For those who own eFiction sites where stories need to be validated before appearing to the public: how do you handle story validation?
Basically, at my archive, every time a new chapter is submitted one of the admins checks it: if everything's okay, the admin validates the chapter and sends the "yes letter"; if everything's wrong ( :-() the admin deletes the chapter and sends the "no letter". Most of the times, anyway, there are just some problems (often with simple grammar mistakes, or bad selections for rating/classifications/etc), so the admin contacts the author and explains what needs to be changed; the author modifies the story, contacts the admin to say that he's done, the admin checks the chapter once again, and only when there are no more problems the chapter gets validated.
Ok, this seems quite simple. I've already modified the "Submissions" panel adding another letter model (the "Moderation Letter" - though I'm not sure it's correct to call it like that in English); the problem is that I also want to keep a sort of log of all the actions, especially for the "moderation letters", since this way we keep track of the mistakes that are more often committed by a certain author, and also because this way an admin can succed to another one if the former is absent for some reason.
I also need a place where we can coordinate the work (we're actually 4 administrators for stories, and soon we'll be 5), post notices, etc.
(Please note that since my archive is only for Harry Potter fanfictions, I cannot really select admins for a specific category.)
Now, this is much more complicated, since the action log covers only the validated stories (for the refused ones, I also need the specific reason) and I'd like some advices - what kind of system is better?
At first we used a private forum in the site message board: a thread for each author plus some special pinned threads for questions, refused stories, etc.
After some time, however, the number of authors became too big and the forum too confusionary.
So I thought to try with a blog: this way there's only one page to check, occasionally filtered by category (each category corresponds to an author, plus a category for refused chapters, plus one for notices and questions, etc.).
Anyway, I'm not satisfied yet, because the blog is not hosted on my server (WordPress would have needed some plugins to be seen only by registered users), but by a blog hosting service I don't really find reliable (for downtimes and maintenance times especially), and still the validation process seems long and disorganized and uncomfortable. I'd like to speed the process, because for me and my collaborators is just an hobby, and not a job 🙂
Perhaps it's just me, but I'd like to hear if someone has the same problem, and also if someone has been able to solve it, and how.
Thanks in advance :-). (And my excuses for the poor English of this post 🙁 )
URL to your eFiction: http://www.acciofanfiction.com/index.php
Your version of eFiction: 3.5.1 (Italian language)
Version of PHP: 4.4.8
Version of MySQL: 4.1.22
New authors on my archive have to submit their stories/chapters. If everything is good, I validate them and send them an acceptance letter letting them know that they now have validation status as authors. Then I validate their pennames.
For stories that have to have their formatting fixed, but are still okay, I validate the chapter, but not the author.
For stories that are completely wrong (like wrong genre), I send a rejection letter and delete it. We have a specialized archive, so only stories on the right topic are accepted. If I can't make a call on that because the story is too short, I e-mail the author asking for more, but neither accept or delete the chapter/story until i get more.
(Please note that since my archive is only for Harry Potter fanfictions, I cannot really select admins for a specific category.)
If you have categories, like subcategories (Genres, Pairings that are used as categories) you could though.
Whoever said nothing is impossible never tried slamming a revolving door.
url: https://www.potionsandsnitches.org/fanfiction
php: 7.4.33 msql: 5.6.51-community GPL
efic version: 3.5.5 latest patches: yes
bridges: none mods: challenges, tracker, story end, beta, word
I have a team of about 5-10 admins that go through the stories on the submission queue. If the story is ok, we just validate it. We hardly ever use the "yes letter" unless the author is just making very minor mistakes (not big enough to cause their story to be rejected, but still important enough to be mentioned for future stories/chapters).
If the story is not ok (too many spelling/grammar mistakes) we reject it by using the "no letter". Basically we tell the author what needs to be fixed and give examples when possible. Then we delete the chapter.
There is actually a bug in the script that prevents the action log displaying WHY a story was rejected. Basically the action log is supposed to display the contents of the "no letter" in the action log. To fix make these changes:
Open admin/noletter.php
Find:
<form method="POST" enctype="multipart/form-data" action="admin.php?action=yesletter&uid=".$story['uid']."&chapid=".$_GET['chapid']."">
Replace with:
<form method="POST" enctype="multipart/form-data" action="admin.php?action=noletter&uid=".$story['uid']."&chapid=".$_GET['chapid']."">
I also had to make a database change in order to display the entire "no letter" in the action log and not just part of it.
SQL Query:
ALTER TABLE `PREFIX_fanfiction_log` CHANGE `log_action` `log_action` LONGTEXT NULL;
* Be sure to change PREFIX to the prefix of your table.
An idea that I suggested back with version 2.0 is when a story is rejected, it goes to a separate queue so that it isn't mixed in with the submissions. That way instead of deleting the chapter after it's been rejected, keep it on the site for a certain amount of time to allow the author to fix the changes ON the site, rather than off. Also, listed in the rejected chapter will be the contents of the "no letter". That way it'll help eliminate some of the confusion between all the admins.
