By now, you have had the chance to read the updates of both NCommander and Barrabas. Nonetheless, you may still be wondering quite a few things about the site and its staff. Here is your chance to ask us anything. These questions can be general in nature, in which case the staff will select a spokesperson to answer it, or it may be specific to an individual. If the question is for an individual, please ensure you identify that person specifically enough.
We will select the best questions from the thread and provide answers to the community. These questions may not be the highest rated, although we will probably use those first.
In keeping with tradition, ask as many as you'd like, but please, one question per post.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by VLM on Wednesday February 19 2014, @02:35PM
Sounds interesting to me, but probably we had too many stories go live in the last 9 hours (sarcasm, aka zero).
Aside from that snarky comment somewhat more politely I'll ask, "Roughly how many stories are you planning to release per day?" Which ties in rather closely with how often I will load up the site and take a look.
(Score: 2, Informative) by LaminatorX on Wednesday February 19 2014, @03:46PM
We've informally been aiming for a story every hour and a half or so, a bit less late at night. We're working to balance our desire to post many of the great submissions we're receiving with wanting the stories we do post to have their time in the Sun at the top of the feed. (This is also a good answer to the "Why wasn't my submission posted?" question, in many cases.)
This is our news site. There are others like it, but this one is ours.
(Score: 3, Informative) by VLM on Wednesday February 19 2014, @05:06PM
Have you been toying with the idea of automation?
There's some stories that really need to go up immediately (Hey, the Ukraine just started a genuine shooting civil war this morning and (insert something soylent relevant here))
On the other hand, some stories can sit and if nothing was force posted in the last 120 minutes then one waiting in the hopper goes up. So some really cool scientific paper from last week (hint hint) could automagically appear to break up a dry spell.
This is not theory... theoildrum and thehousingbubbleblog have done exactly this in a cron job for many years.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 19 2014, @03:58PM
You are wrong. I have made this submission and you didn't publish it: http://dev.soylentnews.org/comments.pl?sid=150&cid=264 1 [dev.soylentnews.org]
Looking forward to hearing from you,
AC
(Score: 1) by cwix on Wednesday February 19 2014, @04:05PM
Calm down. No reason to get upset if your submission didn't make it up yet. Getting frustrated or angry will not help. Remember the staff is fully unpaid volunteers.
(Score: 1) by frojack on Wednesday February 19 2014, @08:39PM
Heh, ALL my stories get Rejected at Slashdot, only to be followed by a less well written one on the same subject, often with the same links, submitted later, by one of their pet submitters.
I just stopped trying.
So Rejection seems the norm, but Rejection without a reason seems less than user friendly and less instructive for the future.
I think some general checkboxes could be attached to the rejection listing one or more things that were reasons for the rejection.
Discussion should abhor vacuity, as space does a vacuum.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by tkd-physics on Wednesday February 19 2014, @08:59PM
Who's upset, frustrated, and angry? Not me. I can't imagine that my original post sounded that way, and I don't think any of the follow-ups did either (a single, mildly snarky comment aside).
Sure, they're all unpaid volunteers. Sure, the site is new. I'm just asking, as a general point of interest, if we can get feedback when a submission is rejected, so that we know why and what to do next time. This seems like a reasonable question to me.