Editors Only

Detailed Instructions for Editors on Editing the Queue

Here are some very detailed tips for editors on how to evaluate and process articles in the queue

When you log in to the admin panel, you'll find a button for the queue. Click on it. That willl display a control panel.
The article name column lists the number of words in the article, then the title.

You can ignore the exclusive column.
In the author column, you want to watch for articles in which a member submits someone else's article. We only publish WITH permission. If a member submits someone else's article, we need to check with them that they have approval. If they've mentioned in the article field, then we need to delete that note.

Check the category to make sure the article is categorized appropriately. After reading the article, if you see some glaringly missing tags, feel free to add them.

If a person has submitted more than one of the same article, use the time in the date added field and delete the older one.

Some rows have red dates in them. Those are purportedly time sensitive. Check them out first to make sure they don't get too old.

Green text shows that a person listed a connection between an article and a group. Try to list them sooner.

Article titles in orange are quicklink submissions.

Generally, based on the article title, and perhaps the author, you can then make a choice of which article you are going to evaluate. I hope you'll also go for older ones, near the top of the control panel. Decide and click on the VIEW link for the article.

Look at the title. Is it too long? Could it be a clearer indicator of what the article is about. Some writers create great articles with terrible, cliched titles.

Does the article read well? Give a foreign author, writing in English as a second language some slack. But if you find numerous misspellings and grammatical errors by a US author, reject it. Tell them to edit and spellcheck before they submit.


Articles should not be self promotional. Reject them.

If the article is mean-spirited, if it calls names, feel free to consider rejecting it.

IF the article doesn't say anything new, reject it.

If the article makes claims that should be documented with links or references, reject it.

To edit the article, click on the MODIFY button.

You can change the article and clean it up. For paragraph formatting, you may want to copy the text, especially if there is no bold, italics, blockquote or linking, and use a simple text processor, like notepad, to separate paragraphs. Then paste the article back in. This will almost always work-- same for font problems.

Once you are ready to accept or reject the article, click on accept/reject. That will take you to a different control panel.

You can change the artice categorization there and select the action to take. I suggest you take a look at the different form letter options available and once, at least, review the form letters already written to respond to article submissions.

If you want to accept the article as a blog diary, push that button. An automatic letter explaining this will be sent out.

Now, this is very important. Theres a check off box which says:

If checked, this article will NOT appear on homepage

This box must be UN-checked if the article is to appear on the front page. DON'T forget this. Most articles have the box unchecked. You would leave it checked if the article is really only very local. Make sure that for those articles, the appropriate tags have been checked off.

Before you click on the button to do the action you've selected, you may want to include a brief note to the author, which will appear as a PS. Put it in the text box.

Feel free to go into the queue, accept or reject articles.

If you are not sure about an article, you can click on the modify button and there's a field for editors to leave notes which appear in red in the control panel. Make a comment, ask a question... others will help.

Quicklinks to blogs: these should be very, very well written articles on the blog site. The blog entry should be on a permalink page, not the front page of a blog, which can cycle down. The blog should be cleanly designed, not loaded with a massive amount of advertising.