..than 90 seconds. All of us peons on the outside are wondering how the system on the inside works. Again, I know that they get a lot of submissions, and even the good ones get rejected, but I'm being to think that only something that gets submitted at least five times (or some X number) will get accepted.

Of course, the first four, which may be high-calibre entries with good links and a well-written review of the article, are rejected, while the fifth, which may be totally junked with spelling errors and bad links, is accepted, because it's the fifth one. At least they should just admit that the system work this way, and build the code around it. Tell you that they are waiting for other entries with the same article, and pick the best one to be shipped out on the main page.

Otherwise, it's like "Hey, guess what? You're the fifth caller! You win the prize of any trashy Slashdot article you want!"

And again, I still want a reason why it's rejected. I seriously doubt the person had time to:

Find a message in his e-mail: 30 sec
Read the submission: 15 secs
Click the link and load the page: 5 sec
Read/skim the article: 1-5 mins
Go back and reject the submission: 5 sec

All that in 90 seconds. It's more like:

Find a message in his e-mail: 80 sec
Read the submission: 5 sec
Reject the submission: 5 sec

It seems like that with 100's of rejections a day for articles, I can understand if I don't get any articles submitted to Slashdot. But, when I have a good article rejected (like this one), and nobody else gets it up on Slashdot, I feel like the editors just aren't doing their job.

That article was newsworthy, especially for the Slashdot crowd. It pissed me off that somebody was jailed for installing a Distributed.net client on a computer, but it also pissed me off that millions of Slashdotters won't be able to see the article because the damn editors rejected a good article.

True, I mostly submit articles from The Register, but that hasn't stopped other people from getting THEIR articles from The Register submitted. It's not that The Register is blacklisted from Slashdot, just because it's another popular tech news site. There's a lot of good tech news sites, and I usually only check Slashdot and The Register. I don't have time to check them all, just like a lot of people don't have time to check The Register.

I think there should be a way to show a canned reason for rejections. This would, at the very least, tell you what's wrong with the submission, so that you can correct your mistakes on future ones. However, I think the programmers are afraid to put such a feature in because most are rejected for no reason at all, or because a story was already submitted in the last hour.

I remember a time when Slashdot wasn't all about PDA reviews, reviews on books we don't have time to read, and other useless pieces of information. Not to say that Slashdot doesn't have a lot of good content, but it's not as much as it used to be, and the way rejections are handled is part of the reason.

Comment on this piece and/or link this entry on your sig, if you argee with me.