Managing Submitted Content

[cameron]

On my skateboarding site, http://www.hdskate.com , I have a form that allows people to submit reviews. The way it works right now, I have to approve each review before it's posted on the site. This is becoming used more often and is time consuming work, especially doing spelling and grammar checks on the reivews.

Can anyone think or a more efficient way to run things? I guess I may just ask someone from my forums to do it, but I will have to do some programming to change my admin area so that they don't have access to updating other parts of the site.

[Chris]

Its a pain. I'm behind on all my sites that offer this feature. This is also one thing my wife occassionally helps out with.

[chrispian]

I get between 40-60 submissions a day at Lit.Org. We have 6 staff members who review everything before it's posted.

We also have Comment validation, but I have it wired up so that I can turn auto validate on. We only switch to "validate mode" when we have people abusing the system as a reminder.

But the submission can be a problem. With my articles site, that's much easier. I usually have several items in the queue and I use Nucleus, which allows me to publish to the future. I publish 3-4 weeks ahead.

Like Chris, my wife also helps out with this kind of stuff.

[mobilebadboy]

There's your answer. Get married.

[intelliot]

especially doing spelling and grammar checks on the reivews.
Check your own spelling of "reviews";)

Seriously, one thing you should state on the site is that submitters should check their own spelling and grammar before submission.

Everyone, how do you get people to submit content to your website? Do you offer any incentives?

[Mike]

What incentives could you offer?

Also, perhaps make a filter. A spelling one and a swear one. If a review contains inappropriate words, then automatically don't publish it.

[MarkB]

People generally will be happy to contribute to a site they *like* without wanting anything in return.

[michael_gersitz]

True, it is also easier if you are looking for comments and reviews, if you already have a bunch of comments / reviews. People read other peoples comments, and decide to comment themselves.

[chrispian]

Oddly, if you give people a place to share their voice, alot of them will. It can be kind of slow going in the beginning, you need to seed the site a little. It's a hard thing to get started because you need content to get people to contribute and you need people to contribute content. At certain points though, you'll notice an exponential growth pattern. At first it'll be very slow, but once you hit a tipping point it'll snow ball pretty well. At least, that's how my sites have worked for me.

[intelliot]

Yes, I can see that happening. In fact, I'm seeing it with an old website I'm now running: www.cydevr.net . There is a surprisingly strong community around it, and people are stepping up to improve it themselves.