SoylentNews Shutdown

by
in pipedot on (#6BWA8)
Our friends over on SoylentNews are going through some things:
score +4
Reply 24 comments

Green Site, Red Site, Blue Site (Score: 3, Informative)

by bryan@pipedot.org on 2023-05-23 23:33 (#6BWB6)

You guys are welcome to come over here if you want. I'm not going anywhere.

Re: Green Site, Red Site, Blue Site (Score: 1)

by fab23@pipedot.org on 2023-05-26 17:50 (#6BXWH)

I like the blue theme, I guess it would be nice too in a dark mode. :-) .oO( now with an ASCII emoji, as the real ones do not yet work )

Re: Green Site, Red Site, Blue Site (Score: 1)

by acidandy@pipedot.org on 2023-05-26 19:50 (#6BXX7)

Thanks so much bryan. I'm amazed I remembered my password. FWIW the forgot password thing didn't work. Not sure if it's not sending emails right now or if it's my email provider shunning them!

I like the Edit function.

Re: Green Site, Red Site, Blue Site (Score: 1)

by bryan@pipedot.org on 2023-05-26 20:12 (#6BXXS)

Ya, just tried on gmail and it marked the email as spam. But as soon as I moved that first message out of the spam folder, all further messages went to the inbox.

Re: Green Site, Red Site, Blue Site (Score: 1, Informative)

by Anonymous Coward on 2023-06-06 02:46 (#6C2M9)

Re: Green Site, Red Site, Blue Site (Score: 1, Interesting)

by Anonymous Coward on 2023-06-06 06:43 (#6C2PM)

Jesus Christ those people need to just talk to each other.

They are right that NCommander seems to be acting like a dictator by putting up plans with a "my way or the highway" attitude, but rightly or wrongly he and Matt basically are dictators from the legal point of view. They are also right that NCommander has made serious errors technical and socially throughout this process.And they are right that NCommander has done serious damage to the trust and reach of SoylentNews itself.

NCommander is right that the rest of the staff don't seem to have a plan, at least one on the website for all to see. He is also right that technically the site has languished with open vulnerabilities for years and no one stepping up either to work on perl or replace it.

This whole thing is like Mom and Dad fighting and I'm starting to get a feeling that another "beta" divorce is coming.

Re: Green Site, Red Site, Blue Site (Score: 1)

by carguy@pipedot.org on 2023-06-14 20:30 (#6C6S8)

Off topic, not sure where the best place is for this Pipedot & Green Site question?

On my Pipedot Feed page I've had Slashdot for years, always worked fine, used it occasionally. It locked up about two weeks ago and hasn't offered any new stories since then.
https://slashdot.org/faq has some information on Feeds including RSS, which notes:
> Please don't request feeds more than once every 30 minutes.
Any chance that is the problem?
Or maybe the /. RSS feed is broken?

Re: Green Site, Red Site, Blue Site (Score: 1)

by bryan@pipedot.org on 2023-06-15 17:59 (#6C77W)

That's a known bug that I've been meaning to look at. It's not just the slashdot feed but several others as well and it's quite annoying to me too. I'm using a third party library called SimplePie that is supposed to parse the RSS / atom text into usable data, but the library often bombs out instead of returning anything. It's a pain because the fatal error in that library causes the whole feed process to completely stop until cron restarts it again. This causes not only the offending feed to not get data but all other feeds afterwards to halt. Feed parsers are complicated because a lot of sites return malformed data with stray tags all over the place. In an ideal world you could just parse an article with a strict xml parser and everything work! But far too many sites forget to close their html tags or use some invalid unicode strings that cause the parse to fail.

Re: Green Site, Red Site, Blue Site (Score: 1)

by carguy@pipedot.org on 2023-06-16 03:46 (#6C7F0)

Ouch!!
Thanks for the complete explanation and good luck squashing that bug.

Re: Green Site, Red Site, Blue Site (Score: 1)

by bryan@pipedot.org on 2023-06-17 05:14 (#6C8AD)

The Slashdot, Engadget, Gizmodo, SoylentNews, and other feeds should now work again. ExtremeTech is still broken because it downloads using IPv6 by default but their server only likes IPv4. I think...

Re: Green Site, Red Site, Blue Site (Score: 1)

by carguy@pipedot.org on 2023-06-18 00:45 (#6C8QB)

Yep, working all day.
One site I'd been following hadn't updated in a couple of years (and is now gone from the web). With your update it disappeared from my Feed page.

