The Front Door

As an OEDILF editor, I use the New queue as a way of mixing things up—looking at new members, looking at prolific not-yet-editors, looking at old hands—and doing a bit of all kinds of workshopping. If you’d like to do the same, bookmark the OEDILF New Queue and have a look at it now and then, setting pieces to Tentative (what we call tenting) unless there’s a good reason to put them on Hold. We call this front-door editing, and any workshop editor can do it, although if you do it’s worth thinking about how to welcome any newcomers to the site you encounter. If you’ve only just started workshopping, it makes sense to limit yourself to workshopping fellow editors rather than newcomers for a few weeks until you get the hang of it.

The New queue is a checking point to ensure that submissions meet the minimum requirements for our site (no racial slurs or similarly offensive content, eight-line non-limericks, and so on); Tentative is the workshopping staging post. It’s technically possible to set pieces to Tentative without leaving a comment or RFA, but our practice is to leave comments on newly tented pieces and RFAs where we can. I always comment on the work of brand new members of the site, who won’t necessarily know what’s going on, when I move it out of New. If I know an author well, or if they’ve had a reasonable amount of workshopping from me recently, I might tent some of their pieces with only an RFA rather than a comment.

In the past we’ve seen the New queue develop considerable backlogs, even though some pieces in it have already had workshopping attention and others have at least been read. As an editor, leaving pieces in New feels like passing the buck to other editors; if you workshop a New piece (by which I mean leaving a comment or RFA) you should really set it to Tentative or Held before you leave. Of course, if you move on without saying or doing anything, no-one will know, although authors can usually figure out when their work has been passed over in this way. As I once wistfully wrote when mine was:

Most R&B songs, I eschew,
But I’m certainly richer for you.
You speak to me, Lionel,
From seven-inch vinyl:
My limerick is still stuck on New.

Commenting without tenting or holding discourages those who have to tent the pieces that others have already demonstrably seen. When I used to go through the New queue regularly, I would get a bit annoyed at editors whose comments and RFAs kept appearing on pieces that were still left in New; it felt like they were forcing work on me. Commenting without tenting also goes against the rationale of front-door editing, which essentially is checking to see whether we should allow submissions into the database; if we’ve started the workshopping process, the piece is no longer New.

To do my bit to address New backlogs, whenever I submit a piece of my own I try to tent some New pieces to compensate for the comparable work I’m creating for some other editor.

The Newest of the New

When it comes to dealing with newcomers, don’t be brusque; say hello, welcome, and that you hope they enjoy their time with us. Don’t overwhelm them with too many criticisms of their first submission or submissions. Point them to the OEDILF’s page on meter (typing double square brackets on either side of the word in a workshop comment will link it to that page; note the U.S. spelling). Don’t be afraid to use the “Hold message #1” Text Macro and put limericks that need a lot of work on hold—there’s no shame in it. When you do that, remember that you’re responsible for that limerick until it’s ready to be re-tented, so try not to neglect it; and remember to re-tent it when it’s ready, because non-editors can’t do it themselves. Basically, treat newcomers as courteously as you would have wanted to be—and hopefully were—when you arrived.

It’s easy to tell how long a member has been a member by looking at one of their limerick workshops. Under their Author’s Preference you’ll see the dates of their last login and their first submission, how many limericks they’ve submitted, and how many they’ve had approved. If the date of their first submission is more than a month ago and they’ve submitted more than a few limericks or had anything approved, they’re no longer a newcomer in need of special handling. Remember, just because someone isn’t yet an editor doesn’t mean they’re still a newcomer.

And try not to call newcomers newbies, which can have negative connotations. Who needs the word when we have newcomer? Two extra letters and all potential offense is avoided.

Reworked from forum and workshopping comments from January 2005–July 2008.