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We had a few hours this evening where there were issues we didn't notice with new submissions. We had been mothballing (setting the number of matches necessary beyond what would ever match anything) some spam filters exclusive to submissions and managed to somehow confuse one of the Apache web frontends. The offending filters are now just deleted entirely and incapable of confusing even MS Paint.
Please excuse the embuggerance. We now return you to your regularly scheduled arguments.
TMB
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On Monday February 17 2014, at 02:06AM SoylentNews announced itself to the world!
(That's exactly seven years ago from the time this story posts.) Does it seem possible? I know it certainly amazes me.
A lot can happen in a year. Here are some items of note. As always, if you are not interested in this kind of stuff, ignore this post — a new story will be along shortly. Otherwise, this story continues below the fold.
- Random Statistics
- Site News
- Staff Activity
- Folding@Home
NB: An earlier version of this story containing much more detail seems to have jumped into a bit bucket. Please forgive any errors that crept into this quick reincarnation attempt!
Random Statistics:
Over the past year, activity on the site comes to:
| Journals: | 2,161 |
| Stories: | 3,927 |
| Moderations: | 114,020 |
| Comments: | 155,098 |
We previously had a great number of posts on the COVID-19 pandemic. It is still with us, but vaccines are starting to be rolled out. Sadly, variants of the coronavirus have appeared, and some appear to be more contagious than the earlier strains. We had let up on our coverage of late, because trying to merge 20-30 story submissions was extremely demanding of time and energy — yet with decreasing amounts of discussion.
In spite of the hit that COVID-19 had on the community, we had a successful fundraiser last year. When we have official results, we will get them to you.
Site News:
We had a few hiccups and a burp or two, but the site has held up pretty well over the past year, all-in-all.
We had a site issue last June where the Most Recent Journal Entries Slashbox disappeared for a while. The Mighty Buzzard (aka TMB, Buzz), investigated, verified the DB was okay, restarted mysqld, bounced Apache/Varnish, and got that running again. Thanks again, Buzz!
We've also had a few (thankfully short) site outages and some issues. One of which, of course, coincided with TMB being on a week's vacation. I investigated, but it was well beyond my ken. TMB made a valiant effort, but being far from home and trying to remotely diagnose/fix problems with a borrowed Windows laptop with a chicklet keyboard was just too much. He got things stable until he could return. At that point, things were fixed up right-quick. Thanks bunches!!
Work continues, in fits and starts, to get our new Gentoo server aluminum up and running. It is slated to take over for our single CentOS server: beryllium. Thanks to TMB and juggs as well as mechanicjay and audioguy for all you do!
Staff Activity:
As noted in last year's anniversary post, TMB had been remodeling a church into a home. "(end of April is what we're currently shooting for as a best case scenario)". Looks like his estimate was pretty close, but just had the wrong year. 😁 As soon as that remodeling is done and he's moved in, we are hoping to start working on some site updates.
That said, there are some non-Perl updates that were made through the template system. We pushed out just such a change last March. When loading a story which contains a wall-of-text, one can now just click "[Skip to comment(s)]" in the story's title bar and save a bunch of scrolling. (Updated the in-memory copy of template: "dispStory;misc;default".)
requerdanos joined the editorial staff last December. We were hoping for maybe a couple stories per week, but in short order he has already posted 106 stories! Thanks so much!
Thanks, too, go to Fnord666 who has been a solid and consistent contributor to the site. He's posted 6,234 stories of which 1,816 have been in the past year — 4.975 stories a day, every day. (No, I have no idea what 0.025 stories looks like!) He has often posted half of the day's stories, and some days has posted every single story. I couldn't have asked for a better Alternate Editor-in-Chief!
Then there's chromas who has posted 158 stories over the past year. (lifetime total: 1,237 stories). He often "seconds" stories (provides a review of the initial editor's efforts) and thereby helps keep our "foe paws" from making it out for everyone else to see and laugh at. But wait, there's more! He also maintains his systemd 'bot' on IRC. It submits stories, resolves links, and looks up things on Google, Wikipedia, and YouTube. It even extracts and generates citations for journal references! I shudder to think of how much harder it would be to post stories without the assistance. Thanks so much!
Our emeritus EiC (Editor-in-Chief) janrinok has had limited spare time while providing primary supportive care for his spouse. Nevertheless, he pushed out 193 stories in the past year (lifetime total: 5,237 stories). Furthermore, he maintains Arthur T. Knackerbracket which extracts and submit stories. Thanks JR! I especially treasure your gentle and able guidance as I try to follow in your footsteps!
Though less frequently, we continue to get regular contributions from mrpg, CoolHand, and FatPhil. Every bit helps and is MUCH appreciated!
Then there's takyon who continues to occasionally post stories (23 over the past year, lifetime total: 1,365). More amazingly, he is a prodigious submitter of stories, too. They are almost always well-researched and well-formatted, with supporting links from other sites beyond the primary source. I suspect he may have been an understudy on Dragnet "Just the facts, ma'am." Whenever I see one of his stories in the submissions queue, I know it will be a simple one to push out into the story queue. In the past year he has had 378 of his story submissions accepted! Thanks takyon!
Hopefully I didn't overlook someone, but before I close here, I should mention that TMB posted 10 stories over the past year... in addition to his efforts to keep the site up and running. Thanks Buzz!
Folding@Home:
You might not be aware, but SoylentNews has a Folding@Home team that contributes spare CPU cycles to a distributed computing project. The effort seeks to determine how different proteins fold and, thereby, be better able to come up with cures. Besides Parkinson's disease and Huntington's disease, the past year's efforts have had a huge emphasis on the CARS-CoV-2 virus which causes COVID 19. Huge multinationals like Amazon, Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, and many others have donated their spare compute power to fighting COVID-19. Yet, even measured against those heavy weights, SoylentNews is still ranked 368th in the WORLD. We have completed 163,441 work units. That has earned us 2,435,739,709 points so far. Yes, 2.4 Billion points!
