Article Audit Trailing

Article Writing & Marketing Insights

Article Audit Trailing

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Effective Friday, we have added a new process that is completely behind the scenes but will aid us in helping you get your articles added into our directory faster.

We’re already audit-trailing a great deal of information about your membership accounts, article submissions, article modifications, article changes and the articles you remove.

In addition, we also time/date stamp who on our team approved your article and have been doing this since 4th qtr 2004.

Now, we’re taking it one step further.

Each of your articles will contain an additional hidden record that will tell us what the last status of your article was.

Why do we want to know that?

Because we have too many articles that are going into the PROBLEM STATUS queue every day and as they come out of the problem queue because an author modified the article… we needed to be able to know what kind of problem was being fixed so we could pay attention as to whether that problem actually got fixed or not.

It’s kind of surprising…I’ve got to tell you. I thought for sure that if an author sees an article of theirs in problem status and they identify the problem from one of our problem status codes…and they fix it, that the problem should be fixed…but in at least half of the cases, the article is NOT fixed yet.

This wastes our time because its as if the author wanted to see if they could get the problem past us a 2nd time.

On the 3rd or 4th time we usually delete the article.

It’s frustrating because we will often send courtesy personal emails to the author to let them know why their article is being sent back to the problem status queue….but so many folks don’t check their email the same that we do (meaning it’s checking all the time in the background and we check in with it between jobs throughout the hour.)

Sometimes the only way we can get an author to respond to us is by suspending their accounts (a new functionality that we added last week).

In the coming month, we will expand the problem status codes and begin to give automated explanations as to “WHY” was have problem status codes and what specifically need to be done to fix the problem.

I’ll admit that we have not done all that we could do to improve the communication to our authors when there is a problem status and this is not because we don’t want to…but rather because we’re always hundreds of articles behind in working the queue, solving author conflicts, etc.