Labor Day, Onion (TOR), and Moderation

Labor Day:
In observance of Labor Day (a federal holiday in the United States celebrated on the first Monday in September) I am hereby inviting the SoylentNews editorial staff to enjoy a three-day weekend - Saturday, Sunday, and Monday. Stories will be scheduled and released on a weekend-story-spacing schedule. The holiday marks the unofficial end of summer and it often marked by parades, sales, cookouts, and the like.

These volunteers give selflessly of their spare time to try and make sure we keep the stories coming. Please join me in thanking them for their generous sacrifice of spare time and experience to keep those stories coming!

Tor:
(short for The Onion Router) is in the process of rolling out an updated protocol. ThIs update is NOT compatible with prior versions. SoylentNews has had support from the early days of the site (thanks to NCommander, IIRC). As nobody on staff has experience in this area, our support will cease at any time - the TOR site is saying October. It was laudable at the time. Unfortunately, its more recent use seems to have been primarily by spammers. As such, we could lose access to Tor at anytime as our network "neighbors" either upgrade or find themselves no longer "adjacent" to back-level versions like ours is. You can still access this site using TOR with our normal URL.

Sock Mods
We have been methodically identifying and shutting down sockpuppet accounts. These are NOT allowed. Attempts to bypass the will of the community by controlling multiple accounts is forbidden. One user, one account. Do NOT use another account (or accounts) to upmod one-or-more accounts that you control. If you do not like getting downmods, take a look at the comments you post. Sure, occasionally, someone might mis-moderate a comment by accident (heck, *I* have done it!) In our experience, such errors are generally rare and are frequently followed at some point by others, offsetting moderations.

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