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from the still-a-meta,-and-it-is-not-changing dept.
It is a long time since we issued a Meta regarding the situation of the site. Much has been happening, but nowhere near as quickly as we had imagined or had hoped. But we are now almost there.
The handover of assets is taking place. The new Board has been instrumental in this and, when the transfer is finally complete, I know that NCommander wishes to write his own Meta to you, the community. Details of who is in which seat will happen once the handover is complete because, until that point, the current site is the one that has existed since 2014, and it is still headed by NCommander.
New hardware is being set up which will allow us to drastically reduce the running costs of the site. Two people, fliptop and kolie, have donated the use of servers and internet connections free of charge to SoylentNews. This is an extremely generous donation on their part and one for which the new Board is extremely grateful. Contracts, where requested, are being actioned as I write this Meta. There will still be annual costs for domains etc.
The new hardware will have a new software structure installed on it, based on Docker containers. These will provide a significantly easier system to manage and, hopefully, will also take care automatically with many of the disruptive issues that we have seen in recent months. I do not claim that there will not be any initial hiccups but the site will still be running on Rehash and will look and behave exactly as it does today. There will be issues regarding updates to software for which new procedures will have to be produced and documented, but that is a task for the future and it need not delay the transfer.
Regarding changes to software, there is an incident that took place last weekend. A community member informed us that the moderation system, under certain usages, could compromise the identity of both the moderator and the moderatee. I passed the information to NCommander and kolie who, despite it being a weekend, identified and confirmed the problem, and subsequently identified a potential fix. The software change was made by kolie first thing on (his) Monday morning, which means that a serious problem was identified and the fix implemented in a fraction over 24 hours. I don't think anyone could have done it any faster bearing in mind that this is an all-volunteer site and considering that it occurred at a time when most people would rather be having some private time with their families. The team we have at the moment is much smaller than we have ever had before but it is still capable of managing the site and keeping the stories flowing. It is only right that I acknowledge on your behalf the contribution made by, and offer my thanks to, the community member who reported the issue (who may identify themself if they wish), NCommander and in particular kolie, who is very much involved in the new site just as he has been for the last 18 months or so.
However, not all problems are under our control. The current issues with IRC have resulted in a ticket being raised by NCommander for support action to be taken by Akamai/Linode. The problem occurred immediately after some routine maintenance, and it appears to be related to DNS and IPv6 as a result of changes that have been introduced by that maintenance. I do not have all the details to hand but it is being actioned.
For this site to remain active and interesting we rely on community support. Whether that be by making submissions (you should know the sort of topics that we are looking for, and we can always put some things under the 'random' topic), or by offering to assist with one of the teams, or just by commenting as many of you are doing now. I realise that this is an important time in the run-up to an election but please discuss TFA and not bring politics into every discussion. You can discuss politics as much as you wish in your journals. In fact, there is no 'politics' topic, nor has there ever been one.
I have been asked numerous times when will ACs be allowed back onto the front pages? There is only one person stopping that from happening now, and it is not me. There will always be occasional spamming and that can be managed quite effectively by community moderation. When the excessive spamming and abuse stops for good then ACs can return to full discussions. But spamming will not result in closing down this site.
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(Score: 4, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday October 22, @02:23PM (8 children)
A few years ago I looked at SN's costs, and found them already very low. I'm a frugal person, and I couldn't see any way to lower SN's costs further. The software was all libre, no commercial stuff. I don't know about the hardware, but I do know it's possible to get old servers for a song. This article says the use of servers was donated to SN. Can't beat that. Well done!
This is so different from the waste of a typical organization. I SMH at organizations paying for commercial software for which there are perfectly acceptable libre applications that are often better. Why pay for MS Office when there is LibreOffice? But there's no penetrating the dogma of the typical manager who thinks "you get what you pay for". They go all in on the commercial, bamboozled by that propaganda. Subscribe to Adobe so that documents can be digitally signed. Subscribe to a pay video conferencing platform when there are so many free ones. Pay for Hushmail email accounts for everyone. Pay one of those bandit website maintainers a large monthly fee for that service, and end up locked in because that's how those website SaaS providers roll. THEY use libre web servers, because they aren't dumb like you, but in such a way that you are not free of them. Oh, you want to change website providers? Say goodbye to your old website, it'll have to be completely rebuilt, scraping can't get everything such as that Apache (or nginx or lighttpd or whatever) config file (God help you if it's IIS) and list of user accounts.
