Administrivia: RISCOSitory opening up for reviews

You write ’em and send ’em, and I may put ’em online.

Until now, RISCOSitory has not carried product reviews. The main reason for this is that the site is run with no financial reward – only costs. As such, I didn’t want to commit to spending even more time working on the site than I already do, and thus not working on things that could be earning an income, and helping to cover those costs.

Sitting down to use a piece of hardware or software, with a critical eye, specifically to write about the experience would be adding to the amount of time I spend working on or for the site, and reducing my potential for earning – so I’ve always felt that it wasn’t an avenue worth exploring.

However, a few weeks ago I was sent a review by a third party. After a couple of emails back and forth, and a brief chat after the Wakefield Show with Jim Nagel, Archive Magazine‘s editor and publisher, I have decided to open up RISCOSitory to publishing reviews submitted by other people – submitted by you, the site’s readers.

It’s not possible to pay for articles, which should be obvious given my comments above, but if you want to see your name in lights pixels on a web page, where it may be seen by thousands hundreds several people, then please send them to submissions@riscository.com and your reviews will be reviewed to see if they’re suitable to then be re-viewed by the site’s reader… Damn it, I mean readers!

If you prefer, you can have your review published under a generic anonymous account name – or you can even choose your own pseudonym.

If you choose to use your own name, or your own pseudonym, you can also provide a brief bio, including a link to your own website. If readers (because there really are several, honestly) click on your name or pseudonym, they will see that bio along with all of the reviews that have been published on the site in your name, and from there they can check out your own website.

Not all reviews will be published, and any that are may not appear immediately. They need to be read by me first, and then set up on the site (see below) – so there may sometimes be delays due to my own limited time. I may also contact the developer or company behind any product being reviewed, as well, to discuss particular issues with them, with any conclusions published alongside your review – and if I do, publishing would have to wait for that.

Should your reviews appear on RISCOSitory, they are unlikely to appear in the form they were originally written. Edits will be made. There may be snark and jokes inserted – whether you consider them funny or not.

You won’t be provided with a log-in for the site, no matter whether or not you wish to use your own name. The process of putting the review into the CMS will be handled entirely in-house, for reasons that include security and privacy. An email address has to be associated with each user account – but your email address will not be used; mine will. This therefore ensures no personal data belonging to you can ever be exposed in the event of a security breach, other than your name and bio if you choose not to be anonymous – but in that case it’s public anyway.

I would also recommend that you don’t send your reviews exclusively to RISCOSitory: While I often refer to Jim Nagels’ publication as the Lesser-Spotted Archive Magazine, because its publishing schedule has slipped significantly over the last few years, it remains a very enjoyable publication to read, and any reviews published in its pages are likely to be enjoyed by a different selection of readers, albeit with some overlap. And because Archive has a different editor, with a different approach and house style, the same review will almost certainly read differently in Archive compared to how it reads on RISCOSitory.

And, most importantly, Archive’s policy has always been to reward any of its subscribers who write for it by extending their subscriptions – so you have an incentive to send your reviews in Jim’s direction!

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