The SNO Report: Best Of SNO Is Back, With One Major Difference

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Alright, we’ve tortured you long enough. Best of SNO is back, baby!

But wait… There’s nowhere to submit my story! Ahh! Am I going crazy? Why are you doing this to me! WAS THAT A GHOST I JUST SAW!

Frankie says “relax.” Gone are the days when you had to fill out a submission form on the site to submit your article. Welcome to the future!

We’ve added a feature in the dashboard of your site that allows you to press a button that sends your article our way. Right there in the toolbar where you click “Stories,” “Breaking News” and more, you’ll click “Best of SNO” — that’s how you’ll get started.

This new feature is constantly sifting through all of your content, marking stories as eligible or ineligible for submission based on several factors, listed below (and listed on your site’s “Best of SNO” section under the “Submission Guidelines” tab).

  • Stories must be at least 300 words in length, with the exception of videos, which are eligible when that video’s embed code is pasted into the proper Video Embed Code field.
  • Stories must have a featured image.
  • That featured image must have a photo caption and photo credit.
  • Stories must have a byline with the writer’s first and last name.

All of the other ideological requirements, like the story being engaging, concise and relevant, standing out from the crowd — that kind of thing — remain the same.

Eligible stories will be listed under the “Eligible Stories” tab of the Best of SNO page in your dashboard and ineligible ones will be listed under, you guessed it, the “Ineligible Stories” tab. View your list of ineligible stories and there’ll be a note there explaining what’s making it ineligible.

Before you do any of that, please review the “Site Data” tab, which should be the first thing that shows up when you click “Best of SNO” in your toolbar. The site data lists important information for us like the adviser’s name and the school’s name. Verify that all of it is correct; if not, fix it.

Now, a few things about submitting…

  • Everyone can view the page to see if their story is eligible, but only site “administrator” accounts will have the ability to submit.
  • Only three submissions are permitted per day, per site. We read all submissions, so cut us some slack on this one.
  • When you hit “Submit” on an eligible story, it goes to the “Submitted Stories” tab and also is added to our master list for review.

At that point, it’s all out of your hands, but you can see the status of each submission (it’s either Pending, Accepted or Rejected) in that “Submitted Stories” section. You can also retract a submission if you change your mind about it.

Your overall progress toward the Excellence in Writing badge is tracked in the middle of the page. There, you’ll see how many stories you’ve submitted this year, how many are being reviewed, how many were published, and how many you’ve submitted (out of three) that day. You still need three stories published on Best of SNO to earn the badge.

OK. You’ve heard enough from us. Now show us what you’ve got!