Re: Green Site, Red Site, Blue Site (Score: 1, Informative)

by Anonymous Coward on 2023-06-27 20:43 (#6CHCK)

Hello Bryan,

No idea if you want to keep playing with the Feed page. If so, here's one I just tried that didn't work for me.
Available feeds listed here: https://theintercept.com/feeds/
I tried adding variations of these two and got a handful of error messages,
https://theintercept.com/feed/?lang=en
https://theintercept.com/feed/?mk=fl_is_on_feature_page&mv=1

The final error message was:
Fatal error: Uncaught Error: Class 'Imagick' not found in /var/pipedot/include/image.php:665 Stack trace: #0 /var/pipedot/include/feed.php(265): save_favicon() #1 /var/pipedot/post/user/feed/add.php(39): add_feed() #2 /var/pipedot/www/index.php(128): include('/var/pipedot/po...') #3 {main} thrown in /var/pipedot/include/image.php on line 665

As always, thanks for the Pipe!

Re: Green Site, Red Site, Blue Site (Score: 2, Interesting)

by bryan@pipedot.org on 2023-06-29 08:23 (#6CJVD)

Thanks. The favicon code needed to be rewritten anyway. Should be working better now.

As for The Intercept feed, the code currently has a one-to-one relationship of articles to feeds. This means that if you add the feed for "All" and the feed for "English" then articles will show up in one or the other, but not both. This is unfortunate, since quite a few sites have overlapping feeds like this. Just add the main feed for now...

Re: Green Site, Red Site, Blue Site (Score: 0)

by Anonymous Coward on 2023-06-29 09:44 (#6CJX3)

Thank you! Works now.

Re: Green Site, Red Site, Blue Site (Score: 1, Informative)

by Anonymous Coward on 2023-07-29 02:33 (#6DCC0)

Yet more SN drama, an offer to buy out current owners - archived in case of more site damage,
https://web.archive.org/web/20230729022406/https://soylentnews.org/~AudioGuy/journal/15410

Re: Green Site, Red Site, Blue Site (Score: 0)

by Anonymous Coward on 2024-02-06 23:46 (#6JE6P)

Six-ish months later and the SN drama continues, but SN manages to keep on going. Latest is cert expires and takes a couple of days until one of the valiant volunteers is able to renew it. In parallel, yet another draft of bylaws (#9, I think) is in play, and appears to be one of the last hangups before a change in ownership/management.

Re: Green Site, Red Site, Blue Site (Score: 1)

by bryan@pipedot.org on 2024-02-07 15:30 (#6JEPZ)

To be fair, Letsencrypt wildcard renewing over DNS is kinda annoying.

Re: Green Site, Red Site, Blue Site (Score: 0)

by Anonymous Coward on 2025-05-03 02:44 (#6X1GJ)

And now the most visible member of the staff is leaving according to this. He is also taking his "anti-sock-puppet" and "anti-spam" measures with him. They've seemingly gotten the technical things under control, too bad that was never the worse of their problems.

Dormant, but not forgotten (Score: 3, Interesting)

by reziac@pipedot.org on 2023-05-26 17:19 (#6BXVM)

For some reason I can't reply directly, so... just to say glad you're still here. Cuz I didn't forget.

Moderation (Score: 4, Interesting)

by Anonymous Coward on 2023-05-26 17:26 (#6BXVN)

Soylent News has had many problems with bad users and gaming the moderation system. Does pipedot aim to have the same free speech values that rely on community moderation? Please elaborate on how you intend to manage the site.

Re: Moderation (Score: 1, Interesting)

by Anonymous Coward on 2023-05-27 03:45 (#6BY05)

The blue site could do it this way.

All in all accounts might be the best way to go. We can't have summary account bans. Let the karma system work. We need transparency. Moderation should be public. One account should be able to /ignore mods from another account. Let the usual suspects have their mod wars. The rest of us can /ignore them. Echo chambers might have interest effects, if it's merely a mod echo chamber, so the runaway and khallow see themselves at 50 karma but the rest of us see them at min_karma. All accounts can mod, n number of points per 24 hours. Have them regenerate like some shitty arpg at 1 per 2.4 hours if you don't want to tie yourself to UTC. Tongue in cheek: sell microtransactions to get buffs to mod regen, then the rest of us can mod /ignore him.

Requiring an email address was not effective mitigation for UID inflation caused by so-called aristarchus, so why not just set up a REST endpoint for allocating UIDs?

Public moderation means that when A starts posting at -1, B can know who thought they should post at -1. If C is a mod troll, B can set up a personal mod /ignore for C, revealing A's comments at whatever score the moderators B does trust have determined.

Re: Moderation (Score: 1)

by decbot@pipedot.org on 2023-05-30 00:45 (#6BZ7W)

Speaking of UIDs, where do you see the UIDs? How can we keep the 4-digit UID 'you must be new here' memes going without the UIDs promptly displayed next to our user name? Can you point me to the setting to turn this on?

Re: Moderation (Score: 4, Informative)

by bryan@pipedot.org on 2023-05-30 18:47 (#6BZN0)

There is no such setting at the moment, but I'll keep it in mind and may show the IDs again in the future.