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Funding Goal
For 6-month period:
2022-07-01 to 2022-12-31
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Base Goal:
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2022-07-02 10:17:28 ..
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(SPIDs: [1838..1866])
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2022-10-05 14:04:11 UTC --fnord666

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posted by NCommander on Tuesday September 12 2017, @11:56PM   Printer-friendly
from the the-joy-of-VPSes dept.

Just a quick heads up to the SN community. As we previously announced, Linode is migrating customers to a new data center. We already did the first stage of migration with most of the production servers two weeks ago. Now we're working our way through the remainder of the servers. As of this writing, we've migrated both webservers, both DB servers, our development server, and the fallback load balancer.

Tonight at approximately midnight EDT, we're going to migrate beryllium, which hosts our IRC server, wiki, and mail server, and boron, which is our redundant KDC/internal DNS server. During this process, IRC and email from SoylentNews will be unavailable. The site itself will stay up during this process.

After this migration, we'll only have our primary load balancer to migrate, which we will likely do over the weekend. Thank you all for your understanding.

~ NCommander

posted by Fnord666 on Thursday August 31 2017, @01:42AM   Printer-friendly

[Update 1]: Fluorine (the web front end) has been back in the rotation since last night and we'll be checking on and bringing up Neon (the db node) tonight. Cross your fingers because if we can't get Neon up and happy by Friday 10:00 PM EDT[*], we'll have to temporarily down the site and copy the db over to our dev server to even keep the site online until we can get a db node back up.

[Update 2]: NC: I successfully CPRed neon, and was able to bring the DB cluster back into sync. I've stopped helium's database services so we're running on neon only now, and getting ready to migrate it after installing updates and such. With luck nothing blows up.

[Update 3]: Nothing blew up. All should be copacetic except for needing to update Neon tomorrow sometime.

* That's the deadline they've given us to move Helium (our other db node) over to the Dallas 2 facility, or they'll do it automatically themselves.

As most of you are already aware, Linode is our web hosting provider. A recent email from them informed us:

We recently announced our new Dallas 2 facility. Over the coming months, we'll be migrating all Linodes to this new, state-of-the-art facility. We're reaching out to let you know your Linode has been entered into a migration queue to move from Dallas 1 to Dallas 2.

We were informed in a separate email that the neon and helium servers were scheduled for an automatic migration. Manual migration was possible, if preferred. That's no big deal as we have redundancy on those servers. The site should continue functioning without a hiccup.

About an hour ago, we received another email saying that fluorine (one of our two web front ends) was also scheduled for migration. That one is a bit more interesting as that server also runs ipnd1 and slashd2 — daemons for which we have no redundancy.

Well, NCommander, TheMightyBuzzard and I happened to be on IRC at the same time as the fluorine migration notice arrived. No time like the present! So fluorine has been migrated. While we were at it, why not migrate neon, too? About 10 minutes later and that was been completed, as well. We discussed whether to migrate helium as well, but decided to hold off.

We did not anticipate any problems... but we found some pages loaded slowly and we were occasionally getting 403 and 503 errors. There are some issues with slower communications between the data centers than what we had within the same data center. Thanks to redundancy, it is not critical we get everything back up and running for the site to run, but it would definitely be best to not run in this configuration indefinitely.

The current state of the world? "one web frontend and one db node are shitting themselves. we're limping along on one of each but with backups in case of emergency." and... "fluorine is technically up but not in the rotation for serving up pages. it's just doing slashd and ipnd."

Hat tip to NCommander and TheMightyBuzzard -- I really enjoy watching these guys in action -- they know their stuff and we are truly fortunate to have them volunteer on SoylentNews.

[1] Instant Payments Notification Daemon
[2] The Daemon that makes it all work


Original Submission

posted by on Friday August 25 2017, @11:26PM   Printer-friendly
from the we're-really-big-time-now dept.

Welcome, new trolls! We're pleased as punch to have you aboard, unfortunately as you may have noticed our moderators are unable to give you the moderations you've been working so hard for. Since we can't really do much about people not moderating more, we're going to be giving out more points so that the ones that do can give you the attention you so desperately crave.

Moderators: Starting a little after midnight UTC tonight, everyone will be getting ten points a day instead of five. The threshold for a mod-bomb, however, is going to remain at five. This change is not so you can pursue an agenda against registered users more effectively but so we can collectively handle the rather large uptick in anonymous trolling recently while still being able to have points remaining for upmodding quality comments. This is not an invitation to go wild downmodding; it's helping you to be able to stick to the "concentrate more on upmodding than downmodding" bit of the guidelines.

Also, this is not a heavily thought-out or permanent change. It is a quick, dirty adjustment that will be reviewed, tweaked, and likely changed before year's end. Questions? Comments?

posted by mrpg on Tuesday July 11 2017, @11:00AM   Printer-friendly
from the where-are-we? dept.

tl;dr:

This is a meta post concerning Soylentnews' background, finances, operations, staffing, story scheduling, and a conclusion. If this is not your cup-of-coffee++ (or tea, etc.), then please ignore this story — another will appear shortly.

