Site Manager Directives

Who this applies to

Site Administrators and Content Editors

What is this about?

General guidelines for managing this site, and how to tackle common problems. This is to make this a permanent "site manager guidelines" document to be archived here.

Issues

Content

It is the responsibility of site admins and content editors to generate content for Sig9. An author (or a promoter) is responsible for his node, and to ensure that his node has visibility, poise and that it generates comments and feedback. To ensure this, follow these directives:

  • Only promote nodes that interest you so that you'll be interested in its fate.
  • When you solicit user feedback and no one responds, keep at it till someone does. This can be done by pestering people, kicking their asses and so on.. :-D, but a simple way to do it would be to add more comments of your own to the node to spark other people to do so. Remember, no one can comment on just a link to another page, you must have an opinion of yourself!
  • Ensure that if you're a content editor or a site admin, you promote and/or contribute at least two pieces of content a week. If you are a content editor, bewarned, you'll be watched! Yes, we are under Nazi rule ;-)

Moderation

Be strict and lenient at the same time while you moderate. On no account should any post be deleted because of bad formatting. That's what you are here for, content editors, reformat the doc away! Make sure that it's readable and presentable and that it looks good.

We also have a very strict policy on the type of content on this site. [see this]. If you feel that any content submitted violates it, warn the user of the violation, but not before thinking it over thrice. You will have to justify your actions to fellow site managers. As a rule, be relaxed when moderating personal blogs, but "personal" blogs do not imply that a user can post anything and everything. When it doubt, defer the question to a site admin.

Only delete a piece of content after warning the user. This rule does not apply if in the judgement of the content editor, the post seriously violates the user submission guidelines.

Publicity

Content Editors and Site administrators are also responsible for publicity for Sig9. This means posting about it in forums, newsgroups and like-minded tech sites. On no account does this directive allow you to troll other forums or spam people. A signature in a forum post is acceptable, but a whole topic on Sig9 (unless you can justify it) is not! We also frown on repeated advertising, mention it once and once only.

See also: HTML Style Classes for the special formatting tools a site manager can use.