“Queuing” is two things.
- It’s how an already-published article/diary/story starts to get republished (reblogged) by/at a group. (But the easiest way is to just do all the steps at onc time, so those easy teps are here.)
- It’s also how diarists line up their unpublished drafts for publication at their group simultaneously as at their own page. Think of yourself as a little publisher, the group as a bigger one, the site the biggest of all.
This tutorial diary focuses on how to do that because that’s where your built-in readership is! When you use the queue to schedule date and time for a draft you’ve written for a group series, it’s when the series readers “meet” and comment together, so they’re looking for you! Which is great for the numbers of early recs and comments that can catch the eye of yet MORE readers at the All Stories or Community (that's us) Stories pages or the Front Page!
And publishing via a group queue stops DK publishing machinery from imposing wait times between diaries if you need to publish two (or more) quick in a row on the topics of specific interest to the group. Queuing also makes possible for getting help with your draft from an editor or admin. In fact, you need to be one or the other to be able to complete the group-epublishing process on your own or help a contributor level member with it. So, if you are at contrib level, please find an ed or admin to help and mentor you, hopefully an admin to promote you to editor role once your reliability is known! Meanwhile, feel free to read on if you want to learn how this part of their job is done.
NOTE: See also:
<big>► official site document Groups: How to queue, publish, or republish a story ► Cranky Users: Group Publishing (2015) by belinda ridgewood for origins of today’s instructions from before DK5/Nov 2016, and the comprehensive ► New Diarists tutorial for formatting drafts, adding tags, publishing options, and editing (2016) by nomandates, her tutorial) and ► New Diarists: How to get feedback on your draft from us (2016) also by nomandates — belinda says that below the fold at that diary, “steps 4 & 5 and figures 2 & 3, while directed toward queuing to New Diarists, are pretty good!” Also: Finding Your Queue (2018) by peregrine kate, And tag pages: ■ tutorials ■ tutorial ■ dk5How-To ■ and of course the tag-page for HowToQueue.</big>
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Onward to this post’s instructions below!
<big>Prep-step for when you’re ready to queue for the first time: </big> Keep this diary readable in a separate browser tab, so you can refer to it step by step, and not have to memorize, until you get the knack.</big>
To start with, did you know that your story/diary/article DRAFT “lives” in your drafts folder ‘til it’s published?
After that, it “lives” at your homepage but it also SHOWS everywhere else it’s been published to. There actually is only one “copy” of any diary, the rest are just places to see it from. (Which is why, if you re-edit it, your changes will show everyplace the diary is visible without you having to do it in all those places. Good thing, huh?) Including group queue pages!
To queue a draft so it will be published at the given group at the same time as at your own page, you need to have at least begun writing it — you can go on polishing it up later in yr drafts folder; it’ll still be there — and there has be be at least one tag on it — the group name or series name is usually good to start with — otherwise the system will NOT let you publish it or queue it either. (Go down to the foot of the diary for a section about tags if you need that info.)
Your draft will look like one of the two illustrations below (hopefully with headline/title, and some text and images already in). The lower image is what most people have, but if you work zoomed in, you might have the upper image. If so, see the 3-line menu button in the top right corner? That’s for clicking to get the big, honking orange&black toolbox to loom in at the right side of your screen, and to make it slide away again when you don’t need it….
...but for now you DO need it, so here it is.
<big><big>[Step 1.]</big></big> Click on SAVE DRAFT up in the top orange section of the toolbox. (Do this often when working with drafts: better-safe-than-sorry! ;-)
<big>[Step 2.]</big> Click on the white-print-against-grey-background <big><big>Add a publish group</big></big> bar/button (red-arrowed in the illo below, at left) to get the toolbox to display a list of all the groups in which you’re a member, in gray print against black (center image).
<big>[Step 3.]</big> From that list, choose the group whose queue you want your draft to go in. (And I’ll suggest just this one time more, click on SAVE DRAFT again. Do that a lot.)
<big>[Step 4.]</big> That group will now be displayed in WHITE-ON-BLACK below the Add a publish group button (righthand image above), Click on the white-on-black group name, and you’ll get a parallel browser tab opening which will display that group’s queue page. Which looks a lot like this <big><big>↴</big></big>
<big>[Step 5.]</big> Find your draft, being excruciatingly careful not to touch anything at anyone else’s drafts or diaries listed on the queue page, only your own!
You may notice that in the SCHEDULE column at yours are the words “Schedule Later” (blue scribble box in the below illustration) but for other diaries that column shows an actual date and time displayed (green scribble box). So, click on the words Schedule Later at your draft.
