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posted by martyb on Friday March 06 2020, @01:00PM   Printer-friendly
from the alliteration++ dept.

I have a couple things to bring to the attention of the community concerning site funding and comment moderations. As always, if you are not interested in these matters, feel free to skip past this one; another story will be along shortly. Otherwise read beyond the fold for an update.

Finances:

A recent comment to a journal article about SoylentNews now having a privacy policy prompted me to pursue something that had been nagging at me for a long while.

In short, I have learned it costs more to run this site than I had estimated. We have actually been operating at a loss for the past couple years. I have, therefore, provided a revised fundraising goal of $3500.00 for the first half of this calendar year in the "Site News" slashbox (that appears on the right-hand-side of the main page).

I have been advised our current funds on hand can support the site for just six months.

For those who have been around for a while, it will come as no surprise to learn that I try to keep a handle on subscription income for this site. Further, I have been maintaining what we affectionately refer to here as the "Beg-O-Meter' that appears in the "Site News" slashbox. It provides a running tally of our financial goal for the period and how far along we are towards attaining that goal. Lastly, I have posted stories in the past apprising the community as to our progress towards those goals.

We are an entirely volunteer organization (no staff member has ever been paid anything for their work on SoylentNews). All funding for the site comes entirely from the community (we have never run advertisements and are strongly resistant to any suggestion to do so). The vast majority of our funding comes from subscriptions.

My prior estimates of $4000.00 per year were based on the only information I had available at that time. Our monthly web hosting costs ($260/month), the fact that we needed to file and pay taxes, and that we paid an accountant to prepare them. Twelve months at $260/month works out to $2160 per year. I reasoned a goal of $3000 for the year would give us about $840 for those other expenses... that should do it, right?

Apparently not.

Thanks to the above-referenced comment, I reached out to a member of our board of directors and inquired as to our financial status. In very short order I received a pile of PDF files. A separate file for each fiscal year's Profit and Loss Statement and a separate file for each year's Balance Sheet. It took a surprising amount of effort, but thanks to the concerted effort of a few staff members, these have been uploaded to our Wiki and can now be accessed through the SoylentNews Finance page.

A couple things bear explanation. You may notice that there are expenses associated with subscriptions. The amount of a subscription made to SoylentNews is a gross amount. From that, Stripe or PayPal charge a processing fee for each subscription. These fees do add up and amount to the aforementioned expense.

Also, why is a Delaware company paying Massachusetts state taxes? I reached out for an answer from a board member, and here is his reply:

We pay Massachusetts income tax (since we are not profitable, we pay the minimum amount of $456 each year, but if we ever become profitable, we will have to pay more) because we are physically located in MA (through me). A physical address was required to open our checking account with BoA[*], and for various other things. For example, we need a physical address to sign the engagement letter with our accountant every year. Note that we are not required to pay Delaware income tax because we are not physically located in DE. The tax that we pay to Delaware each year is technically a franchise tax that we pay for the privilege of being incorporated in Delaware (allowing us to be a Public Benefit Corporation, among other benefits).

[*] BoA - Bank of America.

I will keep the community appraised should I learn anything more.

Moderations:

We had had a discussion on the site a few months ago about moderation on the site. I have been pursuing a possible implementation of one of the suggestions raised there: adding a "-1 Ad Hominem" moderation. Discussion among staff has suggested we would need a counter moderation should a "-1 Ad Hominem" be perceived to have been in error. That wold mean the addition of a "+1 Not Ad Hominem" moderation, too. (In proper geek fashion, they nicely abbreviate to: "-1 AH" and "+1 NAH"!) There is more to its implementation than just adding these options to the moderation table; coding changes would also be needed. This, in turn, would require the modifications be submitted through GitHub as a pull request, then testing, and finally a rollout to the community. It is important to note that this would be on a trial basis! If it proves to NOT be workable, we need to be able to roll that back. This is easier said than done! The previous moderations will need to remain in the system (what's done is done) but future moderations must be able to be blocked... and the code is not designed for this at all.

It bears mentioning that our goal is to provide a forum for the community to comment on stories and to moderate those comments. We strive to be as hands-off about these matters as we reasonably can.

In short, this is mostly an announcement that AH moderations have not been forgotten, design work is in progress, and that when time and developer availability permits, we hope to be rolling this out for a test run. I would not expect anything to happen in the next month, but wanted to provide as much advance notice as to the intention as possible so as to encourage any feedback, discussion, etc. that could help inform our implementation.

<Note class="TMB">

s/next month/next few months/

Contractor woes (just because I technically can do everything doesn't mean it's always the wisest idea) wound up pushing move-in date on the church I've been remodeling back a couple months (end of April is what we're currently shooting for as a best case scenario) and I don't want anything hitting production servers that hasn't had at least two weeks worth of testing on our dev server after me calling it done, because I'm quite often wrong about that. The end of May is the soonest anything is likely to hit production servers, with some time in June being far more likely.

