hey everyone, as you all now, i am a relatively new member here, i have writen 5 snippets and 1 tutorial so far since one week till now and none of them were approved yet, actually i dont know if they were or not , another "mysterious" thing happening is that after submiting my snippet, my snippet is displayed with a Last Date Modified of December 31, 1969 ! then i try to modify it and i am prompted with an error saying my snippet is still not approved, but when will it be approved? it has been for almost 2 weeks! I tried to search for my topics to see if they are there but there is no clue for their existence, i can no more find them. I click on my contributions and nothing of my tutorials or snippets is displayed. I contacted the webmaster(i sent him 2 PMs when he WAS online) and he didn't respond! i really dont know what to do, i really want to contribute and earn some Kudos points just as everyone here, i worked hard on my snippets and tutorials and i can no more find them so all my work has been lost... please if somebody can help me or clarify to me the origin of this problem i would be more than happy, and please admins and mods i need your help to tell me what to do and see if you can do something about it, thanks very much for your help....

From back when I first did the snippets, the date has been an issue. Once it's approved though, it should display the correct date. Also, snippets show up for you when you are the author. The idea was that you should be able then to locate your snippets should you need to modify them before they were approved. The contributions page was written by another and so doesn't have the same code base for grabbing the data.

As for tutorials they are in a queue that mods have to go through and approve. IIRC, they can't be seen by anyone, even the author until they have been approved.

I hope that helps!

snoj, thanks very much for your clarification, but how much time do you think snippets and tutorials need in order to be approved? i have been waiting for almost week!

It really depends on what's going on. Considering that it's the holidays here in the USA and school is just getting out, most mods are probably busy with lives at the moment. It also depends on how versed they are in the language in question and how thoroughly they are testing the snippet.

i see... just out of curiosity, how much time(approximately) does it take mods or admins to approve your snippets for example??

snoj, just out of curiosity, who should I talk to about LISP snippets?

I don't know. I've just come off of like a year's hiatus. The only things I know are from when I was a mod, and from me having re-programmed the snippets.

@ayman_mastermind: You will receive a notification if any of your snippets or tutorials are rejected, but not if they are accepted. I will look through the list of items pending approval, but remember we all have our specialties so they could be in a language I'm not comfortable enough with to approve or disapprove them.

Also remember this, all content that is submitted (tutorials & snippets) are checked for authenticity and tested to ensure that they work correctly, and that they follow (at least to the closest) best practices standards for that language.

i see... okay thanks everyone for your help, btw, i have just received a PM from a mod telling me that my tutorial was rejected lol,at least i got some feedback , so i will work on another tutorial, i will see now if any of my snippets were approved, thanks everyone for your help, thats a great forum, and Merry Christmas...

Oh, my snippets need to be approved? no wonder i couldn't find them =] thx alot guys

Sort of a bump. I submitted 2 or 3 snippets the other day (> 1 week for a couple) and it was odd. 2 that I submitted at the same time, in the same language... one was approved and no word on the other. Its slightly discouraging when trying to write new stuff, just saying.

I understand you have lives and all that. Just wanted to voice a small concern.

The next version of snippets will be far more informative for people submitting content. It was a feature I wanted to implement but right now I'm really quite lucky if the snippet system works at all

We'll get it all figured out though, it'll take some time to re-code it, but hopefully our next developer will do a good job getting all our requirements completed.

Chris, why don't you post the code of the snippets system ( integrated with IPB ) for refactoring here ?

1. Here are some really good PHP coders.
2. The contributers are the people who crushed into problems with the snippet system and they know exactly how it's meant to work.

Hmmm, did my stuff get "lost"? A confirmation that it was received into the queue for approval would be nice.

It's disheartening when competing for say most kudos in a month, or trying to get information out there.

Do you need more people to be able to review C/C++ code? A generic shell sort algorithm isn't really super duper complicated.<- (Example of something I submitted) Easy enough to run/test quickly. I generally provide a whole example as a snippet for both readers and people who approve stuff.

This post has been edited by KYA: 2 Jan, 2009 - 09:16 PM

One problem with that is that a user could post malicious code and it would be run on th server, which is never a good idea. So, human interaction seems to be the best way to accomplish what we are doing.

Huh? That was my snippet, not a recommendation to automate the process. That would be a nightmare.

I wanted to let everyone know that the new version of Dream.In.Code is starting to take shape on paper. I'm meeting with our PHP developer on Monday. The designer has the wireframe and is working on an initial mockup. I'll be going through our Uservoice site to give the developer a list of features to incorporate in the next snippets database.

http://dreamincode.uservoice.com

So just thinking out loud here in this thread. The next version of snippets needs to include the ability to track the status of your submitted snippets/tutorials. An email on approval AND disapproval. Maybe some sort of algorithm showing current ETA for approval (i.e. average of last 10).

Can you think of anything else that would help those of you submitting content know the status of your contributions?

A dedicated snippet search system is in the works too right? If so, then the above and that would make the snippets section golden.

Being able to pick what language section would be gravy.

Ah, sorry, my misunderstanding.