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from the i-am-so-fucking-sick-of-this-drama dept.
Update: 10 March 2014 20:20 UTC. Follow here for the latest.
Update: 10 March 2014 19:10 UTC.
At this point Barrabas reports he is exchanging email with the buyer but refuses to say anything. Until we hear from them, we have to hope for the best but plan for the worst. If this link goes down, please go to the linode site where we will regroup. We will use that link as a fallback if necessary.
Update: 10 March 2014 18:30 UTC.
Barrabas reports in IRC he has received funds for the site and has sold the domain name. The terms of this sale, as well as its buyer, have not been disclosed. We await additional information. If you have information on this, please contact us at admin @ soylentnews . org
Update: 10 March 2014 16:30 UTC.
Due to NCommander's personal involvement with the situation he is recusing himself from negotiations. I (Mattie_p) am currently working with the staff to figure out how to address this incident. We have posted a poll which is available and should show up shortly on the front page.
Original text:
We've been held hostage by John:
Working with NCommander
Am I The Bad Guy
Right now, I can't write a coherent response properly (I'm writing this from a Mac Store right now as some sort of response was necessary). Despite John's offer, we never used the Linode's he purchased for hosting slash, and the two services (forums and wiki) that were hosted on them were migrated. I had hoped that this would have been a private issue between me and John, to be handed by email with a proper agreement, but the site itself is now at risk.
Right now, I'm organizing a response with out staff now, but I won't be home for several hours so MrBluze is currently handling the crisis. He can hand off to mattie_p when he returns, or myself when I have proper net access again. John's offer does not reflect myself or any of the staff here, nor does he have what he says he has. The web server, dev server (fusion forge), and database were always hosted on Linode's on my personal account. John DID have access to the Linode account which was revoked when he left staff, but to my knowledge never had the root password or shell accounts on any of the boxes. That access was revoked. It is possible he has a copy of the database, I do not know for sure. He does not at this moment have access to any of the hardware powering the site. He does however control the DNS register and can possibly yank the site from under us. If that happens, I can send a mass email to every user account to inform them of what happened, and where we are now. We supposedly have until Friday until John drops everything in the trash unless someone pays him $2000 USD. As per the posts, I was willing to pay him, but I had some issue with the expenses as written (my emails are genuine, as is the email I received from John), but I'm currently in Asia, and have no practical way to send him a check until I return to the continental United States on Sunday; I informed John of this on IRC originally.
We're currently in scramble mode to try and organize a new name, and getting migrated as soon as possible. I was serious when I said I was done with the drama but it appears John isn't. I'm personally sorry to have to inflict this on the community, and if you wish to leave us, I shall not blame you in the slightest.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 10 2014, @07:37AM
http://pipedot.org/ [pipedot.org]
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 10 2014, @07:48AM
You beat me to it!
Right! Everyone! On to Pipedot [pipedot.org]!
(Score: 2, Interesting) by halcyon1234 on Monday March 10 2014, @09:18AM
So my first experience within 5 seconds of using the site is a gigantic yellow "FUCK YOU" noscript tag that tells me that they can't generate a plaintext tree of comments without javascript.
To repeat: THEY CANNOT GENERATE A PLAINTEXT TREE OF COMMENTS WITHOUT JAVASCRIPT!
ffs
wtf? [thedailywtf.com]
(Score: 2, Interesting) by fnj on Monday March 10 2014, @09:29AM
With all due respect, stuff the attitude. Pipedot clearly intends to do script and not-script side-by-side, and when it's ready everyone can pick the version they prefer. I happen to be a champion of non-javascript web pages, but I couldn't do my banking and a lot of other things without it.
Rather than run down a valuable site, if javascript is your boogey man why don't you make a spotless pure greaterthandot.org?
(Score: 2, Insightful) by mcgrew on Monday March 10 2014, @11:53AM
With all due respect, stuff the attitude. Pipedot clearly intends to do script and not-script side-by-side, and when it's ready everyone can pick the version they prefer.
I think his attitude was completely warranted. If you're going to have both script and noscript it's just retarded to do script first. And it's a shitty site written by a shitty coder that won't let javascript fail gracefully. I used javascript some in my old Quake site, but if your javascript was disabled you'd never know there was any javascript at all unless you looked at the page source.
It isn't rocket surgery. The guy is clearly incompetent. Unfortunately he's far from alone, some idiots have javascrip-only links! Stupidity abounds.
Free Nobots! [mcgrewbooks.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by GungnirSniper on Monday March 10 2014, @07:39PM
When you are linking to your own personal site that isn't exactly pretty [mcgrewbooks.com] I'm not sure you're the best person to call a web programmer incompetent. You're even calling an HTML page as a JS file:
As near as I can tell, both Soylent and Pipedot are being programmed for free in people's spare time, and should be judged accordingly.
Tips for better submissions to help our site grow. [dev.soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Tuesday March 11 2014, @10:49AM
It wasn't designed to be pretty, it was designed to be functional. The very first rule of design is form follows function and it doesn't matter if it's a physical device, a program, or a web page.
And there's what's known as the KISS principle: "Keep it simple, stupid."
