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As promised, here's the round-table discussion post that I said on Wednesday was coming. We have a long history at SoylentNews of listening and responding to our community; I genuinely hope that never changes. I also recognize that I may have ruffled some feathers in the last few weeks with original content postings so here's the best place to get this all out.
I am mindful of the community's support and goodwill; I don't want to squander any of it. Yes, there are times where my hand may be forced (e.g., DCMA takedowns). Still, I'm always a bit hesitant whenever I post on the main site for anything that isn't site update news or similar. I may be the de facto site leader, but I want my submissions to be treated like anyone else's — I want no favoritism. The editorial team does review my stories and signs off before they go live (unless it's an "emergency" situation such as the last time we blew up the site). However, as the saying goes, the buck stops with me.
SoylentNews accepts original content. I'm also aware that I've probably submitted the most original content so far (See "Previously", below for some examples). I'm grateful for the community's apparent acceptance of my submissions and the positive responses to them. What I don't know is if there is an undercurrent of displeasure with these. Maybe everyone thinks these are all fine. Then again, maybe somebody has an issue with them. Rather than assume anything, let's get it all out in the open.
What I want to cover in this round-table discussion is original content and having images in posts as well as topics such as yesterday's Live Show on Improving Your Security -- Wednesday June 3rd, 2020.
So, contributors and commenters to SoylentNews, get that Reply button hot and let me hear your feedback. As usual, either a member of staff or I will respond to your comments below,
73 de NCommander
Previously:
(2020-06-03) Live Show on Improving Your Security -- Wednesday June 3rd, 2020
(2020-05-24) Retrotech: The Novell NetWare Experience
(2020-05-14) Exploring Windows for Workgroups 3.11 - Early 90s Networking
(2020-05-10) Examining Windows 1.0 HELLO.C - 35 Years of Backwards Compatibility
(2020-05-15) Meta: Having a Chat about SoylentNews' Internet Relay Chat
(2018-10-25) My Time as an ICANN Fellow
(2017-10-09) soylentnews.org experiencing DNSSEC issues
(2017-04-20) Soylentnews.org is Moving to Gentoo...
(2017-04-17) SN Security Updates: CAA, LogJam, HTTP Method Disable, and 3DES
(2017-03-13) Xenix 2.2.3c Restoration: Xrossing The X (Part 4)
(Score: 5, Interesting) by janrinok on Monday June 08 2020, @02:57PM (14 children)
Using images in material processed by the editors is relatively safe. Part of their job is check the suitability of material for release. Images in journals could be much more problematic. There is no editorial check of journals - nor should there be. But that means that a journal could easily contain links to material that is either unsuitable or illegal. Who is responsible for checking that every quoted link points to something that isn't going to end up with us in a legal battle?
As we all know, we cannot even afford to mount any legal defence and the presence of such material could easily lead to a situation where the site is closed down simply because we cannot afford to argue that we are not responsible for the contents of journals. Somebody with an axe to grind could easily leave something in their parting journal entry intended to cause a major problem for us as a site. For that reason I would strongly recommend that images are reserved for published stories only, and not included in journals or comments.
As for original material my view is let's be having it! We often stretch the boundaries of topics to cover stories that might generate an interesting discussion so, as long as they are factual and researched and written with references to sources where necessary, then I can see such material only enhancing the site. However, material based on personal opinions or views should be kept for journals.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 08 2020, @03:09PM
Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition but everybody expects the ancient Greek mathematician...
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday June 08 2020, @03:21PM (1 child)
I agree but not on disk space not copyright or legal grounds. Text is every bit as copyrightable as images are and Journals are no more or less our responsibility as a site than comments are. But images take up way more space if we store them in the db and cause extra headaches for me to code around if we allow <img>/<video> tags to world+dog.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Tuesday June 09 2020, @09:21PM
But most of us can write text. But few of us can make decent images, so there's a greater temptation to filch them from elsewhere.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by shortscreen on Monday June 08 2020, @03:55PM (6 children)
Just for the record, I have no opposition to ncommander or others who are invested in the site posting their own stuff on occasion. But you and TFS appear to be soliciting original content from the wider user base. If so, are there more guidelines about this? For instance, what would distinguish a submission that is worthy of the front page vs. a journal post? What topics are welcome? And if images/etc. are to be permitted, would those be hosted by SN and how would they be submitted?
