SoylentNews

[Update: I do not have access to the mail queue, but the server dashboard shows that, as of 23:00 UTC, beryllium has returned to normal disk and cpu levels. That said, I see a gap in daily story headlines and daily story e-mails that were sent to me. We are continuing to monitor the situation. Please let us know if you have any outstanding issues. --martyb]

martyb writes:

We have been open with the community since the outset, and in keeping with that practice: we just fixed an issue with the site.

On or about May 9th, our mail server, beryllium, stopped sending out e-mails. The cause was the antivirus handler failing to be loaded, so all outgoing mail that would be processed by that handler ended up waiting indefinitely.

Many thanks to mechanicjay for debugging and fixing the issue!

Impact: If you signed up for emails from this site (such as notification of comment replies or moderation, subscription being low or expired, etc.) these have been delayed. It may take some time for the queue to be processed and for all pending e-mails to be sent out.

I well remember when SoylentNews launched and each day brought a seemingly endless supply of crashes and failures. It is a tribute to our volunteer staff that site issues now happen so rarely!

Original Submission

martyb writes:

[Update 5: All done. Nuttin but net. --TMB]

[Update 4: As of 20180509 @ 11:55 UTC, beryllium has been successfully rebooted. This leaves hydrogen to be rebooted in just over 13 hours. --martyb]

[Update 3: As of 20180509 @ 0414 UTC, both lithium and sodium appear to have successfully completed their reboots. That leaves beryllium (1hr45m from now) and hydrogen (20h45m from now) to complete their reboots. --martyb]

[Update 2: The second round of reboots went peachy keen as well. Next round starts at 3AM UTC (7 hours from this story's time) with our dev server (lithium). An hour later the load balancer (sodium) that I switched us off of this morning will reboot. Two hours after that the box (beryllium) that hosts the wiki, mail, IRC, and some other lesser-used stuff will get bounced. If you can't stand being disconnected from IRC for a few minutes, add irc2.sylnt.us (6667/6697) to the list of servers for this network. --TMB]

[Update 1: The first scheduled reboot (of fluorine) was successful. The two-hour reboot window for helium starts 1.5 hours from the date/time stamp for this story. Two hours after that marks the commencement of the two-hour reboot window for boron, magnesium, and neon. We do not anticipate any site interruption as a result of these reboots. --martyb]

We have been informed by Linode (on which all of the SoylentNews servers are hosted) that maintenance is required to mitigate against the Spectre (v1 and v2) attacks. As a result, all of our servers will require a reboot. Historically, any given server is down for anywhere from 15-30 minutes. We have redundancies in place for many of our operations, but there may be some unavoidable downtime. We ask your patience and understanding during this process.

The scheduled reboots are:

[1] Unable to process subscriptions or update comment counts or deliver messages until it reboots.

[2] IRC (Internet Relay Chat) server will be unavailable.

Original Submission

Although lots of different tasks are required to keep a site such as this operating, interesting, and relevant, the most visible are the stories that we publish on the front page. Some stories can be edited in a matter of a few minutes, others take rather longer. Among the editors we celebrate when we reach certain milestones. The first published story is a milestone of sorts but, more importantly, the first 100, 250, 500 and 1000th etc are all events that are more important milestones to an editor and each marks a significant contribution in effort.

Today we have an editor who is the first to achieve having his 5000th published story on SoylentNews: martyb (aka Bytram on IRC) has been with the site from the very beginning but has not limited his contribution to being an editor. He is also the site's one-man QA team and has spent many hours testing software and investigating many of the bugs that pop up from time to time.

Like all of us, he has to manage his own life and work too, and it is impossible to calculate the hours he has expended to keep SoylentNews worthy of being a place that many of us call 'home'.

So let me invite you to join me in thanking martyb for his contribution to this site. Congratulations martyb, and here's to the next 5000!

Over the past week we've had at least three occurrences of this particular bug crop up. It's currently already fixed but I thought I'd fill you lot in just in case it got you too and you haven't noticed yet.

On the subscription page there are two radio buttons if you're logged in. One is to subscribe for yourself and one is to give a gift subscription. For some reason they were both set unchecked. If you didn't check one your subscription would to go NCommander's non-admin account, mcasadevall. It beats the complete hell out of me why this would be the default but it is.

If you've purchased a subscription recently please check that you got credit for it. If you didn't please let us know either here or via email.

~TMB

martyb writes:

It is my great pleasure to announce that SoylentNews has just celebrated four years of service to the community! The very first story on the site appeared on 2014-02-12 and actually went live to everyone 2014-02-17.

It all started when a story on Slashdot made reference to its "audience" which ticked off quite a number of people. Soon after came a boycott of Slashdot — aka the "Slashcott". While this was in effect, an intrepid few people somehow managed to take a years-old, out-of-date, unsupported, open-sourced version of slashcode and somehow managed to get it up to speed to run on much more recent versions of Apache, MySql, etc. Recurring crashes and outages were the norm. (See last year's anniversary story for many more details!) Further, on July 4th, 2014 our application to become a Public Benefit Corporation was approved — this set the stage for us to be able to accept funding from the community.

By the time you read this, we will have posted 20,980 stories to the site to which over 639,907 comments have been made!

We could not have done this without all of you. You (the community) submit the stories for the site. You write the comments... and moderate them, too. You made recommendations for improvements to the site. You are SoylentNews.

It has been my privilege and honor to work with a great group of folks who have done the behind-the-scenes skunk-work which has kept this site running. It does bear mentioning that this site is entirely staffed by volunteers. Nobody here has received even a penny's worth of income from the site. Like you, we have home and work responsibilities, but in our spare time we still strive to provide an environment that is conducive to discussions of predominantly tech-related matters.

Having said all that, I must add that income to the site has dropped recently. Having let my subscription lapse in the past, I know how easy that can be. Take a moment to check your subscription status. We have on the order of 100 people who have subscribed in the past, have visited the site in the past month, and whose subscription has expired. If your subscription is up-to-date, please consider either extending it or making a gift subscription (default is to UID 6 - "mcasadevall" aka NCommander). NB the dollar amounts presented are the minimum payments required for that duration -- we'll happily accept larger amounts. =)

If financial contributions are infeasible for you, we always appreciate story submissions. Submit a link, a few paragraphs from the story, and ideally a sentence or two about what you found interesting and send it to us. Any questions, please take a look at the Submission Guidelines.

Of course, the comments are where it's at. Thoughtful, well-reasoned, well-supported comments seem to do best here. Inflammatory histrionics garner attention, and usually down-mods, too. Speaking of which, if you have good Karma, and have been registered with the site for at least a month, you are invited to participate in moderation. Unlike other sites that up-mod or down-mod to infinity, we have something more like olympic-scoring here. A comment score can vary from -1 to a +5. This is how I look at scores: -1 (total waste of your time), 0 (meh), +1 (okay), +2 (good), +3 (quite good), +4 (very good), +5 (don't miss this one!).

Original Submission