SoylentNews

martyb writes:

It passed without fanfare, but this very site recently passed an important milestone... SoylentNews celebrated its two-year anniversary!

On Wednesday February 12 2014, @07:28AM our very first article was posted: Welcome to SoylentNews! and then, on Monday 2014-02-17 at 02:06:00 UTC, we announced our presence to the world at large: Welcome to the World of Tomorrow... Today!

There were some who thought the site would fail right from the start. Yes, there have been some significant challenges along the way. Thankfully, the community has pulled together and given the support needed to keep this site running as a going concern.

The support has come in many forms. Of course, there is the financial side where people have subscribed or purchased SoylentNews swag. We are also grateful to those who submit stories, post comments, and perform moderations. Others post journal articles and comment on those. Still more are active on our IRC server. Then there's our very own Wiki. There are those, too, who mention our site to family and friends.

On an entirely different level we have the folks who maintain our servers, front ends, code base, site, mail, and the like. Others handle behind-the-scenes organization and communications tasks.

For those who joined us at the outset, you may recall that site crashes were a regular occurrence. Now, most of our downtime is due to either site upgrades or reboots of our systems by our hosting provider.

For those who may no be aware, this is all brought to you by volunteers who freely give of their free time and energy to make this all happen for you, our community.

So, I'd like to take this opportunity to say a big "Thank-You!" to all who have helped us get to where we are today. Some helped at the outset and moved on, others have been with us from the start, and still others have joined more recently. We would not be where we are today without ALL of you!

Original Submission

The Mighty Buzzard writes:

It's a slow news day so far, so it's time to talk about user to user messaging. There are two main questions I see here that we need to answer as a community:

1. Do we even want user to user messaging?
2. Should we use the existing messaging system or fire up an xmpp server or what?

The first is pretty self-explanatory. I've heard arguments for both sides. Yeah, it's convenient but it could also cut down on comment participation if you can just message someone directly.

The second is a little more open. The pros for web-based messaging on the site are it will take almost zero work since we already have a system in place for sending messages. The cons include it could take up to five minutes for a message to be delivered (this can be tweaked but not really made instant) because we only process the message queue that often and not being able to use your instant messenger of choice. I know AJAX is likely to come up for this in particular but we'll be needing a proper AJAX dev before we go down that road.

For XMPP the cons include not being able to have spaces in names so we'd have to keep a mapping of usernames in the db and check that there are no nick collisions before allowing creation of that XMPP account. The pros being instant delivery plus you could use any XMPP-friendly instant messenger and do voice/video chat as well if you like.

I know we're going to get a lot of tangents going here but please do try to answer both questions as well.

takyon: How does IRC (which includes private messages) stack up against these options?

Original Submission

Sir Finkus writes:

I've taken the liberty of setting up an official folding@home team for Soylent News. In case you aren't familiar with folding@home, it's a distributed computing project that simulates protein folding in an attempt to better understand diseases such as Alzheimer's and Huntington's.

There is more information on the project here, which explains it much better than I could.

Clients are available for Linux, OSX, and even Windows (if you swing that way), so come join our botnet!

That Other Site's team is ranked at 1817, so we've got some catching up to do.

On a personal note, my Dad carries the gene markers for Huntington's disease, and will eventually succumb to it. Research like this is very helpful for understanding, and hopefully developing treatments for it.

tl;dr Our Soylent News team ID is 230319

Original Submission

The Mighty Buzzard writes:

It's that time again, boys and girls. I know it's been a while since the last site update but this kind of thing can happen when everyone on staff has life things happening at the same time. Still, we weren't entirely goofing off. We managed to get the following all squared away for this update:

• API made more nexus/topic-friendly. (see TFM)
• Fixed the API to return the proper mime type. (this fixes the unicode issue)
• Fixed some backend stuff that you don't care about.
• Added the ability for Editors to give you a reason if they reject your submission. (In your Preferences, click on the Messages tab, and then set "Declined Submission Reason" to one of: "No Messages", "E-mail", or "Web"; default is "Web")
• Added the ability for Admins/Editors to message users using our message system. (In your Preferences, click on the Messages tab, and then set "Admin to user message" to one of: "No Messages", "E-mail", or "Web"; default is "Web")
• Several template fixes by martyb (Bytram).
• You will now be notified in the moderation slashbox if you are mod banned.
• Added Stripe as a Credit Card payment processor.[*] Feel free to subscribe.
• URLs with spaces are working again.
• Some typo fixes from stmuk
• Two new themes. VT220 by me and Grayscale by chromas.
• Unbelievably alpha version of some mobile css that should only show up on devices with a horizontal resolution of 800 pixels or less. View it while you can; if there's significant aversion to it, it's going away until we can polish it properly.
• Some XSS bug fixes by paulej72.
• Much fixing of my screw-ups by paulej72.
• A few more things you won't care about but that make us happy.

[*] Okay, the code is all there. We just forgot to have mrcoolbp activate the account so we could switch it from test mode to live mode. We'll drop another note when it gets squared away. Update: 02/07 05:27 GMT by mrcoolbp: I activated it, credit card payments are live now!

Alpha version of a mobile theme for the site was deemed too sucktastic to run with so you'll have to wait two or three more months. As in April or May. Of this year. Really. Personally, I have a clear schedule and the burning desire to code stuff, so we should have enough material to release another upgrade by then even if paulej72, NCommander, and Bytram get abducted by supermodels. What we plan on working on:

• You know how heavily commented stories load slow? I hate that and would like them to load fast. I'm thinking caching will play a big role here.
• Mobile theme. Currently fleshing out how best to go about it.
• Bug fixes. Gravis keeps finding new ones. The bastard.
• General QA/test and UI sanity checking/fixing from Bytram.
• Whatever strikes his fancy from paulej72.
• Ditto NCommander, time allowing.

Original Submission

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.