Reader submissions and moderation

A publication does not have to find everything itself. A signed-in reader can submit a link, and it shows up on the site straight away, marked pending. Editors then decide what to do with it: leave it, promote it into a draft story, or hide it. A publication that wants a gate can hold new submissions until someone approves them, and one that wants help can let an AI moderator make the first call.

The feature is built and tested. Like reader votes and ratings, it turns on one site at a time, when that site enables the reader features; nothing here says that any site has it running today.

Submitting a link

A reader with a handle gives a link, a title, an optional kind and an optional short note. The submission is public the moment it is saved, with the reader's handle on it, and it shows "Pending" while the site reads the link. The form tells the reader about two things before they send it:

• Duplicates. The same address, written any way (capital letters, a fragment, a default port), is one submission. Submitting it again returns the existing one instead of a copy.
• Similar links. Another link from the same site in the last two days is shown as a warning, never a block.

While a reader types, the form keeps a draft in that browser only, says so, and clears it when the link is sent. A reader can submit ten links a day, and a new account a third of that.

Spam checks and entity extraction run afterwards, in the background, never while the reader waits. The first looks at the title and the note with simple rule checks and records signals for the people who moderate. The second, which finds the people, products and organisations a link is about, is a later step; a submission waits as "extraction pending" until it runs.

From a submission to a story

Readers can upvote a submission with the same controls they use on stories. An editor can promote a pending submission: Papyrus creates a draft story from it, with the link and the reader's note, and the editor works and publishes it like any other draft. A reader earns karma when other readers upvote their submissions or the story they became, and when readers report using it.

Moderation after the fact

Submissions and comments are public first and moderated second. A publication chooses how:

• Human review. Every new submission and comment waits in a queue in the newsroom's Administration area, public meanwhile. A moderator approves it, hides it, promotes a submission, limits or bans the reader, or undoes any of that. Each decision is written to a log with who made it, when and why, in the same step as the change, so the log and the site cannot disagree.
• Hold until approved. The publication can keep new content hidden until a moderator approves it.
• AI moderator. A model reads each new item and answers allow or hide with a reason. Its decision is logged as the AI moderator's, it is public at once, and a person can undo or overrule it; once a person has decided about an item, the model never judges it again. If the model fails, the item stays in the human queue. The instructions it follows are a plain file, the reader's text reaches it as data, never as instructions, and it never sees who wrote the text. Its API key is kept in the account's encrypted parameter store and is never logged.
• Off. No queue. Moderators can still hide content and ban readers. Moving from human review to AI review, or to none, is one setting.

Readers can report a submission or a comment with a reason, up to twenty a day. A report puts the item back in the queue. Hidden content leaves the public files at the next update, and a banned reader's actions are refused.

Privacy

The public files carry a random reader id and the handle the reader chose, never an email address, a name or the identifier the site uses internally. A reader cannot put an email address in a title, a note or a comment: the form asks them to remove it. A test renders the public files and fails if any identifying value appears.

The details for people who run a publication are in the Papyrus repository, in docs/reader-steering.md. See also Reader votes and ratings and Comments as steering.