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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 on Sunday January 19 2020, @03:40PM   Printer-friendly
from the lingere dept.

Well, crap. I have no idea why or when it happened but the Threshold setting when using Threaded-TOS appears to be non-functional at the moment. It's supposed to set the value below which a comment and any of its subcomments will be collapsed, unless a subcomment is over the Breakthrough value which should cause that comment only to be expanded. Right now it's functioning as if Threshold were set to 6. I never noticed it because I have both settings set to -1.

I can't monkey with it right this second but I'll see if I can get it fixed some time this weekend. Just a hotfix patch to the live code not a full site update.

Beats doing construction work in the rain I suppose.

Update: Okay, I can't fix something that ain't broke and TOS is functioning as intended. I just forgot that Threshold applied only to top-level comments, all subcomment trees should be collapsed by default, and Breakthrough was the setting for subcomments to show up no matter what. This doesn't make sense to me but then I'm not the one who decided it should function like that and I don't use TOS. If you lot want it to function differently or want a new mode that's similar, drop your insipid inspired ideas here and if there's enough demand I'll put it on the todo list.

posted by martyb on Tuesday January 14 2020, @08:00AM   Printer-friendly
from the editors-wanted dept.

The observant reader will notice that we have reduced the number of stories we post on weekdays from about 15 stories per day to about 13 stories per day. We would certainly like to continue with the higher rate, but we have been struggling to do so with current staff.

We try to post enough stories each day so that there is "something for everyone". Ultimately this site is for the community. It is also by the community; it does not run all by itself.

We Need Your Help

People's lives change. They move, get married, have health issues, change jobs, etc. All of these place additional demands on their spare time. SoylentNews is not immune to this; in fact we have experienced all of these. With less free time available, more work falls upon the other staff members — whose lives are already quite full.

What would help?

Volunteer! Have you ever thought about being an editor at SoylentNews?

You'll get to learn a super-sekret handshake, the passcode to enter our volcano-lair, and the admiration of your fellow Soylentils!

Right from the start, let me point out that we — SoylentNews — aim to be impartial. If you have an agenda that you would like to push or advocate (or denigrate) then skip to the next story.

On the other hand, not a great deal of time is needed. Even if you have only an hour or two per week that you could contribute, that would be greatly appreciated!

An earlier request for help summarized things nicely (slightly updated here):

Well we are all volunteers, so we contribute what we can, when we can, no one is expected to edit X stories/day (make your own hours). I would say a strong recommendation (maybe not requirement) is signing onto IRC once in a while (especially when editing) so one can communicate with the other editors. Editing a few stories a day, or even a few a week would be welcome. A typical submission takes me about 15-30 minutes to edit, usually on the longer side if I'm expanding or adding a balanced point of view without trying to put words into the mouth of the submitter. The rest is pretty much what you'd expect:

  • Opening up a story
  • Checking links
  • Checking basic grammar and spelling
  • Correcting wording
  • Expanding a weak submission (sometimes it's just a few links and a sentence or quote)
  • etc.

One also needs to:

How else could I help?

Nominate someone. Have you noticed someone who tends to compose well-written comments or journal entries? Think they might be a good fit? Please let us know!

How else could I help?

Submit a story! A well-written story that needs little editing takes a huge load off of the editorial staff. If just a few Soylentils submitted a story each day it would make a world of difference. Ideally, a story submission would be grammatically correct, have no spelling errors, be balanced and impartial, and be "publication ready". But even if your writing skills are not up to (or are even far from) that level, we are experienced at "cleaning things up", so do not let that keep you from making a story submission! If you see something tech-related that you think would be of interest to the community? Send it in!

How can you reach us?

Send an email to editors (at) soylentnews (dot) org. Or drop a message on our IRC (Internet Relay Chat) channel. Just issue the command "/join #editorial" and leave a message expressing your interest, along with your SoylentNews nickname, and someone will get back to you.

What's in it for me?

That is a good question. Speaking for myself, it started with my getting onto IRC and occasionally pointing out an error I'd seen in a story. Sometimes it would take a while before I could get the attention of an editor who could make the correction. I got frustrated. Finally, I suggested that if I were made an editor, I could fix things myself without having to track people down. Over the 5 ½ years since then, I have made mistakes... and learned how to own them, in writing, in front of all of you. I've developed a thicker "skin". I've made great friendships with people all around the world. The technical expertise on staff here is amazing; they've taught me so much. And, I hope, I've been able to teach them a thing or two, too.


