Rejecting submissions: they just… disappear

My thanks to Ellie Kesselman for provoking this investigation, and to Heather Jedrus for fulfilling the investigation.

If your submission to a Quora blog is rejected, we have recently seen here (You may provide an optional explanation; but we won’t let you), you can’t notify the author why (bug), and possibly they never get to see your notification anyway (bug?)

Something else happens:

When a blog owner rejects a submission on Quora, does the author still have access to what they wrote?

The submission disappears. You don’t have a record of it. You can’t resubmit it elsewhere. It just *poof* vanishes.

Heather says in her answer:

So, my advice for anyone who’s submitting posts to blogs owned by other people, is to copy that content and save it somewhere, in case the post doesn’t get accepted to the blog.

My advice for blog owners is to PM the author their post before rejecting it, so they can reuse it as they see fit.

Bug (and by “bug” I mean “Wholesale Incompetence”, because I have no more reserves of patience for the Quora “Design” team), or feature?

Well, to quote from my previous post on blog submissions.

A feature to illustrate the futility of all things in this Vale of Tears, perhaps, including blog submissions.

Or, maybe, I’m being trapped in Story Thinking, of how I just want to reject a blog submission politely, and Quora Design is trying to nudge me into System Thinking (i.e. seeing the big picture), that blogs are a deprecated part of the Quora Experience, and everyone should just stick to Q&A.

And then again, maybe regression testing is just another thing that gets in the way of Quora Design DEPLOYING EVERYTHING ON THEIR DRIVE TO PRODUCTION IN 8 MINUTES!!!!!111!!11!!!!!eleven!!!

Or, maybe, since they don’t have “Reject” on the button but “Ignore”, it may be that the only alternatives they had in mind when they “designed” the blog submission workflow were

• Accept: I am happy to include this submission in my blog.
• Ignore: This is trollery which I want gone from the face of the earth.

But not:

• Reject: I don’t think this submission is appropriate for my blog, but it might well be useful elsewhere, or the basis of an answer, and I have no intention of it being deleted from Quora servers forever.

No.

That would require… oh, what’s the word…

USER Thinking.