“Every day, dozens of hackers send us news of their code and
hope for a spot in the appindex. Since we know how much our
approval can mean, it honestly does hurt us more than it hurts you
when we have to frown over a submission and write back, “You know,
this really doesn’t fit here…” In today’s editorial, Nathan
Hurst, part of freshmeat’s Australian crew, explains what goes
through our minds and why we sometimes feel we just have to say
“no.”
“In the course of reading, editing, and approving the endless
stream of freshmeat that passes our way, we have to reject quite a
lot of scripts, small C programs, and PHP classes. While these are
clearly useful to someone, we often have the difficult task of
rejecting them on the grounds of triviality. In this editorial, I
am going to attempt to explain what metric we use for making this
decision, some thoughts on what might be done in the future to
reduce the need for such screening, and, finally, what to do if
your script is rejected.”
“Every freshmeat submission bin warrior quakes at the thought of
that one submission each day that sits on the edge between clearly
in and clearly out. Sometimes it’s a script for automating the
ripping of an audio CD; sometimes it’s a PHP class to display the
current date in Roman numerals.”
“The reason for this fear is not retribution from the offended
contributor (although my spam rate increased dramatically after
rejecting one person’s script for bulk emailing), but rather the
fact that we feel that we’re sending the message “You are not
worthy of contributing to freshmeat, and, by association, not
worthy of contributing to Free Software”. This is probably the
worst aspect of the job. Sometimes it’s a 10-year-old who has
written his first Python program, and sometimes it’s a seasoned
business programmer who has had her first try at Web programming.
In any case, we are going to hurt their feelings by rejecting their
work.”