Dealing with spammy submissions
Hosting, Managing February 3rd, 2008
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.
Do due diligence with hosts
Managing December 30th, 2007
Getting hosts for your carnival can be tough. It takes organization to keep things moving, and sometimes the hosting schedule gets tight.
It’s tempting to jump at the first person who offers. That’s fine but be sure to do some due diligence.
Meaning check out their blog. Is it a place that you’d want to have the carnival posted at? Is the blog ready for the carnival (assuming it’s a popular carnival)?
I didn’t check out someone’s blog for the carnival that I manage. There were some questionable advertisements (almost not safe for work) in the sidebar, but I had already asked the person to host. I had to apologize to the person I asked to host and eat a lot of crow. If I hadn’t, I might get someone fired who checked the carnival at work on break, which wouldn’t be good at all.
Word to the wise: Don’t do what I did, and check your hosts’ blogs out before extending the invitation to host.
Communicate with your hosts
Managing November 27th, 2007
If you’re managing a carnival then you know how important your hosts are. They can make managing the carnival a piece of cake. And if they volunteer to host, they likely know what it entails and will put together a good carnival for you, the carnival readers, and for the submitters.
Once in a while, though, life gets in the way, someone forgets, someone gets kicked down by a really bad cold, someone dies, etc. The carnival may (rightfully) take a back seat for the moment while things get sorted out. A week ago the host for the Carnival of Debt Reduction got really ill and didn’t post. I finally saw her online and asked where the carnival was. She told me that she was sick, and I stepped in and did the carnival for her.
Now, I was pretty sure something was wrong because this particular host was on top of things in previous editions of the carnival. Even though I had to approach her as to why the carnival wasn’t posted, the day of the carnival was the first time that I actually tried to remind her. This was a mistake. I should have checked before then. Here are a few tips to keep on top of your carnival hosts (in an unobtrusive way):
- A few days before the carnival, check the e-mail account where the submissions go. If it’s a Gmail account, then if the host has read them, they’ll be marked read unless the host (a) hasn’t read them yet or (b) deliberately marked them unread again. It’s a positive indicator if they’re marked read, but inconclusive if they’re not marked read.
- Email the host to remind them of the carnival and ask for a response. It’s important to ask them for a response to make sure it’s still in the cards for them to host. I’ve found most hosts will respond if you ask them to.
- If the carnival isn’t posted on time, politely look for an answer. It’s common sense to me not to dump on your hosts, but it’s always better to assume something’s wrong than to accuse.
- Pinch hit if necessary. It may be that you end up dressing up an InstaCarnival just to get the carnival edition out the door. If this is the case, then definitely be sure to e-mail all of the participants so that they know where the carnival is, because they’ll be expecting it somewhere else. I found it was helpful to explain why the carnival moved at the last minute, and folks had sympathy for the sick host.
It’s definitely better to communicate more with your hosts.
How effective is this carnival for anyone?
Commentary, For New Carnivals, Hosting October 20th, 2007
I was catching up with the blogs in my reader and ran across this Carnival of Future Millionaires in my reader. It was posted this week, and honestly I had forgotten that I had. (I did not receive an e-mail from the host asking me to link back to the carnival.)
Some things to note about this particular carnival:
This seems to be an example of “you get out what you put into it.” Getting the carnival ready to go probably took all of ten minutes, if that: Log into BlogCarnival (or open up the e-mail with the link to the InstaCarnival), find it, CTRL-A, log into Blogger, New Post, CTRL-C, Publish, done. But, it looks like the blogger spent all of ten minutes on it, too.
This edition of the carnival is really of minimal use to anyone involved. It’s not really useful to the host, because no one has even commented on it. It’s not useful to the people who submitted because their links are buried amongst nearly 300 others, many of which look like some authors submitted everything they ever wrote to that carnival. And it’s non really useful to the readers because it’s not at all engaging.
I have said before that InstaCarnivals do serve a purpose and that they can bring lots of traffic for little work. I might amend that a little by saying that InstaCarnivals can bring a lot of traffic if they’re already popular. The carnival in question here is a new carnival, so it doesn’t have its audience built up. Unfortunately, InstaCarnivals are not the way to build up a lot of traffic.
I hope How to Make a Million Dollars (the only host of this carnival so far) dresses up the next one a little bit.