Auto Article Authorisation Now Live for IndieDB and ModDB! news - DBolical

Articles that are authorised will be added straight to the home page, though there are limitations noted later in this article

Intro

Before we get into it, a brief preamble - the sites have been wanting to implement a system like this for a long time. It’s been a frequent concern brought up by developers in the community that it was sometimes difficult to coordinate releases alongside articles that provide context, installation instructions, and the like. The DBolical sites have strict codes of standards that our editing team hold all articles to, and previously, articles were edited prior to going live in order to ensure a consistent standard of quality across all authorised articles on the site. However, as ModDB and IndieDB have grown, this process can be slow and tedious (especially when we know you have hot news to share) so this enhancement will not only reduce the workload on our team, but will also make it easier for you, the developer, to get your articles out on schedule.

Solid article standards are part of what make IndieDB and ModDB great places to post your development updates

System

When it comes to micro-edits, you can see a lot more details by going into the source editor for an article, allowing you to adjust preview image sizes and more at a micro level

From now on, when you post your first article of the day, you will have the option to verify it immediately or schedule it's go-live date using this feature when posting:

This might result in a small increase in low-quality articles, but our content moderation team will still be manually checking and editing to ensure the quality remains consistent. If you want a better chance at your work being immediately well-received, here’s a quick run-down of the main edits that our team tends to perform even on good quality articles:

• Text shouldn’t be centered, and instead should be the default left alignment or justified
  
• Image previews should be 600px across or centered
• Grammar should be correct and properly proof-read
• Headings should be used to break up major sections of your article and avoid walls of text
• If your article is announcing a release, use the handy download button widget in your article

Whilst sticking to these rules before would increase the speed at which your articles are verified, sticking to them will still result in your mod page looking more professional, and save our content moderation team time in editing your articles manually.

Usage

Following the regulations and content standards below will ensure you don’t get one of these on your article!

There are some limitations to this system, and a few things our content moderators will continue to enforce:

• Previous rules regarding authorisation (minimum image limits, formatting, and so on) all apply
• Articles shouldn’t be uploaded more than once every 48 hours and frequent article posters might have articles archived to give other profiles time on the front page
• You must have been a member for thirty days and pass a few other backend spam checks
• Terms of use continue to apply - no obscene or graphic content
• Failing to meet all of these criteria may result in your article getting archived or deleted

This has been a long-requested change to the site’s news system and we hope the community gets a lot of good use out of it! Leave a comment down below on how you feel about this system and if you have any questions, don’t hesitate to ask!