(Score: 4, Informative) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday June 08 2020, @05:17PM (4 children)
Not an editor but what we discussed in our super secret IRC channel that motivated this discussion mostly boiled down to we don't really want to be posting any original content besides tech/science type stuff to the front page. Op-ed, politics (unless we get an interview or one of the community is running for office or something), and such need to go in a journal. But it's just a general consensus of whoever was around on IRC at the time not a rule, which is why NC asked here.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by fustakrakich on Monday June 08 2020, @07:26PM (1 child)
mostly boiled down to we don't really want to be posting any original content besides tech/science type stuff to the front page. Op-ed, politics (unless we get an interview or one of the community is running for office or something), and such need to go in a journal.
That's perfect! Who the hell is arguing against it? If you spot a particularly interesting journal, can they be cross posted to the front page?
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by NCommander on Tuesday June 09 2020, @01:11AM
We can *sorta* cross-post a journal to the main page. This is actually part of rehash, and code we inherited from Slashdot. As we got it though, the feature was partially broken so it's currently disabled (and has been since GoLive). It's been something I've been meaning to fix for ... oh say five years now?
Maybe something I'll do on one of my hacking streams.
Still always moving
(Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 08 2020, @11:38PM (1 child)
That's backwards, let users write and submit political articles under the politics nexus. People who hate politics should just hide those stories in their preferences or ignore them. Politics and opinion are more discussed than anything else here, and we'd see far more interesting original content if it wasn't relegated to journals.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday June 09 2020, @04:44PM
I get your point but it would also lead to mountains of butthurt. We'd turn down a huge majority of politics op-eds for being poorly written, outlandishly biased, or just because we don't like to run more than one or two a day max.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 5, Informative) by janrinok on Monday June 08 2020, @06:29PM
We have always encouraged original material provided that it meets all the other requirements that are expected of front page material.
The expected topics are the ones that we have always covered. So, if you have something that you have researched or even have a significant interest in and which fits into the topics that we usually cover (Business, Career & Education, Code, Digital Liberty, Hardware, Mobile (devices), OS, Science, Security, Software, Soylent. Techonomics etc) then by all means submit it as you would any other submission. However, like any other submission, we would expect it to contain supporting references for any claims that you rely on and not simply be your own personal views or opinions. You should be able to defend your submission to critical review and back up your own claims by either your own research or by references from a reputable source, or at least be able to sensibly and logically argue your findings to the community in the subsequent discussion. It would help us significantly if you clearly identify such submissions as 'Original Material' so that we can process them appropriately.
NCommander's articles are a very good example of what we would like to see. He has resurrected software that was obsolete many years ago, and he has looked at how it was developed, what design decisions appear to have been made, and their long-term implications etc. It fits into several of the topics that we cover and, as a result, it received a positive response from our community and generated a good discussion.
Original material submissions would usually have to be by a named member as it is very likely that the editorial staff would need to contact you to discuss the submission during its processing to make sure that we are representing your submission accurately, but if you are prepared to provide us with a contact method we can protect your identity when/if the submission is published.
But do not let what I have written dissuade you from making the submission - we can always help you to put your submission together into something that we can work with and which will interest some of our community and generate a discussion. We would all , manpower permitting, prefer to spend time helping someone put a submission together rather than have to rely on bots to find suitable material for our site.
If you want to express your own opinions or even insightful views on a topic but it is not something that you have researched or have specialist knowledge about, then that would be more appropriately placed in your own journal.
That is part of what we are discussing in this thread. However, the ability to include images or other media in submissions is built into the system although it is currently disabled for the wider community, partly because of security reasons but also for technical reasons. Currently we tend to use simple links to external sources where images are essential to explain the content under discussion
Other editors might - in fact, almost certainly will - have different views on this topic hence the discussion.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by VLM on Monday June 08 2020, @08:51PM (3 children)
I'll see your "illegal images" and raise the stakes with "illegal numbers"
This rather large binary number was VERY illegal about 13 years ago. 09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0 I don't think anyone cares about that number anymore, but it was a big deal a long time ago.
