SoylentNews

We just learned that our VM provider, Linode, had to perform some emergency reboots. Three of our servers have already been taken care of, but more are still to come. This led to our site being unavailable for a period of approximately an hour. Here is the reboot schedule:

Identified - Linode has received a Xen Security Advisory (XSA) that requires us to perform updates to our legacy Xen host servers. In order to apply the updates, hosts and the Linodes running on them must be rebooted. The XSAs will be publicly released by the Xen project team on July 26th. We must complete this maintenance before then.

Here's the schedule and status:

We apologize for any inconvenience.

[Update: It appears the second round of reboots has completed successfully, and, thanks to the advance notice, the site stayed up throughout. We anticipate that the site will still continue to operate normally through the last-scheduled reboot. Many thanks for your understanding and patience.]

[Update #2: We are taking advantage of a free offer from Linode, our hosting provider, to convert our VPSs (Virtual Private Servers) from Xen to KVM. The rebooting was required to repair a Xen vulnerability. As a bonus, the Xen to KVM conversion gives us a free upgrade to twice as much memory. The additional memory will provide much-needed additional headroom on our servers and possibly provide a performance improvement. Thanks to our redundancy, the changes should not be noticeable when we reboot/upgrade, except for the IRC and e-mail servers as they are single-hosted.]

[Update #3: Thanks to the tireless efforts of paulej72 well into the wee hours of this morning with able assistance by audioguy in straightening out some IP issues as well as Deucalion and TheMightyBuzzard providing guidance and support, all but two of our Xen servers have been upgraded to KVM. This free upgrade doubled the amount of memory available to our VMs, giving us some much-needed headroom. That leaves beryllium (IRC and email) and boron (DNS, Hesiod name service) as the two servers that have not been upgraded yet. Date/time is TBD.]

[Update #4: Boron will be reconfigured shortly, and then Bberyllium after that. Plan on an hour or two, though, obviously, we'll try to keep the downtime to a minimum!]

[Update #5: Boron's second upgrade for the ram sat in the queue for several hours, so Beryllium had to wait until paulej72 got up and finished it this morning (0830 EDT)]

martyb writes:

Two years ago, on 2014-07-04, SoylentNews received official confirmation of becoming a Public Benefit Corporation. Though there is no user-visible manifestation of this on the site (or any of the other services we provide), it does stand as an important milestone in our history.

A lot has happened since this site went live. Here are some numbers:

• 93 - polls posted.
• 170 - current subscribers.
• 1816 - journal articles posted.
• 6278 - registered nicknames.
• 12252 - stories posted to the site.
• 14556 - stories submitted.
• 369411 - comments posted.
• 41767215 - story hits we've counted (ignores AC hits)

Numbers, however, provide only part of the story. We have been able to keep the site up and running with only a few unplanned site outages, which is a far cry from how things were back when the site launched. To watch this community coalesce and grow to what it is today has been a heart-warming and enriching experience. I've read stories and comments that have changed my view of the world. All thanks to the tireless (and very occasionally tired) efforts of our all-volunteer staff and you, our community. And what a talented and selfless group of people we have! I am continually impressed with the knowledge and professionalism exhibited by the staff — I tip my hat to them all.

One of the comments to last year's story sums it up very well for me:

I[t] feels like much longer than a year ago, maybe because Soylent perfectly replaced the place Slashdot occupied in my heart. Except, it's better. NCommander, Eds, we really appreciate the work, spirit, and intent you've put into the community. It's a mark of distinction that this place feels more like a really big, walnut-panelled study filled with learned colleagues than it does a random, pointless forum. The latter is ubiquitous, the former unique.

It is my fervent hope that we will continue to earn your support and provide you with the best news discussion site we can.

Original Submission

martyb writes:

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

The Mighty Buzzard writes:

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

martyb writes:

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