Everyone Can Add News!

Yes, everyone can write news articles. They have to go through a process called "workflow" to appear on the site, but most of that isn't your problem.

So, if you have news that is relevant, new group forming, tiny-plot starting up, whatever is reasonable (your judgement call), go ahead and follow the steps below for making a news article.

If the article happens to be rejected, don't take it personally! However, unlike the MOTD where people are spammed with it, news is voluntarily read, so there's no reason not to be spammy with the number of articles.

The All-Important Dates

One area I want to stress before describing the steps for adding news is the importance of effective dates and expiration dates.

The effective date is when the article appears. If you are planning a TP for a few weeks in the future, and you want a week's notice to start recruiting, don't wait and post the news later, post it now and set the effective date to a week before the event. That way, news can be posted while it's on your mind. Besides, you can always retract it later (even before it shows up) if you need to.

The expiration date causes the news article to fall out of the news file on the given date. Use this to keep an older article from cluttering the list when it's no longer needed. To stick with the TP example from above, if your TP starts on Dec 6, and is expected to go two weeks, have the article expire on Dec 20th. That way, nobody has to go through the old news and "clean it out" like the MOTD on the MUCK.

The Process to Add a News Item

First off, be sure you know how to add documents to your home folder. See Adding a Document if you haven't done this before.

A news article is just a document with some additional data added.

When you'd pick Document to add a document, pick News Item.

The name is internal-only. Make it machine-happy, it goes in the URL later. No spaces, etc. The title should be human-friendly.

The lead-in should be SHORT. It's what appears in the news folder display.

The Body Text is where the real article content goes. This can be HTML, plain text, or structured text. If you want to use structured text (which is the default for normal documents) then you need to select that in the Format radio-button at the bottom of the page before you hit save.

Then hit save.

Workflow and Approval

At this point, your page is visible, but not yet news.

Click the State tag at the top of the display form, and you'll see at the bottom the choice to Submit or Make private. Pick Submit and you're done.

A reviewer will review the news, and either publish it, or make suggestions and send it back to you. When you next login, you can check its status by looking at the state page.

A Final Word

Don't hesitate to add news! The purpose of the site is to let us all know what is going on. News is a useful part of this!

Reviewers don't reject things because "You post too much." They reject things if they are outside the scope of the MU, break our policies somehow, or if they are so poorly written as to be not worth the effort.

So when you have something to say, write it well and submit.