Other examples of illegal numbers: Absolute power corrupts absolutely and its illegal in some backwards parts of the world to not bow down to claims about "the six million". Ironically given that one extremist group has absolute power over that topic, and everyone knows absolute power corrupts absolutely, the people most responsible for encouraging holocaust denial are the people who wrote those theoretically well-meaning yet despotic laws.
Another psuedo illegal number can be seen in statistics. Its borderline illegal in 2020 to notice the mathematical fact that 13% of the population commit 52% of the murders.
My point is the pix aren't a new issue, and theres lots of existing law and tech to handle illegal content that already applies to the site.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 09 2020, @05:05AM
It is called criminal stupidity, and it seems to have a non-zero transmission rate. Sorry you caught it, but treatment is available whenever you get desperate enough to be taken seriously.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Tuesday June 09 2020, @07:11AM (1 child)
I remember that number too!
However, my concern would be with something like child pornography or material which aids terrorists, where the laws in the US take a very unusual stance. It is has appeared on your server - even if subsequently removed - you can still be accused of distributing such material. We cannot even afford to have a lawyer go to court to plead our case so I suspect that, in US law at least, we would be guilty.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday June 10 2020, @12:02AM
Same thing applies to someone posting song lyrics or plenty of National Security stuff. We start down the road of censoring any time someone might take us to court and it'll quickly descend into absurdity, because you can take folks to court without the slightest bit of merit to your claim.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 08 2020, @02:58PM (3 children)
As long as they're tastefully pornographic.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 08 2020, @03:15PM
There. FTFY.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday June 08 2020, @08:24PM (1 child)
I would say maybe 24% of reddit pr0n is along the lines of "if you'd like to see more, my reddit name is my onlyfans name" or similar for instagram etc.
On the bright side 74% of reddit is good old fashioned pr0n.
Reddit has a good scam running where the remaining 2% of the site is extreme leftist propaganda and echo chambers. So they get the corporate support of being that ultra leftist commie discussion group site whereas they're actually a pr0n site. Honestly I think there's more non-pr0n content on pornhub ("The Sex Video site") than on Reddit ("The Angry Jewish Lesbian discussion group site")
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 09 2020, @05:14AM
Maybe you should stick to Voat, they like your kind over there.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by crm114 on Monday June 08 2020, @03:03PM (1 child)
I enjoy your posts.
Especially enjoyed your walk down Novell history. Worked at a shop that was one of the first Novell386 installs in NYC, your post made me want to fire up my DR-DOS VM and set up an IPX network - just for old times sake.
I think that kind of sharing of "how we got here" is important to the community.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by VLM on Monday June 08 2020, @08:29PM
I also enjoyed that post, and to embrace and extend your remarks there's a big difference between OC posts that are just one-way spam and OC posts that generate huge (by SN standards) 3rd party discussion in the comments. Its not just important to the community, its also fun.
As long as it stays fun, stirring the pot for technical topics seems pretty cool. If in contrast, NC merely posted (his) noodz and a link to his onlyfans and insta resulting in no community discussion then I wouldn't like it.
(Score: 1) by leon_the_cat on Monday June 08 2020, @04:00PM (1 child)
You can then grow site quickly. Use this to take over all social media and replace Zuckerberg as KING. I will e-mail you a crown when mission is complete.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday June 08 2020, @05:19PM
I got no beef with cat memes/videos but I personally prefer the professional idiots stay in the nice, pretty jails that Facebook and Twitter serve as. Makes this place much nicer.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by looorg on Monday June 08 2020, @04:26PM (6 children)
I'm ok with images in the articles, original content or not, if they serve some kind of purpose and the image is needed to show something and just isn't there for the sake of just having images -- that would be pointless and a waste. I don't think most stories posted actually need or would be improved by having images in them. But I could be wrong. Perhaps a trial period or experiment running for a few weeks is in order?
