Although some of you still haven't quite been acquainted with how the article submission process works, I'd like to ask you if there are any ideas on how it could improve....

• Icon Ability to modify news article icons
• Categories Do you think these need to be re-thought?
• Preview Being able to preview posts would make life so much easier.
• Approval The "(NOT YET APPROVED)" isn't quite that clean. Disapproving posts is quite buggy, Kevin might have more information on that.
• Graphic News articles could have an associated graphic image, like a small thumbnail image of the content within. This could even replace the Icon system.

The old wish list is still available. If you guys have any new ideas or items to add, please feel free to edit this post. These will eventually be conveyed to the rest of the staff. [Edited by - Rob Loach on October 15, 2006 5:02:33 PM]

[CROSS-POSTED FROM OTHER THREAD, AS REQUESTED]

Site-wide decision-making seems to take place anywhere and everywhere. Some meetings might be held on IRC. Others on some random ad-hoc wiki. Others in some random forum. Yet more in AIM or MSN Messenger or whatnot. This simply cannot go on: half of us have absolutely no clue what the hell the other half is doing! This is completely untenable. We cannot synchronise our processes and ensure consistent workflow under the present system.

Real-time communications channels really ought to be a last resort, used mainly when a smaller subset of people are working closely on a project. For everything else, high-latency comms should suffice. (GDNet's Founding Fathers are more than capable of taking any necessary snap decisions should such be required.)

I would, given my past experiences working for other "virtual" businesses -- I've consulted for Greg Costikyan's www.manifestogames.com website as well as www.smallrockets.com -- like to see this sorted ASAP. Lack of clear lines of communication WILL kill a business, virtual or otherwise. I guarantee it.

So far, so rant. Now for a possible solution:

One way of making a virtual business work is to create virtual 'departments' that are analogous to real-world equivalents. Thus, I would like to suggest a thorough re-org of the existing staff-only forums along the following lines:

- STAFF ADMIN   - Global Projects Status (semi-automated: aggregates project status forums in other departments.)   - New Starters Induction & FAQs   - Staff Meetings (includes sticky "AGENDA FOR NEXT STAFF MEETING" forum)   - KHawk's Diary   - Oluseyi's Diary   - (and so on for each staff memeber. These are used to notify everyone of holidays, availability, etc.)- TECHNOLOGY DEPT.   - Projects Status   - Policies & FAQs   - Hardware   - Software   - R&D   - Meeting Room (includes sticky "AGENDA FOR NEXT DEPT. MEETING" forum)   - Requests (where requests from other departments are posted.)- ADVERTISING   - Projects Status   - Policies & FAQs   - Current Clients List   - Meeting Room (includes sticky "AGENDA FOR NEXT DEPT. MEETING" forum)   - Requests (see TECHNOLOGY DEPT.)- CONTENT (covers _all_ site-created content, such as News, Articles, etc.)   - Projects Status   - Policies & FAQs   - Meeting Room   - Articles Inbox (see notes for this and the equivalent News * groups.)   - Articles Discussion   - Articles Active Index (public: READ-ONLY; staff: READ-WRITE)   - Articles Archived Index (public: READ-ONLY; staff: READ-WRITE)   - News Inbox   - News Discussion   - News Active Index (public: READ-ONLY; staff: READ-WRITE)   - News Archived Index (public: READ-ONLY; staff: READ-WRITE)- COMMUNITY   - Projects Status   - Policies & FAQs   - Meeting Room   - (all the public forums appear in here.)

* NOTES: The "CONTENT DEPT." forums include a suggestion to improve the current workflow...

Raw, unprocessed articles arrive automatically in the relevant "Inbox" forum. Here, they are assigned to an appropriate member of staff for review or rewriting. It will be possible to add a 'stub' article to the forum with the idea being that it's then assigned to a writer for completion as an in-house news item. (The stub would be just a brief comment and some relevant URLs). An article can also be rejected at this stage, or (for non-news Articles), bounced back to the author for rewriting / changes.

When a News Item has been assigned, or a non-news Article approved, it is automatically moved to the appropriate "... Discussion" forum where the spit-and-polish work is done. The article can be discussed, edited, approved for posting, or rejected should it prove ultimately unsuitable. Approval requires the completion of a "REVIEW BY" field, which determines the News Item or Article's expiry date. (Note that this should be a _required_ field, not optional; in this industry, nothing stays current for long.)

Once approved, an Article or News Item will be posted to the relevant destination. At the same time, a link will appear in the "... Active Index" forum. When an Article reaches its REVIEW BY date, it will be bounced back to the Inbox forum again automatically, the entry in the "Active Index" disappears, and the old version will be moved to the archives with an entry in the "...Archived Index" forum. For News Items, the only difference is that there is no bounce-back to the Inbox: the Item is simply archived.

