Well, this is exciting.
5 Likes
Awesome! I can see this fitting into the Fediverse Publications conversation along with an alternative to Comments. Can’t wait to see what other uses there could be.
1 Like
Well, that really is interesting. Looking forward to it.
Submit.as is now in open beta! And we’re looking for anyone who wants to try it out and give us feedback (more on that below).
Today it’s pretty simple; it lets you:
- Create submission prompts associated with any of your blogs, which then show up on submit.as/yourblog – e.g. https://submit.as/writeas
- Gather a name, email address, and writing submission from anyone – no sign-up required on the submitter’s part. (Try it out here.)
- Get an email notification whenever you receive a new post, so you can review it.
- See the current review status of submissions you’ve received.
- Approve a post to mark it as such and publish it to your associated blog, with the submitter’s name included.
- Reject a post to mark it as such.
Next, we want to support:
- Multiple admins / reviewers
- An approval process with more control, so you can e.g. schedule the accepted post for a future date, edit it before publishing, or do something else with it besides publishing to your blog
- Publishing to third-party services like Ghost, Tumblr, and Twitter upon approval
- Publishing to any WriteFreely instance upon approval
We’re now looking for feedback from the Write.as community. While we’ve priced Submit.as for larger publications and organizations, we’re also offering it at a steep discount to individual users and small publications – especially in these early days, while we’re looking to quickly improve it based on user feedback.
If you’re interested in trying it out today and telling us more about your use case and any feedback you have along the way, let us know and we’ll get you set up!
3 Likes
Woohoo!
I am trying to use it as a healthy alternative to a commenting system on my blog. Check out the post behind my decision here. If it is something you’d be interested in using on your blog then feel free to let @matt or myself know.
We’d love for you to try it out in any way you want!
That’s a great new feature, but isn’t it kinda pricey? Usually your products are cheap/very cheap.
It’s starting off priced for larger organizations, like the public library we’re currently working with to develop this. While we’ve set our prices low in the past, this is part of the current place we’re in as a bootstrapped company, as I’ve written a bit about before.
But like I mentioned, we want to see how we can make it work for individuals now, too. So I’m totally open to feedback on price there – e.g. should it be a one-time purchase (like Snap.as Albums)? A subscription? Should we bundle it with Pro? How much should it cost for individuals? Would love to hear any of your thoughts there.
My take is that this may be of interest to only a minority of users and won’t be as much in demand as e.g., snap.as. I don’t favor it being bundled with Pro - if Pro is to be enhanced, I’d rather see it done with stuff of more general interest. Therefore, my suggestion is to either require a one-time fee or a subscription.
1 Like
Honestly, I fear that this will simply drive the overall cost of ownership into some rather extreme heights. Assuming a monthly subscription, Pro is $6, add $25 for submit.as and you’re at $31. Setting aside the one time fee for albums, you’re now at a price above that of a comparable subscription for, say, WordPress ($25/month with image uploads in greater resolutions, with lightbox effects, albums, galleries included, submission of posts with WPSubmit, a plugin, Fediverse connection, IndieWeb Connector, Comments, Tags and Categories, etc.)
I know the arguments, but “this doesn’t have those features, which is a feature, and therefore more expensive” is a really hard sell, especially if those features can be turned off at the click of a button in competing products.
I appreciate the input, and totally understand the concerns with price. I want to avoid driving up the cost for everyday writers, which again is why we’re asking for feedback on all of this – whether that’s a better price point or some way we might bundle Submit.as with other services.
On a related note, a lot of what you’re seeing now is us experimenting. There aren’t many other ethical, self-funded services to look at for examples on how to build a suite of small apps like we are, serving both individuals and business, etc. So that’s why we’re leaning heavily on you all, the community, to help us find our way with this.
Just know we’re not going to simply dump this all on you and expect you to pay – we want to build it entirely around your feedback and concerns. So please feel free to share any ideas you have.
I’m wondering if Submit.as would promote conversation about various blog posts? I’m trying to picture how effectively people could see the comments and follow them as a continuing conversation to the original post, but am not sure how it works. The use scenario is prompts for dialogue on modern parables (short stories). As mentioned by others, until way down the road, $25/mo is steep. Rolled in with pro, and happy to pay a bit higher rate for pro with it.
Hi @DeaconPatrick! If you would like to see how Submit.as works, check out the official guide - it would be a good starting place to see if Submit.as would fit your use scenario. If it seems like a good fit then just let us know - we would be more than happy to let you try it out. And that goes for anyone too. Please feel free to drop us a line!
And while Submit.as is focused on submission management, just know that we are still going to build a dedicated solution for conversation about blog posts with Remark.as.
Thank you, @cjeller1592. I suspect the fact that you will also have Remark.as answers my question, and I may well be better off waiting for it; however my other website has a good application for Submit.as, so yes, please, I would like to try it.
EDIT: I just saw your “Letters to the Editor” idea, and love that. That may work well for my usage on multiple blogs then.
Any guesstimate on timeline for Remark.as?
Testing this so far, I like the simplicity and smoothness of Submit.as. My one beef so for, as I am using it to have authors of books submit their books for folks to read during the pandemic, is that many people have no markdown experience, so I’m needing to:
- publish
- edit
- add markdown for header, links, etc.
- re-publish
And there is no reference to the original topic the submittal is to, which would be helpful.
Overall, excellent begenning, and I can see it is already a strong tool for multiple authors on one blog, presuming they know markdown.
1 Like
Thanks for the feedback @DeaconPatrick!
We’re working on a WYSIWYG version of the Write.as editor so that people with little Markdown experience can still format their posts — it should help make that workflow easier.
If you go to your Submission page (https://write.as/me/submissions) and click on a submission, it will show what prompt the submission is In reply to. Would you prefer that to be in the list of submissions?
1 Like
Thanks, CJ. Yes, to me, it is very clear what the post is in response to, but not in the post that gets approved, unless I add it, if that makes sense? I was hoping for an option to have the query be part of what posts, perhaps a defined header at the top in the post (but not on the preview on the front page).
So a defined header in the post like In response to This prompt ? (with the prompt linked to so others can participate & reference the original prompt). I could then imagine an accepted prompt looking like:
# Accepted Submission
_By Deacon Patrick_
_A response to [This](link) prompt_
I really like that idea @DeaconPatrick as it’s something I’ve personally run into using Submit.as too. Just a matter of trying to create something universal enough that would make sense with other submission contexts.
Exactly, @cjeller1592! Ideally, the title could be edited in the template. Also, the ability to give it a #tag, so all those can be seen at once, automatically, would be lovely.
1 Like
Really appreciate the feedback, @DeaconPatrick!
As a general update for you and everyone else, we are circling back to this right now to improve Submit.as based on all the feedback we’ve received. The first area will include improvements to that approval process – I know there’s a lot that can be done with that step.
On a related note, we’ve permanently dropped the base price to $12 / month. And we’ve recently made billing more straightforward – if you buy Submit.as, it’ll simply be added to your normal monthly / yearly invoice without creating a new subscription.
We’ll keep you all updated on more development progress here! You can also get updates on our Submit.as blog, Mastodon account, and Twitter account.