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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://dev.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. :) ]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by lhsi on Monday March 24 2014, @04:32AM
What is the minimum required for a story submission? I have submitted 16 in total, most of which I wrote on a phone or tablet, and it takes a fair bit to format correctly on a touchscreen. If I just submit a link, a brief description and a relevant quote without markup (maybe blockquote for the quote) would that be enough for an editor to clean-up the summary and use the link in a hyperlink properly? (Quick aside: the submission form is a little awkward to use on a mobile device; if there was an email address we could use to submit a story that would be handy)
How "fresh" do we want stories to be? If I find something interesting from a month or so ago, is that still a possible candidate so long as it is not time sensitive (and hasn't already been posted)?
As an aside, most of the stories I see posted on the site in the last few days are from two editors, is this what is actually happening, or have I messed up a setting somewhere and am hiding stories from other editors by mistake?
(Score: 3, Informative) by LaminatorX on Monday March 24 2014, @08:54AM
As far as specific formatting goes, the editors can handle that, as we have to do a bit of hands-on de-slashdot-ifying on the output from the submission process already. "A link, a brief description and a relevant quote without markup (maybe blockquote for the quote)" is great. If you've got more to say, by all means feel free (up to a point), but what you described is enough (and more than we've gotten in many cases).
This is our news site. There are others like it, but this one is ours.
(Score: 2) by lhsi on Monday March 24 2014, @09:33AM
I don't suppose it is possible to allow longer titles? Some stories I have submitted are pointing to a research paper and tend to want to use long words - I can only fit in so many with the current limit. I think editors have a longer limit to work with, is this true? Can I put a longer title as the first line of the submission if it didn't all fit in the actual title box?
(Score: 2) by LaminatorX on Monday March 24 2014, @09:38AM
I haven't done any comparison of limit differences, but my hunch is that you're correct. Give it a shot. We'll see what we can do.
This is our news site. There are others like it, but this one is ours.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Monday March 24 2014, @11:51PM
I have noticed that the 'feel' of the stories is different from Slashdot.
For one thing, here we don't seem to have the snark, nor the leading question used as a tagline. This is not a complaint. :)
(Score: 3, Informative) by LaminatorX on Monday March 24 2014, @08:59AM
Oh, and to your other questions (sorry, haven't had my coffee yet):
Current is better than not, but interesting is still interesting. If something is from a month ago but hasn't been all over the press and seems worth discussing, feel free to submit.
You are not experiencing a problem. Only Janrinok and I have been active this week. We will be adding new editors this week to address this staffing shortfall.
This is our news site. There are others like it, but this one is ours.