SoylentNews

It has been a while since I was able to update the community on various aspects of our site.

Back in the Saddle

Many of you will recall that I had to step back from many of my site duties to begin a period of medical treatment. That has now been completed and, although it was not 100% successful, I am feeling better than when it started. During that time I was asked, where possible, to continue to help manage the site until replacements could be found for various roles.

Unfortunately we have not been successful in finding anyone to help administer the site. It might appear a daunting task, and the job list is appreciable, but many of those tasks take literally 2 minutes to complete. Perhaps the most important role is being available to answer the queries that arrive at admin@soylentnews.org. They are often simple to resolve and again only take a few minutes, but the emails have to be checked fairly frequently, at least daily. It is usually an empty mailbox. I would be more than happy to step down from this role but I realise that some may be wary of volunteering to take on the task. You needn't be, and if several people wish to consider it the current job list can easily be divided between them. So if you are interested then please contact admin@soylentnews.org and I can start to show you around without any firm commitment on your part. If you do not fancy it you can say 'no thanks' and remain as a community member. However, I cannot say what the future will hold for me and I cannot keep the role indefinitely. I would rather have a person or two who at least are aware of how the site works before I disappear at some point in the future.

I have approached the Board and offered my services, although I would prefer to hand the role over to someone else. This should actually be as a result of an election process but unless someone wishes to step forward there is little point. The Board has agreed to me taking on the role again, for which I am grateful.

Jelizondo

'jelizondo' joined the editorial team a month or two back and has hit the ground running, having already published approaching 200 stories. Not only has he brought an extra pair of hands to the team but he has also brought a new perspective on what we do. It is always useful to have a fresh look at what we do and to question why we do it that way. Often there are very good reasons but it is sometimes easy to forget how the team has developed since the fledgling days in 2014. While he is a recent addition to the team he has been a community member from the first few weeks of the site's creation. I'm sure you will make him feel welcome.

Flagging Trial

Some of you will be unaware of 'flagging'. Staff with a specific seclev have had the ability to delete comments from the database since the site was created . This is necessary because legally we are required to remove certain material. Initially the deletion was a 'hard' delete and although the database remained in a stable condition, the linking of comments below a deletion was broken so that while they existed in the database but could not be seen. kolie corrected this to a soft delete - 'deleted' comments would not display but subsequent comments still displayed as they should. It is a far better system. However, it is a system that is still under development although the basic system is fully functional. It is a continuation of the community discussions that kolie held in his journal over the last year or two.

With the relatively small (but slowly growing) community the number of journals being used has also fallen. Furthermore, they have been targeted by ACs who in a small number of cases have abused the journals and made them unusable for the owners purpose. Flagging such abuses removes the abuse from view but of course others rightly complained that there was no community visibility of flagged material. Thus it is necessary to develop a management system which allows a flagged comment to be reviewed, returned to view if it has been incorrectly flagged, edited if the offending material can be removed, or blocked entirely in the event of CSAM, doxxing, banned users, or unacceptable material being found.

Journal owners complained that their journals were being spoiled by the antics of the few ACs and as a trial we have given the journal owners the ability to flag material that they believe is intended to disrupt their discussions or to abuse the journal owner directly. That trial is running at the moment. Several journal owners have used it, but there is no obligation on any journal owner to do so if they do not wish to. It is in addition to the current moderation system and it is not intended to replace it - indeed argument and moderation should be used if it is simply a difference of opinion. The alternative would be to make journals accessible only to logged-in users in the same way that front page stories are currently published.

Once the trial has finished we should be in a much better position to decide how the function will be managed: who will review the flagged comments, how quickly must reviews be carried out, and how will the contents be edited while showing clearly that such editing has taken place etc?

It has to be realised that flagging only affects a very small number of anonymous posters but they are intent on disrupting the site wherever they can. Unfortunately that is mainly in the few journals that are active, but it is also seen in Polls.

Once the trial has been completed it is intended to present the findings to the community for discussion and possible approval.

Finally...

As usual, we encourage the community to submit potential stories for publication and discussion. We normally approach submissions with the following priorities in mind, providing that the material is suitable for discussion.

1. Submissions from named community accounts.
2. Submissions from Upstart - the IRC submission bot. This is because an actual user has taken the trouble to make a submission even if he/she remains anonymous.
3. Submissions from other anonymous sources.
4. Submissions found by search bots.

Sometimes it is not possible to stick to this set of priorities because of the need to vary story content across the topics that we cover and, regrettably, not every submission is suitable for publication. It stands to reason that the better prepared a submission is then the more likely it is to be used, and the submission guidelines are contained in the Wiki.

We are aware of the significant number of 50x responses that users are experiencing from the site. The problem was recognised about 1 week ago and there is much investigative work going on behind the scenes.

The actual cause is difficult to identify. As of Saturday there is new software in place which is trying to find how often the 50x responses occur, while trying to correlate the occurrences with other functions in Rehash. This is a time consuming process. Some users have been assisting by reporting on IRC #soylent when they receive such a response. If you would like to help please report when the 50x response was received with a precise time so that we can find the corresponding query in the server logs, exactly what function were you doing that appeared to trigger it, and how long the problem lasted? If you also know your own IP address it would be very helpful but we understand that many of you will be reluctant to give this information.

In most cases the problem clears itself in less than 10 seconds but there have been periods of unresponsiveness that have lasted several minutes in some rare cases.

FIXED - at least until we find out that it isn't.... [Added at 2025-1005 19:00Z--JR] See also here.

Over recent weeks we have been experiencing connections from a large number of bots, spiders and scrapers. Some are the expected ones (Microsoft, Google, Amazon etc) and these tend to rate limit their requests and cause us little problem.

Others appear to be AI driven scrapers and they can result in tying up a large percentage of the site's resources. For the most part they ignore robots.txt or when we return code 429. While they are individually only an annoyance their activity can affect the speed at which the site can respond to members attempts to view a page or leave a comment. They have contributed to some of the 404 or 503 (Backend Fetch Failed) that you might have experienced recently. A small number of bots isn't a problem, but if many bots are querying the site at the same time then they can affect the speed at which the site can respond to your comment or request.

Software has been developed to block such abusive sites for a short period. In the majority of cases this will be invisible to you as users other than to hopefully improve the responsiveness of the site.

However, it is possible that sometimes there might be a false positive and you may encounter difficulties in connecting to the site. If you do experience connection problems please inform us immediately either by email or on IRC. Neither of those apply filters to connections; the short temporary blocks only apply to the site itself. We will have to contact you by email to ascertain your IP address so that we can lift any block that may have been incorrectly applied. Please do not publish an IP address in either a comment or on IRC.

If you are using a VPN or Tor it might be advisable to try another routing to circumvent any temporary block that might be affecting your connection.