May 29, 2016 at 10:35 am

@bestwriter Does one friend other Zazzlers? If so, feel free to friend me, or to send me your link 🙂

I have to look for a set of guidelines on the site that gives the optimal image sizes for various products. So far, I just made one image because it was part of the registration and set-up process. I need to inform myself more before I get set up to make the designs I want to sell.

May 29, 2016 at 10:30 am

@peachpurple Thanks so much for the compliment! I really do value your good thoughts 🙂

@scheng1 Ah, pizza delivery! Do you have all-night pizza delivery where you are? It’s something I miss, not living in Montreal anymore. We used to call for pizza or souvlaki at 3 am sometimes. We weren’t so lucky with the Chinese restaurants, and most of the Indian and other places either didn’t deliver or shut down early. But I still miss that part of living in the city….

May 29, 2016 at 10:11 am

@peachpurple When I wrote the original message, I was overlooking the mention of editing in the TOS. I think if they are minor edits made in seconds on the fly, and it’s been made clear that content submitted is subject to editing, then it makes sense.

What I wonder is how the staff can keep up with editing when the moderation queue now has a wait of 24 hours or more? It shows more respect to the authors to state expectations clearly upfront, and to distinguish between suggestions and requirements for post approval. And certainly, putting the responsibility for quality posts in the hands of those who are producing the content makes a lot more sense than staff having to make corrections after the fact.

May 29, 2016 at 7:45 am

I’m going to have to give that one a good, hard think! I want to try to approach the topic from an unusual angle….

May 29, 2016 at 7:43 am

@thinker How did you get your post to embed so nicely here in the forum? That’s a very handy trick! I think it would be great if you could teach it to all of us. It should help to increase traffic to those posts 🙂

May 29, 2016 at 7:41 am

I couldn’t remember if I had shared my link and I seem not to be getting much traffic to that post. Just in case my link went missing, here it is:

http://172.104.9.193/spend-million-dollars-improving-world/

May 29, 2016 at 7:21 am

I’ve never encountered this sort of situation as an employee, but I have experienced something similar when we were the client. We ended up passing on most of the services that were on offer, because there it would take about 3-4 hours round trip to access them.

I wish I had some advice to give you! I have no idea if the situation is likely to improve with time, but I think I’d be tempted to take the full-time job if the cost of the commute isn’t going to be too much.

May 29, 2016 at 7:16 am

We aren’t blended in the usual sense. I have four kids, all with my husband, and neither of us had any kids before. My parents also had just me and my sister, and have been together now for over 50 years.

But hubby’s family was a little unconventional. His mother divorced and remarried, so my kids and I always thought of his stepfather as the primary FIL/grandfather on his side. And because he and his sisters were all raised separately, it sometimes feels like a blended family.

We still all treat each other the same, though. There’s no difference between full siblings of half-siblings, or between parents and step-parents. We just all love each other.

May 29, 2016 at 6:05 am

@morgoodie I’ve been doing a “paste as plain text” by using CTRL + SHIFT + v when I submit. It removes all the formatting, which means I have to add it all back in again. That’s a pain in the rear, but the posts have a cleaner look to them than when I paste the formatted text straight in.

The drawback of this workaround is that I’m missing options I’d have in the full WordPress edit/post form. For example, I’m not able to add any additional info to links – just the URL. So I can’t use a “title” or decide if I want the link to open in a new tab, for example. Another missing feature is proper headers, as well as underlined text. I only have the option to use boldface, italics, and strikethrough (the latter of which is almost never useful.)

By simply enabling the “text” or HTML view in the “post now” form, I could add properly formatted posts with HTML tags in place. That would eliminate the display issues associated with pasting in the formatted text, and would be a huge time saver. I can’t understand why it’s enabled here in the forums, but not when we submit posts….

