Trashed Articles
Every week, we end up deleting a few hundred articles (it’s gotten better because we used to have to delete almost a thousand per week) that were either too spammy or completely missed the mark and ignored a dozen or more of our posted editorial guidelines. I think our site must be having a greater impact and additional care is being taken to read our 5-6 page editorial guidelines before submissions than in the past (and we thank you for that!)…
I’m contemplating today if we should create a new status for an article called “Trashed Article” or something like that — that would stay inactive in our system as long as the author had a membership account in good standing with us.
This would impact 3% or so of our members…
We already have a rejection status code, called PROBLEM ARTICLES… and these are articles that can be fixed because they only missed the mark by a little bit.
What I don’t want, is for an author to waste their time logging in to their account to discover we rejected one of their articles and put it in the TRASHED ARTICLES bin …only to find that they then edited it and resubmitted the trashed article without any improvements… even if we found a way to communicate within our system as to the specific reason why we trashed it.
You must know that if we trash an article, it’s only because we believe the article has not only missed the mark, but they completely missed the whole point of the game all together.
About 97% of the articles we trash are done when we blow away an entire account.
This “Trashed Articles” concept is purely for the 3% or so of members who are in good standing but just didn’t send in an article that even remotely met our editorial guidelines.
The real internal reason for this Trashed Article system is so that we can have some internal accountability when an article gets trashed by an editor…so a quality control Managing Editor can swoop in and view the article that was trashed rather than it being gone forever (as it is now). An author would then be able to see why we trashed their article.
What are your thoughts on this?
Well you seem like a trust worthy type, so this is probably fair. However it is somewhat censorship-ish in a way. So one might get upset when you decide a topic or critique article is too controversial for publication. However knowing the average reader, it is hard to say if anything is too trashy for their blood, just look at the throw away tabloids? Selling 25 million per week. Too much sales in an article makes it useless and upsets the reader when they click in and find it is too salesy, it is as if their time has been wasted. Hopefully they do not hold that against us other authors on the site, by boycotting the site in their minds while surfing or deciding this is not the right place to find material at all, thus everyone is damaged. Although have you considered that crappy articles make people leave and as they do they might hit on a Google Word ad on the side of the page, where as you will benefit, the trashy article writer will not and everyone wins while free markets and consumer taste rule over the regulation of morality? Thoughts, only thoughts, interesting subject.
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