</Note>


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by janrinok on Friday March 06 2020, @02:47PM (15 children)

    by janrinok (52) Subscriber Badge on Friday March 06 2020, @02:47PM (#967422) Journal

    It's surprising that it's hard, it really seems like something that should be a data change only.

    It was explained in TFS. Once a moderation has been used it cannot be deleted from the database, otherwise any moderations that had been given would no longer make sense - they would be moderations without a reason. Therefore the logic of the program has to be able to cope with a moderation value in the moderation table which can no longer be considered valid, but must remain otherwise the database will have errors in it. That changes the logic in the code that handles moderations.

    If we change the code, we have to test it. Therefore there will be a period of testing, including testing on dev.soylentnews.org where we will try to break it, martyb will QA the life out of it, and eventually assuming that it passes it will be released.

    But I suspect that you already know that, or you don't write software....

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +3  
       Informative=3, Total=3
    Extra 'Informative' Modifier   0  
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   5  
  • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday March 06 2020, @02:54PM

    Yup. Remove an entry from the modreasons table that's been used and the script would error out any time you tried to load a page it'd been used on. Leave it in and add a disabled flag to the table so it doesn't show up in the dropdown boxes and you still have to programmatically check that the reason isn't disabled before accepting moderation requests to keep people from crafting POST requests by hand to use it even after it's disabled.

    tl;dr Not just a data change.

    --
    My rights don't end where your fear begins.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 06 2020, @03:09PM (5 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 06 2020, @03:09PM (#967434)

    (+6, Extra large penis) I feel this is a necessary change for me to continue on this site.

    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday March 06 2020, @04:44PM (2 children)

      Nah, we'd run into all kinds of issues like how do you categorize trans folks or those who otherwise buy aftermarket penises in their myriad varieties. It'd be entirely too much bother.

      --
      My rights don't end where your fear begins.
      • (Score: 3, Informative) by MostCynical on Saturday March 07 2020, @12:00AM (1 child)

        by MostCynical (2589) on Saturday March 07 2020, @12:00AM (#967721) Journal

        no, parent poster is asking for a +6 larger penis. Not sure php or perl or any database changes can help with that, though.

        --
        "I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 07 2020, @03:51AM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 07 2020, @03:51AM (#967797)

      You do realize that +6 is not "extra large"? It is only about average, or maybe just a bit below average, depending on your source. I suspect that if you ever see an "extra large" you will suffer inadequacy complexes for the rest of your life.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 07 2020, @05:59AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 07 2020, @05:59AM (#967819)

        Complexes? You mean sore throat.

  • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Friday March 06 2020, @03:24PM (7 children)

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Friday March 06 2020, @03:24PM (#967444) Journal

    Wouldn't it suffice to remove the value from the dropdown menu? That way the moderation would stay valid but it would be impossible to actually submit it.

    --
    The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
    • (Score: 2) by janrinok on Friday March 06 2020, @03:42PM (2 children)

      by janrinok (52) Subscriber Badge on Friday March 06 2020, @03:42PM (#967456) Journal

      If you subsequently roll-back the code having decided that ad-hom moderations are not a good idea, how would the code know what moderation names should be applied to historic moderations? How would it know that the AdHom moderation should not be allowed for future moderations? We roll back the code but NOT the contents of the database - otherwise you lose everything that has been discussed during the period that the moderation was acceptable. Story and comment IDs become invalid, and a whole host of other problems ensue. Therefore, we keep the database as it is and the moderation name MUST remain in the moderation table, even though it is no longer available for use.

      One way to do that is to flag that moderation name as invalid, but that requires changes to the logic so that any attempt to use it as explained by TMB [soylentnews.org] cannot be actioned. The change is simple in concept, but requires a non-trivial effort to implement.

      • (Score: 2) by janrinok on Friday March 06 2020, @03:51PM

        by janrinok (52) Subscriber Badge on Friday March 06 2020, @03:51PM (#967464) Journal
        You must also remember that the code is stored on GitHub. Anyone is free to inspect the code and it is impossible to hide how the code hangs together. People WILL try to abuse the system - they already have and they probably always will.
      • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday March 06 2020, @04:49PM

        Oh it's relatively trivial but not purely cosmetic. The latter I'm okay with hot patching into the live code, the former I want run past martyb's perfectly good code breaking eyes for a bit.

        --
        My rights don't end where your fear begins.
    • (Score: 3, Informative) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday March 06 2020, @04:47PM (3 children)

      Nope. If it remained in the db, the code would see it as a valid moderation and allow it to be applied if you were to hand roll a POST request using the removed moderation. Also, the API doesn't know squat about a dropdown box, just what reasons are in the modreasons table.

      --
      My rights don't end where your fear begins.
      • (Score: 2) by pkrasimirov on Friday March 06 2020, @09:46PM (2 children)

        by pkrasimirov (3358) Subscriber Badge on Friday March 06 2020, @09:46PM (#967663)

        May I suggest quick and dirty solution if you are just trying things out? Make the new mods with ids 100+ or something. The rollback code change would be "WHERE id 100". Easier than adding a flag.