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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 martyb on Saturday March 21 2020, @12:30PM   Printer-friendly
from the if-at-first-you-don't-succeed,-avoid-skydiving-or-making-immediate-changes-directly-to-live-systems dept.

[2020-03-21 15:06:00 UTC: Update 1:
(1) Reminder: this has so far been implemented only on our *development* server (https://dev.soylentnews.org/); it has NOT yet been rolled out to this (the production) servers.
(2) The control (now a simple text link, no longer a button) no longer defaults to taking up a whole physical line immediately above the first comment.
(3) Please note that in certain corner-cases, it is possible that screen size limitations may cause an overflow onto the next line.
(4) And the control should now appear aligned-right in the story header. =)
--martyb]

[2020-03-21 15:42:00 UTC: Update 2: Fixed typo in the first of the above two links to our dev server. --martyb]

This is a follow-up to: Changing the Site UI to Making Long Stories Easier to Navigate -- Input Requested.

Wow! Thanks for all the positive feedback to the previous story! I knew the implementation was a bit rough around the edges, so I very much appreciate the positive, constructive feedback that was provided!

Based on your input -- primarily displeasure in having a single button take up a whole physical line -- I have modified the in-memory template on our development server to now provide a textual link in the story header right after the printer icon. It should only appear when viewing the story by itself; there should be no indication of this on the main page.

To repeat, this is only on our development server so far; it is not yest implemented on our production server (i.e. what you see here).

In short, should this get rolled out to production?

  1. Yes.
  2. Yes, with these suggested changes.
  3. No.

Please refer to the previous story (linked above) for test scenarios and reply with any issues you may find!

teamwork++


Original Submission

posted by martyb on Friday March 20 2020, @03:00PM   Printer-friendly
from the putting-our-heads-together-from-a-distance-seems-like-it-should-be-easy-but-it's-MMMMMMMMMMMMMM-not! dept.

[20200320_184315 UTC: Update: Made the dept. line longer to better demonstrate space [un]availability.--martyb]

[20200320_202305 UTC: Update: Added topics: "/dev/random", "Code", "Software", and "Answers" topics to better illustrate their use of space in a story. --martyb]

[20200321_175412 UTC: Update: superseded by: Skip to comment(s) -- Second Try --martyb]

First: Please accept my best wishes to everyone during SARS-CoV-2 / COVID-19 / Coronavirus pandemic. Please take all necessary precautions to keep yourself and those around you safe!

Second: I should not have been surprised, but I must confess my admiration at how the SoylentNews community came together in support of each other in response to SoylentNews Community -- How has SAR-CoV-2 (Coronavirus) / COVID-19 Affected You? As of my writing this, there are over 300 comments! community++ This is what I had hoped for when SoylentNews started over six years (Wow!) ago, and so validates my giving of my time to this site!

Third: (and the focus of this story) our virus roundup stories are... long. An AC posted a comment: thanks to eds:

Thanks editors for pulling together this summary. SN for the win!

One comment--it is kind of long to scroll down through, to get to the comments. Perhaps next time some of the longer stories could be put inside the spoiler tag?"

This was quickly acted on by a member of staff, but that was not universally embraced as a "Good Idea". Both Soylentils, to my eye, had good points. If I am visiting an active story again, I have already read the story (both the "Intro Copy" and the "Extended Copy"). Why should I have to scroll through a wall-of-text to get to the comments? The suggestion of using <spoiler>...</spoiler> to bracket the contents of each of the merged stories seemed like a reasonable suggestion. But, when you have a hammer... Right idea, but maybe not quite the right tool.

Aside: If I am reading a review of, say, a movie, then a spoiler is an appropriate way to hide plot details from those who have not yet seen the movie. That is not the situation here. Why hide details of a story about the pandemic? Hmm. A good first try, perhaps, but it looks like we need something different in this case.

Idea: what if there were, say, a button at the top of the story that I could click and be brought immediately to the comment section of a story? Hey! I can do that!

Acknowledgements: At this point, I hereby express my sincere thanks to AndyTheAbsurd for constructing some CSS which allowed the conditional display of a button, and to FatPhil for his testing efforts. Thanks guys!

Read on past the break for details on the implementation and a request for assistance before I attempt to roll it out to production.

So, I hacked up something that I hope addressed the initial concern: "kind of long to scroll down through". I'll be the first to admit the implementation is crude. We can go for pretty later. (The perfect is the enemy of good enough, right?) I think the ideal would be to have a separate nexus for virus-related stories. That way we would not feel compelled to gather a bunch of story submissions into a single story. We could process each submission independently and release each on its own. Unfortunately, there is much more to it than just adding an entry to the site DB.

It has been implemented on our development server: https://dev.soylentnews.org/ and I hereby solicit feedback from the community on how well it works. It was implemented with one addition to an in-memory copy of a single site template (dispStory;misc;default).

For the curious, see Original and Updated Versions of Template: "dispStory;misc;default" ("Skip to Comment(s)" button), but do be aware that rehash replaced tabs with spaces, so what you see is NOT an exact copy of the sources.

