Kuro5hin.org looks like a lot of other weblogs you see in your everyday clicking. But there is one important difference in how we operate here, that you may not be familiar with, or even, at this point, aware of.

You see, I, and the other editors, do not pick what stories appear on the front page here. Really. Sure, we *can*, but in practice, we very rarely do.

So how do stories get posted? You post them! Yes, really. The readers evaluate and decide which stories they think "fit" and which ones are just filler.

How it works, or, the life of a story

Every page has, at the top and bottom, a "submit story" link. Anyone who happens by, and has some news or some thoughts they'd like to share, can click that link, fill out a simple form, and submit new content for consideration. This is pretty familiar to many of you.

But the next step, on most sites, is that the content you submitted disappears for a while, and the Gods of the site choose whether to release it or not. Not so here, though.

When someone submits something, it goes into a list, accessable by all registered users. When you make a user account, and log in, you'll see a little box on the right, marked "Admin Tools." Click the "Moderate Submissions" link in there, and you'll see a list of pending stories, that is, stories that have been submitted, but do not yet appear on the public front page.

Click a story title in this list, and you can read the submission, and then vote whether you think it should be posted or not. You can vote to post it, drop it, or just that you don't care (+1, -1, and 0, respectively). You can also attach a comment to your vote. When enough people vote to post a story, up it goes, on the public page.

So, really and truly, you are the editors of the site. I'll clean up grammar or typos from time to time, but the final decision on content is yours. And it's crucial that you do exercize your power!

Why we need you to vote

The score a story must reach to be posted is a percentage of total user accounts. I realize that not everyone wants to vote, and that's fine. The percentage is really low. But still, as the number of users grows, at least some of you need to be voting on stories, or they languish forever in the queue, unposted, yet un-dropped. Kind of a purgatorial situation for a story to be in.

So please, when you wander by, take a minute and check out the story moderation queue. Chances are, if you vote a few times, you'll be "the straw that broke the camel's back" and push a story over the threshold with your vote. Kuro5hin.org is community-edited, and the most important part of that philosophy is a community willing to edit. So please vote on pending stories. It's fun. :-)