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Online Moderation Guide
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GUIDELINES CLARIFICATION: On selecting a magazine for moderation, please look at the Correction Record to see if it is one which has already been partially corrected and moderated, and then re-released. If so, please look at the pages marked as having corrections 'To Do' first, and un-check those boxes if the problems have now been resolved. If these pages look correct, you may proceed to accept the magazine correction. However, if 'Assorted, on various pages' has been recorded, then please examine ALL pages subsequent to this as though the magazine were being submitted for the first time. If in doubt, don't hesitate to consult!

Page Index
Introduction

All our volunteer text correctors know that there can sometimes be a substantial time lag between submitting a magazine for approval, and receiving notification of the moderator's decision. This in itself can be frustrating! If some further amendments are then requested by the moderator, a further lapse of time ensues. All this while, the corrector is not enabled to start correcting a further magazine. The main reason for this is that our small in-house team (2-3 people) all have an additional range of duties in addition to moderation, and so we are not making sufficient headway with the volume of magazines waiting for approval—which is added to every day.

While at present, the Online Text Correction project is going very much to plan—at this rate we may well achieve the target of 100% completion by the time of Dickens's Bicentenary in February 2012—we would very much like our Text Correctors to enjoy a faster turnaround, and at the same time, offer experienced and skilled Correctors an additional way of contributing to the project. To this end, we've developed an Interface to allow you, as someone who has already had their Text Correction of at least one magazine approved, to moderate magazines corrected by other volunteers.

Advice is given at every step on how to do this. As you can imagine, there are some areas where judgements are quite fine. The balance between declining a magazine for one reason or another, or making a few key corrections oneself, and accepting it, is not always obvious. Some imperfections matter more than others! All this is made clear in the steps and notes to our new Online Moderation interface, which we hope you will enjoy using. We'd love to have your feedback on how you find it: please email This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it with your comments and ideas.

9-step plan for Online Moderation
  1. Log in with your usual username and password
  2. Hover over the 'Online Moderation' tab on the Homepage, and read the 'Getting Started' guide.  At the end of the Guide, is a note of your 'Moderator Status'. This will indicate if you are eligible to become a moderator. If you are, and would like to, please click on 'update' to update your status. Now proceed to 'Waiting for Approval' on the Online Moderation dropdown menu.
  3. On the resulting table of magazines awaiting approval, you will see the magazines are sorted chronologically by 'Days Waiting'. Please select the first that you see, and click on 'Correction Record,' as the Text Corrector of this magazine will have been waiting longest. You will be taken to the 'Correction Record' for that magazine.
  4. Under 'Options / For the moderator...' select MODERATE, and confirm your choice. (You may give up your moderation of this magazine at any time, by pressing 'Cancel' under the moderator options here.) You will now see a message that says: "Thank you! You can now moderate the magazine...."
  5. Scroll or jump down to 'Page Details' and proceed to open up each page in the 'Editor View' by clicking on 'Edit'. To the right of each page, is a checklist where you can indicate any changes/errors that you think need to be made or fixed. Fix any yourself that are easy and quick to do; otherwise mark them as 'To Do.' Each category of change/error has advice and criteria for the moderator, available by hovering over the blue information symbol. Exit and click on 'Read' to check that the text is correctly formatted. Click on the Flag icon to return to the magazine correction record. If the page needs further editing, click once more on 'Edit'. (N.B. Do not attempt to moderate the magazine via the Pencil icon on the page view).
  6. Having annotated the 24 pages, and consulted the moderation criteria as appropriateplease proceed to the 'Moderation Summary' page. This is on the 'Magazine Record' page, under 'Options / For the moderator...'
  7. Click on 'Accept' if you wish to accept the text correction. A summary of the changes you have fixed yourself will be attached to this notification as a 'PS' so that the corrector can learn from this if/when they volunteer to correct another magazine.
  8. OR Click on 'Decline' to decline. The corrector will be notified, in a polite e-mail that summarises the categories of change that are needed. They will be given a direct link to your page-by-page annotations in the Magazine Record, as well as an option to release the magazine for correction by another volunteer.
  9. You may now log out, or select another magazine to moderate (or correct).
Correction Categories

Here is the complete checklist of categories of correction, each of which individually we consider important enough as a criterion for deciding whether we accept the correction work on a magazine, or ask for some further modifications to be made (i.e. decline). The descriptions and items of advice are all available as pop-up notes on the new Online Moderation interface.

When more than one of these are in combination, across various pages, we would almost definitely decline to accept: mindful, of course, of the generosity and skill of the volunteer corrector in having navigated their way to the point of submitting a magazine for approval in the first place. As you will know from having completed one successfully yourself, they can be frustrating as well as fascinating! A concise version of this checklist will be available on each page of the magazine you will be asked to moderate, in such a form that you will simply have to check the relevant box or boxes in order to indicate to the corrector what to revise. Where we have tried to indicate the amount or frequency of uncorrected errors/procedures not followed that would result in correction work being declined on first submission, we hope that any lesser amount or frequency of errors would be more swiftly and simply removed by the moderator, i.e. you, in the course of moderating. So some of your decisions will naturally be shaded by the amount of time your are willing or able to dedicate to tidying up!

If you come across a problem that falls outwith these categories, please email us at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it with the magazine details and the nature of the problem and we will deal with this directly.