Article submitting system needs improvement Thread

The problem is that articles are checked and then posted in batches, usually only 2-3 times a day (and not at predictable times either!) This means that the time a developer submits an article and the time the staff member checks the next batch of articles will have a huge effect on how many views it gets. It's very frustrating when you make an update post and it ends up getting very little time on the front page, where it's actually visible to people. Honestly, combined with the greatly decreased traffic on IndieDB over the past year or so, it's hard to justify the effort it takes to add new content, when you never know whether or not you'll get lucky with the time you submitted the new post.

For example, the news post I submitted yesterday took around 7 hours to be approved and appear on the front page, appearing at the same time as a batch of 18 other posts. Since it was one of the earlier ones in that batch, it started out already about halfway down the front page. The earlier articles end up getting around 20 views before they were pushed off the front page, while the later ones always get many times more. (for comparison, the 2nd latest post in this batch is still on the front page and at 118 views, the latest article in this batch is actually a dead link - apparently the game "We Break Out Tonight" hasn't even been authenticated, but the link to the post still showed up on the front page.)

Here' s one suggestion for how to fix this:

2 Step Publishing:

When the user submits an article, (via a "submit for authentication" button) it first gets send to staff for approval, but once they get to it, instead of posting it then, they simply check a box that marks it as approved for publishing, at which point the user gets an additional button on the article page that lets them post it directly.

This way, a developer could submit an article one day, and once it's approved, post it the next day at whatever time they want.

I can't see any downside to this compared to the current system; it's better for devs/modders because we'd be able to get more exposure, and it's easier for the staff since this way it wouldn't be a big deal if they check through submissions even only once a day.

I totally agree that the system is frustrating. Challenge is we are pretty much the only website that allows articles developers post to appear directly on the homepage. Because of this we set a really high bar for what is allowed, but being human cannot check the content 24/7.

Ideally we should really automate the system (like we did about a year ago for downloads) and let users schedule when they want their articles posted. Challenge with this is that most developers will put their article on the homepage not realizing that a single paragraph poorly written is simply not good enough.

I'm not suggesting to get rid of quality checking, just to give users some kind of control over when an article appears on the front page. Everything still goes through the approval process, just don't have the people doing the checking post it themselves.

The main problem is having large batches being added to the front page at the same time, so anything that would cut down on that would be an improvement. If it would be easier from a technical standpoint to instead set a publishing time for each article once it's been approved and then have an automated script post it to the front page at that time, that would also be a good solution.

That would be true but only generally, not practically. Taking it in points:

1. Quality and newcomer's posts are bumped to the top of the rotation batch (yes that means it is biased towards developers who need exposure or submit news pieces that rise above the standard) so no need to worry about your article being one of the last ones (the ones at the bottom), only about making it super quality to get noticed and bumped to the 1st, 2nd or 3rd position.

2. That dead link to We Break Out Tonight news is a mistake, the game page should have been approved (well, both the developer and the news manager missed checking and authing it) so you are right about that. Sadly, the admin tickets page (which is a hidden section on the Updates page actually) does not redirect to profiles themselves only to general news pages (normally when you visit a news page you see both the game and the news piece, but anyone visiting from the admin page sees only the news page and what profiles have been linked yet not the game profile itself).

3. The indie news had drastically less views lately because one of the admins suggested separating ModDB and IndieDB news (each indie article was receiving 300-500 visits from both sites in many if not most cases, now only 50-100 visits or even less), a change which came into effect over a few weeks ago. Only indie news closely related to mapping or modding is approved for ModDB homepage at the moment.

4. If you can choose the exact time when the news goes live, that would be good, and I thought so too only until recently. You see, if everyone could choose the exact timing, then all articles publication time could be set to the European and American "rush hours", which means you would end up in the same situation as before: too much news authorised at the same time. Practically, nothing would change.