Our Readers Give Feedback, And We Listen
Posted by Editing StaffNot too long ago we made some adjustments to our submission guidelines, and openly stated that we were cracking down on users of automated writing and submission programs.
The truth is, our editors and submission reviewers have always been good at weeding out articles which were machine written, and users who were employing automated submission programs, but still there was a rise in the number of catches we were making and that’s what prompted our public announcement of a crackdown.
As a result of that announcement we received a ton of positive feedback from members, and even more from visitors.
I have to stray off topic just a bit here to say we have an exceptional class of visitors coming to this site and reading our member’s articles. They are both inquisitive and engaged, as displayed by the insightful questions they ask in our article comments areas, and the comments they provide when using our “Report This Article” feature any time they feel an article is misleading, abusive or violates one of our terms of service or submission guidelines.
From all of the feedback we’ve received in the last few weeks, a number of things have become clear to us.
- Many of our members and regular visitors are very passionate about their use of this site–that’s a great thing
- The majority of articles which displease our readers, despite conforming to our submission guidelines, tend to be on the shorter end in terms of word counts, and often push the boundary of informative vs. sales pitch–this is bad
- An overwhelming number of articles that readers have indicated they dislike are related to Internet Marketing and Making Money Online–this was predictable
So, as we’ve always done when our readers and members take the time to give us their opinions and ideas, we took all of this feedback into consideration and have updated our submission guidelines as follows:
- All articles must now contain a minimum of 450 words. This rule itself will not force submissions to be of higher quality, but it will weed out some of the low quality gibberish from those who aren’t concerned at all with providing quality content, and it will make the job of spotting poor quality submissions even easier for our reviewers.
- There will no longer be any second chances for members who break our rules and use automated software to write or submit their articles. We have tried to be lenient in the past, especially when the violation was only in the submission process, however time and again these members simply became repeat offenders, so now, just as with anyone who uses automated means to inflate their page view counts, we are taking a Zero Tolerance approach with all automated software use in any interactions with our service. Anyone caught using automated software for any purpose related to our site or service will have all of their articles removed from our system, and their account terminated.
- All articles related to Internet Marketing and/or Making Money Online will now receive a double review process, first by one of our regular article reviewers to ensure it meets our standard submission guidelines, and if it passes there it will then be sent to one of our senior editors for content review where it will be scrutinized for accuracy. By that we mean if you claim you can push a button and make millions of dollars in your article, you had better provide proof to support your claims, or we will not accept it for publishing. We do not want to ban these topics outright, but our service is not the place for publishing misleading or false information. Our senior editors will use their own judgement to determine if the content, tone and claims in these articles will provide value to our readers or not.
- Health related articles which make medical claims of any kind must include citations or reference links to recognized or authoritative sources which validate those claims, or they will be declined. It’s acceptable and encouraged for writers to state their personal opinions or theories in an article, however when you do so it should be clearly evident that it is an opinion or theory, and not be stated as fact without supporting evidence. In other words, it’s fine to say that the latest Watermelon Diet helped you lose weight, but if you claim it also helped thousands of other people lose weight, or that it cures Cancer there had better be some corroborating evidence to back up those claims, and you must link to that evidence from your article or resource box.
On a closing note, we aren’t adjusting our policies to make things harder for writers. In fact, by following our guidelines it will make it easier for writers to provide higher quality articles for readers, and to establish themselves as authorities on their topics.