<big>[Step 6.]</big> Now you’ve got the below interactive windowbox. If your date isn’t in the current month, click the right-arrow at the top-right corner of the calendar to get the month you need, and click on the correct date there to make it show in the DATE bar. Then put your cursor in the TIME bar and type the proper time of day in.
It’ll show for your own time zone but means whatever time that is everywhere else, as well, e.g., I type in leftkost publishing time because I’m in California, but to east-kost groupmembers looking in the queue, the time shown will be 3 hours later. And so on depending on where who is.
<big>[Step 7.]</big> Hit the orange SCHEDULE button/bar at the lower right corner of the windowbox. It will vanish, and the queue page will now display the date and time you’ve just set for the draft to be published automatically, just like in the green scribble box below.
Above is a group queue showing automatic scheduling set for 7a.m. leftkost time — PDT or PST — which means it will post at 10a.m. eastkost. And et cetera all the other time zones where kosaks are.
In the queue-note space, the author asks for help in case the scheduling was done RONG. Besides the author, skilled editors and admins can click on a rong data/time display in order to get the SCHEDULE THIS DIARY box to reappear so they can correct things. But you can’t count on anyone monitoring the queue for errors like that — best to get it right the first time yourself.
<big>CAUTION: If you Q to a group:
[A] DO NOT set scheduling in the big honking black&orange toolbox in yr draft because that can block publication at the group until someone schleps over to the queue to fix it, and usually, no one realizes what happened until way too late.
[B] Likewise, DO NOT hit the PUBLISH bar in your diary’s black&orange toolbox even if you want to publish manually ahead of schedule,
Instead, for both [A] & [B], click on the group’s name in white print below Add a publish group to reach the queue,-where you can hit PUBLISH NOW if you really must publish early, or you can click on the existing scheduling to change it.
[C] If you queue to multiple groups, set schedule in each queue 5 mins apart — to prevent technical conflicts — starting with the group whose diary series it is.
[D] Don’t use the “Queue (notes)” link in the toolbox. Long story short, just go to the queue and do queue notes there.
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<big>If the above instructions don’t work for you,</big> you can ask at the HelpDesk, or kosmail to the author of this diary.
Most practical probably would be to ask experienced admins or editors in your actual group. Just be sure to kosmail to each such person individually, because only that will put a new message alert at the envelope icon of their blogviews. Messages-to-group don’t.
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<tt>POSTSCRIPT ABOUT TAGS</tt>
The ADD A TAG bar/field is at the foot of your draft. Type your tags in where the tag symbol is and the words “Add a tag”, then hit enter/return The below illustration shows the tags for the group Back Yard Science and their series, Daily Bucket.
In DK, tags are less ephemeral than out in twitterverse etc. Besides group names and series names, many of ours are also long-term topics (sorta like subject headings in a library’s catalogue) such as name of the public figure under discussion (e.g. candidates, formatted ElizabethWarren, not Warren or SenatorElizabethWarren or LizWarren), issue areas, and so on, e.g., ■ Economics ■ Energy ■ Healthcare ■ USHouseOfRepresentatives ■ name of the state or city or region or nation, if the diary is geo-specific ■ perhaps group name, definitely series name if the diary is part of a series.... Often, many or most proper nouns in your story are useful tags readers are already following (some for years!) or may start to. Our much-missed tag librarian aoeu (r.i.p.) sometimes said, ‘the more tags the better, if they’re all appropriate ones.’
A diary’s tags will be displayed at the diary’s bottom edge, following the pale blue box containing DK’s statement about community content, as the below illustration shows:
Readers can click on any tag to see the page listing all diaries so-tagged, and to hit the FOLLOW button if they want all diaries like that automatically delivered to their own Activity Stream.
Which is reached by clicking on their own avatar disk up in the top right corner of all DK5 pages, producing a dropdown menu looking roughly as illustrated here — in reality, it’s much longer — which gives each kosak links to all their/her/his own DK pages.
Be aware that CHARACTERS NOT IN OUR ALPHABET will not display even if you paste them in, so do yr best in English alone or the tag will display too rong to be of any use.
Also, no slashes — forward or back — will be displayed, nor most other punctuation or typographics except hyphen, ampersand, and fullstop. Look closely at tags when you’re making them, and if you see them displayed rong, delete rong ones and try to retype them in different ways so they display as correctly as you can manage. Avoid tags made of entire sentences or slogans, or more than 25 characters; only a country or company (etc) with a very long name is likely to require even that many. Long tags can cause problems elsewhere in DK: be considerate to spare everyone that.
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<tt>Postscript about comments in the thread</tt>
This diary was originally published when the site looked and operated rather differently than now. The comments are from back then, so the ones discussing how-to or anything else technical may be out of date or worse.