Manage Existing Submissions/Comments
Contents
Manage Existing Submissions/Comments
As your site becomes known as a place for people to contribute in a meaningful way, you'll find yourself with more and more submissions and comments to manage. This is the central location where you manage all your existing submissions.
Management involves six sets of actions for your submissions.
- Sorting your submissions according to your preferences.
- Moving submissions from one invitation to another.
- Editing submissions (ex., you find a typo in a submission you accepted previously).
- Deleting submissions that you previously accepted.
- Merging (combining two or more submissions into one page) and demerging submissions (removing one or more submissions from a merged page).
- Managing merged submissions.
In addition, there's an information button that reveals extra information about each submission.
There's a sixth set of actions that you can take -- managing comments, which includes editing or deleting them, or deleting them and banning the commenter.
Sorting Submissions
- Choose your Sort method from the drop down menu.
The Sort option is not displayed until there are at least two submissions.
You have four options for sorting your submissions.
- Sort New-Old, with the newest submissions at the top.
- Sort Old-New, with the oldest submissions at the top.
- Sort A-Z, with those starting with "A" at the top.
- Sort Z-A, with those starting with "Z" at the top.
Tip
- You may find as you manage more submissions that a different sorting method makes more sense. You can change the sort setting at any time to suit your needs.
Using the Information Button
-
Click on the
button to the left of a submission title.
The information button reveals and hides info about the contributor and her submission. This info may be useful for you, but doesn't need to be displayed constantly. Click on the button to display the information, and click again to hide it and give you a simple, uncluttered interface.
On the left, you'll see...
- the date of the submission
- the name of the visitor who submitted it (first name only, full name, a nickname or perhaps no name at all if none was provided)
- that person's email address, if she asked to be notified of acceptance
- a link to the submission page itself, so you can view it as it appears now on your site (after approving it).
Important: While you may have access to your contributor's e-mail address, do not use it to add her to your e-zine or other mailing list. She agreed to provide her address only so you could notify her (done automatically by SBI!) when you accepted her submission, and when others comment on it and/or when they contribute.
On the right, you'll see...
- the total number of submissions made by this person across all your invitations, and
- the total number of comments made about this submission.
Merge Check Boxes
- Add a check to two or more submissions.
- Click on the Merge Checked Submissions button.
Add a check to any submission to add it to a merged page. Once two or more submissions are checked, the Merge Checked Submissions button activates. Click on that button to merge the submissions.
After the submissions are merged, the new page title appears instead of all the merged submissions, and the word "merged" appears in the check box column.
Merging (and demerging) submissions are discussed here.
Move/Edit, Delete and Comments Links
Click on the move/edit or delete link to perform the corresponding action. Moving, editing and deleting submissions are discussed here.
Note: If you have merged several submissions, the merged page cannot be moved. So the word "move" is grayed out and is no longer a link...
Once you receive a comment for a particular submission, a comments link appears to the right of the delete link. A 
graphic will also appear whenever there's a new comment for that submission.
If you set your Comments preferences to require a review of all submissions before publication, you'll also see a P. This indicates that there is at least one comment requiring your review. Note that comments requiring review can be new comments or existing comments that you read earlier but made no decision about.
Click on the comments link to go to the Manage Comments page. The will disappear after you visit the Manage Comments page. The P will not disappear until all comments are published or deleted. Managing comments is discussed here.