Post material

Once you have familiarized yourself with the project, joined a group, and done your homework, post your material as follows:

• Write up a solid draft of your proposed submission, post it to the relevant sub-forum. Give it a title and specify here that this is the 1st draft.
  
  
  • Currently the entry needs to be in English. We accept U.S, British, Canadian and Australian spelling. If you have trouble with English and really want to submit material, post a question to the membership looking for others that may also speak your native language. This way they may be able to aid you in the construction of a submission.


• Wait at least 2 or 3 days, a week is better, to receive any suggestions, objections or criticisms.


• Be prepared to back up any scientific or technical concepts with at least one good reference. Posting wild speculation, technobabble and pseudoscience is disrespectful of the membership and their time.


• PLEASE DO NOT TAKE COMMENTS AS AN ATTACK ON YOU. Our goal is to ensure a good fit for the material within the setting. If you truly feel you have been unjustly treated, and the problem has not been dealt with on-list, please feel free to contact an administrator. Potentially, an issue may actually be with a moderator or senior member. In this case please contact the Executive Moderator (currently Rynn) or any other administrator you feel comfortable with. Everyone is expected to behave according to the rules laid out in the Netiquette page, and we want to ensure everyone is treated fairly. We do ask you to remember that we have hundreds of members, and not everyone will see eye-to-eye on every point.


• We expect you to defend your idea. If you did not think it was a good one, you would not have submitted it in the first place.
  
  
  
  • There are a number of acceptable ways for arguing for the incorporation of an idea into the OA project if it is questioned.
    
    
    
    • Referencing generally accepted scientific or engineering publications (peer-reviewed or popular), serious websites, or other materials. Online references, including links, are particularly welcome.
    
    
    • In the case of ideas of a societal/psychological nature, arguing a plausible chain of historical events, based at least loosely from a starting point in the present day that might lead to the conditions you propose.
  
  
  • The following are unacceptable defenses and will result in your submission being ignored (i.e it will never become part of the setting):
    
    
    • The idea is simply "neat" or "cool".
    
    
    • If you just keep talking about/presenting the idea and ignoring criticism thinking we'll just give in and incorporate it
    
    
    • You really, really believe strongly that it should be the way you say.
    
    
• Once you have had plenty of feedback, rework your draft, accounting for suggestions and criticisms. Post this in a new thread with the same title but label it "2nd draft". In your first post include a link to the 1st draft thread and likewise post a link to the 2nd draft at the end of the 1st. If you're not sure how to do this in the forum, don't be afraid to ask for help, either from an administrator or the group in general. We've all been there and no one will laugh at you


• Repeat these steps until the consensus is that the submission is ready.


• Post a final draft in the Ready to Edit subforum. From there it will be batch uploaded to the site with other completed submissions, usually one batch per month.


• You can keep track of what material has been added using the Latest Updates page on the website.

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