Original Submission

posted by martyb on Tuesday January 07 2020, @02:45AM   Printer-friendly

It brings me great pleasure to announce that — thanks to a few last-day-of-the-year subscriptions — SoylentNews has successfully reached its fund-raising goal for the second half of 2019! (Note: these amounts are unaudited and are, therefore, approximate.)

During the period 2019-07-01 through 2019-12-31, we received a net total of $2036.33 (from gross receipts of $2121.64) on a goal of $2000.00! There were 71 paid subscriptions which ranged from $4.00 up to $200.00

Here's a great big thank you to all who have subscribed to SoylentNews... every contribution is important!


Original Submission

posted by martyb on Wednesday December 25 2019, @06:00PM   Printer-friendly

Greetings!

To those of you who may be celebrating a holiday at this time of year, on behalf of the staff at SoylentNews, please accept my best wishes to you and those you hold dear.

For Fun:

With glee I am pleased to announce that The Mighty Buzzard has given a gift to all registered users on the site. These are good until 2019-12-26 00:10:00.

Thank You!

As the end of the year approaches, I extend my humble thanks to all of you who have subscribed to SoylentNews!

As of this writing, we have received $1799.47 towards a goal of $2000.00 for the second half of the year. All funds received go directly to supporting the site: web hosting, domain name renewal, tax preparation, etc. Nobody has ever received any money for their work on SoylentNews. We are staffed entirely by volunteers who give of their free time to keep the site running and the story queue filled. By my estimate, we have probably passed the minimum funds received that are needed to support the site for this half of the year... but actually reaching the goal would give us a bit of a cushion against the unexpected. To those who have let their subscription lapse and to those who may have never subscribed before: please subscribe and help us meet our goal.

Folding@Home:

Rarely mentioned, but SoylentNews does have a folding@home team which recently surpassed one billion points earned and now holds 218th place in the entire world! Here are views of their progress individually and as a team. Their efforts contribute to helping medical research into Alzheimer's disease, Huntington's disease, and many forms of cancer, among other diseases.

This Year So Far:

The SoylentNews web site has been available 24 hours day, 7 days a week... except for a couple relatively brief unplanned outages. Further our IRC (Internet Relay Chat) has been available throughout this time, as well. (There may have been a brief downtime due to scheduled Linode maintenance on our servers.) Also, behind the scenes, all the supporting back-end stuff has been chugging along: web servers, databases, caches, E-Mail processing, and lots more. Those of you who have been with us since the start remember the frequent site crashes of those early days. Often several times per day! The rarity of site crashes, now, is a testament to the hard work of many people who gave of their time and expertise to make SoylentNews so stable, today.

These are the folk who quietly mind the underpinnings of and automate everything so well you don't even know they are there and would likely feel embarrassed if attention were brouht to them. Please join me in thanking them, anyway!

Some Numbers:

The editorial staff at SoylentNews has posted 4,884 stories to SoylentNews since 2019-01-01. With a very conservative estimate of 5 minutes per story, that amounts to 407 hours' time. Put another way, that is 10 full-time person-weeks.

Please join me in thanking the editors who have so generously given of their free time to make this happen!

Thanks Again!

Lastly, I am taking advantage of this opportunity to again thank everyone who offered their support during my recent health issue. I'm still a little wobbly typing with my left hand's pinky, but as things could have gone, I'll take this any day of the week, instead! It is my sincere hope that by sharing my experience, it may help someone else make a change in their life and avoid my experience or much worse.


Original Submission

posted by martyb on Saturday November 23 2019, @04:10AM   Printer-friendly
from the trying-to-please-the-Momma-Bear,-the-Papa-Bear-AND-the-Baby-Bear dept.

We get a lot of story submissions here on SoylentNews. Well over 37,000 so far and still counting. (THANK YOU!)

We occasionally see a story submission from an Anonymous Coward or new user that is an obvious attempt to increase the number of views of the linked story. We regularly decline to publish those stories. The self-seeking or self-promoting aspect is rather obvious. Or they have a political viewpoint they want to spearhead. They stand out from the more mainstream stories that you have seen posted here over the past 5+ years.

The next-scheduled story gave me pause.

