SoylentNews

This is a quick blurb about our financials last year and looking forward.

Last year we comfortably paid expenses and reduced our server costs. We ended up paying more for tax prep than originally was estimated, but we exceeded our funding goals by enough to afford that with a little breathing room. I'm optimistic this year will be similar, if not better overall; I believe that tax-costs will be lower, and we have no large expenses planned. Here is a rough breakdown of where the money is going:

• 54% Hosting/Backups/Domains
• 37% Taxes/Accounting
• 9% Administrative/Other

It's obviously frustrating that such a large amount of where we spend money is on taxes, but we should see that number come down as we mature.

Moving forward I'll be estimating all expected costs on a yearly basis, and then still continuing with goals on a half-year funding periods; this should make things more consistent and easier to understand. As usual I'll link to the current funding breakdown on the wiki from the beg-o-meter. My estimate is that we will spend about $6,000 this year, so that puts the beg-o-meter at $3,000 for each half. Thanks again for all of the support we receive that keeps this such a cool community for everyone.

Hello fellow Soylentils!

We were informed by Linode (our hosting provider) that they needed to perform Xen updates on all of our servers. This forces a reboot of our virtual servers which may cause the site (and other services) to be temporarily unavailable.

Here is the two-day reboot schedule along with what runs on each server:

As we found some errors with our MySql setup during the last Xen updates, The Main Site will be down starting at 2015-12-14 at 0300 UTC while we reconfigure MySQL prior to the shutdown of the main MySQL server helium. The site should be up by 0500 UTC.

We apologize in advance for any inconvenience and appreciate your understanding as we try and get things up and running following each reboot.

So, every once in awhile, if things have been quiet, I like to pop a post seeing what the general feelings of the community are towards the site, seeing what we could do better, etc. I think its been a few months since the last time I posted in Meta, so I think this is a good time to get a pulse on the community, and provide a venue to get any feedback (good or bad).

On the staff side, I know things have been relatively quiet over the summer due to most of us being busy with life and such, which is why we haven't made a major site upgrade since the original rehash upgrade at the end of May. For myself, I've been working at a new job, and dealing with a fair bit of non-Soylent related things to the point that I really only have the time or energy to post, and occasional check in, and I'd like to thank the rest of the staff, and mrcoolbp in particular for holding down the fort for me.

Anyway, in contrast to my usual posts, I'm going to cut this off here, and will be looking forward to your comments below.

73 from NCommander

Sometime recently, something in our setup (or in the bitpay API) changed and left us unable to receive notifications of bitcoin payments. The bad news is the payments still went through but the subscriptions were not rewarded on SoylentNews. We realized the error and credited the accounts (there were only 4 such cases) giving extra subscription time to make up for the error.

Bitcoin subscriptions are temporarily disabled until we can work out exactly what happened and avoid it in the future.

Thank you, and our apologies for any inconvenience.

~mrcoolbp and TheMightyBuzzard