The Approval Process

In the beginning, our Editor-in-Chief, Chris J. Strolin, approved OEDILF limericks directly. Before long he enlisted the help of Workshopping Editors by asking them to express whether pieces were ready for approval, by clicking a button to insert the comment:

I’d say this piece is RFA (Ready for Approval) as is.

Once a limerick reached three RFAs and its author expressed their own approval of the workshopped version, it went to Chris for his final approval.

Not long after, our webmaster, Virge, changed the RFA button to increment a counter rather than leave a comment, and the threshold for approval went from 3 RFAs to 5, not including the author’s own RFA. The threshold settled down at the start of 2006 to 4, where it’s remained ever since.

At around the same time, Chris delegated the task of final approval to a group of Associate Editors, who perform a final check of each limerick with the author’s self-RFA. I was one of that first group of AEs, and started tackling the backlog of a thousand such pieces...

How It Works

In our AE role, we make “pre-STC” changes to limericks so that they fit our house style, correct any obvious typos (some do slip through, even with 4 RFAs), and then click the button that says Set To Confirming. Making pre-STC changes minimizes delays, but if we notice anything substantial we’ll ask you, the author, first. A week after your limerick is set to confirming you’ll get the chance to sign off on it for good so that it becomes Approved.

There are still occasional outright errors that have to be fixed at pre-STC stage—stray punctuation, typos, and plain old spelling mistakes—which is only to be expected: we’ll never get everything 100% right, any more than anyone ever has. We can’t take examples of occasional imperfection as evidence that we aren’t striving for perfection; plenty of us are striving to do our best, all the time. Over a very long time, in many cases.

If I see something as an AE that needs fixing or doesn’t seem quite right, I’ll raise it, just as I would as a Workshopping Editor. If it’s a typo or a formatting issue I’ll edit it pre-STC; if not, I try not to jump the gun, even if it’s just a comma, because the author should have the final say. (Life would be easier in some ways if editors had the power to swoop in and clean up formatting at any stage in the workshopping process, but before the approval stage the author’s say is given even higher priority.)

There have been one or two cases where it became apparent from their reaction that an author felt my pre-STC suggestion was holding their final approval to ransom. If I suggest something at this stage, I’m not saying “change this or the Approval gets it”—I’m opening (or extending) a discussion about something I see as important, but not as essential to the question of whether the piece gets approved.

If something is essential, I’ll make that as clear as possible, while still trying not to get too heavy about it. If it’s an indisputable and easily fixed mistake, I’ll edit it pre-STC. Even then, you have the option of stopping the clock or saying no to final approval if you’re unhappy with it. During the confirming period, if you see anything you want to change about the piece, pressing the Stop Countdown button will take it back to tentative so you can make changes.

Strengths and Weaknesses

The system we’ve evolved over time has various checks and balances, but its weakness is that these can bring us to a standstill, for fear of offending each other. That fear isn’t entirely unjustified, as we sometimes see when one AE makes a suggestion that goes unanswered and another AE steps in and sets the piece to confirming. What’s the worst that can happen in that situation, though?

• Someone stops the countdown, the author agrees with them and makes the change, and the piece is then set to confirming and approved in short order;
• Someone stops the countdown, the author disagrees with them and re-self-RFAs, and the piece is then set to confirming and approved in short order;
• Nobody stops the countdown because it isn’t seen as a big deal, and the author approves the piece within a few days.

If no one has made the first move, the piece sits un-STC’d for months, coming up on AEs’ screens again and again, because everyone is waiting for the author to respond; the author, meanwhile, might be assuming that because they’ve self-RFA’d they’ve answered all criticism. The piece clogs up the system and wastes everyone’s time.

We watch each others’ backs, though, and when every STCable limerick has at least five editors involved there are plenty of watchers. I’ve certainly had other editors query my pre-STC changes or notice something that needs a mid-confirming or even post-approval fix, which is as it should be. As long as we have mechanisms in place to take a second look at any limerick—which we do—the system will work as well as one can reasonably expect.

If you need to rethink a piece in response to a pre-STC suggestion and want to take your time over it, by all means do. All we would ask is that you remove your self-RFA so that it sits in the tentatives queue rather than the STCables queue, where it would get in the way of AEs trying to STC whatever can be and make suggestions about what can’t. (If you stop the clock on a piece that’s already been set to confirming, it will drop your self-RFA and return it to tentative automatically.)

Why All of This is Important

When working through hundreds of pieces we’ll inevitably rub someone up the wrong way from time to time, but it would be a great shame to let fear of causing offence stop us from going through them all—and going through them as promptly as possible.

There’s no point in having an STC system—or an RFA system—if the pieces with 4 RFAs and the author’s self-RFA aren’t being looked at and dealt with by AEs with an aim to approving them or encouraging the authors to improve them—in other words, if we aren’t trying to reduce the size of the STCables queue. If we take away the idea of actually striving to get our limericks approved—as writers, WEs, and AEs—we end up with something vastly less interesting: a place where anyone posts anything, and one or two people leave comments on it, and that’s about it.

I don’t accept that slowing down any stage of this process will automatically give a better product; we’ve spotted errors in long-approved pieces that took a long while to be approved. That the OEDILF will never be finished in our lifetimes shouldn’t mean that we as individuals should be prevented from finishing our own individual contributions to it. I’ve got enough unfinished projects in my life without adding hundreds of five-line ones to the list, and there must be others who feel the same.

I would never want people to stop submitting limericks, but I have in the past held back from raising my own output until the system as a whole was working better. At times it’s been so finely balanced that if a few AEs took a break we saw the STC backlog balloon by hundreds in a matter of days.

Seeing limericks come up to STC years after they were first submitted reminds me of the time I applied for a job and got a reply six months later. Thanks for getting in touch, but hey, I’ve moved on. We sometimes compare the OEDILF to building a cathedral; if I were a stonemason on the Sagrada Familia I wouldn’t want to wait a year for each brick to be approved.

Reworked from forum and workshop comments from January 2006–February 2007.