h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Englander: It works in Alabaster, it just looks kinda ugly. In order to make it look good in all skins, you would have to take out your customized fonts, you know.. That tag.

I wonder how true the anti-non-christian sentiment is. It sure would seem so from our perspective since many of the efforts of members of the Foundation get an awful lot of rejections based on CONTENT rather than style. Its not that our entries are poorly written (there usually is a comment with "it is well written BUT..." in our rejections is it not?)

Perhaps it would be interesting to begin an official FFFF page dedicated to rejections. We could collect our rejection letters in one place with links to the rejected articles. A small aside, after rejection we should probably do the next draft as a new entry instead of changing the original one submitted so we can have a draft record showing how when something was "fixed" it was still rejected.

Just think, we might be able to advertise PROUDLY that the Freedom From Faith Foundation has had more GOOD entries rejected based on CONTENT than any other community on H2G2. If we could become minor celebrity underdogs, perhaps pressure from the other H2G2 communities could pressure the powers that be to put us in the approved --er edited guide.

I think it's a safe bet that we already have more rejections than any other group... after all, who would reject a movie review from the Film Society based on content alone? There are a lot of other groups producing material related to their chosen field, but nobody embraces a controversial movement, like we do.

If you want a collection of rejection letters, we'll need someone to administer the project. Interested? As for the rest, we could make it a badge of honor in the link library right here on the FFFF page. Put a little something next to the rejected articles, proudly pointing this fact out. Plus, I could put a little tribute to our rejections on the page somewhere.

I'd also be happy to reference the page in my View From the Queue article for the Post.

Heh, nice idea. Though you do seem to get *some* articles through the treadmill - certainly more than the "opposition"...

I have been very lucky with getting entries through the "treadmill," so far. My entry on Agnosticism has made it to the "pending" stage, which means a sub-editor is currently working on it. I must express my surprise. It was in limbo for a couple of weeks compared to the other entries I wrote at the same time.

However, it also appears that the sub-editor has introduced new and interesting grammatical errors to my work, none of which change the actual meaning of the text in some useful manner. You can see the revision in progress at http://www.h2g2.com/A446339

The original, for reference, is at http://www.h2g2.com/A446339

Oops! Sorry. The original is really at http://www.h2g2.com/A371873

Beware the low-quality editing. That was exactly what happened to my article on Atheism. The first sub who got it mangled the text horribly, and I could not abide the grammatical errors introduced, so I flagged Anna, and she reassigned it to another sub. That sub corrected the grammatical errors, but used a plastic butter knife to painfully saw out all the good parts, until it no longer said what I intended it to say.

Hmm. Thanks for the story. I think what I will do, then, is allow the silly thing to pass through with whatever grammar problems in tact. Then, after it has been placed on the front page, I'll noodle Crusader with the editing nitpicks. He's pretty good about that sort of thing.

Funny, I don't remember putting in any grammatical errors in on purpose

Oh well, it was a long day....
I thought the content was great though, if that makes you feel better. I wasn't actually trying to mess it up, must be some sort of problem with my observation skills

Question:
Can the insanely happy join your organization ?

Only if you tone it down a bit...

yep - there's a smiley quota - no more than one every two lines...

I think we´ll have to come up with a number of new smilies in the long run. >Ö< `Ü´ -Ä-

?-@-?

Cool <^¶¥¶^>

Fragilis:

I looked at the two Agnosticism articles side by side; your original, and the edited. They do say the same thing (in essence, if not using all of the exact same words). While admittedly, Engel's prose might not be up to par with your high expectations for the article, I can understand why he made the changes.

"and often attribute to them the harm that's done to others as a result of their 'fanatical' attempts to propagate their often extreme views."

with the original: "and often attribute them with malice aforethought for attempting to push their views onto other people."

Most of our readers will trip over the original. The new version isn't perfect, but it works.

I'd be happy that a FFFF member recieved the article to edit. It could have been hacked to peices by some of the other subs.

Non Sequitor; I failed your compatability test several times.

-jb

Zenmondo is a good editor. It's too bad we can't pick who we want an entry to be assigned to when we submit a piece.

I thought I'd send the FFFFers (that sounds sort of dirty) over to this forum http://www.h2g2.com/F54811?thread=81198&skip=0&show=20 I think my beliefs are offended ;-)

Happy: In order to join, you need a chair, and in order to have a chair, you have to give it a name. Otherwise, you just find yourself sitting on the floor, sitting in whatever Scopes happened to fling there.

If the quality of editing was good across the board, we wouldn't have to worry about who gets our stuff, but I do recall that the Towers were going to make a sincere effort to get articles into the hands of subs who knew a little something about the subject at hand. As such, most of our freethought articles should land in the hands of our FFFF subs. As for my experience, I just wish they would fire that one particular sub... I had problems with that one well before the Atheism article.