The "...Index" forums would be visible to the public in read-only format. Each index would use a modified viewing template showing the path to the content -- e.g. "Resources / Beginners Start Here / What Language Should I Use?" -- and the "REVIEW BY" date, along with the article link itself and the author's name/profile link (if available).



Whether the above is even possible using the current forum code I don't know. (I'd like to see threaded forums supported at some point, for example. The above tree is also, I think, one layer deeper than the existing structure.) It's mainly a suggestion for how the existing forums could be modified to improve the workflow. The content creation workflow forums would certainly require some coding to add the necessary UI features, logging and automation, but I think it would be worth it.

(IMHO, of course.)

Quote: Original post by Rob Loach
Although some of you still haven't quite been acquainted with how the article submission process works, I'd like to ask you if there are any ideas on how it could improve....

• Icon
  Ability to modify news article icons
  

The current icons are often so cryptic that I can easily spend longer trying to find one that bears some relationship to the story than on editing the story itself. I would personally eliminate the icons and just use topic headings. (E.g. "Business", "Industry", "Community", etc.) Displayed in a decent CSS style, possibly by using different colours for each, these should be more than enough to differentiate news items visually.

Text is also a bloody site less bandwidth-consuming than graphics. Given the cost issues, it makes sense to keep loading times and bandwidth usage as low as possible while maintaining an interesting house style. Text tricks would seem a better choice for this than graphics.

Quote:

Categories
Do you think these need to be re-thought?

Yes.

Almost every article I've ever approved has had multiple categories ticked. I believe a keyword tagging system should ultimately replace the current categories.

A list of tags would be provided. These would correspond to SIGs to allow users to more easily filter out items and articles that aren't of interest. (E.g. a "Graphics" tag would flag the article as being of interest to graphics artists.) Additional tags could also be added to the list if desired. (This might need to be limited to Editors only.)

Tags should be hierarchical to allow intelligent tag searching. (See the "Word Menu" program for an illustration.) The idea behind this is that a search for a lower-level term would also match terms above it in the same branch of the tree. Thus "modeling" would appear under "graphics". It would add intelligence to our search system. Since tags would be provided by us, this intelligence would come more-or-less for free, so it's worth doing I think.

Top-level category 'metatags' could be created that are simply mapped onto groups of tags. For example:

For website classification purposes: "Community" (about GDNet, competitions, etc.), "Technology" (updates to development tools, new language standards, etc.), and "Business" (corporate buyouts, business decisions, layoffs, etc.).

For user-level filtering preferences, I would also add metatags like "production", "programming", "art", and so on.

NOTE: These tags would be used for both News Items and general Articles.

(One important issue: what happens to old news items if category changes are approved? Do we keep them as-is, retaining the old category names in the system? Do we go over each one manually to re-classify them? Do we purge them? Or simply tag them all as "Archived"?)

Quote:

Preview
Being able to preview posts would make life so much easier.

Yes. Since similar functionality already exists in other areas of the forum, I would like to propose that _all_ forums, regardless of UI / template / whatever, support preview functionality as standard. Spellchecking would also be nice since not all of us speak English as our first language. Spellchecking isn't perfect, but it would give us a base level of quality control.

Quote:

Approval
The "(NOT YET APPROVED)" isn't quite that clean. Disapproving posts is quite buggy, Kevin might have more information on that.

I would prefer to see this system completely replaced by something like the one I suggested in my earlier post. In particular, I have no idea what would happen if two people happened to be working on the same entry at the same time. If one says "Approve" and another says "Reject", I suspect the first person to click the button 'wins'. This is not ideal and is why I'd like to see the three-stage process above.

Only Editors should have the right to approve or reject an item initially. Writers should be assigned to items, so that labour isn't duplicated. A Writer would see "Recommend Rejection" and "Recommend Approval" buttons, but only those with Editor privileges should get the final say. This will allow a more formal QA process to be used should this be desired, giving a more consistent house style.

(All writers and editors could be given "Editor"-level rights initially if this sounds like too big a leap, but it would be good to have the functionality available should it be desired later on.)

Quote:

Graphic
News articles could have an associated graphic image, like a small thumbnail image of the content within. This could even replace the Icon system.

I would prefer this over the icon system. However, I suspect it would cause problems with the layout of the front page, so this is something that should be discussed in depth first to see how feasible it is. I suspect we would end up following a C|NET-type route with pictures and other graphics appearing within the article, but not on the front page.

To be honest, I would really like to see a formal CMS in place. News Items and Articles are basically the same thing, so unifying the back-end handling of these would open up some useful possibilities, such as automatically generating cross-reference links from News Items to relevant explanatory Articles (and vice-versa).

This is something the technology team needs to be brought in on at an early stage so we can find out exactly what the current state of play is. I'd rather we were pragmatic about this and found out whether features are actually possible to implement first, before discussing how they'd work.



[Edited by - stimarco on October 15, 2006 12:22:41 PM]