LWN meta-news [LWN.net]

It's time for our weekly report to our readers. Read on for the latest subscription counts and a few bits of site news.

As of this writing, we are getting close to 2200 subscribers. That still leaves us far short of our medium-term goal of 4000. Things are headed in the right direction, however; with continued support from our readers, we hope that we will get to where we need to be before too long.

We are also encouraged by a small increase in the rate of corporate subscriptions. They still fall short of our hopes, but there are signs that the bureaucratic wheels are beginning to turn. If you work for a company that could benefit from a subscription, please consider talking to them about setting one up.

This week we were also able to announce a group subscription for the Debian project, which has been funded by HP. Debian developers are encouraged to read the announcement for information on how to get access to this subscription.

For those of you who have been requesting the ability to pay with American Express: we have finally managed to get that set up. Progress on setting up a Euro-zone bank account has been slower; it looks like that will not be a viable option anytime soon. The best approach for accepting funds from Europeans without credit cards may turn out to be to simply have those people send us checks. We're still working on that one, though.

There has been a small stream of requests for a stable URL for the latest free version of the Weekly Edition. That has now been implemented; the current free weekly can be found at:

http://lwn.net/free/
http://lwn.net/free/bigpage (the "one big page" format).

Of course, lwn.net/current continues to refer to the most recent (subscription) Weekly Edition.

We have been having some trouble with sites blocking mail from the LWN server (things like the various LWN mailing lists and subscription notices). That mail originates from our production server, which is donated to us by Rackspace. Some people, evidently, have received a lot of spam from Rackspace-hosted systems, and have simply blocked the entire Rackspace network. Rackspace tells us that they shut down spammers as soon as they know of them, but it's an ongoing battle. Meanwhile, we are looking into other ways of generating and routing mail so that this problem, hopefully, will be behind us soon.

For those of you making your holiday shopping lists: LWN gift certificates will be available shortly. The work is mostly done, but won't be completed at this point until after the weekly publication cycle. Stay tuned for the announcement.

That is the LWN news for this week. Thanks, as always, for your support.

to post comments

LWN meta-news

Posted Oct 29, 2002 22:44 UTC (Tue) by afriedel (guest, #5472) [Link] (1 responses)

Is the HP/Debian or any corporate subscriptions included in that 2200 subscriber count?

I just wanted to thank the people who put LWN together. You guys do a fantastic job and are doing very well in adapting to a difficult situation. LWN is an under-appreciated asset to the Linux community. Thanks.

Aaron Friedel

Subscriber counts

Posted Oct 29, 2002 23:17 UTC (Tue) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link]

No, the count is for individual subscriptions. We'll eventually make the group subscription information more public, but that will take a little bit.

The ability to alert the news staff

Posted Oct 30, 2002 1:16 UTC (Wed) by TheOneKEA (guest, #615) [Link] (2 responses)

I've been thinking about this ever since I began reading LWN, and have finally decided to say it:

I think you guys should setup a mailinglist or mailbox where the community can alert you to interesting events in the Linux world.

I say this because IMO the LWN development team spends as much time looking for events as it does writing about them. Being able to have the community help you in identifying stuff that people would want an article on could be a benefit. The only downside I see is having to read an enormous pile of e-mail , but since the e-mail has been distilled from who-knows-how-many mailinglists down to just things we want you guys to look into, I think it could be a benefit.

Comments, suggestions, flames (especially flames) welcome.

The mailbox for story submissions is lwn@lwn.net

Posted Oct 30, 2002 2:49 UTC (Wed) by frazier (guest, #3060) [Link] (1 responses)

From http://lwn.net/op/About.lwn:

For story submissions, questions, and general issues, send mail to lwn@lwn.net. In most cases, we request that you use this address rather than contacting individual LWN authors directly - somebody is always watching the lwn@lwn.net address. As a special case, Penguin Gallery submissions should go to penguins@lwn.net.

I've submitted two or three things in the past. They picked them up and added them quickly.

They also have pr@lwn.net for press releases

The mailbox for story submissions is lwn@lwn.net

Posted Oct 30, 2002 12:10 UTC (Wed) by TheOneKEA (guest, #615) [Link]

Good! I didn't know this already existed. Perhaps it should be displayed in a more prominent place.

LWN meta-news

Posted Oct 30, 2002 8:12 UTC (Wed) by climent (guest, #7232) [Link]

We have been having some trouble with sites blocking mail from the LWN server (things like the various LWN mailing lists and subscription notices).

Black lists are bad. I have been advocating the use of RBLs for tagging spam, but rejecting spam based on the wills of someone (some company/organization) which might decide to include your whole domain in the spot of thousands of MTAs is no good.