Perhaps an account preference if you like to show the images or not? Sort of of like how you can select which colors or theme you like to have to. So you can just turn it on and off on a global setting, or have a few settings for yes/no in stories and yes/no in comments?
That said I don't think I would like to see images in comments, not even for registered users. If you have an image post a link and I'll look at it if I want to. Just taking some of the multi-page stories and it would probably be very annoying if it started to pre-load all the images people would post. I prefer the pages to load fast and snappy over having images.
(Score: 3, Touché) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday June 08 2020, @05:26PM
Those are pretty much my exact thoughts on images in comments, with the addition of a fair amount of existential dread at what EF would post.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Common Joe on Monday June 08 2020, @07:45PM (4 children)
I think I'm good with images for posts that require it and only if reviewed by editors.
For one, I'd prefer not to see a picture of the Antarctic with some cute king penguins when talking about Linux. And more importantly, if someone says something NSFW, that's a lot more acceptable to read at work than having a multi-megapixel closeup of some girl spread eagle unexpectedly pop up on the screen. So, no images in journals and no images in comments.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 08 2020, @08:10PM (3 children)
I completely agree! Face down, ass up close ups only!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 08 2020, @11:50PM (2 children)
Just move to Australia. I hear everything is upside-down in Australia.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 09 2020, @03:03PM (1 child)
And in Rand-McNally, they wear hats on their feet and hamburgers eat people. [wikipedia.org]
You are in for *such* a booting!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 09 2020, @11:50PM
Come on, you have to at least link to the clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_ef0WvOPTg [youtube.com]
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Monday June 08 2020, @05:20PM
I, mean, Ari notwithstanding, I'm all for it.
I kid! I kid!
Love ya, Ari!
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 1) by redneckmother on Monday June 08 2020, @05:25PM
A refreshing attitude, Friend. Thank you!
Mas cerveza por favor.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 08 2020, @08:27PM (10 children)
Images should be limited to original content only, with strong editorial applied. I.E. never in journals, comments or the summary articles.
As an aggregator SN is mostly about summary, hyperlink and commentary, for that pics are totally NOT necessary. If the summary and comments pique my interest of course a trip to TFA is likely, where original authors intended impact of pics is more appropriate.
Agree that pics/diagrams are absolutely required for the STEM content we expect to see in original content here on SN, where a hyperlink to an image store loses out on inline images. Would therefore support more people being given rights to post pics, as long as aforementioned editorial load is given and okay for eds.
One question. Does this mean subs queue would have pics, or are image laden articles handled differently?
(Score: 1) by Maddog on Tuesday June 09 2020, @06:29PM
Totally agree regarding images: limit to original content only, strong editorial approval, and never in journals or comments.
The last thing this site needs is memes. Go elsewhere for them. Text forces individuals to "put words to paper" and think!
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Tuesday June 09 2020, @09:40PM (8 children)
Perhaps allow only SVG images? They'd blend right in with allowable HTML tags.
And as for what's needed for STEM content: mathematical notation. Perhaps allow mathml or even (if absolutely necessary) mathjax. Using images for math is *not* OK.
I would like to present a few category-theoretic diagrams here from time to time.
-- hendrik
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday June 10 2020, @12:04AM (7 children)
I'd love to but you have no idea how enormous an ask that is.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 10 2020, @05:24AM (6 children)
I've looked at adding MathML to the rehash code. The problem I ran into is that the tag balancing and other code doesn't behave the way I thought it should with test inputs when I ripped it out into its own file. However, if you wanted my basic idea, it is made easier because the MathML elements are only valid within a "math" element. Roughly, your tag balancing code checks the markup as if the data between the start and end math tags didn't exist, and then run a dedicated math balancer against the code between the start and end math tags. Thus you separate concerns. Without MathML, the slowdown should be minimal and the attack surface identical to the present. With MathML, the new system only has to worry about the MathML itself without worry of interacting with the rest of the comment.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday June 10 2020, @05:40AM (2 children)
Consider a missing </math> tag and the difficulties getting it put in the right place in the balanceTags sub. Further consider that we couldn't just ignore anything inside <math> tags because of all the unicode hilarity that would rapidly ensue. Plenty of our processing that we do is straight up text processing rather than html processing and would also need to be done to anything inside <math> tags. And there would be exceptions needing carved out.