Free Nobots! [mcgrewbooks.com]
(Score: 1) by Reziac on Monday March 10 2014, @11:30PM
That was my gripe too... why do I have to turn on JS just to read comments? Pipedot has potential too, and it certainly doesn't hurt to have more community options, but why turn away some would-be users at the door??
I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and speculate that whatever code he's using didn't originally provide for noscript use, but I certainly hope it start working soon.
(At which point maybe the moderation dropdowns will actually do something... in SM, I don't see any way to apply them.)
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Geotti on Monday March 10 2014, @09:41AM
He cannot generate a plaintext tree of comments without javascript yet!
FTFY. I hope you see what the issue is now.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 10 2014, @09:47AM
No anonymous posting too. Fuck pipedot. I'd go back to Slashdot first.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 10 2014, @11:47AM
Ohhh, that (no anonymous comments) is a bit of a showstopper. Too bad -- I was getting excited for a minute, as the site and article selection looked good.
But without free commenting, they're not going to move past the 3 or 4 comment totals they're showing now.
What a clusterfuck we have. Might as well see what Slash is up to.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 10 2014, @07:48AM
lol wtf how many forks are there going to be?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by wantkitteh on Monday March 10 2014, @07:51AM
Too many is bad, but Pipenews does at least have that wonderful threaded view of the comments that /. uses, my one complaint about SN so far has been it's poor comment section navigation.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Marneus68 on Monday March 10 2014, @07:55AM
That's pretty nice indeed. I wish SL had this already. Too bad there are not that many people actually using Pipedot.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 10 2014, @07:59AM
Another problem with Pipedot is that the code is not open-source AFAICT so it can't be forked if it sells out. I don't know what the author's stance is on this, though.
(Score: 1) by SleazyRidr on Monday March 10 2014, @03:10PM
Is being open-sourced really that big of a deal though? This site got a big pile of code from the open repository and cocked it up. Pipedot just got to work emulating the functionality and seems to be doing a good job of it. Even if the way it works changes a little as long as the person/people running it can get something vaguely functional happening it will be good.
(Score: 0) by crutchy on Monday March 10 2014, @09:00AM
i added collapsible comments in a pull request. it was a bit of a hack but worked.
not sure if/when it will be merged though.
(Score: 2) by mrcoolbp on Monday March 10 2014, @10:19AM
Threaded expandable comments done properly with proper fall backs: This is already in the pipeline here BTW.
(Score:1^½, Radical)
(Score: 2, Insightful) by wantkitteh on Monday March 10 2014, @12:09PM
Awesomeness!
I sincerely hope these issues can be worked out without SN going tits-up. SN is building up a nice critical mass of users and has great long-term survival hopes, it would be a tragic shame on all concerned if that concentration of participants was scattered around the web because a few simple management conflicts and practicalities.
(Score: 2) by wantkitteh on Friday March 14 2014, @10:26AM
Late to the discussion, but this Greasemonkey plugin adds this feature quite nicely:
http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/399112 [userscripts.org]
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by TWiTfan on Monday March 10 2014, @08:41AM
If real life were like D&D, my Charisma score would be a negative number
(Score: 4, Informative) by engblom on Monday March 10 2014, @07:49AM
Then there is also http://technocrat.net/ [technocrat.net] as an alternative. Personally I do not care who will succeed, all I wish is a strong alternative to slashdot. It is always good with some competing in the field.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 10 2014, @07:52AM
Looks like they've got expandable comments working. That alone is almost worth switching. Of course, the ridiculous drama doesn't help SoylentNews' cause. I'm sorry, but $2k is *not* a lot of money to loose if you're trying to start an entity (business/non-profit/whatever).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 10 2014, @08:18AM
Yeah and since Bryan got expandable comments working over on pipedot, neither posting without JS enabled or posting as AC works. The guys work is excellent though.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 10 2014, @10:05AM
So? If he's stated he won't do AC on principle that's definitely a problem. If it's just a failed regression that will be fixed as time goes on, well, that's how these things sometimes work. To be perfectly honest, I'm posting as AC because I'm too lazy to log in, and there's no penalty to posting as AC (at least as far as I care).
(Score: 1) by Kell on Monday March 10 2014, @07:58AM
I rather see bailing on Soylent as a last-ditch manouever to be used only in desperation - like that switch in the mecha with the missile-cover, that you wonder why they didn't use it in the very first moments of the battle. This is like that button... except unlike every anime ever, there are good reasons to hold off on the desperation move until the situation truly is desperate. Also, Pipedot has the same existential risks that Altslash had, so it's no sure safe haven.
Keep the faith, folks.
Scientists point out problems. Engineers fix them.
(Score: 3, Informative) by tdk on Monday March 10 2014, @11:59AM
Or how about going somewhere we can't be held hostage by one person? ...
The comp.misc group on Usenet has many ex-slashdotters. There is a moderated interface to it at http://squte.com/ [squte.com] which has a familiar look
Moderated Usenet [squte.com]
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday March 10 2014, @12:05PM
Sorry, I won't be using Pipedot. According to my company's internet filter, it's a gaming site, so I'm not allowed to go there.
(Score: 1) by Zinho on Monday March 10 2014, @12:36PM
Ditto.
(Score: 1) by mister_playboy on Tuesday March 11 2014, @07:09PM
Signed up and got a 3-digit UID!
Now to wait for the next forks so I can have a complete set!