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:
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
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Monday August 10 2015, @01:56PM
I cannot comment as I cannot trace your submissions based on a username of AC.
However, I will ask you a simple question, and it is not intended to be insulting, or necessarily relevant to your own submissions. If we receive multiple submissions on a specific topic, and one is far better written than the others, which would you expect the editor to choose? Usually, if this occurs we will acknowledge all submitters but if the queue is low and I have to choose between finding stories and making my own submissions to increase the size of the queue, or re-editing a processed story to give each submitter a mention, you can probably guess what I would choose to do to keep the site active.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 10 2015, @02:07PM
Good points as usual, Janrinok.
I have a simple request though - change your sig. It sounds like a spouse throwing up his/her hands during a fight. Not something that encourages direct communication.
- different AC
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Monday August 10 2015, @02:17PM
lol - I hadn't seen it that way! Anyway, on IRC we all know that everything that goes wrong is Bytram's fault - and we don't let him forget it.
But I like to think that I am very approachable and will do my best to help anyone with genuine queries - please do not be put off by my sig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 10 2015, @02:49PM
As was mentioned in the parent post, the replacement stories were two days later with shoddy summaries. They were not the better stories.
(Score: 2) by mrcoolbp on Monday August 10 2015, @03:23PM
"Shortly after the site started" was a crazy time for us. If things did not go swimmingly then you'll have to excuse us. We were scrambling just to keep the site from going down, dealing with tons of bugs, we only had a few editors still learning the ropes, etc. Please do give us another chance.
(Score:1^½, Radical)
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Monday August 10 2015, @03:33PM
'Shoddy' is a matter of personal judgement. I know that I have felt the same when my stories have been rejected and yet someone else's story was published. As we have often said - rejection happens, it is not personal.
There are other occasions when this can happen. If we receive a submission saying that such-and-such and event will take place tomorrow, we sometimes wait for the event to take place so that we can provide the full story. For example, A certain comet is approaching perihelion in the next few days - while that is worth knowing in advance (and we have published that story) the next news item on this topic will be when we start to see the results. Without seeing the rejected submissions, I cannot offer any more constructive comments. I'm sorry that AC feels offended but I cannot take it any further without a lot more information.