FidoNews FidoNews Article Submission Guidelines Article Submission Guidelines Last Updated 21 February 1986 FidoNews is the user group newsletter of the users of the FidoNet(tm) remote bulletin board network. As of this writing it has an estimated readership of seventy thousand people nationwide. In keeping with the nature of FidoNet(tm), FidoNews is an electronic newsletter which is passed from node to node over the network. All of the articles which appear in FidoNews are written by users of FidoNet(tm). FidoNews is very much an electronic newsletter by, of, and for Fido users and sysops. This document describes the technical aspects of submitting an article to FidoNews. FidoNews Submission Guidlines Page 1 _________________________ INTRODUCTION AND OVERVIEW FidoNews is assembled as a scheduled event at FidoNet(tm) node 1/1. Every Monday morning a special utility called MAKENEWS is run, which puts together the various articles which have been received and generates the latest issue. The ROBOT utility is then run to place release messages into the network mail area, so that the finished newsletter will be automatically mailed out during the Monday morning national mail slot. The intended purpose of this procedure is to ensure that FidoNews is assembled and released on time, even if node 1/1 is unattended on Sunday night. In practice, the primary purpose of the MAKENEWS utility is to scan the articles which have been submitted for any technical disqualifica- tions. If MAKENEWS finds an article which does not meet its technical specs, then a message is logged and that article is not included in the newsletter. At this point the article must be modified by hand until it passes the technical requirements. Since this is dependant on the availability of human resources, then an article which fails to meet the specs may be delayed indefinitely, or even cancelled entirely. Much of this document is intended to describe the technical specifica- tions which an article must meet in order to be included in the news- letter. FidoNews Submission Guidlines Page 2 _____________________ SUBMITTING AN ARTICLE The first step, of course, is to create a file which contains the text of your article. You should then send the file via FidoNet(tm) mail to node 1/1. Filename extensions are used to distinguish types of submissions, as follows: .ART An article, commentary, open letter, or general news item. .SAL A "For Sale" advertisement. .WAN A "Wanted" advertisement. .COL A column, or other regular feature. .NOT A notice for the back of the issue. If your file doesn't have one of the above extensions, then it will lay around taking up disk space until some human takes a look at it and realizes what it is. The name of the file is up to you, though you should use a name which is not likely to be "stepped on" by someone else. For example, FNEWS.ART is probably not a good name for an article. If you are writing a regular feature, such as a column or a series of articles, you can put a number at the end of the name, and submit several in a batch. For example, you could send in a set of five files, named: MYWORD1.COL MYWORD2.COL MYWORD3.COL MYWORD4.COL MYWORD5.COL These would be used one at a time in sequence. MYWORD1.COL would be printed the first week, MYWORD2.COL the second, and so on. FidoNews Submission Guidlines Page 3 ________________________ TECHNICAL SPECIFICATIONS This section describes the technical requirements which an article must pass before the MAKENEWS utility will include it in FidoNews. If your file does not meet these criteria, then, again, it will languish on the disk until some human steps in and fixes it. These constraints are for purely practical reasons. There are roughly a million different word processors out there, all with their own different formats. We simply do not have the time to convert them all to the format we use. 1. FLUSH LEFT MARGIN: The finished FidoNews is indented five columns. We do that here. If your submission is also indented, then your indent will be added to ours. So please set your left margin all the way at the edge of the screen. 2. RIGHT MARGIN AT COLUMN 65 OR LESS: Less is tolerable, more is definitely not. 3. NO FUNNY CHARACTERS: This includes formfeeds, returns without linefeeds, linefeeds without returns, and other oddities. 4. NO GRAPHICS CHARACTERS: Believe it or not, not everyone in the world has an IBM PC. Please restrict yourself to printable ASCII characters in the range 20 hex to 7E hex (space to tilde). However, if you are using PC-Write to create your file, then feel free to use the "hard space", "hard hyphen", and "soft hyphen" characters. MAKENEWS understands them, and will handle them properly. 5. TOTAL ARTICLE LENGTH: Well, there IS an upper limit, but I'm not going to say what it is, because: a) it's pretty big, b) it changes from time to time, and c) we override it now and then, as the circumstances merit. Advertisements and notices are an exception. Since we don't charge for ads, we feel justified in limiting them. The maximum length of an advertisement is rather small (never more than one page). 