Hey everyone!
As you might have seen, we've been changing up a few things regarding content. The editorial process has changed a little since then, so I think it's a good idea to let everyone know how things work now.
1. Write an Article
Exactly the same as before really. Pick a topic, and go nuts. Pretty much any subject is fine, as before, try to avoid subjects that might start a war in the comments. But otherwise we're good. If you're writing in a word document, remember to add BBcode tags to your article so it shows up properly.
2. Images
We'd encourage you to add relevant and/or humorous images to your article. As before, we'd prefer these to be from an open source, so we don't get any copyright issues. Please add these images with [img] tags in your article. One change from before is that we're now going to be re-hosting all article images on a TCS account. This just means that older articles won't suffer from image loss if someone removes them, or whatever else might cause them to be lost or otherwise missing. Don't worry about that, we'll sort it, but it's a change from before I think we should mention.
3. Jokes
As before, we're (at least tangentially) a comedy site, so jokes in your articles will be awesome. Obviously, if you're writing something more serious or based on history, we can tailor those to the content, but often a dry subject will be lightened by humour.
4. Sources
Also as before, if you're writing anything reasonably serious, please try to include sources. Wikipedia is still okay.
5. Plagiarism
Run your article through this, because we will
http://www.dustball.com/cs/plagiarism.checker/
6. Submit
Submitting your article to us has been completely changed, and has never been simpler. Go to the main page, and there's a button to "Submit an Article". When you press this you get the option to submit the text of your article, a title, and any additional comments. This will be posted to our editing subforum, where we can play with it.
I want to add here, that only registered users can access this button, and I'd like to think that anyone here will use this responsibly. However, in the event we get something which is obviously trolling or inappropriate, we're going to consider that grounds for a warning. We want to use this to make things a heck of a lot easier for everyone, but please don't mess around with it.
7. Editing
Once the article is in our hands, we'll go through it, alter minor wording, add jokes and images where necessary, and generally make it look like something we think we're happy to publish. Which brings us to the next bit that's a little different.
8. Author Consultation
Regardless of how much we edit, your work is still your work and we'd like to make sure you're happy with the final version before we post. Our new editing setup allows us to make a preview that only the author can view, so we can make sure you're happy with the end result before we post. As such, once the editing is done, we will approach the author to see if they're happy with the article, and we'll try to work with the author to make sure any concerns are addressed prior to posting.
However, if we are unable to contact the author of an article for a period of a month dating from the time we begin looking for author approval, the article will be eligible for posting. We'll try and only use this where absolutely necessary, but we don't want to sit on perfectly good content waiting months for someone to return to okay something. We want everyone to be on the same page about this; we will do our best to contact authors and get their approval before posting, and will only do this if the editorial staff deems it necessary. Ideally, this will never be an issue.
9. Promotion
Obviously we have social media up and running as well, but feel free to share your article, or any article you liked on your social media as well. The more people view this, the better.