I was somewhat hesitant because of the foregoing reasons. But, I decided to accept it anyway and I'd like to explain my reasoning. One, the story submission comes right out and candidly admits it is from the author. Two, the story provides a level-headed description of a technical problem, its causes, and suggestions for mitigations. Three, it provides reasons why the suggested changes would be beneficial to all readers; not just people in the target audience. Further, the submitter has been an active member and contributor to the site — even before it went live. I've seen him at work and have never seen any self-seeking behavior or pushing of an agenda of any kind. Quite the contrary, all of the contributions I have seen have been strictly for the benefit of the site and the community. Lastly, the submission had been reviewed by another editor and the only question is the one that is now posed to you here.

What do you think?

Is this the first step down a slippery slope? Should we have a "bright line" policy that strictly rejects even the appearance of self-promotion? Should the editors just use their best judgement, based on their past experience and informed from the feedback to this story? Other?


Original Submission

posted by on Wednesday November 13 2019, @11:10PM   Printer-friendly
from the lingere dept.

Just a quick note to let those of you who care know that our load balancer finally got bumped up to openssl 1.1.x and is now TLSv1.3 happy. For those of you who are especially paranoid, "ssl_early_data" is explicitly set to "off" in the nginx conf file, actively disabling 0-RTT, even though it's disabled by default.

That's all, carry on.

posted by Fnord666 on Saturday November 09 2019, @05:24PM   Printer-friendly
from the hoping-for-a-speedy-recovery dept.

The observant among you may have noticed I'd been posting fewer stories recently.

On October 27th I went to the hospital. After a physical examination, CT scan, and MRI, it was determined that I had had a minor stroke. I had mild loss of use of the pinky and ring finger of my left hand as well as some loss of fine motor control in my left arm and leg. A couple days later saw me in the operating room with a stent being inserted in my right carotid artery. I was released on Halloween day for a few days' recuperation at a relative's home and am now cleared to go back to work. I'm starting easy with slightly shortened work days, as I lack the stamina I had before.

Still, as these things go, I can't help but think of how fortunate I am. Nothing internal seems to have been affected (heart, lungs, etc. all working fine.) I am right-handed, so no problems there. No problem with talking or swallowing, so that's a huge plus. Thanks to neural plasticity and prescribed exercises, I have already mostly recovered. The lack of stamina manifests as my just being too tired after a day at work to be able to do much in the way of posting stories out to the site. As for my mind, I can attest that I am still as tarp as a shack! =)

As much as I would like to think I'll just bounce back to normal in no time, I acknowledge that my activities here will be at a somewhat diminished capacity for a while; time will tell.

With my absence, the rest of the editorial team rose to the occasion and kept the main page fed with stories. This meant extra time and effort on their part. Please join me in thanking Fnord666, Janrinok, cmn32480, takyon, chromas, NotSanguine, and CoolHand for their efforts to help push out stories to the main page. There were probably others whom I failed to notice; please accept my apologies for their omission. Call them out in the comments, and join me in thanking them for their efforts.

On a related note, it is my pleasure to announce that Fnord666 has accepted my invitation to step up to fill the position of Alternate-Editor-in-Chief. When janrinok was Editor-in-Chief (EiC), I accepted becoming Alternate-EiC, and when he stepped down as EiC, it was a privilege to take on becoming the EiC. I foresee no imminent demise on my part, but recent events made it abundantly clear to me the value of having this position filled. Please join me in congratulating Fnord666 on his promotion!

(For completeness' sake, I wish to point out that all of the staff at SoylentNews are volunteers. Nobody here has ever been paid anything for their work on the site. Any monies received when you subscribe go towards paying hosting fees, domain name registration, tax preparation expenses, and other costs required to keep this site running. Speaking of which, we are at nearly 70% of our goal for this half of our fiscal year—many thanks to those who have already subscribed!)

Lastly, I now place a request to the community. With the holiday season coming, my free time will become even more limited by work demands. It would be such a help to us to see story submissions from members of the community. It's really not that hard to do. Take a look at what the general layout of each article looks like on the site. Nothing very fancy or elaborate is needed. Click the Submit Story link in the SlashBox on the left-hand side of the main page of this site. Provide a title for the story, select a topic, provide a link to what you are writing in about, and a few paragraphs from the linked story would prove extremely helpful to us! We aim for mostly tech-oriented stories, but that is not an absolute requirement. Please submit your story in English (either North American, British or other variant is fine). Do be aware that we aim for balanced reporting here; attempts to push an agenda with one-sided, biased, or slanted submissions will likely result in the story being declined. The story submission page provides a link to the Submission Guidelines that, if followed, greatly improves the chance that your story will be accepted. (NB: We tend to relax the standards a bit on the weekend so as to include slightly offbeat or humorous stories; we appreciate a good laugh, too!


Original Submission