SoylentNews

martyb [soylentnews.org] writes:

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 the update.

Finances:

A recent comment [soylentnews.org] 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 been operating at a loss for the past couple years. I have, therefore, provided a revised fundraising goal in the "Site News" slashbox that appears on the right-hand-side of the main page of $3500.00 for the first half of this calendar year. I just sent out an e-mail to a SoylentNews board member requesting feedback on that estimate and will update that amount if needed.

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 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 [soylentnews.org].

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 [soylentnews.org].

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

Moderations:

We had had a discussion on the site a few months ago about moderation on the site [soylentnews.org]. 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 ciould help inform our implementation.

Original Submission