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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
(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.
The Musk/Trump interview appears to have been hacked, but not a DDOS hack...more like A Distributed Denial of Reality.
(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.