Background:

In February of 2014, a group of ticked-off Slashdot users got together, said "Fuck Beta!", and launched an alternative web site focused on the community. It started with an out-of-date and unmaintained open source version of slashcode which was promptly forked and renamed 'Rehash'. We incorporated as a Public Benefit Corporation. We experienced site outages, questions of leadership, and faced predictions of failure. Thanks to persistence, dedication, many late nights (and some very early mornings), we persevered and are still here today.

Soylentnews is a place for people to engage in discussions about topics of interest to the community. Not all topics are of interest to everyone, of course. In large part it is up to the community to submit stories — the large majority of these do get accepted to the main page. This is all the more important during the "silly season" &mash; summer in the northern hemisphere — when many people are on vacation and fewer scholarly articles are published.

Finances:

We are still an all-volunteer organization. Nobody here has made a profit off this site. In fact, Soylentnews is still in debt to the founders who put up the funds required to get us up and running. I am happy to report that we have finally made enough progress that some payback to the founders may be possible.

Here are the unaudited numbers from site subscriptions for the first half of our fiscal year (2017-01-01 through 2017-06-30):

Base goal: $3000
Stretch goal: $2000
Subscription count: 133
Gross subscription income : $3795
Net subscription income: $3645 (estimated - after payment processor fees)
Net over goal: $645

So, thanks to all you Soylentils who have donated, we have a surplus at the moment. The ultimate decision is up to the Board of Directors, but the current sense is that we should build a prudent reserve of some months' operating expenses before paying back the founders. In light of the foregoing, we are aiming for the same fundraising goals for the second half of the year... $3,000 base and $2,000 stretch goals. More in line with business norms, however, these are now being presented in the "Site News" box as quarterly goals: $1,500 base and $1,000 stretch goals, respectively.

Operations:

We've been forthright and upfront right from the start and it is our continued commitment to keep you informed of any issues in the site's operations.

To wit, we recently received a notice from our web-hosting provider, Linode, that one of our servers had been reported as having been added to a spam-blocking list. Staff immediately responded and found a misconfiguration in our link-shortening service. (It was only supposed to shorten links originating on Soylentnews.org, but was accepting links for other domains, as well.) A dump of the database was taken, non-SN sites were purged, the shortening service was updated to correctly implement the restriction to only shorten links from soylentnews.org, and Linode was informed of these actions.

We also recently experienced a problem with our slashd daemon which, among many other tasks, hands out moderation points each night. This fell over on us for a couple of nights leading to our handing out mod points manually to all users. This seems to have been rectified — please let us know if you see a recurrence.

Staff:

Lastly, one of the senior editorial staff has been on hiatus to deal with major illnesses in his family. His dedicated efforts in helping them has brought ill health upon himself, as well. I ask you to keep janrinok and his family in your thoughts and, if you are of a mind to do so, in your prayers.

Scheduling:

There have been discussions in the past as how we should best handle circumstances when there is a dearth of acceptable stories in the queue. Do we post something marginal just to fill the time or should we hold out and only publish when we have enough suitable material to publish. Past efforts and comments have suggested the majority prefer we avoid posting stories just to fill time slots. In short: quality over quantity. Further, staff cannot work 24/7/365 without a break either. We all need a break sometimes and summer is a good time to take one. In other words, we have been running with reduced staffing for the past couple of months and will continue to do so for the next few months as well.

The result? Over the past month or so, we have experimented with further spacing out stories on holidays (Independence Day in the USA) and on weekends. Instead of the usual cadence of a story appearing every 90 minutes or so, we have tried slowing to posting a story every 2 hours or even every 2.5 hours.

My perception is that this has worked okay. At least I have not noticed any complaints in the comments. It could well be that I had missed something, too. So I put this question to the community: How has the story spacing been working out?

Finally:

Please keep those story submissions coming, please continue to subscribe (you can offer more than the minimum suggested amount), and — most importantly — please keep reading and commenting! Discussion is


Original Submission

posted by n1 on Thursday June 29 2017, @12:43AM   Printer-friendly
from the you've-got-a-point-there dept.

[Update: It looks like the slashd daemon which was scheduled for 2017-06-29_00:10:00 failed to run again. We are investigating.]

We ran into a problem with the process which hands out moderation points each night.

We received a couple reports that people had no mod points. A query of our DB showed that fully 80% of our users had the full complement of 5 mod points. That seemed strange — we have a daemon that runs every night and that, among many other things, replenishes your supply each morning at 00:10 UTC. Apparently that process fell over and went toes up. Complicating matters, if you had mod points left over from the prior day, those were still available to you.

I put out the call to the devs as I tried to sleuth out what was going on. Many thanks to mrpg who played guinea pig and offered a fresh perspective as we tried to isolate the issue. With the information that was gathered, TheMightyBuzzard and paulej72 quickly figured out what happened. Further, rather than wait for tonight's process to run, TheMightyBuzzard manually updated the DB and handed out mod points to everyone.

(Debugging was complicated by the fact that there was another issue that was clogging up the logs which made it doubly hard to determine what happened. Debugging efforts are continuing on that matter.)

We anticipate things should be back to normal tomorrow. We'll check in on this story first thing in the morning so if you run into any issues with this, please post a reply with details.

P.S. I remember in the early days of this site when more than 12 hours of continuous up-time was an accomplishment. It's a credit to the staff here that we are now at a state where a system issue is a rare event, rather than an everyday occurrence.

-- martyb


Original Submission