Now what? Feedback! This is your site. I am well aware there are Soylentils who have a much better grasp of HTML and CSS than I do, and am hereby soliciting supportive feedback.

Test scenarios:

  1. Does the "Skip to comment(s)" Button not appear on the main page?
  2. Does the "Skip to comment(s)" Button appear on the story page?
  3. Does it work?
  4. Is the appearance consistent across all of the available themes?
    1. Site Default
    2. BadA55
    3. Chillax
    4. Grayscale
    5. Black IcIcle
    6. Night Mode
    7. NV
    8. OMG PWNIES
    9. SoylentNews
    10. Vomit
    11. VT100
    12. VT220
  5. Is the layout consistent other homepage settings?
    [] Simple Design
    Simplifies the design of Dev.SN to strip away some of the excesses of the UI.
    [] Low Bandwidth
    Reduces the size of pages for people with slower network connections
    [] No Icons
    Disable topic icon images on stories.
  6. Which of the preceding homepage settings would be better served with just a simple anchor?

    <a href="@acomments">Skip to Comment(s)</a>

  7. Other, what did I miss?

Original Submission

posted by martyb on Friday March 06 2020, @01:00PM   Printer-friendly
from the alliteration++ dept.

I have a couple things to bring to the attention of the community concerning site funding and comment moderations. As always, if you are not interested in these matters, feel free to skip past this one; another story will be along shortly. Otherwise read beyond the fold for an update.

Finances:

A recent comment to a journal article about SoylentNews now having a privacy policy prompted me to pursue something that had been nagging at me for a long while.

In short, I have learned it costs more to run this site than I had estimated. We have actually been operating at a loss for the past couple years. I have, therefore, provided a revised fundraising goal of $3500.00 for the first half of this calendar year in the "Site News" slashbox (that appears on the right-hand-side of the main page).

I have been advised our current funds on hand can support the site for just six months.

For those who have been around for a while, it will come as no surprise to learn that I try to keep a handle on subscription income for this site. Further, I have been maintaining what we affectionately refer to here as the "Beg-O-Meter' that appears in the "Site News" slashbox. It provides a running tally of our financial goal for the period and how far along we are towards attaining that goal. Lastly, I have posted stories in the past apprising the community as to our progress towards those goals.

We are an entirely volunteer organization (no staff member has ever been paid anything for their work on SoylentNews). All funding for the site comes entirely from the community (we have never run advertisements and are strongly resistant to any suggestion to do so). The vast majority of our funding comes from subscriptions.

My prior estimates of $4000.00 per year were based on the only information I had available at that time. Our monthly web hosting costs ($260/month), the fact that we needed to file and pay taxes, and that we paid an accountant to prepare them. Twelve months at $260/month works out to $2160 per year. I reasoned a goal of $3000 for the year would give us about $840 for those other expenses... that should do it, right?

Apparently not.

Thanks to the above-referenced comment, I reached out to a member of our board of directors and inquired as to our financial status. In very short order I received a pile of PDF files. A separate file for each fiscal year's Profit and Loss Statement and a separate file for each year's Balance Sheet. It took a surprising amount of effort, but thanks to the concerted effort of a few staff members, these have been uploaded to our Wiki and can now be accessed through the SoylentNews Finance page.

A couple things bear explanation. You may notice that there are expenses associated with subscriptions. The amount of a subscription made to SoylentNews is a gross amount. From that, Stripe or PayPal charge a processing fee for each subscription. These fees do add up and amount to the aforementioned expense.

Also, why is a Delaware company paying Massachusetts state taxes? I reached out for an answer from a board member, and here is his reply:

We pay Massachusetts income tax (since we are not profitable, we pay the minimum amount of $456 each year, but if we ever become profitable, we will have to pay more) because we are physically located in MA (through me). A physical address was required to open our checking account with BoA[*], and for various other things. For example, we need a physical address to sign the engagement letter with our accountant every year. Note that we are not required to pay Delaware income tax because we are not physically located in DE. The tax that we pay to Delaware each year is technically a franchise tax that we pay for the privilege of being incorporated in Delaware (allowing us to be a Public Benefit Corporation, among other benefits).

[*] BoA - Bank of America.

I will keep the community appraised should I learn anything more.

Moderations:

We had had a discussion on the site a few months ago about moderation on the site. I have been pursuing a possible implementation of one of the suggestions raised there: adding a "-1 Ad Hominem" moderation. Discussion among staff has suggested we would need a counter moderation should a "-1 Ad Hominem" be perceived to have been in error. That wold mean the addition of a "+1 Not Ad Hominem" moderation, too. (In proper geek fashion, they nicely abbreviate to: "-1 AH" and "+1 NAH"!) There is more to its implementation than just adding these options to the moderation table; coding changes would also be needed. This, in turn, would require the modifications be submitted through GitHub as a pull request, then testing, and finally a rollout to the community. It is important to note that this would be on a trial basis! If it proves to NOT be workable, we need to be able to roll that back. This is easier said than done! The previous moderations will need to remain in the system (what's done is done) but future moderations must be able to be blocked... and the code is not designed for this at all.

