Submissions closed

by
in ask on (#499MD)
The pipe has just become a haven for spam bots, and there's no easy facility for monitoring and blocking it. After all my work closing out the current flood of spam, I'm going to disable story submissions entirely so I don't have to do it again. I have no objection if Bryan wishes to reverse this, but I don't plan to do this kind of clean-up again. I still regularly check for new comments, so feel free to chime-in.
score +7
Reply 14 comments

Egg, bacon and Spam (Score: 2, Interesting)

by bryan@pipedot.org on 2019-02-20 01:36 (#49FR0)

Agreed. A great deal of effort is required to mangle many of the user submissions we've received into something that is high enough quality and worthy of being published. Of course, the hundreds of stories already published by evilviper/zafiro17/etc set a rather high bar of quality. :)

Over 5 years ago, a growing rift in the green site set in motion a movement for a "better" news for nerds site. The result was not only a split into the new red and blue sites, but also reforms in the original site as well. The feared "beta" was shelved and calmer heads prevailed throughout. Although some rumors have suggested that Pipedot is dead, and I can hardly blame them, there simply doesn't need to be so many forks of the same thing. As for product differentiation, we still have plenty of technical features the others do not (editable comments!) but other features that we pioneered (colorized new vs old comments) have even made it into the others. Rest assured, if the other sites decide to self-destruct again, we will be waiting; this time with an easier turnaround. As an abandoned user of iGoggle and Reader, I'm still a huge fan of the RSS features of Pipedot and still use it daily. Others have suggested that other site features, like the internal mail system, could be expanded to include full web-email abilities - which may still be explored in the future. Suggestions for improvements are welcome!

As always, if an enterprising individual wants to step up and help as an additional editor or help in other ways, send me a message.

Re: Egg, bacon and Spam (Score: 2, Interesting)

by carguy@pipedot.org on 2019-05-10 03:11 (#4EV2E)

I also like your RSS / Feed view and use it constantly, thank you for keeping this available!

Had to stop and think for a minute, which is the "red site"...because I read SoylentNews in VT100 mode, green text on black background, very easy on my old eyes.
If you get in the mood for further updates here, some other color schemes/themes might be a worthwhile addition?

Feed question (Score: 1)

by carguy@pipedot.org on 2019-10-24 16:31 (#4T4CX)

I continue to enjoy your Feed page, but lately I've noticed that the feed from The Guardian (news) seems to have stalled -- the same items/links have been listed for a week or more. Clicking on the header of the "feed-box" gets me to the main Guardian page. Other Feeds like XKCD work fine.

Any idea what is going on? Has Guardian changed their RSS source?
Thanks again!

Re: Feed question (Score: 1)

by bryan@pipedot.org on 2019-10-25 01:58 (#4T5HC)

A misbehaving set of feeds (raw weather data) was taking too much time and caused some of the other feeds to miss their updates. When I coded the feeds, I never really considered raw weather data would be used as an RSS stream. Every time the feed updates, the system would generate a new permanent article with the current temperature. Some of the weather feeds racked up millions of ephemeral and rather worthless articles. For now, I've deleted a big chunk of these and unclogged the updates.

In the future, I will probably need to come up with a more elegant solution to showing weather information. With some of the other sites (like iGoogle), you could add a "weather widget" that showed a better summary of current conditions than an RSS feed.

Re: Feed question (Score: 1)

by carguy@pipedot.org on 2019-10-25 02:32 (#4T5HD)

Thank you Bryan!
And thanks for the explanation too. Simpleminded comment--perhaps for weather you need to "overwrite", or write in a circular buffer of fixed size, rather than "append"? Same might apply for stock market prices, anyone that wants the history of a stock price has plenty of choices for that data.

Re: Egg, bacon and Spam (Score: 1)

by carguy@pipedot.org on 2019-10-24 16:32 (#4T4CY)

I continue to enjoy your Feed page, but lately I've noticed that the feed from The Guardian (news) seems to have stalled -- the same items/links have been listed for a week or more. Clicking on the header of the "feed-box" gets me to the main Guardian page. Other Feeds like XKCD work fine.

Any idea what is going on? Has Guardian changed their RSS source?
Thanks again!

Story submission: Eric S. Raymond: [GPL]"revokists" have it right. (Score: 0)

by Anonymous Coward on 2019-06-02 06:08 (#4GAXT)

Eric S. Raymond: [GPL]"revokists" have it right.

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=8317#comment-2238862 (Archive link: http://archive.fo/emkVd )
A commentator asked on Eric S. Raymond's website:

>ESR: Eben Moglen suggested that he was going to write a paper refuting the notion that "The GPL is revocable":
>
>>I think the best procedure would be for me to publish my analysis and
>>for you then to tell me what is wrong with it.
>https://lkml.org/lkml/2018/10/26/718
>
>Why has no such paper from him materialized?

ESR response was shocking, blunt, and to the point:
>esr on 2019-05-30 at 08:08:23 said:
>
>>Why has no such paper from him materialized?
>
>Because Moglen is either wrong about or deliberately misrepresenting the law and the "revokists" have it right. Thank you, I had already figured this out from his (non)responses on lkml.

Re: Story submission: Eric S. Raymond: [GPL]"revokists" have it right. (Score: 0)

by Anonymous Coward on 2019-06-02 06:10 (#4GAXV)

esr on 2019-05-31 at 08:44:49 said:

>Again, if the revokists have it right, I don't think you'll like how that will actually play out.

Maybe I won't, but the law is what it is. We can't solve any problem by denying that reality.

Re: Story submission: Eric S. Raymond: [GPL]"revokists" have it right. (Score: 1)

by evilviper@pipedot.org on 2019-06-06 09:53 (#4GM78)

ESR is not a lawyer, just another college drop out. His legal opinion is quite worthless.

The legal opinion from a Professor of Law at Columbia Law School holds a lot of weight.

I don't know why you want to keep beating this dead horse, MikeeUSA. The issue will only be resolved conclusively once it makes its way through several court trials and challenges.

Feed question (Score: 1)

by carguy@pipedot.org on 2019-10-24 16:33 (#4T4CZ)

I continue to enjoy your Feed page, but lately I've noticed that the feed from The Guardian (news) seems to have stalled -- the same items/links have been listed for a week or more. Clicking on the header of the "feed-box" gets me to the main Guardian page. Other Feeds like XKCD work fine.

Any idea what is going on? Has Guardian changed their RSS source?
Thanks again!