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SoylentNews is people

posted by mrcoolbp on Monday August 10 2015, @10:00AM   Printer-friendly
from the who-you-gonna-call-now dept.

As you are all aware, we are in the middle of the dog days of summer. We get it, people are busy with work, family, and a plethora of other things. Some of our (volunteer) staff need a break too, so we are looking for a few good people, be they man, woman, child, animal, mineral or vegetable, to join our ranks and help spread the workload.

There are a number of ways to help out:

  • Join us on our webchat IRC or, if you are new to IRC (I was only a year ago), check here for some tips on getting connected.
  • Email mrcoolbp (or if you are sick of that guy any other staff member like janrinok will do; "nickname@soylentnews.org" works for any of us)
  • Read the wiki page on "Getting Involved"

One thing that this site needs more than anything else to thrive is submissions.

We greatly appreciate all of our submitters. The submission queue is the lifeblood of SoylentNews, when it is empty, there is nothing to read, learn from, and argue about.

Takyon, Hugh Pickens, Phoenix666, and Arthur T. Knackerbracket come immediately to mind as people that we see submissions from a lot, and they present great submissions. However, consider that just one article a week from 25% of our registered users would give us more material than we can use, and yield a far greater variety of viewpoints, opinions, and stories. When you find something interesting, submit a story. Take a quick peek at our Submission Guidelines for some insight into best practices.

"But what do I submit?". Check out the RSSbot logs. Scroll down to 'today' and check out the links. This bot simply posts stories from various relevant sources in real-time by scraping RSS feeds (you can refresh the page and get more up-to-date stories).

A well crafted summary is preferred, but not an absolute necessity. Your summary doesn't have to be elaborate. It could be a copy/paste of the first paragraph or two from the article, but please, be sure to give us the link where you are getting the material.

I can only speak for myself, but I find the time spent working on SoylentNews and hanging around on IRC generally pretty relaxing. It is fun for me, and I appreciate that the community is an interesting place with people from many places, industries, and walks of life. It is a place where I come to learn, and read things I would otherwise never see.

Thanks to you all for helping build a great community, and we hope to see many new faces over the coming months.

--cmn32480


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by martyb on Monday August 10 2015, @12:28PM

    by martyb (76) Subscriber Badge on Monday August 10 2015, @12:28PM (#220645) Journal

    I'm pressed for time, so I apologize in advance if I've been terse or blunt.

    I looked back over your submission history (at the bottom of your user info page: https://soylentnews.org/~mendax/) [soylentnews.org] and saw that 52 out of 57 of your stories were accepted. That is better than 91% accepted — well done! It appears that two of the submissions were dupes of other stories. (1 [soylentnews.org] and 2 [soylentnews.org].) Excluding those two, over 95% of your submissions were accepted. That's near the very top of the accepted percentage range based on my experience. (Case in point; my own submission history [soylentnews.org] reveals that not all of my submissions get accepted, either. And I am an editor on the site!) Rather than dwell on the few that were not accepted, I try and focus on the submissions that *were* accepted.

    The story acceptance process is basically that an editor logs in, checks the submissions queue, and uses their best judgement to select a story to edit for the site. Accepted stories are removed from the submissions queue. Do realize this is a purely volunteer activity and is performed in our spare time. For example, I was reviewing the submission queue at 10:30PM last night (Sunday) because the story queue was running dry and I needed to see if there were any submissions that I could promote. I found a story but I've received enough feedback from the community that I recognized the it would not be acceptable it as-is. I followed the links, obtained additional info from those, included those in the story, edited it together, and finally promoted it to the main page. That required the better part of an hour on my part. I say this only to give a glimpse into some of what goes into the story editing process. If you would like more details on that process, see the Editing Process [soylentnews.org] on our Wiki which explains the entire process of how a submission makes its way to the story queue. Please also check out the submissions guidelines [soylentnews.org] if you have not done so recently.

    Do be aware that he day of the week, time of day, and prior editor's efforts can dramatically affect the story submission queue size and hence the likelihood that your submission will be selected.

    Yes, it would be nice if there were a UI element we could select for feedback. There was discussion of this a while ago and it bears revisiting. Do realize the site developers are also volunteers, so this needs to be balanced against other demands on their time. We have recently had some stability issues with the site and that has taken up much of their time of late.

    To summarize, please don't let a few submissions that were not accepted hold you back; it happens. Your submissions are generally ones that I can accept with minimal effort, so I encourage you to please keep those submissions coming.

    --
    Wit is intellect, dancing.
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