It bears mentioning that our goal is to provide a forum for the community to comment on stories and to moderate those comments. We strive to be as hands-off about these matters as we reasonably can.

In short, this is mostly an announcement that AH moderations have not been forgotten, design work is in progress, and that when time and developer availability permits, we hope to be rolling this out for a test run. I would not expect anything to happen in the next month, but wanted to provide as much advance notice as to the intention as possible so as to encourage any feedback, discussion, etc. that could help inform our implementation.

<Note class="TMB">

s/next month/next few months/

Contractor woes (just because I technically can do everything doesn't mean it's always the wisest idea) wound up pushing move-in date on the church I've been remodeling back a couple months (end of April is what we're currently shooting for as a best case scenario) and I don't want anything hitting production servers that hasn't had at least two weeks worth of testing on our dev server after me calling it done, because I'm quite often wrong about that. The end of May is the soonest anything is likely to hit production servers, with some time in June being far more likely.

</Note>


Original Submission

posted by on Sunday February 23 2020, @03:20PM   Printer-friendly
from the anything-not-illegal-is-compulsory dept.

Bleh. Apparently not caring what you do on other sites or even requiring any personal information isn't good enough for the state of Confusion^WCalifornia, so we have a shiny, new, temporary Privacy Policy posted on every page and linked at the top of the nav bar.

If you feel like prettying the language, layout, or whatever up before I get around to it, feel free to do so and submit a pull request.

posted by martyb on Sunday February 16 2020, @09:09PM   Printer-friendly
from the cake-time! dept.

Thank You!

On the occasion of the site's sixth anniversary, I thought it fitting to mention some of the many ways that fellow Soylentils contribute to our community. This also seems like a good opportunity to mention some of the site's history, relate some staffing changes, mention other contributions by the SoylentNews community, and to wrap things up with some site statistics.

Please accept our thanks:

These thanks go out to all of you: my fellow members of the SoylentNews community.

To the Anonymous Cowards who post comments to our site (be they inciteful or insightful). To our registered users who not only post comments, but are also the only members who can moderate comments. No matter how long you have been here; whether you have just arrived (Welcome!) or have been with us from the very start... Thank You!

Speaking of which, thanks go to our staff who bludgeoned and duct-taped an ancient unmaintained open-sourced version of the code underpinning slashdot into some sort of basic functionality, and who have since made it the site you are enjoying today. Thanks, too, to our behind-the-scenes staff members, who keep the underlying services we depend on, running 24/7. Other staff members are more visible, like the editorial team who spend several hours every single day processing the stories that get posted to the site.

And let's not forget the members of the community who purchase subscriptions and thereby fund the operations of this site. We do have real world expenses: paying for our servers, domain registrations, and paying a CPA (Certified Public Accountant) to do our taxes.

Read on past the fold for all the rest!

Some History:

The history of this site has been well documented in our prior birthday announcements.

I've collected links to them for those who would like to take a walk down memory lane or to learn of how we got our start. It is worth mentioning here that preceding the creation of SoylentNews was a SlashCott, a boycott of the slashdot site where participants pledged to not access slashdot at all during the week-long period of February the 10th through the 17th. The first paragraphs of our 5-year anniversary post describes things quite well... Enjoy !

  1. Welcome to the World of Tomorrow... Today!
  2. SoylentNews is One Year Old!
  3. Happy Second Anniversary to SoylentNews!
  4. Three Years In - What Has Happened and How we Got Here
  5. Happy Birthday to SoylentNews -- Four Years Old!
  6. SoylentNews is... FIVE YEARS OLD!

Staffing:

I am happy to announce our editorial team has a new member spiraldancing who has been getting up to speed and has already posted several stories. And... we have two more who will be going through training as soon as some free time appears in their schedule.

Helping Others

SoylentNews is not just all about ourselves. Several members have joined together to help medical researchers examine the causes of protein misfolding which is of interest to medical research into Alzheimer's disease, Huntington's disease, and many forms of cancer. Please see my Journal Entry for details on what has been done and how to sign up!

Statistics:

Since this site went live, over 950,000 comments (WOW!) have been made to over 30,700 stories and 4,760 journal entries. Along the way, the community made just shy of 650,000 moderations to those comments. We now have over 9,500 registered nicknames, too.


Original Submission

posted by martyb on Friday January 31 2020, @01:00PM   Printer-friendly

Who has noticed anything new at SoylentNews these past couple days?

We have a new editor who has just come on board and has posted his first two stories to the site (one each for the previous two days).

You may recall that I posted a request for help a little over two weeks ago. I am happy to report that we had a positive response to the request... and a new editor has been in training starting a few days later!

Please join me in welcoming spiraldancing to his new role as an editor on staff. He is not new to the site as he created an account here a bit over 4 years ago. He worked his way through training on our development server. (Under the watchful eye and guidance of janrinok. JR not only walked SD through the mechanics of how to post a story, but also a goodly amount of what to be mindful of during the whole process. It is all too easy to make a mistake... which I can attest from personal experience!)

I look forward to seeing him bring his perspective and input to our team.

Welcome
Aboard!


Original Submission

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