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Three Whole Years -- Thanks to You! [ DRAFT VERSION ]

Accepted submission by martyb at 2017-02-13 21:27:16
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FOR RELEASE ON 2014-02-17

Three years ago, today, SoylentNews announced its presence to the world. Much has happened along the way of our providing a place for a community to grow and to engage in discussion. [soylentnews.org]

It started as a fork of old open-source code which had suffered under benign neglect. Perl, Apache, MySQL, and other products had continued on. So we had to deal with dependencies on unsupported and back-level versions of code. A great deal of effort went into bringing the site up-to-date with current versions of that base.

Those of you who were with us then can attest to the fact that site outages were a regular occurrence. Bugs were found and eradicated. New bugs were made, and found as well. We invited the community to vote to name the site. We created documents of incorporation and had them dutifully filed. Notably, we received notice on July 4th, 2014 that we received notice of officially becoming SoylentNews PBC [soylentnews.org].

Not content with just running a clone of the old code, the staff embarked on a large number of improvements to the site. Support for Unicode characters (via UTF-8) was an early improvement. Refinements to moderation took place — you could now moderate and comment in the same story. Moderation points were issued to every registered user every single day. An API was written [soylentnews.org] and made available. We have our own Folding@Home team which contributes spare compute cycles to help find cures to maladies such as Huntington's Disease. (See the Main F@H site [stanford.edu] and Our team page [stanford.edu].) We sent out a call for new editors to help our beleaguered editing team who was approaching burnout; several of you answered the call and we are greatly enriched by their viewpoints and their questioning of the status quo.

THERE MUST BE MORE -- WHAT DID I LEAVE OUT???

And what have we wrought? Our own place on the world-wide web, supported and run entirely by the community. For the numerate in our midst, here are some statistics for the site. So far, SoylentNews has:

  • published nnnn stories
  • received nnnn story submissions
  • registered nnnn user nicknames
  • seen nnnn user journal article stories posted
  • posted nnnn comments
  • been viewed nnnn times

We could not have done it alone. A great many of you have contributed to the site. Some in providing sysops support; others by writing code and providing feedback; others contributed financially by signing up for subscriptions [soylentnews.org]; and still others brought the site to life with their story story submissions [soylentnews.org] and, of top importance, submitting comments and engaging in discussions with other interesting and intelligent people on the 'net. Some discussions have become heated, but for the most part, many reasoned and well-though-out discussions have been engaged.

So, on behalf of the rest of the all-volunteer staff here at SoylentNews, let me say thank you. For your support, engagement, and questioning — we are a better site because of you. May we continue to earn your trust and support for many years to come.

So, to wind this up, I have one last question: "emacs or vi?" =)


Original Submission