Seen something that deserves a moment of glory on the Front page? Here’s what you need to do to make the magic happen.

Several people have asked for clear guidance on how to contribute Quotes to 'Quote of the Day'. So here is my attempt to make things clear. To begin with you need to select a Quote. Maybe it's something that made you laugh, or made you think, or made you . Any way up, if a Researcher has said something anywhere onsite that you like, for whatever reason, please consider sending it to [email protected]. And I mean anywhere onsite. Quotes most often come from threads on Askh2g2, but I'll take them from anywhere, up to and including Approved Entries. I mean, we write those just as much as we write posts in threads, so why not? If a Researcher has written it, then it's fair game to my mind. I might need to make judgement calls about whether to use some Quotes, admittedly, but I'll make that decision based on each Quote as it comes.

The Basics

When you send a Quote to [email protected] there are just two things that I really, really need:

1. The Quote
2. A Link

It's not a long list, I know, and if you want to provide more information you can, and I'll come to that later, but this is the bare minimum that I need. There is more I can say about them though. Firstly, the Quote: the bit of text that you would like to appear on the Front Page. If this was left out it would leave me having to work out the Quote from the Link you give, and I might pick the wrong bit, especially if there's a lot of text in the post or entry. Also, please bear in mind that the box on the Front Page for QotD is not huge - it can't cope with terribly long Quotes. Now, if there is a long Quote you want to submit, that's fine, but it may need to be edited down a little to fit into the box. Please don't be terribly disappointed if this happens. We are trying our best, really we are.

Secondly, the Link. Now, the link can be in any format you want, just so long as it gets me in the vicinity of the Quote. It can be in either Ripley of Pliny format, I don't mind. If the Quote is from a post in a thread, then it would be nice if the link could get me to the page the Quote is on, but I'll settle for it merely getting me to the thread. But yes, any kind of link is fine. There will be a bit of digging that I will need to do to format link ready for QotD whatever form it comes in, I assure you, so whatever form it comes in is fine by me.

You don't really need to worry too much about the subject line of the email either. [email protected] is set up specifically to receive submissions for QotD. Shocking, I know. If an email turns up there I'm going to assume that it's a Quote being submitted regardless of whatever may or may not be in the subject line. I know that when I was on the other end, sending Quotes in, I would often use the subject line to make some wry, and probably meaningless to anyone else, comment on the Quote I was submitting. Now that the shoe is on the other foot, I can see that this was probably unhelpful and highly annoying, but if I now started to specify what people ought to put in subject lines I'd look seriously hypocritical, so I'm not going to do that. The subject line can, therefore, be anything or nothing, whatever you want, really; just so long as the email turns up in that there inbox.

More Detail

If you are inclined towards further helpfulness, then there is slightly fuller list of useful information that you could provide:

1. The Quote
2. A Link
3. The Quoted Researcher
4. Their Unumber

Now, points 3 and 4 there are not terribly hard to get, and I can, if needed, find them out myself from the Link and the Quote. Which is why I left them out from the first list; I want submitting a Quote to be as pain free for you as possible, even if that means I need to do a little extra work myself getting things ready. I don't mind doing that at all, but it would save me a bit of time if you did include the Researcher's name and their Unumber. Please don't feel you have too, mind, it's just that it would be nice.

The End Result

Just so that you can see where all this ends up, I'm going to show you the formatted information I send to the Editors for them to update the Front Page with new Quotes. Here, as an example, is the Quote I sent through for May 7th 2013:

Quote: If dressing as pirates on the slimmest of pretexts was a source of discredit, why; we wouldn't have any credit left.

Link: http://h2g2.com/forums/A148907/conversation/view/F19585/T8301796/page/1/#P110749113

Researcher: SiliconDioxide

Unumber: 170853

As you can see, that uses all the information from the second list, and the Link is in Pliny format, without a www. in it (that messes things up for some reason) with the right numbered page referenced and down a specific post (the #P bit). I have to run around several tabs to put this together. If the link I was given was Ripley format then I have to translate that into a Pliny link. I work out what the page number is (it's the number of posts Ripley would normally skip divided by 20 and add 1). I find the Quoted post and click to reply in order to get the post number, and then go back to the thread and add the post number on to the end of the URL. Then press enter and see if that works. If it doesn't I'll have to fiddle with it a little more till it does.

Now, and I want to absolutely clear, I'm not expecting you to go to the same effort to work out the Pliny post number link for me. You can if you want to, but it is in no way necessary. I can do all of that for you. That's what I'm here for. This is merely you show you how it will look after I've done my job. Please don't be scared off if this last section looks like too much work. I don't want that at all. If all you want to provide is the stuff up there in the first section, that is perfectly fine. As long as I get a Quote and a Link coming to [email protected], I am happy.

Geggs

20.05.13 Front Page

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