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posted by on Thursday December 21 2017, @04:28PM   Printer-friendly
from the sic-semper-insectus dept.

Seems we've hit one of those rare days where circumstances have conspired to keep all the eds busy enough that the story queue ran dry, so I figured I'd go ahead and tell you lot about the upcoming December site update just so they have a little less time to fill now that a couple of them have appeared and started refilling the queue.

It's mostly just a minor bug-fix update, stuff I could get coded quickly and didn't require extensive testing that martyb doesn't have much time for right now, so don't get your hopes too high. Most of the good stuff is currently slated for spring of next year. Here's what we've currently got up on dev for testing with an expected release date of between Christmas and New Years Eve:

  • Add an admin-configurable minimum karma requirement for a journal entry to show up in the Most Recent Journal Entries slashbox. Should eliminate having to see journal spam by folks who don't otherwise contribute anything to the site.
  • Fixed the <spoiler> and a couple other unnoticed tags to work properly in journal entries.
  • Removed the size limit on Editor Notes (the admin page ones, not the ones Eds add to the bottom of a story). Should make takyon happy.
  • Put a link to the submission queue on the left sidebar.
  • Fixed the spacing around <ol> and <ul> lists.
  • Made chromas have to work harder to post comments with no apparent subject or text.
  • Fixed an annoying bug in the admin interface that was trying to use a comment mode no longer in existence.

Like I said, not a whole lot there on account of us not having time to thoroughly test much what with the holidays coming up. Here's the list (using tinyurl due to a Rehash bug that will definitely make the Spring 2018 cut) of what we'd like to get done for this spring if you're curious though.

Them of you of the disposition to celebrate Christmas, have a merry one. Them of you who celebrate otherwise, happy whatever you're celebrating. Them of you who don't celebrate at all, have a happy rest of December.

[Ed note: I nudged the time this story was due to be released by just a few minutes so that it coincided with the beginning of the Winter Solstice in the northern hemisphere... and the Summer Solstice for those of you who are south of the equator. Maybe we can get the next release out at the start of the equinox (2018-03-20 @ 16:15:00 UTC). --martyb]

posted by on Monday December 18 2017, @08:33PM   Printer-friendly
from the stupid-blue-bird dept.

So, apparently around November 5th we stopped posting to Twitter. We didn't find out until around the end of that month and when we did nobody had the time and/or ability to look into why until this past week.

Now how we get our headlines over to Twitter is overly complicated and, frankly, idiotic. It's done by one of our IRC bots pulling headlines from the RSS feed and posting them on Twitter as @SoylentNews. The bot was written back in 2014 with hand-rolled (as opposed to installed via package manager) Python libraries and hasn't been updated since. This was breakage that should absolutely have been expected to happen. Twitter's penchant for arbitrarily changing their unversioned API means you either keep on top of changes or expect things to break for no apparent reason.

Here's the question: do we even care? We can either find someone who's willing to rewrite the bot to a new Twitter library, do it the sane way as either a cron or slashd job, or just say to hell with it since we only have two hundred or so followers on Twitter anyway. What say you, folks?


[TMB Note]: Twitter's who-to-follow algorithms really impressed me this morning when I logged in to manually post this story. How did they know we were all huge @JustinBieber and @BarackObama fans?


[Update]: We're again annoying Twitter users by spreading relative intelligence across their platform of choice. Credit goes to Crash for wisely pointing out that we don't have to code everything ourselves.

posted by NCommander on Monday October 09 2017, @12:04PM   Printer-friendly
from the always-something-new dept.

We've discovered over the weekend that soylentnews.org was failing to resolve with some DNSSEC enabled resolvers. After debugging and manually checking our setup, the problem appears to be occurring due to an issue with the Linode DNS servers when accessed over IPv6. As such, some users may experience slow waiting times due to these DNS issues. I have filed a ticket with Linode about this, and will keep you guys up to date.

73 de NCommander

posted by martyb on Saturday October 07 2017, @12:20PM   Printer-friendly
from the moving-right-along dept.

Nearly two months ago, we received notice from Linode (which hosts the servers for SoylentNews) that they would be migrating our servers to a new data center in Dallas, TX. Our systems would gradually be scheduled for migration. We could either accept their scheduled date/time or trigger a manual migration. In theory, this should be a no-worry activity as we have redundancy on almost all of our servers and processes. But in practice, that is not always the case. Rather than take our chances, we were proactive and manually performed migrations as they became possible.

We had a couple hiccups with one server, but with NCommander, TMB, PJ on hand (among others), we were able to get that one straightened out with only limited impact to the site. We also lost access to our IRC server for about 20 minutes when that server was migrated.

So, with that backdrop, I'm pleased to announce that we completed the migration of our last Linode (hydrogen) to the new data center in Dallas this morning! Shoutout to TheMightyBuzzard for tweaking our load balancer to facilitate the migration, and for being on hand had things gone sideways.


Original Submission

posted by martyb on Friday September 29 2017, @04:12AM   Printer-friendly
from the moving-right-along dept.

As part of Linode's migration of servers to a new Data Center in Dallas, two of our servers were scheduled for migration at 10pm EDT on September 29, 2017. NCommander happened to be around when I sent out a reminder I'd received from Linode, so he 'hit the button' at 9:30pm tonight (Sept. 28) and did a manual migration ahead of time.

Unless you were on our IRC server (Internet Relay Chat) at the time, you probably didn't even notice... and even then, it was unavailable for only about 15-20 minutes. Redundancy for the win!

That leaves us with a single server, sodium, to migrate. It is currently scheduled for migration on Tuesday, October 3, 2017 at 10:00pm EDT. Since sodium is one of two front-end proxies for us (the other is magnesium which has already been migrated), I expect we'll be able to perform that migration without any site interruption.

Separately, and in parallel, we are slowly moving our servers from Ubuntu 14.04 LTS to Gentoo.

To the community, thank you for your patience as we work our way through this process. And, for those of you who may have been with us from the outset, and when up-time was measured in hours, please join me in congratulating the team for their dedication and hard work which has facilitated such an uneventful migration!


Original Submission