SoylentNews

So, I've recently revived my gaming streak, and for as long as I've gamed, I've always enjoyed interacting with others. As such, I'm curious what games SN folks play. I've been strongly tempted to setup a Minecraft server for SoylentNews, but I don't really want to put in the effort if no one else is interested in playing. So, here's my simple question for the community; what games do you play, and would you want to play on an SN hosted server?

I'm tempted to make any gaming-related things be a subscriber perk, as an attempt to both increase subscriber benefits, and make such a target harder to grief. Not sure if it's a great idea, so I'd love to get feedback below.

cmn32480 writes:

As you are all aware, we are in the middle of the dog days of summer. We get it, people are busy with work, family, and a plethora of other things. Some of our (volunteer) staff need a break too, so we are looking for a few good people, be they man, woman, child, animal, mineral or vegetable, to join our ranks and help spread the workload.

There are a number of ways to help out:

• Join us on our webchat IRC or, if you are new to IRC (I was only a year ago), check here for some tips on getting connected.
• Email mrcoolbp (or if you are sick of that guy any other staff member like janrinok will do; "nickname@soylentnews.org" works for any of us)
• Read the wiki page on "Getting Involved"

One thing that this site needs more than anything else to thrive is submissions.

We greatly appreciate all of our submitters. The submission queue is the lifeblood of SoylentNews, when it is empty, there is nothing to read, learn from, and argue about.

Takyon, Hugh Pickens, Phoenix666, and Arthur T. Knackerbracket come immediately to mind as people that we see submissions from a lot, and they present great submissions. However, consider that just one article a week from 25% of our registered users would give us more material than we can use, and yield a far greater variety of viewpoints, opinions, and stories. When you find something interesting, submit a story. Take a quick peek at our Submission Guidelines for some insight into best practices.

"But what do I submit?". Check out the RSSbot logs. Scroll down to 'today' and check out the links. This bot simply posts stories from various relevant sources in real-time by scraping RSS feeds (you can refresh the page and get more up-to-date stories).

A well crafted summary is preferred, but not an absolute necessity. Your summary doesn't have to be elaborate. It could be a copy/paste of the first paragraph or two from the article, but please, be sure to give us the link where you are getting the material.

I can only speak for myself, but I find the time spent working on SoylentNews and hanging around on IRC generally pretty relaxing. It is fun for me, and I appreciate that the community is an interesting place with people from many places, industries, and walks of life. It is a place where I come to learn, and read things I would otherwise never see.

Thanks to you all for helping build a great community, and we hope to see many new faces over the coming months.

--cmn32480

Original Submission

For a good portion of today, SoylentNews was generating 503 errors if you either logged in or tried to post a comment. While not 100% consistent, the underlying problem is that the design of MySQL cluster requires us to manually allocate space for indexes and data storage. Today, the index storage maxed out, and MySQL refused to insert new rows stating "Table 'name' is full".

We've doubled the size of the IndexMemory which should solve this issue in the short term. Longer term, we need to migrate some data to reside permanently on HDD storage. If anyone has experience with MySQL Cluster and can offer suggestions, we're all ears.

Here's our current memory usage on the cluster for those who are interested:

ndb_mgm> all report memoryusage
Node 2: Data usage is 81%(53650 32K pages of total 65536)
Node 2: Index usage is 46%(15407 8K pages of total 32800)
Node 3: Data usage is 81%(53648 32K pages of total 65536)
Node 3: Index usage is 46%(15407 8K pages of total 32800)

Sorry for any inconvenience

So, for those who saw the announcement yesterday about doing another community event, here's the follow up details.

I'm going to be hosting this on my Twitch profile, while being active in both #soylent on IRC (please hightlight my nick to get my attention), and the integrated Twitch chat itself. I'm looking for some members of the community who'd be interested in joining on a Skype call. As previous mentioned, the game of choice is Europa Universals IV, and at the start of the stream, I'll give a crash course of the game mechanics. As of writing, I've been leading towards playing as Aragon or Venice, though I'll be glad to take other suggestions.

I'm currently planning to stream between 5PM Eastern (50 minutes after this goes up) to 9PM, fielding whatever questions the SoylentNews community has for me, and will be inviting both members of the staff and those active on the stream to join me as host.

For those who were with us on April 1st, you may remember that I hosted an eBBQ playing Nethack. There's been some talk on doing something like this again, perhaps in the form of an ongoing Dungeons and Dragons campaign or similar. While those still remain up in the air, given our relative stability at the moment, doing another livestreaming event seems like it would be a fair bit of fun both for the staff and the community.

I'd like to make this a semi-regular feature, and invite members of the community to both join on the stream (via Skype), or even in the game itself as either allies or opponents. As such, I'm going to be hosting the second SoylentNews eBBQ this Friday, and then try to repeat every few weeks or so.

As for the choice of game, I've been feeling an urge to play Europa Universalis IV . For those unfamiliar with the series, Europa Univeralis is a set of simulation games set from the late 1400s to the early 1800s, covering the vast majority of the age of sail. As for time, I'd proposed Friday at about 5PM EST, and continuing at least until 9, if not later (the first SN eBBQ was a 24 hour event, though that was more due to insanity). I'd love to hear from the community if anyone would be interested in listening in, or actively joining. The time isn't set in stone, and I can move it if the community feels later in the evening, or perhaps during the weekend is a better idea.

As always, feedback will be welcome!