Man, this is going to give me nightmares but it's late and I'm going to bed anyway.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 10 2020, @08:11AM (1 child)
Fair enough and, to be clear, I'm not volunteering you for it. I was just putting my thoughts down in case it was helpful to you or others who felt like tackling it. If you genuinely don't care or are not in the mood, you might want to skip to the last two paragraphs for the humor.
But to your points, a missing closing math tag could be handled two ways. The first is according to the standard. If you hit any HTML tag outside a token or HTML annotation, put the close there. If it errors, it errors. They should have fixed it in the first place.
Even easier, you'd have to regex the thing looking for math tags to determine your code path or at the split, so reject it at that stage if a closing math is missing or your splits your indexes > 0 don't split after splitting on the opening tag or however tickles the implementer's fancy.
Before and after the balancing part would mostly look the same, as it is mostly just the processing of tags and sanitizing the MathML specific part that is different in the case of MathML. The server could still check for too many combining characters, or whatever else it looks for, as MathML still has to conform to the XML and HTML. There are plenty of pitfalls for MathML, many you probably haven't thought of and an order of magnitude more I haven't thought of, but a missing closing math tag isn't really one of them.
If you've made it this far, I've got a project you might want to do that might help this along and take it off your plate. Make a bot that scans the firehose of comments, and every time a user other than yourself or itself uses the term "MathML" have it post the following text as a reply, but be sure to change that first link to a comment I'm sure already exists somewhere.
Now that I think of it, maybe that last one should link to your payment processor of choice. Depending on the number of trailing zeros, it could be quite helpful in getting it done after all.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday June 10 2020, @11:40AM
Yeah, I ain't saying it couldn't be done, just that it'd be a lot of work.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Thursday June 11 2020, @03:46PM (2 children)
Tag balancing? I don't understand the problem. Can't you just reject any posts with math tags that aren't already balanced? Isn't mathml just properly balanced XML?
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 11 2020, @10:41PM (1 child)
MathML in HTML allows implicit closing as you go out of scope. But even if you wanted to enforce explicit closing, the tag blanacer still has to check everything is closed in proper scope and that requires quite a bit of work. You'd also have to do the various bits of sanitation on the MathML, which includes entity references, Unicode silliness, href and other dangerous attribute removal, safe Content/Presentation markup separation, annotation sanitizing, etc. And you have to do that without adversely affecting posts without MathML or increasing your profiling results too much.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday June 12 2020, @03:59PM
Yup. And the current order of operations would make that necessary in many different places in the order of execution and source files alike. We're just not geared to handle a second markup language at the moment, though I'd most definitely leave room for a third, fourth, Nth to be easily added later if I end up adding a second.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 08 2020, @08:28PM
I'll stop reading SN if there are images in comments or journals. It's far too likely that goatsex (or far worse) will appear in comments. No thanks.
I'm a little more accepting of the idea of images in stories, provided the images are hosted on SN. If they're hosted on a third-party server, it's far too easy for them to be taken offline and become broken at a later date, or changed to another image after the story gets posted to SN. Trolls could easily submit a story with images hosted on their own servers, then changing those images to goatsex once the story gets posted. If images are visible in stories that are in the submission queue, it's still easy for goatsex to appear at an SN URL. I do look through the submission queue because there are interesting stories that don't get posted. If there's goatsex in a rejected story, the URL to the rejected story would still be valid, still allowing people to be tricked into viewing goatsex at an SN URL.
Basically, if there's a risk of seeing images I don't want to see, then I'll stop reading SN. I can scroll past obscene text and even ASCII art can be ignored fairly easily. But that doesn't work quite so well for images. If there's a high risk of encountering goatsex (or worse), I'll leave. It's been many years since I've seen hello.jpg and I would prefer not to encounter it again.
(Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 08 2020, @11:42PM
Just trash moderation altogether except for spam. It only makes people angry, and doesn't provide any value. Just get rid of it and let people hide AC posts if they don't want to see.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Tuesday June 09 2020, @02:24AM (2 children)
I have two requests that I've requested before. First, allow journals to be internet searchable. I get that there's abuse potential in journals, but surely, we can figure a way to do that without enabling the spammers and SEOers.
Second, math in journals, please. I believe I have commented on both in journals before.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Tuesday June 09 2020, @09:42PM
Math in articles, too.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday June 10 2020, @12:05AM
See above [soylentnews.org].
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday June 09 2020, @03:39PM
What are "images in posts?" I use Lynx.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday June 09 2020, @03:47PM (1 child)
I would say that as far as moderation goes, we don't have a volume of comments that really requires meta moderation or anything like that. It's unusual for a post to get more than 100 comments, so even if you browse at -1 you can quickly scroll through everything. I do that because there is a mild issue with mod abuse that crops up from time to time, and I like to see what everyone has to say, even if I disagree with it. When I moderate I only mod up; if I disagree with something I try to respond instead, because discussion is what makes the community tick, and, I believe, disagreement and discussion about it makes all of us smarter and gets us to learn new things or see known issues in different lights.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 09 2020, @05:41PM
I'd add that such discussion helps us improve our rhetorical skills and in doing so (hopefully) forces us to examine our views more critically in order to do so.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Tuesday June 09 2020, @04:17PM
I've enjoyed the original content, please continue.
I don't mind the images. If they actually help explain the topic at hand, I'm all for it, just not the vaguely related content free ones some tech sites feel the need to post with every article.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by hendrikboom on Tuesday June 09 2020, @09:45PM
We need an "incomprehensible" mod.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Tuesday June 09 2020, @09:46PM
We need to be able to include mathematical notation in posts, articles, and comments.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Tuesday June 09 2020, @09:48PM (5 children)
Can we get comments of different moderation levels displayed in different colours?
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday June 10 2020, @12:12AM (4 children)
Pretty easily but I think it'd annoy more folks than it made happy unless it was optional.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Sunday June 14 2020, @09:12PM (3 children)
Just like the old-style green letters on a black background is optional. I use it all the time and really like it. But it has the effect of confusing me momentarily whenever I hear someone talking about the "green site".
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday June 15 2020, @09:45AM (2 children)
Well, making it optional would mean writing a second CSS file for each and every theme and then deciding if that gets put in a user's page based on their setting. Relatively simple but not as simple as using Stylish or the like to do so for you. Comments have a score1, score2, etc... class applied to one of their highest level divs, so it should be dead easy and to pick whichever colors you like and apply them to whatever sub-elements you like based on comment score. Really, if I were to work something like that up, I'd probably have to save two user color settings (background and font) for every scoring to account for colorblind folks and folks who just dislike my color choices.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Monday June 15 2020, @05:32PM (1 child)
So it looks as if the way to do this is for me to use Stylish. I'll look into it.
Thanks.
-- hendrik
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday June 18 2020, @12:38PM
If it gives you much of a headache at all let me know and pick your colors and I'll write one up for you. Won't take ten minutes.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Tuesday June 09 2020, @09:50PM (5 children)
Can we have an API so that I can write my own code to display Soylent News the way I want?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 09 2020, @11:53PM (3 children)
They already have one: https://wiki.soylentnews.org/wiki/ApiDocs [soylentnews.org]
Have to warn you though, the docs don't match the implementation 100%. I've had to work around a few unexpected bits of behavior. Also, the comments returned have different information depending on if they are a response to a discussion request or single request.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday June 10 2020, @12:15AM (1 child)
Get me a list of the workarounds you're having to do and I'll put them on my to-do list.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 10 2020, @08:18PM
Most are in the issue tracker already or relatively minor. I'll have to check my code to get a definitive list.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Thursday June 18 2020, @01:16AM
Looks usable.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday June 10 2020, @12:15AM
See AC's comment above. It's by no means fully functional but it should work well enough for story reading, comment reading, and posting.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.