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posted by NCommander on Tuesday April 01 2014, @05:00PM   Printer-friendly
from the this-feature-maybe-a-nag dept.
Assuming everything went well with our upgrade (and thus we're running the new and shiny slashcode 14.04), you might have noticed a new bar at the top of the page which looks like this: "SoylentNews is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop. Only 13 submissions in the queue."

This is our cue to the community that the queue is running low, and acts as a request to "please submit your stories if you want to keep the flow of news coming." We've previously had to run stories asking for submissions, so this will prevent us from having to spam the index for help. A lot of you left good comments in the previous "need stories" post, so I'm going to take take a moment and address that.In the comments on our last plea, two things were identified. First, too many moderators can limit community involvement due to moderate^post. I've gotten tons of good feedback already (and I ask you guys to keep it coming), and I'll have a writeup of what we're doing based on that feedback soon.

The second one was, in my opinion, a more serious failing on our part; specifically that we don't communicate on why a story is rejected. This is a side-effect of simply not having a way to send a notification to a submitter short of an editor going to a user's profile, getting their email, and sending them mail. That being said, I promised you guys transparency, and we're going to deliver. The other site often frequently worked in a void, and while Firehose let everyone see the submission queue, it didn't provide any insight on what does (or doesn't) make it onto the main page.

We don't have it now, but we will implement a way for editors to easily communicate about rejections to submitters via the messaging feature on the site. I've flagged this as critical for the 14.06 release, but I hope to get it backported and live before then. Until then, please bear with us. I've asked the editorial team to send messages to the email addresses included in submissions (or the email on a user's profile) so we can communicate why we're rejecting a story.

mrcoolbp adds: Please include an email in your submission if you'd like to receive feedback in the case that the submission is rejected until we can implement a better solution.

 
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  • (Score: 2) by lhsi on Tuesday April 01 2014, @06:27PM

    by lhsi (711) on Tuesday April 01 2014, @06:27PM (#24392) Journal

    Think I figured out the magic number is 20. I had been wondering. It was under 10 this morning so I submitted a story to see if it would change the message (I thought the "only" might disappear at least over 10). Then just logged on now and saw it at 19. Submitted another story and the message disappeared...

    As a side note, thanks for reformatting story preview. I could never tell if I had formatted my em tags correctly as everything was in italics.

    As another note, does the submit new story page show ALL my previously submitted stories at the top?

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2