Contributor dashboard text causes confusion

[QuincyLarson]

With our community publication, we have opted to keep authors in the "contributor" role and have them submit stories through email to our editorial team. This is to ensure sufficient quality control on each article.

But one of the issues we're facing is caused by a single confusing line of text in the Ghost CMS.

As a contributor, if you sign into Ghost, and you don't have any active drafts, you will see the following message: "You haven't written any posts yet!"

But in many cases, the contributor has written posts and published them. So many of our authors have reported that they thought they had signed into the wrong account, or worse that their stories had been deleted.

At our current scale, with hundreds of contributors, this single line of text has caused quite a bit of confusion, and I've had to get on several calls to reassure authors there's nothing wrong.

So I propose that instead of saying "You haven't written any posts yet!" this could be reworded to say "You don't currently have any drafts." or something like that (and without the out-of-place exclamation mark).

[JohnONolan]

Huh. 🤔 this is a totally valid point - I'm not sure if the copy is the only problem here, either! We'll have a look in detail and follow up. Thanks for bringing this to our attention :)

[JohnONolan]

Actually, just for some extra context @QuincyLarson - would you be able to give us a summary of your current editorial process in as much detail as you're able to? Whatever format is most convenient, if you just want to share the same docs you would normally give a new contributor to explain to them what to do / and any info about what the editors are then expected to do.

We'll fix this specific issue either way — but would love to see if we could maybe also do more than that

[QuincyLarson]

@JohnONolan Thanks for your patience.

Sure – here is how we're handling freeCodeCamp's publication now:

• All of our authors have the "contributor" role
• Once they're done writing their drafts, they email a link to their draft to editorial@freecodecamp.org
• Our editorial team edits and publishes their article.
• If they need to make edits to already-published articles, they send an email to editorial@freecodecamp.org describing the edit, and we go in and make it for them.

This isn't how Ghost was intended to be used, but we have adapted our use to the scale at which we're using it, and our desire to ensure quality at every step of the way, and reduce the likelihood of authors accidentally introducing typos / broken links into their articles.

There are several aspects of Ghost that make these additional workflows necessary:

1. Once an article's slug changes, all of the old links to it break. I assume some sort of slug-history-with-redirects feature is on the roadmap somewhere. But until it is, there is the risk that an author might unknowingly change their slug and break all backlinks to that article.

2. Ghost doesn't have a version history, so if an author changes something, our editorial team has no idea this has happened. Usually these changes are innocuous such as accidentally deleting a diagram or code snippet. But since they can go unnoticed for weeks or months, we are making edits ourselves directly.

3. There are a lot of unlikely but terrible things that can happen when 300+ authors have the ability to directly publish anything to a website without any sort of review beforehand.

If you ever want to hop on a video call, I can walk you through exactly how freeCodeCamp uses Ghost. We now have more than 5 million unique visitors per month on our publication, and are publishing around 20 articles per week. So this might give you some insight into what other big publications might experience if they switch to Ghost.

[stale]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

[matthanley]

Ghost now has a restructured interface for contributors, which addresses the points raised in the original issue. @QuincyLarson thanks for the feedback!