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posted by LaminatorX on Monday March 24 2014, @04:01AM   Printer-friendly
from the Call-to-Action! dept.

All of the trend lines on this site are positive except one: story submissions. After an initial surge, they have been gradually declining despite users and page views climbing. Tonight the submission queue ran dry. Janrinok and I could go scrounging, as we sometimes do, but this needs to be addressed.

We have around four thousand registered users, and who knows how may AC's reading along. We can do better.

I challenge each of you to submit stories on a regular basis, at whatever frequency you find comfortable. Really, if even half of us submitted a story once a week, we would have more than we could ever use. Once a day, once a week, once a month, whatever you can handle, send it in.

Bookmark this link: http://soylentnews.org/submit.pl - use it. Give us so many stories that we can select the cream of the crop and stun you with how amazing our community is. Make it happen.

I'm going to leave this story on top for a while, and see what is waiting for us when I get to work in the morning. Wow me, please.

This is our news site. There are others like it, but this one is ours. Its success is in your hands.

[UPDATE: We have received, in less than 12 hours, more submissions than we had the whole rest of the weekend. THANK YOU SO MUCH, and please, keep them coming. Even one story a month matters. Let the party re-commence. :) ]

 
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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Open4D on Monday March 24 2014, @06:19AM

    by Open4D (371) on Monday March 24 2014, @06:19AM (#20109) Journal

    but constant rejection stopped me submitting stories on Slashdot a decade ago. Some simple feedback - even just a few words - for rejected submissions would be a fantastic guide and help improve quality of future submissions

    I know the feeling of constant rejection from another aspect of my life :)

     
    But seriously, I do agree a submission feedback process would be a nice-to-have, but we should bear in mind it would place at least some extra burden on the editors. "How do I word this feedback politely ...". Or "This submission from Open4D just doesn't quite feel right, but I can't put my finger on it. I'd rather accept the other one on the same issue from Anonymous Coward. Oh, but Open4D has a 3-digit user ID and I don't want to offend him with a dodgy feedback comment, so it's easier just to take his one."

    And once there was feedback, some people would then want a 'right of reply' to the feedback. A slippery slope? Actually, I broadly reject slippery slope type arguments, but the point is this move wouldn't bring us as much closer to perfection as we might hope. Maybe it's better just to go with a 'firehose' type system? The discussion at the story frequency poll [soylentnews.org] covered that kind of thing too.

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  • (Score: 2) by lhsi on Monday March 24 2014, @09:27AM

    by lhsi (711) on Monday March 24 2014, @09:27AM (#20142) Journal

    I think instead of having something typed in, just a selection of common rejection types to choose from would be better.

    • (Score: 2) by Open4D on Sunday March 30 2014, @06:19PM

      by Open4D (371) on Sunday March 30 2014, @06:19PM (#23223) Journal

      I think instead of having something typed in, just a selection of common rejection types to choose from would be better.

      Agreed. As long as it's optional for the editor, it can't do any/much harm. (And for all I know the editors might want it mandatory.)

       

       
      I note that currently the submission page [soylentnews.org] has this wording:

      Note: grousing about rejected submissions is Offtopic and usually gets moderated that way. It happens, don't take it personally.

      Maybe there'd need to be something similar talking about the rejection reasons.

      • "Just because your submission was first, doesn't mean we're going to take it. We don't mean to offend by calling it a duplicate."
      • "We know we sometimes post stories that stray quite far from our core subject matter. But in this case we just decided yours didn't quite fit. We don't mean to offend by calling it off topic."
      • etc.

       

       
      Anyway, FWIW, this is now an issue on GIT: https://github.com/SoylentNews/slashcode/issues/10 2 [github.com]