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posted by on Sunday April 19 2020, @03:36PM   Printer-friendly
from the economics dept.

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)

 
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  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 21 2020, @06:23AM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 21 2020, @06:23AM (#985354)

    Ethanol-fueled is a troll. However, I fail to see why it's necessary to further restrict his ability to post. If you don't think the troll mod has enough of an effect, you're more than capable of setting a -6 modifier for posts modded troll so you can avoid seeing them. You also have the ability to add Ethanol-fueled as a foe and set a -6 modifier for foes. If you don't want to see his posts, you are more than capable of ensuring you never see them. Why is it necessary to further impede his ability to post? I don't agree with his views but I also don't like censorship. Ethanol-fueled has a fairly low volume of posts and doesn't repost the same comment in an article when he gets modded down. It's not like he's straining the moderation system to deal with his trolling. He's not following around individual users and harassing them, just posting some troll comments while mixing in some genuinely worthwhile comments.

    I do wish that more users would use the spam mod on APK's comments. But Ethanol-fueled is quite benign compared to APK. Absolutely nobody is forcing you to read Ethanol-fueled's comments and you are more than capable of making sure you never see a single comment from him. Shouldn't that be enough?

    Starting Score:    0  points
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    Extra 'Insightful' Modifier   0  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Wednesday April 22 2020, @01:26AM (1 child)

    by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Wednesday April 22 2020, @01:26AM (#985631) Journal

    I've already done the personal modifier and "foes to -6" thing. That's...kinda not the point. Actually it's *anon* shitposting that's bugging me; IMO the simplest solution to this is just to set anon comments to -1 by default but what the hell.

    --
    I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
    • (Score: 2) by RS3 on Friday April 24 2020, @01:43AM

      by RS3 (6367) on Friday April 24 2020, @01:43AM (#986337)

      IMO the simplest solution to this is just to set anon comments to -1 by default ...

      Seems reasonable, but then the good AC comments will be seen by very few, and not likely get upmods to be seen by the many.

      I've given this a lot of thought- it's not an easy thing to solve.

      I think giving a lot more mod points, maybe based on karma, with no ceiling on karma, and 1 mod doesn't change your score by 1, but rather some percentage. Not easy, and would need a lot of collaborating, brainstorming, etc.