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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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We always have a place for talented people, visit the Get Involved section on the wiki to see how you can make SoylentNews better.

posted by chromas on Wednesday June 06 2018, @02:30PM   Printer-friendly
from the community++ dept.

[Update #2: Wed 20180606 @ 14:30 UTC: WOW! Since this story first posted, we have received 36 subscriptions totaling approximately $1126.27 which brings us to a total of approximately $2716.36 which works out to just over 90% of our $3000.00 goal!! I am extremely impressed with the showing of support from the community and reminds me why I volunteer so much of my time here. It really is the community! THANK YOU! --martyb]

[Update #1: Mon 20180604 @ 14:14 UTC: So far today we have received 16 subscriptions bringing us to just shy of $2000.00 raised for the period and just over $1000 to go. THANK-YOU! --martyb]

tl;dr: SoylentNews needs your financial support... $1400 by June 30th. Please Subscribe.

We have raised approximately $1590.09 towards our funding goal of $3000.00 which covers the period from 2018-01-01 though 2018-06-30.

We run the site with a team of volunteers — absolutely nobody gets paid for their work on this site... all the funds raised go directly into keeping the site up and running.

From the time we went live on February 17, 2014 through today, we have posted over 22,000 stories and nearly 120 polls. In kind, the community has posted over 3270 journal articles and over 688,000 comments.

We understand that not everyone can afford to support the site financially. Those who make contributions "in kind" through submitting stories or comments, making moderations, and the like... please accept my sincere "Thank-You!" Without your contributions, there would either be no site or no reason to come here.

For those of you who have previously subscribed, thank YOU for "keeping the lights on". Good wishes did not pay for servers, federal and state tax returns, or domain registrations... You did! Thank you!

A complicating factor came from our having a problem with the subscription page about a month ago... but TMB put up a fix and we've seen no regressions, since. Perhaps this bit you and you meant to "try again later"? (As of my writing this, we have 123 users who have accessed the site within the past month, who had previously subscribed, but whose subscription is now lapsed.)

Whether your subscription has lapsed or you never previously subscribed, would you please consider signing up? Go to the subscription page, pick a duration, and type in an amount that is at least the amount suggested for that duration (excess amounts are, of course, most welcome!). If you would like to help the site without getting a subscription for yourself, you can make a gift subscription by specifying a UID and an amount, instead. (If you have nobody in particular in mind, please feel free to use UID 6 — "mcasadevall")


Original Submission

posted by martyb on Sunday June 03 2018, @01:45PM   Printer-friendly
from the free-is-good! dept.

[Update: as of 20180603_135454 UTC, all 4 server upgrades have completed and all servers should be running normally. --martyb]

Our server provider, Linode, has made available a free upgrade for our servers. Generally, it's a storage upgrade and sometimes a bandwidth upgrade, too. We use only the tiniest fraction of our bandwidth allocation each month (something like < 1%), but the extra storage IS useful.

We (read: The Mighty Buzzard) have already taken 4 of our servers out of rotation this morning. We anticipate no community-visible interruptions of service as a result of these upgrades.

So far, migrations of sodium, hydrogen, and lithium have completed. Migration of neon has started and should complete within the next 10 minutes or so.

Migrations of the remaining servers may cause some community-visible effects. We will provide advance notice before we perform those upgrades. Very tentatively planned for Thursday.


Original Submission

posted by janrinok on Thursday May 17 2018, @06:10PM   Printer-friendly
from the draining-the-queue dept.

[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]

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

posted by martyb on Thursday May 10 2018, @01:58AM   Printer-friendly

[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:

Sat 2018-05-05 1:00:00 AM UTC fluorine [1] Production Cluster Completed
Tue 2018-05-08 1:00:00 AM UTC helium Production Cluster Completed
Tue 2018-05-08 3:00:00 AM UTC boron Services Cluster Completed
Tue 2018-05-08 3:00:00 AM UTC magnesium Frontend Proxy Completed
Tue 2018-05-08 3:00:00 AM UTC neon Production Cluster Completed
Wed 2018-05-09 3:00:00 AM UTC lithium Development Cluster Completed
Wed 2018-05-09 4:00:00 AM UTC sodium Frontend Proxy Completed
Wed 2018-05-09 6:00:00 AM UTC beryllium [2] Services Cluster Completed
Thu 2018-05-10 1:00:00 AM UTC hydrogen Production Cluster Completed

[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

posted by janrinok on Saturday March 24 2018, @09:06AM   Printer-friendly
from the credit-where-credit-is-due dept.

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!

martyb here. It feels awkward receiving such praise so publicly. Yes, at many times it has been a labor of love. As most of you are aware, all staff work on a purely volunteer basis -- nobody has been paid for their work on the site. So it is with great pleasure that I can attest how privileged I feel to work with such an outstanding team... there is no way I could have achieved this milestone alone!

Along with editing and posting stories, we editors strive to second each story before it goes live. Many a mistake of mine has been caught and fixed by my fellow editors. I cannot thank them enough for saving my bacon on far too many occasions!

It has, indeed, been a team effort to keep the stories coming. A quick look at the Authors page shows that several editors are approaching milestones as well! janrinok (our Editor-in-Chief) just attained 3700 stories; cmn32480 is not far from 3000 stories; Fnord666 though arriving later on the scene is on the cusp of reaching 2000 stories. Coolhand, at 1121 stories, pops in from time to time and continues to help keep the story queue filled. Not to be left out, mrpg joined us comparatively recently, and yet has nearly reached 500 stories.

I would also like to take this opportunity to call out FatPhil who answered our call for editors not too long ago, as well as our newest editors chromas and fyngyrz -- please join me in welcoming them to our editorial staff!

A special thanks goes to takyon who has not only posted over 900 stories, but has also single-handily provided well over 3700 well-written story submissions which helps make our lives as editors so much easier.

A special shoutout to janrinok and LaminatorX; there was a long stretch where they were the editorial team and who, when the submissions queue went dry, would rustle up stories from across the web and submit them for the other to push out onto the site. I'd hate to imagine what would have happened without their steadfast effort and perseverance.

Lastly, a sincere thanks goes to the SoylentNews community. Your story submissions are tremendously important -- not just in giving us something to post on the site, but also in providing insight into what topics are suitable for the site, as well. Please keep those story submissions and comments coming!

Okay, that wasn't the last thing. We seem to be running behind prior periods in subscriptions to the site. We need the money to pay for the servers, domain name renewal, taxes, etc. Again, none of the staff receive any payment of any kind for our efforts -- we are all volunteers. Please take a moment to go to our Subscription Page. Even Anonymous Cowards can, via a gift subscription, make a contribution. If you are logged in and looking to start, renew, or extend your subscription, be certain that you select the correct radio button for renewal (i.e. NOT a gift subscription). Click through the FAQ link there to see the benefits to you for subscribing. Also, the amounts shown are minimums for the duration shown -- please consider changing to a larger amount to further help the site continue as a going concern.

tl;dr: teamwork++

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