But to be honest, I think that @support and @admin really need to consider giving at least the more experienced writers access to the back-end WordPress functions. There is so much we could be doing to improve the quality of posts using plugins like Yoast’s SEO tool, Embedly, and other tools that add big, attractive social media buttons to all the posts. It would make content on the site more attractive, resolve issues with display, allow us to edit as needed, etc.

May 29, 2016 at 5:39 am

@morgoodie I had my last by C-section, and they had originally told me I’d be in hospital 5 days. It ended up being only 4, of which I was really glad! I stayed about 48 hours with my other children – sometimes a bit more, sometimes a bit less. Four days was so long! I couldn’t wait to be out of the hospital and home with my kids.

May 29, 2016 at 5:33 am

@morgoodie I use a couple of different tools for graphics, and I’ll be publishing a few posts on different sites that relate to those tools. So soon I hope to have more resources for you!

In the meantime, this particular graphic is an image from Pixabay that was edited in Canva. Both are free to use, and neither requires you to install anything on your computer. you will be asked to create an account on Canva, but in my opinion the site is well worth it. I use it even more than GIMP these days, and have been getting a lot of compliments about my images since I began to make many of them on Canva 🙂

May 29, 2016 at 5:20 am

@bestwriter I feel bad that I hadn’t seen the mention of editing in the TOS, because it is there. But you know that I usually can spot such things, and if I didn’t see it I have to wonder how many others were completely unaware.

I am glad you mentioned the specifics of your experience. Again it seems we are back to micromanaging. It should not be the job of the site admin to edit our posts or provide images for them, and if they’re just going to throw whatever graphic they can quickly find at a post I honestly don’t know that it’s going to improve the quality of content or have a positive impact on the site’s earning potential.

Wouldn’t it be far better to treat us all like adults, and spell out the expectations in full? Instead of creeping in to add subheadings or to add graphics that aren’t particularly attractive or relevant, why not simply produce a set of writing guidelines that says what they want? This would mean the approval process could go more smoothly, and the increased transparency about what constitutes a quality post would go a long way to ensuring more writers are meeting the standard.

It seems counterproductive to not publish writing guidelines. If there is a worry that some writers will be turned off by too many rules for posts, the answer is very simple: offer better compensation for those whose posts meet most or all of the standards, while awarding a lesser amount if many of the points are not met. This creates more of an incentive to post optimized content, while still allowing room for those who aren’t yet ready to go to that next level of achievement.

May 29, 2016 at 1:21 am

@peachpurple I wonder if she will have time to be active on the site? Having a newborn in the house is big work! I remember that time in my children’s lives fondly, but I’m glad it’s over 🙂

May 29, 2016 at 1:19 am

@thinker Thank you for pointing out the mention of the word “edit” in the Terms & Conditions. Yes, I missed that when I was looking through the terms again this morning, as it is buried in a dense section of the text that is difficult to read for a couple of reasons.

This is something that needs to be made more explicit, and there should be a proper set of writing guidelines published on the site in order to encourage more writers to submit content that won’t require such editing.

Transparency is an issue here, but any time that a project is being micromanaged the way it is here on LiteracyBase that excessive control soon becomes an issue. Lack of ability to preview, edit or delete our own content is a huge issue, as is the excessively long wait for content to be approved. As users contribute more content and as more users join the site, the staff won’t be able to keep up. I would like to know what @admin and @support intend to do when the publication queues extend not for hours or days, but for weeks at a time?

If better control of the content is desired, it is important to first communicate in clear language the expectations and then to give concrete feedback to any user who doesn’t meet expectations. There is no guarantee that all content will publish, or that it will publish the first time around. Why not simply return posts to authors and ask for a rewrite if there are issues?

May 28, 2016 at 9:10 pm

@bestwriter How do you find most of the assignments and the clients? I see that you believe some rejections weren’t justified, which is always a concern with client work. Some people are very picky, and also not very good at stating what they want. I try to get a sense about clients, and make a point of avoiding any that seem to be that way….