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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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posted by NCommander on Sunday July 01 2018, @01:33AM   Printer-friendly

Just a quick note, as previously noted, our SSL certificates were due to expire. Due to various headaches involving issues changing our DNS records, and my personal unavailability, we were unable to renew our certificates in time. Right now, soylentnews.org is running on a LetsEncrypt certificate that was issued after quite a bit of pain. We're still trying to fix the fundamental issues that prevented us from being issued a two year Gandi certificate. Currently, I'm unable to resolve this issue more in-depth, but I've granted access to TheMightyBuzzard to be able help handle the necessary issues that caused the downtime. I will try to get a full writeup of the situation, but for the time being, the main site is up. Secondary services remain down due to the same renewal issues.

Apologies for any inconvenience,

NCommander

posted by martyb on Saturday June 30 2018, @03:20PM   Printer-friendly
from the certs-are-not-just-a-breath-mint dept.

[Updated 2018/06/30 15:19:00 UTC. I've received word that "certificate renewed, but hasn't been issued" and that it will be installed as soon as we receive the new cert. Original story follows. --martyb]

We've been up front with the community right from the start... and intend to keep doing so in the future.

Where we are at:

We have encountered an issue with Lets Encrypt (LE), the certificate issuer for the majority of our [sub]domains. Even though we can 'see' these domains from any number of different servers... for some unknown reason, LE fails to see them. So, at the moment, we are unable to get them to generate certs for us.

Separately, the cert for soylentnews.org is handled by Gandhi. As far as I understand it (and I'm no sysadmin so take this with a healthy dose of salt) there are only two members of our staff who have the ability to update that cert. (We obviously don't want to let world+dog have access to that, right? My guess is that at that time, having a couple people seemed sufficiently redundant and secure).

What it means to you:

You may encounter a warning from your browser when trying to access the site that a certificate has expired. I cannot speak for all browsers, but I've generally seen that along with the warning is an option to trust the cert anyway. (Note: along with allowing that exception, I've sen at least one browser default a checkbox to make the exception permanent. It's entirely up to you, but I see no reason to make it a permanent exception at this point.)

We are working on it, and obviously hope to have things straightened out sooner than later! On the other hand, should things go sideways, I want to keep the community informed about what's up, what's happening, and what you can expect.

Checking status:

If you would like another means to check on the status of the certs, Comodo makes it easy with queries such as these:

https://crt.sh/?q=soylentnews.org
https://crt.sh/?q=%%25soylentnews.org
https://crt.sh/?q=sylnt.us
https://crt.sh/?q=%%25sylnt.us

tl;dr:

If the site becomes unavailable because of an expired cert, yeah, we know and we're working on it. Accept a temporary exception in your browser and we'll let you now when things are back to normal.

--martyb

P.S. Our Editor-in-Chief, janrinok, is currently undergoing preparations for a medical procedure... it's hard to say at this point, but it's likely he may be unavailable to help with the site for a couple weeks. Please join me in wishing him well for the procedure and for a speedy recovery!


Original Submission

posted by mrpg on Friday June 08 2018, @09:00AM   Printer-friendly
from the community++ dept.

Just three days ago, I asked for the community's help to raise funds for continuing operations. Incoming funds were trending upwards — but way too slowly — and it was clear we were going to come up short. I was genuinely worried about our ability to continue as a going concern.

My fears were, apparently, unwarranted... over those three days we received 49 subscriptions totaling approximately $1534.74 which led us to exceed our base goal of $3000.00 for the first half of the year!

THANK-YOU!!

Of these 49 subscriptions, the vast majority were for $20.00 (36 of these), but we also had 3@$40.00, 1@$50, and (drum roll please) 3@$200.00! And for those who subscribed at other amounts, I also thank you. I've had times in my life when my finances did not allow me to help others as I'd wished. Every bit helps!

Let me interrupt the funding-focus for a moment to call attention to a notable accomplishment among our staff: Our Editor in Chief, janrinok (aka JR), just passed 4,000 stories posted to the site! There was a long stretch about a year or so into SoylentNews' existence when JR and LaminatorX (aka LamX) handled pretty much *all* of the story duties on the site. During that period, story submissions were rare and often little more than a bare link to a story of interest. So they'd tag-team finding stories on the web, making submissions, posting stories, and reviewing same. Were it not for their extended and heroic efforts, there would have been a period of months with almost no stories for us to read. LamX left us a couple years ago (would love to have ya back!) But JR has stuck with us, and we are forever indebted to him for his generous contributions of time, expertise, and guidance. Please join me in congratulating JR for reaching this amazing milestone!

Many thanks, too, for the feedback in the comments to the earlier story — I read every one of them — but am in severe crunch mode at work and lacked the spare time to respond individually as I would have liked. I'll respond to a couple items here.

There was a suggestion to set up a "war chest" from which we could draw off interest to support continuing operations among other things. I don't anticipate we will have $100K in the bank any time soon (one of the suggestions), but having a rainy-day fund "just in case" does seem prudent to me. In light of that, you may have noticed in the "Site News" slashbox there are now two goals listed: a base goal and a stretch goal.

So how much should the stretch goal be for?

As it now stands, we have received approximately $125 in excess of our base goal. So, how about $2000.00? With only about 3 weeks remaining in the period, that seemed like too much of a stretch. I pulled a number out of my butt and came up with $1000.00 which is still a stretch (doh!), but I believe is attainable. I am mindful that we have the second half of the year ahead of us and will be needing funds for that period, too. So, I am NOT asking for folks to go crazy to reach this stretch goal at the expense (pun intended!) of the needs for the rest of the year... if you can help out, that's great! If not, well that's okay, too.

Another suggestion was a means to generate funds besides subscriptions. I failed to mention this in my earlier exhortation, but we DO have SoylentNews-related things for sale over at https://www.zazzle.com/soylentnews*. (NOTE: The asterisk at the end of the link is intentional and gives SoylentNews a slightly larger return on each purchase; please leave it in.) This link is also listed in the Site News slashbox ("buy SoylentNews Swag"), should you wish to refer back to it.

We are still in the process of taking advantage of the free disk space upgrade available from Linode. It is unclear at the moment whether these free disk upgrades will make further server consolidation possible, but we are looking into it. We will keep you informed as we proceed with the upgrades, as well.

One more thing. One of the comments mentioned how soylentnews.org had become their "goto site" to see if the internet was up. I nearly fell out of my chair! Those who were with us the first few weeks of the site will well recall how we would have multiple crashes each day. That things have changed so dramatically as this... please join me in thanking the sysops who may stay out of the limelight, but keep things running like a top!

Again, please accept my thanks for the huge outpouring of support for the site. I am humbled by the generosity of the community and count it a distinct honor to be able to play some role in it. --martyb


Original Submission

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