True, commercial stuff can be better, but when it is, it's often because of unfair advantages. For instance, the pay version of Adobe's PDF software can edit PDFs in ways that libre software really cannot. For instance, would you like a PDF form with a signature field? So I tried to do an e-signature (not a digital signature, just an e-signature) with LibreOffice, by specifying a font that looks like cursive handwriting. But LibreOffice does not support the use of custom fonts in text input fields in PDFs. It does in its native .odt file format, but not when exported to PDF. So far, the only software I have found that can do that is commercial stuff. It figures that the parent of the PDF standard, Adobe, would make sure their commercial software can do things with PDF that no libre software can do. Yet the entire issue can still be avoided by using real digital signatures, no PDF needed at all!
(Score: 4, Insightful) by fliptop on Tuesday October 22, @03:33PM (6 children)
I've had clients who insist MS Office is better and worth the expense, simply b/c there's one or two features LibreOffice doesn't have or support. Same for email vs. Thunderbird. Which is fine by me, b/c I'll be making money when they call me to fix something.
It's a lot like food, why pay more for fresh fruit, veggies and meat when you can eat ultra processed crap for much less? You'll wind up paying a lot more in medical bills, gym membership, and lost time due to reduced desire.
Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
(Score: 3, Informative) by fliptop on Tuesday October 22, @03:37PM (5 children)
My bad, I meant to say it's the opposite of what happens w/ food. Neither makes any sense to me.
Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Wednesday October 23, @02:37AM
Nah, you good. Many thanks to you and kolie and everyone else back there behind the counter.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by canopic jug on Wednesday October 23, @02:52AM (3 children)
My bad, I meant to say it's the opposite of what happens w/ food. Neither makes any sense to me.
I had wondered about that.
As for the number of features, if LibreOffice (or any other non-M$ software) has fewer features, more features, or the same number of features it does not matter, for the most part. The reason is that if the software happens to have all the features people actually use, then the extra features are irrelevant and might as well not exist. M$ has been using the feature list in marketing since at least the late 1980s back when not only were there actual reviews of desktop software but the competing software was compared. M$ eventually effectively banned comparisons and benchmarking and negative reviews of their products for a while but all the while before that they simply piled on the features whether they worked or not so that the reviews could advertise to the box tickers [a4kids.org] that their product had "more features" than the ones they were starting to compete against.
As for the features themselves, the "Internet Driver's License" marketing scam which m$ has going in many countries doesn't go much beyond what you would have in mousepad let alone LibreOffice. FFS that curriculum does not even cover either styles, stylesheets, or document templates. It's like a typing class on old typewriters, but with the exclusion of proper typing technique.
Again, if a product or tool happens to have the features which a person actually uses or is likely to use, then it meets their needs. In that area, LibreOffice is far more than enough for anyone I've spoken with regarding productivity software or observed in the wild during recent decades. And, not that it matters, LibreOffice has more and better features in some areas. Likewise for Calligra.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 2) by fliptop on Wednesday October 23, @12:49PM (2 children)
IIRC the most recent instance was multiple page searching in a spreadsheet. Apparently when you hit CTRL-F in LibreOffice and type a search string it only searches the page you're currently on. In Excel CTRL-F brings up a dialog box and you can check a box that says "Search all Pages."
Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
(Score: 3, Informative) by canopic jug on Wednesday October 23, @01:13PM (1 child)
IIRC the most recent instance was multiple page searching in a spreadsheet. Apparently when you hit CTRL-F in LibreOffice and type a search string it only searches the page you're currently on. In Excel CTRL-F brings up a dialog box and you can check a box that says "Search all Pages."
While it is true that there is not a direct option for that in the search dialog itself there is at least one work-around. A work-around is to ctrl-click on the relevant tabs first to select them — and then press ctrl-f to search.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 2) by fliptop on Wednesday October 23, @02:09PM
Thanks for the tip, I'll pass it along if I encounter this situation again.
Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by dx3bydt3 on Wednesday October 23, @10:12PM
If you can pinpoint exactly where on the page of your PDF you want the signature, you can create another PDF to act as a "watermark" and use PDFTK to watermark that page. This approach would work for single page PDF files anyway, but I'm not 100% sure you can do it easily with multipage documents. PDFTK can be used to split the main document, then apply watermark, then reassemble. Clumsy but possible with libre software, at least probably. I know it works for PDFs I've created, not so sure about someone else's.