 06 2019, @04:08PM
Hm... Parma Spam sounds like some cheap and nasty Prosciutto.