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Funding Goal
For 6-month period:
2022-07-01 to 2022-12-31
(All amounts are estimated)
Base Goal:
$3500.00

Currently:
$438.92

12.5%

Covers transactions:
2022-07-02 10:17:28 ..
2022-10-05 12:33:58 UTC
(SPIDs: [1838..1866])
Last Update:
2022-10-05 14:04:11 UTC --fnord666

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posted by n1 on Thursday June 30 2016, @01:22PM   Printer-friendly
from the oliver-twist dept.

We have been made aware that there were some problems with our site's automatic notification of subscriptions expiring. We are looking into it. I was surprised to find that mine had run out and suspect that others may be similarly unaware.

Please take a moment to load the Subscription Page and verify your status. We appreciate your support and cannot run this site without it. This is a purely volunteer effort here -- none of the staff receive any financial remuneration for their efforts. Your contributions go entirely to keeping this site running.

Please accept my deep and heartfelt thanks to all of you who contribute to the site in other ways: those who helped get the site off the ground in the beginning whether they moved on or stayed. Those who submit stories, post and moderate comments, edit the stories, support our systems, maintain and update the software, and all-round do what they can to make this a community for all of us — we need all of you.

On behalf of all the staff here at SoylentNews, I thank you in advance for your support.

[Update — 2016-06-30 12:45:00 UTC] Many, many thanks to all of you who have updated their subscriptions!

Since this story originally posted, we've had 14 people renew; by my rough calculations, we are now at approximately $2688 towards our $3000 goal for funding this site for the first half of the year. As was noted in the comments, it is possible to give a gift subscription to another user on the site -- just enter their UID on the form. Also, one can change the amount from that offered to a larger value, if you wish. We have one member whose subscription ends in 2026!


Original Submission

posted by janrinok on Tuesday June 14 2016, @01:23PM   Printer-friendly
from the like-maple-syrup dept.

So, the Islamic Terrorist Opens Fire on Florida Nightclub; 50 Killed, 53 Wounded story is up over 400 comments and loading slower than hell. We finally managed to find ourselves a limit to comments under the current code. There's a fix going to be coming in the upcoming site update but for now there are two workarounds; take your pick.

  1. Change your comment view mode to Nested or Flat.
  2. Change Comment Limit under Preferences to five to ten.

The latter solution gives you 5-10 root level comments and all their children not 5-10 comments total. It also allows you to keep using the javascript expand/collapse buttons if you were.


Original Submission

posted by takyon on Saturday June 04 2016, @03:30PM   Printer-friendly
from the just-a-thought dept.

Not infrequently, we receive a story submission to SoylentNews that consists of a single URL. Or, a story that contains but a single sentence or paragraph along with the URL. During weekends and holidays, the story submission queue tends to run dry. We have an IRC channel (#rss-bot) that gathers RSS links from around the web. Hmm.

It would be really handy if there were an automated way to "scrape" the contents of that page. In some cases, a simple redirect of the output of a text-based browser like Lynx would do the trick. Unfortunately, all too many sites subscribe to the idea that a web page needs to pull in Javascript and libraries from a myriad of other sites. Failing to do so displays a blank page.

There must be a way to do it — search engines like Google and Bing must extract the page text in order to index it. It would be best to have a general-purpose solution; having a custom template for each site is time-consuming to create and maintain (think if the site changes its layout). Our site is powered by Perl, so that would be the obvious preference.

So, fellow Soylentils, what tools and/or techniques have you used? What has worked for you?

Maybe I'm approaching this the wrong way? When all you have is a hammer... what am I missing here? Is there another approach?


Original Submission