News posting and approval system on ModDB Thread

Hey,
I have a suggestion about news posting on ModDB. When you add a news post you get a red for bad/green for good post.
This is already a nice indicator that your news post is most likely going to be approved by someone on the ModDB staff.

My suggestion:

Why not when posted add it to the front page straight away? This way you get the most front page time and coverage.
Most news posts will be correct anyway. Now when a staff member approves a news posts, they do multiple news posts
at a time, causing for many news posts to be buried in page 2 straight away. Instead of approving/posting them all at once
wouldn't it be better for both sides (developers and staff) to check all new posts and then remove the ones that were made
in a bad way? Perhaps link this with a warning system if a developer is making bad news posts multiple times THEN make him
go through an approval system. I'm sure most developers know the rules to have a news post approved by now and they should
imHo be able to post straight away. This way the developer gets more front page glory (yay) and the Staff doesn't really need to
do any extra work, except still check news posts after and remove the ones that were made bad.

it is unfortunate that some people put a lot of effort into their posts and they look great. The majority do in fact.

However by allowing content straight onto the front page would encourage spam and discourage quality. We try to be fast at authorizing and that is a challenge, but if you want your news to go up quickly make sure you include images / videos. Format it nicely paragraphs, center images etc and that way we auth your news the minute we see it and it doesn't get archived or take us additional time to help you make it look great.

Shame to hear that if it is in fact the majority of the news that is posted nice and clean gets a kick because of the fewer who don't. I know you guys have a huge task at hand to validate each post I'm sure and it would be a lot to ask for each news post to hit the front page within 1 or 2 hours. This is however not the case even with a clean news post as you mentioned.

I think if you have to check news posts for validation you might as well do it when they were already posted on the front page (perhaps keep the "un-authed" tag public as well). There will be a small minority as you mention that reaches the front page who don't respect the ModDB quality approval, those you can (as you do now) not approve and have their front page news post be removed. If some people abuse this system you can implement a warning system that where they post really bad stuff they get banned or loose their news posting abilities for a number of days/weeks/months.

Either way, ModDB is a great site, and I appreciate you hearing me out! Keep up the great work.

There is a whole lot that you don't see, if we did as you suggested you wouldn't be on the front page longer, you would be there for a shorter amount of time. People would also stop paying attention to the front page due to drop in quality as well.

You are forgetting a few things, if a post is great and its bumped off the front page I will normally bump it back on, that and our RSS feeds do a whole lot more then you imagine.

Bump it back on? Has this ever been done? I can't remember having ever seen a news post being bumped (well... I "did" but I doubt i has been your doings).

Edited by: Dragonlord

Maybe have news have some time they stay on the top, and when the time has passed, then next news will be posted. Then all news get equal amount of show time on the front page. News should show up in the mod profile immediately after they're authorized, just the front page show up might be delayed.

J_C_A wrote: Maybe have news have some time they stay on the top, and when the time has passed, then next news will be posted. Then all news get equal amount of show time on the front page. News should show up in the mod profile immediately after they're authorized, just the front page show up might be delayed.

That is a great idea and could potentially work. I will definitely keep it in mind.

Until it builds up then the line to get on the front page is longer then just posting it when you want.

Make it automatically scale the post rate - so on a quiet time it might only post a few a day, but at crazy times like now it can post several every hour. If nothing else it means that it can spread some posts out through the Aussie nighttime when most of the authorising team are asleep

This is a very good idea. Anyway to normalize News screen time without sacrificing quality can only benefit the site.

Another idea could be to allow defered posting. The user submits the content of his post, and once that the news item has been approved, then he can decide when to post it. This way developpers can decide when they want the news to appear on the page, or either post automatically.

Cheers guys,

Alex

I like this last idea, once approved give the original poster the freedom when to post it. Should be the simplest thing to incorporate I suppose.

That sounds a good idea too.

I think giving a rating system to the news could be cool. The news with the highest rating would be most likely to be displayed on the front page whereas ones with poor ratings aren't. In my opinion this may also help out with MOTY seen as all the major and best mods will be shown more.