Running Weblogs with Slash

Editing User Submissions

Authors can winnow out off-topic or duplicate Stories from the Submissions list, but the Review Submission page provides the opportunity to review Stories in depth. A typical submission is built around a URL pointing elsewhere on the Web. If the user has included a well-formed <A HREF> tag, the preview will contain a working link to the destination. To validate and verify the link, use the Open Link in New Window command found in many web browsers.

Warning

Viewing the destination link will quickly verify if the link is well-formed, whether the page exists, and if the page is actually relevant to the site. Spammers and practical jokers are everywhere, and some consider it the height of comedy to post relevant-looking Stories with URLs to commercial, embarrassing, or irrelevant pages.

If the URL does point to something worth seeing, make sure that it will continue to do so. For example, is the link target the homepage of another site? Many news-related web sites display stories on the main homepage or on a Section page, aging them to archival URLs, as new stories arise. (Newspapers and other weblogs frequenty use this technique.) Users who don’t realize this may submit Stories with the homepage URL. If a linked page seems totally unrelated to the submission description, perhaps the destination Story has already moved to an archival link. It’s worth looking around for a permanent URL to salvage a good submission. Many sites provide keyword searches to ...