Read a related thread:

http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2002/debian-devel-200210/msg01603.html

LWN meta-news

Posted Oct 30, 2002 15:16 UTC (Wed) by ewbish (guest, #3043) [Link]

I have a suggestion for you. Many organizations that have to derive some sort of income from their websites turn to forums as another subscriber "perk". LWN would be an excellent place to host forums ranging from kernel discussions to distro discussions. The forums, of course, would be free to read, but only subscribers could post. Imagine, a 'nix and open source forum free from spam and trolls (not many would pay the subscription fee just to harass people). There are plenty of GPL'd web based forum packages out there so you probably wouldn't have to start from scratch. Just a thought, but one that has proven successful in other industry's.

Eric

LWN meta-news

Posted Oct 30, 2002 17:03 UTC (Wed) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link] (5 responses)

A few wishlist features:

When you have to log in to follow a link, and you log in, it would be nice to go directly to the page you were going to in the first place. But not a big deal.

For the links to stories that can have comments, it would be nice to have the number of comments in the URL (but ignored by the page you get to). That way, the link only looks "visited" when there aren't any comments since you last read the page. It should be pretty trivial to do, since you're putting the number of comments in the link text anyway.

Put comment count in URL

Posted Oct 30, 2002 18:03 UTC (Wed) by Baylink (guest, #755) [Link] (2 responses)

Thank you!

That is *the* cleverest solution to that I've ever seen.

Put comment count in URL

Posted Oct 31, 2002 5:35 UTC (Thu) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link] (1 responses)

It's actually a feature from livejournal, so I can't take credit for it. But I'm happy to promote sharing of ideas between open source projects. :)

Put comment count in URL

Posted Nov 11, 2002 20:25 UTC (Mon) by gravious (guest, #7662) [Link]

¿And LWN is an Open Source project how?

LWN meta-news

Posted Oct 31, 2002 8:51 UTC (Thu) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (1 responses)

another option that would be useful would be the ability to show all the comments. I am one of those who still use the 'one big page' setting and it's sometimes frustrating to read a story, decide I want to see the comments, so I have to download the story again to get the page with the comments on it

if there are to many comments this could be a problem, but we are a ways away from that still.

David Lang

LWN meta-news

Posted Nov 3, 2002 19:47 UTC (Sun) by lamikr (subscriber, #2289) [Link]

I would also like to see some kind of "show all including comments" bigpage option as I sometimes print the whole magazine and read it in the train...

Mika

LWN meta-news

Posted Oct 30, 2002 19:04 UTC (Wed) by mbcook (subscriber, #5517) [Link]

I think you guys should put something like a hitcounter on your sidebar on the left. Only instead of counting hits, it shows the number of subscriptions. That'd be kida cool. Obviously just a neat idea, nothing of importance.

LWN meta-news

Posted Oct 30, 2002 21:09 UTC (Wed) by whitleych (guest, #6866) [Link]

Hi,
For the mailing lists, could you set up the mailer to bounce off some wonderfull volunteers mail server? If I weren't a windows loser I would volunteer my cable connection. After all, I would guess the bandwidth requirements aren't all that high?
CHW

e-gold.com

Posted Oct 31, 2002 11:19 UTC (Thu) by zooko (guest, #2589) [Link]

Another payment mechanism you can try is e-gold.com. They have been in business for a long time (since before the dot com boom, in fact) and according to their statistics page they have a lot of happy customers.

The way this could help you is if there is a money changer that has both a Euro bank account and an e-gold account, then your European fans would be able to give you subscription money right away.

It is extremely simple to set up an e-gold account. A few clicks and a couple of text entry boxes and you're done. It is similarly simple to put a "we accept e-gold subscriptions" button on your subscriptions page.

They used to have an incentives program where institutional customers (like LWN) would get a kickback for each other new customer they brought in. I'm not sure if they still do. You can always e-mail <pr@e-gold.com> and ask.

Full disclosure: I have met the principals behind e-gold on several occasions (Financial Cryptography conference, other cypherpunkly social events) and consider them to be friends. Also I interviewed for the position of CTO in around 1999 or so but didn't hire on.

Regards,

Zooko

Best comments of the week and letters

Posted Oct 31, 2002 13:01 UTC (Thu) by copsewood (subscriber, #199) [Link] (2 responses)

Suggest lwn include a best of the week with the letters section.
Best of the week being a selection of the most interesting/funny
user comments. I read the comments on the most interesting header
topics, but probably miss many of the best reader contributions
that way.

Best comments of the week and letters

Posted Nov 1, 2002 5:26 UTC (Fri) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (1 responses)

another reason to do this is that those who read things shortly after they come out frequently won't see comments posted later.

Best comments of the week and letters

Posted Nov 1, 2002 13:09 UTC (Fri) by nan (guest, #710) [Link]

I like this idea. I think the level of comments is fairly good and always comes as a good view of how the points raised by the article are seen by others. This could go in the letters to the editor page, as an addendum, filling it with content even when there are no letters to the editor.