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from the Constants-aren't-and-variables-won't dept.
[2021-02-14 15:53:00 UTC: UPDATE added need to check apache log before doing a slash -restart]
We seem to have experienced some difficulties with the SoylentNews site.
I've noticed that both the number of hits and comments for each story do not seem to be updating.
Corrective measures taken:
- "Bounce" the Servers I doubted it would help, but it causes no harm to try it, so why not? And, as expected, it did not help, either.:This is my personal "bounce" script:
cat ~/bin/bounce#!/bin/bash
servers='hydrogen fluorine'
for server in ${servers} ; do echo Accessing: ${server} && rsh ${server} /home/bob/bin/bounce ; doneWhich, in turn, runs the following script on each of the above servers:
cat /home/bob/bin/bounce
#!/bin/bash
sudo /etc/init.d/varnish restart
sudo -u slash /srv/soylentnews.org/apache/bin/apachectl -k restart - Restart slash For those who are unaware, slash has its own internal implementation of what is, effectively, cron. It periodically fires off tasks that support the site's operations. But, this potentially has side-effects, so first need to check the apache error_log.
# Go to the appropriate server:
ssh fluorine
# Ensure the apache log is not showing issues: tail -f /srv/soylentnews.org/apache/logs/error_log
# Restart slash:
sudo /etc/init.d/slash restart
>> slashd slash has no PID file
>> Sleeping 10 seconds in a probably futile attempt to be clean: ok.
>> Starting slashd slash: ok PID = 3274NB: this failed to run to a successful conclusion when I originally tried it a few hour ago. I gave it one more try while writing this story... it seemed to run okay this time?!
Things appears to be running okay, now. Please reply in the comments if anything else is amiss. Alternatively, mention it in the #dev channel on IRC (Internet Relay Chat, or send an email to admin (at) soylentnews (dot) org.
We now return you to the ongoing discussion of: teco or ed?
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It's been one heck of a week:
Against the backdrop of record-setting numbers of COVID-19 deaths and infections in the US and around the world, there was turmoil in Washington, DC. As court cases surrounding the presidential election were filed and dismissed, a close race in Georgia was coming down to the wire and with it control of the US Senate. While the US Congress was completing the Electoral College tally and certification, a mob formed outside — and eventually broke into — the US Capitol. This resulted in a 4-hour lock-down. Eventually, the intrusion was repelled, and the Electoral College count was completed: Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. was confirmed as the 46th president of the United States of America.
Conspiracy theories have flourished. Propaganda has streamed forth across multiple platforms. Tempers have flared.
And SoylentNews has been there for you. And have you ever spoken up! Two of the most-commented stories in the site's nearly seven-year history were posted in just the past week!
Insomuch as the activities in the US Capitol were far from the US' most shining moments, neither were things all unicorns and rainbows on SoylentNews. Tempers flared. People were attacked and called names. I even accidentally deleted a story and the 17 comments attached to it! [NB: Problem addressed: the delete button no longer appears by default for our editors.]
IRC (Internet Relay Chat):
Even our IRC service was not free from controversy. We had a spate of nick (nickname) impersonations. Going forward, IRC users are free to use whatever nick they like with the following caveats:
- Prefix / suffix of a nick is fine for practical purposes (e.g. ${nick}_laptop)
- Impersonation or misrepresentation will not be tolerated
- The use of another user's website nick or derivative thereof on IRC will be subject to sanctions up to and including perma ban.
Further, we understand conversations can easily ramble from subject to subject, but there are separate channels for different topics. (Use the /list comand to see what is available.) As #soylent is the default landing channel, we want to keep the discussions there civil. Name calling and personal attacks are grounds for a timeout. I have had discussions with deucalion (the site's CEO and also IRC-maintainer) about these activities.
NOTE: we are NOT going to sit there watching every discussion, poised to take action. But, if such activity is seen by staff on IRC, they are free to take such actions as they deem necessary.
Aspirations:
As I approach posting my 10,000th story(!) to SoylentNews, I think back to when it all started. How a group of people got together. They shared freely of their expertise, of their free time, and of their hard-earned funds. They tried to create a place free from corporate overlords where people could engage in discussions that focused primarily on technology, but with a dabbling in other areas and current events.
SoylentNews provides a forum for discussion. It also provides tools so the community can express themselves in the comments and moderate those comments, as well.
This got me to thinking. What are our aspirations today? What are our guiding principles? I will list some of my guiding principles, and I encourage the community to share what guides them in the comments.
- "Explanations exist; they have existed for all time; there is always a well-known solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong." --H. L. Mencken (cite)
- "People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do." -- Isaac Asimov (cite)
- "If you speak when angry, you'll make the best speech you'll ever regret." -- Groucho Marx (cite)
- "Say what you mean, mean what you say, but don't say it mean."
- "Don't get furious, get curious" -- Miley Cyrus (cite)
- "Humiliation is when someone points out my shortcomings. Humility is when I confess them myself."
- "I need not participate in every fight I am invited to."
- The most difficult behaviors to observe in another person are the ones I dislike in my own.
- "You have not converted a man because you have silenced him." -- John, Lord Morley (cite)
How about you? What sayings guide your aspirations?
Thank You!
Lastly, I thank all of you for supporting me as Editor-in-Chief. I have no formal background in writing or management. I've made mistakes, but I've tried to own up to them as they happened. I strive to be fair, impartial, and open-minded. Under the watchful gaze of the community, I have grown. It is my hope that I may continue to earn your respect and continue in service for many years to come.
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