How To Fix a Submission Oopsie?

Reader contributions are what make Slashdot Slashdot. We've posted more than 125,000 news items over the years, and the vast majority of them started out as reader suggestions. Someone read (or wrote!) a cool story, or witnessed an interesting event, or was stumped by a technical or ethical question, and thought it was worth sharing with the rest of the world.

(Submitting a story to Slashdot should be fairly painless. Hit the submission guidelines, and then the submission form to stack an item on the pile for consideration.)

But sometimes we (the editors) goof by either overlooking or introducing errors, and sometimes we (the all-inclusive "we" of humanity) goof. If you find that you've submitted a story but left out a vital link, or got hijacked by a cut-and-paste demon, or hit "Save" when you meant to his "Keep Editing," here's the best way to fix it:

• Resubmit, using the same submissions form :) Except in unusual circumstances, that's far easier for us to deal with that attempting to fix things by email, over the phone, or in the smoke signals. Versioning is the work of the devil, especially when it means mixing streams of communication.
• Point out that it's a resubmission, and briefly explain why. ("I'm resubmitting to fix some bitrot; site changed its addressing scheme right after I read this article," say, or "I didn't realize that Finnish keyboards put the 'Enter' button inside the space bar," etc.)
• If you've still got a link to the previous submission (the one you're updating), we'd appreciate it if you could include it (it's something like "https://slashdot.org/submission/$number-here/your-previous-articles-title"). That makes it easy to compare the new one to the old and understand why you've resubmitted. Any given editor might have not realize that you'd submitted a different version previously, especially if you submitted it anonymously.

That's it!

Note: We must decline far more of the submissions that come in to Slashdot than we run; that's the nature of the beast. So we can't guarantee in advance that any particular submission will run on the page, but we definitely give re-submits a close eye.

For a bigger-picture view of the submissions process, see our previous blog entry, too.

As always, we try to answer reader questions (whether personally, or by incorporating design changes, or by explaining in ways like this blog) that are sent to feedback at Slashdot dot org; pop us a note if you've got a question, suggestion, or complaint.