If there are no rules for what can be submitted to your blog carnival, then just about anything will be submitted!  The overall quality of posts submitted to the Carnival of Debt Reduction had been going downhill a touch.  Lots of automatic carnival submission was happening through BlogCarnival.com, and I decided to cut the cord over there.  That reduced the volume quite a bit, and the folks that were submitting on-topic articles already knew about the blog carnival submission form on my site.

I decided to take things a step further and make it very clear what was to be expected of people submitting to the carnival.  I drafted a set of blog carnival rules and added a check box on the submission form that indicated that they accepted the rules.  The rules could be used as screens by the hosts.  Don’t follow the rules, and it’s an easy rejection.  It makes the host’s job much easier, which is a good thing for a carnival manager.

What I regret it that I didn’t do this a long time ago.  My aunt, who was a health teacher, always said that it’s far easier to be strict at the beginning than it is to get stricter later.  The Best of Money Carnival started things off on the right foot with very clear rules.  Hosting that carnival was a breeze, and I hope that hosts of my carnival find it just as easy.

• Carnival of Personal Finance cutting the BlogCarnival.com cord? Last week when I tried to submit my article to the Carnival of Personal Finance over at BlogCarnival.com, I found out that this carnival was "inactive." At one point the carnival I manage, the Carnival of Debt Reduction, was in danger of becoming inactive over there because I hadn't updated......
• Does it pay to be clever as a host? Putting together a carnival can take anywhere from about five minutes to many, many hours.The five minute version takes advantage of the "InstaCarnival" feature on BlogCarnival.com. The InstaCarnival is a post that has a number of lines with the format:Blogger presents blog post, posted at blog, saying "comment"for each post......
• An unfortunate reality of hosting a blog carnival The larger benefit goes to the people who submit to the carnivals rather than to the people who put forth all of the effort to host them. A number of bloggers I respect have figured this out already, and they're fairly reluctant to host a carnival anymore. They understand the......
• Dealing with spammy submissions 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......

• Carnival! Carnival! Just like Pizza! Pizza! but without the cheese, sauce, and crust. Here are this week's debt reduction posts: Out of Debt Again updates their Discover Card debt reduction progress. Studenomics debates good and bad debt. Ask Mr. Credit Card hits on a tough issue: debt negotiation, or bankruptcy? Miss Bankrupt......
• Get Money Online This is really great, just visit anyone can make money online Working from home. It's the dream of abounding humans today and the internet absolutely makes it added accessible than anytime before. With avant-garde day technology there are so abounding altered means that you can accomplish money from home. If......
• Digerati Life has posted the carnival! Silicon Valley Blogger at The Digerati Life has posted this week's Carnival of Debt Reduction in a cool question-and-answer format!The personal debt reduction stories and first-hand experience with debt reduction are the main types of posts that I had in mind when I started the carnival, so among the great......
• Why Do You Go to Work? One of my favorite movies about work is the DVD classic, Office Space. The movie basically pokes fun at everything "corporate," from cubicles to consultants. In one scene the main character, Peter, is lamenting to friends about his plight as an office worker: Human beings were not meant to sit......