news submission

Development
1

I’m considering options for how to structure the news submission system so that users can again submit news items. One thing I don’t want to go back to is a system where everything submitted by anybody goes on the front page as-is, as this results in quite a bit of low-quality or inappropriate copy showing up in the place where we present VASSAL to the world. Specifically, if you look back through the news archive, you’ll see a lot of headlines which contain no verb, which are ungrammatical, or which are help requests which should have been directed to the forum.

I think an appropriate solution to the problem is to have an editor who handles incoming news submissions. This isn’t a big job—historically there have been only a few news items per week—and in many cases would amount to not a lot more than changing headlines like “Foo 1.2.3” to “Foo Module Version 1.2.3 Released”.

Are we in agreement about this?

Would anybody like to volunteer to be the news editor?

That said, I’m struggling a bit with how exactly to link up our news package, phpns, with the rest of the site. One way would be to let users into phpns to submit news items directly; another would be to have a simple news submission page which talks with phpns. The advantage of the latter is that we don’t have to create user accounts in phpns, but one disadvantage is that news items won’t show up as being posts by the user who wrote them.

2

If you did the latter, even though it might not communicate with phpns, and
if it is a more or less typical php type submission page, couldn’t you add
in an extra required field for the username.

The info in this field gets sent to the editor via email
(editor@vassalengine.org or something like that) with a simple notification
“John Doe submitted a news article”

Now Editor has the name and can go review submission

-----Original Message-----
From: messages-bounces@vassalengine.org
[mailto:messages-bounces@vassalengine.org] On Behalf Of uckelman
Sent: Thursday, August 05, 2010 5:58 AM
To: messages@vassalengine.org
Subject: [messages] [Developers] news submission

I’m considering options for how to structure the news submission system
so that users can again submit news items. One thing I don’t want to go
back to is a system where everything submitted by anybody goes on the
front page as-is, as this results in quite a bit of low-quality or
inappropriate copy showing up in the place where we present VASSAL to
the world. Specifically, if you look back through the news archive,
you’ll see a lot of headlines which contain no verb, which are
ungrammatical, or which are help requests which should have been
directed to the forum.

I think an appropriate solution to the problem is to have an editor who
handles incoming news submissions. This isn’t a big job—historically
there have been only a few news items per week—and in many cases would
amount to not a lot more than changing headlines like “Foo 1.2.3” to
“Foo Module Version 1.2.3 Released”.

Are we in agreement about this?

Would anybody like to volunteer to be the news editor?

That said, I’m struggling a bit with how exactly to link up our news
package, phpns, with the rest of the site. One way would be to let users
into phpns to submit news items directly; another would be to have a
simple news submission page which talks with phpns. The advantage of the
latter is that we don’t have to create user accounts in phpns, but one
disadvantage is that news items won’t show up as being posts by the user
who wrote them.

Read this topic online here:
https://forum.vassalengine.org/t/news-submission/3155/1

3

Thus spake “Tim McCarron”:

If you did the latter, even though it might not communicate with phpns, and
if it is a more or less typical php type submission page, couldn’t you add
in an extra required field for the username.

The info in this field gets sent to the editor via email
(editor@vassalengine.org or something like that) with a simple notification
“John Doe submitted a news article”

Now Editor has the name and can go review submission

That isn’t quite what I was talking about; I should have explained better,
since other people do not have access to my thoughts (I hope). :slight_smile:

If you look at the news page (vassalengine.org/news.php) you’ll
see “Posted by $PERSON on $DATE” with each item. That’s the thing I’m
referring to. The $PERSON field comes from phpns, and, without modifications
to phpns, has to be a user that phpns knows about.

It’s easy enough to collect the user details in the submission form—the
user has to be logged in to use it, so the script can pick that up itself.

–
J.

4

Thus spake uckelman:

Would anybody like to volunteer to be the news editor?

News submission is working now. We still need a news editor.

–
J.