This page is documentation for moderators and partner organizations of Between the Bars. It describes the various processes involved in logging, scanning, uploading, processing and publishing blog posts from paper mail. (For optimal quality, change the resolution on the videos below to 480p or higher!)
Interested in becoming a moderator? Find out more.
Please send any questions or suggestions for improvements to this documentation to partners@lists.betweenthebars.org.
This video describes the process of logging incoming mail, and adding new users. This is the stuff you do when new letters comes to your mailbox.
Every scanner is likely to be different, which is why we have no video for this section. But the main idea is: you use whatever scanner you have to produce PDF files of the letters or artwork you are uploading to Between the Bars.
Some principles to remember:
- Scan the whole letter, including the envelope. Envelopes have useful information to keep around such as postmark dates and return addresses.
- One whole letter per PDF file (this could be multiple documents, but should be from only one person).
- After scanning, return any material that the author asks to have back. They ought to have included a return envelope; but if not, send it back to them anyway.
- If we don’t yet have a license agreement from someone, return the materials after scanning their introductory letter. If they later ask us to publish the material we can, but we don’t offer to. Give them the opportunity to revise their letter after having read more about who we are and what we’re doing.
This short video describes the simple process of uploading PDF files (scans of whole letters) and zip files with many PDFs (from many letters).
This series of videos explain how to split, process, edit, and publish contents of a scanned letter.
See instructions for individual parts: (Post 1, Requests and Controls, Profiles and Licenses, Post 2)
Or all at once:
Need to change an address, look something up, write a letter, or otherwise look at anything pertaining to a particular individual? Do that all on the “Mange users” page.
Batch-downloading and printing of letters, envelopes, and postcards.
Communicate with other moderators and your future self with sticky notes.
Reply IDs are a mechanism for letting people respond to the comments that have been left on their blog, without forcing moderators to research what it’s in reply to.
To manage the organization (including adding or removing members and moderators, changing the description, name and byline), hover over the user menu in the top right again, and select “Admin”. You’ll see a set of editable content types. Click on “Organizations”, and then chose your organization. Fields you can edit are:
- Name:
Whatever you like. :)
- Personal contact:
this is the default name that goes at the bottom of form letters. It should be either a person’s name, or something like “My Org Name Staff”.
- Slug:
This is the short name that goes into URLs for the org, e.g. http://betweenthebars.org/blogs/my-org-name/
Think carefully about changing this; it’ll break inbound links.
- Public:
This means the organization will be listed on the people page. If it’s unchecked, all of your users would just be listed under “Between the Bars” (but you’ll still be managing them), and there would be no organization-specific pages.
- Mailing address:
Should be your organization’s address.
- About:
This is HTML that will go on the “about your organization” page.
- Footer:
This is HTML that will go at the top and bottom of each post by a member in your organization – something generic like “This author is writing for My Org name. Buy prints at <a>...</a>”
- Members:
Don’t bother with this – it should be handled in the moderation site.
- Moderators:
If you add a new volunteer as a moderator, you’ll need to assign them that role here.
To add a new moderator, first create a user account for them. The easiest thing to do would be for that person to create their own account on the site first – just click “Sign in or Join” at the top right.
Once the user is created, two things need to be done in the admin site (click “Admin” from the user menu of a staff user in the top right):
- Make them a moderator in general. Go to “Auth -> Users -> their user account”, and scroll to the bottom. In the field labeled “Groups”, select both “readers” and “moderators” (control/command -click to multi-select). Hit ‘Save’.
- Make them a moderator of your org. Go to “Profiles -> Organizations -> your org”, and scroll to the bottom. In the field labeled “Moderators”, find their name in the list on the left, and select it. Hit the right arrow in between, and it’ll join the list of “Chosen moderators” on the right.
If you want to remove a moderator from your organization, do the reverse of the previous two steps – deselect “moderators” from their User account page, and remove them from the list of “Chosen moderators” for your organization.
A few brave moderators who have elected to be spam patrollers receive an email every time a comment, transcription, or visitor profile is uploaded. If spam is ever posted, it’s their job to remove it.
Each activity report email includes a link to delete the user account. Click that! You will be directed to a confirmation page that lists all the content associated with that user that will be deleted when their account is deleted. If everything is spam, delete away!
If a user asks that their blog be taken offline, or if for some reason its necessary for us to enforce against violations of our guidelines or terms of service, uncheck the “Active” box on their user management page. Go to “Manage users”, search for the user, and after pulling up their page, uncheck “Active”.
This will have the effect of making all of their content disappear from the site, though it will still be in the database where we can make it active again in the future. If someone requests to have their account and data completely destroyed, it is necessary to delete the user account. To do this, log in as an administrator, find the user in the Django admin site, and delete them. This will remove all associated content in addition to the user account.
(Note that users who have access to the Internet can delete their own accounts from their user profile page.)
If someone is released and wants to continue blogging from the web, we support that!
Go to the “Mange users” page for that user, and uncheck “Managed” in their profile. Be sure that they have an email address set – they’ll need it to retrieve their password. Next, direct them to use the “forgot password” function from the sign in page, which will send them an email which lets them set a new password.
Finally, after getting a new password, they can post from the web, like so.