SoylentNews

Symptom: It all started with a tag (i.e. HTML element) error in this comment in a user's journal where the user coded a <strike> tag, but neglected to provide a matching </strike> tag.

Example: Let's look back to the original comment which manifested this bug. Here's the latter part of it, after being corrected:

Looks who's projecting. Consider your phrase "steal jobs and send them overseas for cheap/free labor" (no such thing as free labor). That helps billions of poor people improve their lives. Yet here you are, selfishly obsessing over your developed world pricing power (with some very unempathic label spewing) rather than display the alleged empathy or morality that you claim to be concerned about.

Your empathy is nonexistent and your morals are bankrupt - definitely not the sort of person I should be taking advice from!

The problem is that there was no closing <strike> after the word "cheap", so it looked like this:

Looks who's projecting. Consider your phrase "steal jobs and send them overseas for cheap/free labor" (no such thing as free labor). That helps billions of poor people improve their lives. Yet here you are, selfishly obsessing over your developed world pricing power (with some very unempathic label spewing) rather than display the alleged empathy or morality that you claim to be concerned about.

Your empathy is nonexistent and your morals are bankrupt - definitely not the sort of person I should be taking advice from!

If that was all that happened it would be ugly, but tolerable. Unfortunately, every single character following it on the page was struck through, too. Not Good™.

Immediate Fix: To my knowledge there was only one way to rectify the immediate issue: manually go into the DB and insert the missing tag. This I was able to do quite quickly, but I still saw a problem.

More to Come: Anyone who saw this comment discussion, either at this moment, or who happened upon it later, would see an opportunity to intentionally leave a hanging tag and thus disfigure the site. Trolls gotta troll. So, I made the fix and noted same in this comment reply.

So, an instance of the problem was fixed, but now what? There's a "proper" way to do it, and there is another way to get the same effect that can be quickly implemented. I chose the latter.

Perl Code: Normally, such HTML errors in a user's comment or journal entry (or an editor's edit of a story!) are caught and handled by a routine in our Perl code: balanceTags(). The code looks though all the tags, with whatever nesting is present, detects where tags do not have a required closing tag,and silently inserts it into the text that makes it into the DB. It's rather hairy code because it also needs to handle: extra closing tags, mis-matched closing tags (e.g.: <b> bold <bold and italic> </b> </i>), mistyped or otherwise non-existent tags, restricting what tags are supported, and custom-created site tags! Whew!

Further, to fix it in the Perl code means going through the process of: checking the code out from GitHub, understanding the code, making the change, compiling the change, testing the change, (after rolling it out to our dev server), and then -- if all looks good -- rolling the change out to our production servers. And, of course, nobody was around at the moment who could support such activities even if it were an easy coding change (and it is not!)

Expediency: I realized there was another approach which would mitigate the problem -- not requiring Perl coding changes -- but could still prevent its recurrence: changing the value of a "Site Variable" (aka "site var").

Rehash Primer: Now I need to step back for a moment and explain a couple things. The code for SoylentNews.org is a fork of ancient Slashcode that was put up on GitHub. Slashcode was implemented using a Model View Controller design. There is a clear demarcation between what is done where and at what level.

Templates: As part of its implementation, the SlashCode implemented "Templates" which generate the HTML pages that get sent to the browser and act as an interface between the code and the user. As far as I know, every page you see on the site comes by way of a template. Each template may, in turn, make use of other templates. Templates can make calls to underlying Perl code. This is where the site implements the heavy lifting of talking to the database (DB), creating e-mails, and other closer-to-the-metal activities. The template language (from personal inspection; I have yet to find an official document as to its syntax and semantics) presents what appears to be a simple, macro-capable language. The templates are stored in the DB and loaded into memory when the site is started. An advantage of this is that changes to templates can be made "on the fly" using a template editor (which is, itself, a template!) There is one caveat: for the changes to take effect, processes on the front-end servers need to be "bounced", i.e. restarted, so the changes are loaded into memory from the (updated) DB.

Site Variables: There are some parameters whose values affect the site's operations: Name of the site, domain name of the site, the name of the Anonymous User account, ... it goes on and on and on. There are no less than 750 site variables! And, as many things that grew beyond their initial construction, there is no simple way to look for what site vars might be appropriate to any given situation. One is just expected to know what they are and what they do and how they do it. Simple enough approach when they first started, I guess. A search capability would be very nice to have, but it will take some coding to make that happen, so it has become just another of the several changes that would be nice to make to the site.

So, back to the matter at hand, I knew about the "approvedtags" site var which lists all tags which are permitted to be used on the site. Sure enough, "STRIKE" was in there! And, I saw that "DEL" was in there, too. Does "DEL" have the same problem? I tried a quick test comment on our development server and it revealed that balanceTags() properly handled a hanging <DEL> without a matching </DEL>. Yay! I removed "STRIKE" from the "approvedtags" list, saved the change, bounced the front-end servers, and breathed a sigh of relief.

All was good, until someone asked in a footnote to a comment why do we still list STRIKE as being a permitted tag for comments? What? I double-checked and verified that "STRIKE" was no longer listed in "approvedtags". What is going on? So, I commenced searching and finally discovered another site var: "approvedtags_visible" which contains the list of tags that is presented to the user as being available. And, sure enough, "STRIKE" was in that list. Grrr! I removed "STRIKE" from "approvedtags_visible", saved the changes, and saw no further issues mentioned there. Finally!

Or so I thought. Did you see what was missed? The site vars were now correct and up-to-date. The changes were saved to the DB. But... those changes existed only in the DB. Still needed to 'bounce' the front end servers for the changes to take effect. So, that entailed a quick SSH to our servers, running the bounce scripts, and verifying that "STRIKE" was truly and properly removed from the tags presented to the user as being available for use, and that anyone trying to use <STRIKE>, anyway, would discover it did not work.

Conclusions: So, here are some lessons learned:

1. When you want to use a <STRIKE> tag, use <DEL>, instead.
2. There is no assurance that reporting a problem in the comments will be noticed.
3. Please report site issues with an e-mail sent to admin (at) soylentnews (dot) org.
4. In addition to sending an e-mail, mention it in the "#dev" channel of our IRC server.
5. This particular issue should now be well and truly fixed. Please report any problems you may discover with it.
6. When communicating changes made to the site, a mention in the comments does not suffice.

7. --martyb

[Janrinok says: TL:DR Martyb fixed it, OK, OK, I have read it....]

Original Submission

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

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).

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