One among our guiding principles as a publication is that authors’ work stays theirs. This hasn’t modified since launching our independent site earlier this 12 months; quite the other. On a practical level, nevertheless, we knew that a very important element was missing so long as authors couldn’t directly edit their articles, and members of our community mentioned this again and again as vital feature.
We’re thrilled to share that due to the labor of several team members and partners, authors now have editing access to all their previously published work on TDS — including each articles that we’d brought over to our site ahead of its launch and people we accepted on to our recent platform.
Great power, great responsibility
Our relationship with our contributors relies on trust. We invest an incredible deal of effort and time in our initial screening and review process, and because of this, we’ve grown right into a publication with tons of of writers whose skilled expertise matches their integrity.
The flexibility to edit published articles is one which we ask you to make use of judiciously. Fixing a typo we hadn’t caught, tweaking a chart based on reader feedback, and adding a link to a relevant recent resource are all examples of post-publication changes we consider reasonable. We also know that the formatting in a few of our older articles got a bit wonky during their migration to our recent site; addressing these issues is perfectly advantageous, too.
What we ask authors to avoid is making any substantive changes to published stories without first initiating a conversation with our team, which you’ll do via email or directly from inside your article. Should you ever sense that an article you’ve published with us warrants a more thorough revision, we’d be comfortable to work with you on finding the very best path forward.
How editing works
Whether or not you’ve already published with us on our recent platform, making tweaks to your published articles is as straightforward as could be. Just head over to your list of articles (note: this link requires you to be logged in to the TDS Contributor Portal), hover over the article you’d wish to work on, and either click on the title or on the Edit button.
When you’re done, consider previewing your changes as they are going to appear on our site’s front end — search for the laptop symbol near the top-right corner of the editor screen, and click on on Preview in recent tab. This is particularly necessary in the event you made any tweaks to a visible element in your article.
If every part looks good to go in your end, remember to click on the Save button to take your edits live. This also notifies our team about changes to a broadcast article, and provides us a likelihood to double-check that every part is so as.
We hope all articles we’ve published on TDS stay here, but we recognize that sometimes authors want to remove their work from our site. Up until now, you’ve needed to contact us to ask our team to delete articles in your behalf; with this update, you possibly can now do it without our intervention—in your article list, search for the Mark as Deleted button under the relevant title. (Be happy to succeed in out to us before deleting articles — in lots of cases, we are able to address the problems that prompted you to take this decision in the primary place.)
Onwards and upwards!
With this recent feature, we’ve made it through much of the long list of key improvements we desired to offer authors on TDS. For all of you who’ve asked about editing access since our site’s launch, thanks in your patience! We hope to publish more of your work within the near future, especially now that our Creator Payment Program has been running successfully for several months. And in the event you’re not yet a TDS creator but would really like to affix our community, we’d like to see your work, too.