6. WHERE IS THIS ARTICLE FROM: A good question! You can submit an article anonymously if you want to, but most folks start out by stating their name and node number. If you want your article to be listed in the table of contents, then you should start it with a "content line". This is just a normal line, except that it is the FIRST line of your file, and it begins with an asterisk ("*"). Here's an example of a content line: * My Word! FidoNews Submission Guidlines Page 4 _______ EXAMPLE Here's a sample of what a typical submission might look like: * A Sample Article Thom Henderson Fido 1/1 This Is My Title And here is my article. Note that it is flush left (zero indent). Also note that the right margin is at column sixty five, so that the result will look good when the formatter sets it up. I also started the file with a content line, so my article will be listed in the table of contents. Figure 1. Table 1. +-------+ ======== | A Box | Alfa +-------+ Bravo Note that I am not using any funny characters. This ensures that the final article will look the same to every user, no matter what sort of hardware he has. This is the last sentence of my article. And that's all there is to it! You should be able to get a file like this out of any word processor. FidoNews Submission Guidlines Page 5 _________________ FORMATTING ADVICE There are certain things you should do to improve the general appearance of your article when it is published. After all, seventy thousand of your fellow users will be looking at it. You want it to look good, don't you? You may have noticed that FidoNews articles are separated by dashed lines. These are inserted by MAKENEWS, so you shouldn't add them yourself. If you put a dashed line at the top and/or bottom of your article, then it will appear right next to the dashed line MAKENEWS inserts. Since your line is almost certain to be a different length, then the result will not look very good. You should also put a blank line between paragraphs. This sets them off better than just indenting the first line, and makes you article easier to read. You should not, however, put a lot of blank space at the top or bottom of your article. MAKENEWS works hard to make sure that the articles are well separated to the eye, so any space you add at the ends will just waste paper when someone prints out the news. If you want to put in a table or a figure, go right ahead. MAKENEWS does not rearrange text, so your table or figure will remain exactly as you entered it. If you want to justify the right margin, please feel free. You may also leave it ragged if you wish. An even right margin looks neater, while a ragged margin makes for text that is easier to read. A friend of mine once told me that an even right margin is really just a gimmick, since typesetters don't really do it that way, but you decide for yourself. ____________ OTHER ADVICE The biggest thing I see, the thing that irks me most, is when someone submits an article that is full of basic errors in spelling, grammar, and/or punctuation. Please remember, seventy thousand people will be reading what you write. Please, for your own sake, use a dictionary when you're not sure how a word is spelled. Or, if you're not good at grammar, get a friend to help you write your article. We ain't the Literary Digest here, and our standards are pretty (very) lax. If you're willing to write it, we'll put it in. It's just that it's in your own best interest to come off looking good. _________________ EDITORIAL CONTENT I suppose I should say something about article content. Basically, it's up to you. As we've stated many times, FidoNews isn't ours, it's yours. We will publish ANYTHING. Most articles tend to be related in some way to personal computing, but that is by no means a requirement on our part. FidoNews Submission Guidlines Page 6 _____________________________ WHEN WILL YOUR ARTICLE APPEAR A good question indeed, and almost impossible to answer. If FidoNews is running unattended (as it sometimes does in the summer), then all received articles that meet the above criteria will probably be published in the third issue after they are received. The reason for the delay is to allow us some time to "play" with each issue before it goes out. You see, while things are set up to get the news out even when node 1/1 is unattended, we still usually go over everything by hand. Fitting together a newsletter is in some respects like assembling a jigsaw puzzle. Some parts have to go right away, while others can wait a bit. Some articles are longer than others. And articles seem to arrive here in "spurts". We might get two articles one week, and then twenty the next. We generally try to keep the issues more-or-less the same size, so you don't get a fifty page newsletter one week, and a two page newsletter the next. So sometimes we'll push an article up, and publish it right away. More often we'll hold it back for a short while. As a general rule, we usually have some idea of how the next three newsletters are shaping up, so we usually juggle things around a bit to try and even things out. _________ YOUR TURN I've typed enough for one night. Now it's YOUR turn to sit down and write that article you're thinking about! Best wishes, and good luck! FidoNews Submission Guidlines Page 7