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SoylentNews
So, COVID-19 (coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, whatever you call it) sucks a bit for your health but it turns out it sucks a lot for the economy. So we're extending any subscriptions that were going to expire before then out to June first (this may be extended a time or two depending on how well our savings hold up). Yeah, we know we're an extremely small cap entity and that's not going to make a whole lot of difference but it's something we felt we should do anyway for a couple reasons.
First, we as a corporation do not have paid employees. The only people we give money to are our hosts, our registrar, our CPA, and the revenooers. Which we're going to have to continue doing regardless and which we can currently afford to do for a month or two without dire risk of having to make infrastructure cutbacks. Putting money into us during this nonsense doesn't help much in directly putting food on someone's table or keeping jobs from going poof, so we'd prefer you guys put anything you were going to send us to work where it will help at least a tiny bit in keeping the businesses that your neighbors work at afloat. Which is to say, spend it locally.
Second, we're quite fond of the folks who've chosen to financially support the site and we don't want them to get dinged because of something that wasn't remotely their fault.
Now we're not shutting down the site's subscription functionality. If you feel a desire to contribute anyway, we're happy to oblige and we're not going to tell you that you can't. We're not the bosses of your wallets and it would mean extra work for me when I don't really have time to do much of anything code/admin-wise.
Also, we're only doing this automatically for current and new subscribers; we don't want to hit people who weren't interested with an unsolicited email about subscription expiration when we have to shut the extensions down. They may have quit subscribing or even frequenting the site and it's annoying as all get out to keep getting emails from sites you stopped doing business with on purpose. We're happy to handle it manually, though, if your subscription ended any time since the first of the year. Just drop a comment to this journal entry (NOT to THIS story!) and I'll take care of it as often as I have time (at least once a day).
That's all. We now return you to your regularly scheduled mix of discussion, debate, yelling at each other, and trolling.
(Oh, and you can still submit stories, too! Hint hint! --martyb)
(Score: 1, Troll) by Subsentient on Monday April 20 2020, @12:54AM (8 children)
Again, people using euphemisms and slang for the virus.
Just use the official WHO name.
EBOLAIDS.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
(Score: 3, Funny) by kazzie on Monday April 20 2020, @10:28AM
The EBOLAIDS? Are those the creatures from the Crab Nebula that got squished by Dr WHO's Tardis?
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday April 20 2020, @11:09AM (6 children)
It started out as Coronaids but martyb likes accuracy above humor for some reason. He even changed the email column on the subscription grant entries to read 'COVID-19' instead of 'coffee++'.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by martyb on Tuesday April 21 2020, @08:16AM (5 children)
I had a good friend -- kind, gentle, polite, sensitive, and caring -- who was given one year to live, but finally succumbed to AIDS after something like a dozen years. I learned much from her in how she dealt with adversity and societal rejection. Would the same 'humor' apply because someone had diabetes or cancer or any other disease? I find the it to be not funny and to be in poor taste.
As for coffee++, I refer you to the story recently posted here, Beware the wrath of Abibarshim. If yoy have ever had to refactor code which used 'funny' variable names like ringo and paul and george or xyzzy plugh and plover, you might better understand why I prefer a 1:1 correspondence between semantics and syntax. We have decades old COBOL code people are still supporting. Our site code is a fork of 10+ year old slashcode. In another 10 or 20 years, should someone want to update *our* code, I suspect 'COVID-19' will be more explanatory than 'coffee++'. Who knows, it might even be you looking at the code and thinking wtf? =)
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday April 21 2020, @02:08PM (3 children)
I almost always think "WTF" when looking at a piece of rehash that I've never touched. Hell, I usually initially think it when it's code that I wrote but haven't touched in a year. The "coffee++" entries were in a field in the DB that otherwise would have been left blank though, so I amused myself.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by martyb on Tuesday April 21 2020, @06:54PM (2 children)
Last things first:
Actually, the 'email' field is directly entered by the user when subscribing. That said, I did not like the chance of a false positive using that field. Upon further reflection, I have restored the 'coffee++' values in the email field, and instead updated the 'method' field's value to 'CV-19'. Not ideal, but we're limited to what would fit in a CHAR(6). It also has the benefit of being strictly under our control — no false positives!
It's good to know that I'm in good company when going wtf while looking at the Perl code!
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday April 23 2020, @11:13PM (1 child)
No need to go to actual effort to restore a bit of momentary amusement, man. I had my chuckle already.
Correction:The email field is never used on grant type subscription entries. And since the trans_id for them already begins with "##Corona", there's no need to put it in any other field.
Good code... No, scratch that. Working as intended code is self-documenting. Which is to say, being able to understand (without comments) what's going on by reading a bit of code should be an absolute requirement for anyone to ever touch that bit of code without supervision.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by martyb on Thursday April 23 2020, @11:32PM
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Azuma Hazuki on Wednesday April 22 2020, @01:38AM
Remember Uzzard's entire guiding philosophy is "whether it amuses me or not." You're dealing with a sociopath here, Marty. He'll *try* and spin it as George-Carlin-esque irreverence and a healthy freedom-lovin' good-ol'-boy disregard for censorship, but that's a wafer-thin excuse for letting his assholery fly on full display.
Just understand who and what it is you're working with, okay?
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...