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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by Open4D on Wednesday March 05 2014, @09:17AM

    by Open4D (371) on Wednesday March 05 2014, @09:17AM (#11225) Journal

    I've posted about these before, but putting all our thoughts in a central location makes sense

    Agreed. Here is a slightly improved version of my comment at the "SoylentNews Status for Feb 27" story [soylentnews.org]:
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    I agree that breaking news should be given some special treatment. I assume you mean the submitter would flag his/her submission as such, so that the editors may more easily choose to consider it immediately - possibly even drafting in help ("dude I'm busy for the next two hours, could you take a look at this breaking news submission?")

    With regards to holding back stories, I agree there is some merit to spreading things out. But this shouldn't be an absolute rule, and for breaking news it's worth breaking the rule.

    A word of caution though. We shouldn't go too far in all this. The editors shouldn't be panicked into a race to publish first. If an editor is available to apply all the editorial standards and publish a breaking news submission to the front page fairly quickly, then great. If not, it doesn't matter that much. It's the discussion by the community that really matters, and timeliness is not the biggest factor affecting the quality of the discussion.

    And I hope it doesn't sound like we are loading onerous responsibilities on the editors. Everything I've said here is what I'd consider an aspiration, never a grounds for criticism. I'm grateful for all the editors' hard work. Thanks people!

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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Popeidol on Wednesday March 05 2014, @11:17AM

    by Popeidol (35) on Wednesday March 05 2014, @11:17AM (#11270) Journal

    I wasn't sure whether it should be the submitter or the editor who tags the priority. While the submitter doing it makes it more likely to hit the queue quickly, it also could lead to abuse with people 'accidentally' mistagging articles as urgent to get it looked at faster than everybody who used the tag correctly.

    You're right about the rest as well: The option to push breaking news is nice, but it should never become a focus. That's not what we're about.

    • (Score: 2) by jt on Sunday March 09 2014, @02:50AM

      by jt (2890) on Sunday March 09 2014, @02:50AM (#13416)

      IMHO the submitter should never tag the priority, as it will either be a) abused, or b) ignored. In a previous workplace our bug tracking system had 2 priority fields. One was visible to the users, who always tagged everything as top priority and highest urgency. The other was visible to the tech team who estimated the real priority from the user-suggested priority and a broader knowledge of the organisation. It would have been a career-limiting move to allow the users to know this.

      Let the editors make these decisions and maintain an independent viewpoint.

      • (Score: 2) by Open4D on Sunday March 16 2014, @02:00PM

        by Open4D (371) on Sunday March 16 2014, @02:00PM (#17178) Journal

        In the system I'm proposing, the urgency level would simply be the submitter's opinion, which the editor would be made aware of - possibly at the same time as being made aware of the Karma of the submitter. It would still be down to the editor to chose if & when to post any particular story.

        My take on some priority levels:

        • Urgency Level 1 - Important breaking news that should ideally be considered soon
        • Urgency Level 2 - Breaking news that may be worth considering soon
        • Urgency Level 3 - Today's news.
        • Urgency Level 4 - Best posted within the next few days
        • Urgency Level 5 - Best posted within the next few weeks
        • Urgency Level 6 - Non-urgent

         
        I suppose I'm assuming that every now & then, an editor thinks "right, time to post a story", and has a look at all the submissions. When they do so, they might sort by urgency - as long as they don't defer to it too much (because we certainly need level 6 submissions quite often).

        Furthermore, some editors might chose to receive an alert (email, for example) whenever a user above a certain Karma level submits what they claim is a level 1 or 2 story.

        Most "Ask Soylent" type submissions should be Urgency Level 6.

        I've submitted two stories so far, and I would have declared them as levels 3 and 5 respectively.