Blog Carnival Tips

As a blog carnival gets more popular, the number of submissions goes up, and the traffic the carnival gets goes up as well.  This is good.  Unfortunately, this popularity also attracts posts that are of marginal quality or are highly commercial.  Or, people will submit several posts to a single edition of the carnival.  Spammy is a good word to describe these posts and these submitters.

It gets annoying after a while.  BlogCarnival.com has enough safeguards that the “spam” is limited, but as of now there’s nothing to prevent someone from going down the line of carnivals and submitting the same post to every single one, or from submitting multiple posts to a single carnival edition.  Here are a few ways to handle these kinds of unwanted submissions:

• Leave it up to the host to use editorial discretion.  This has worked so far with the Carnival of Debt Reduction, but some of the hosts are beginning to complain.  And rightfully so, I suppose.
• E-mail the offending poster and ash him/her to post more normally.
• Ban the offender if the submissions get bad enough or if s/he doesn’t take the hint.
• Move the submission form off site.  The Carnival of Personal Finance did this, and the submissions still seem to be up.  The last time I hosted the spam was pretty moderate if not non-existent.  This might cause a hit in the number of submissions initially, but after a while the posting should get better.

Filed under: Managing, Hosting