Curation Desk

Run a shared queue of posts for your feed, so collaborators can suggest, review and promote posts with a full audit trail.

The Curation Desk is a shared queue of posts waiting for a decision on one of your feeds. Collaborators put posts forward, and the people you trust decide what goes in. Every action is recorded, and you can freeze the desk at any time.

It's built for feeds run by a team, like a newsroom or an election-night rota. Who can do what on the desk comes from each person's collaborator capabilities.

Two places to work

The Suggestions section on your feed's page: a simple list of suggested posts, where people can suggest, add and reject.
The Curation desk page: the full queue, with claiming, keyboard shortcuts, pinning, a candidate feed and the freeze switch. Open it from the list icon in your feed's header. Its tooltip shows how many suggestions are waiting.

Both show the same queue.

Setting up a desk

A desk is created automatically the first time someone suggests a post. To set one up yourself, with a name and a candidate feed, open the Curation desk page. If your feed has no desk yet you'll see "No desk on this feed yet":

Enter a Desk name (for example "Election night desk").
Optionally enter a Candidate feed ID.
Click Create desk.

Only the feed's owner can create a desk.

The candidate feed

A candidate feed is a second feed of your own with looser rules. Its matches become the desk's queue, so your published feed can stay tight while a wider net catches posts for people to review. It must be a different feed from the one the desk serves. Leave it blank to add posts by hand only.

Click Pull from candidate feed to bring the candidate feed's most recent matches into the queue. Posts that are already queued, or have already been decided, aren't added again.

Suggestions on the feed page

The Suggestions section reads: "Posts put forward for this feed. Nothing here is in the feed until somebody who can add posts accepts it."

Suggest a post: paste a post link and click Suggest. If someone else already suggested it, your suggestion counts as another vote for it.
Each suggestion shows how many people suggested it.
People who can add posts see Add (adds it naturally, keeping its own timestamp), Add to top (if they can add posts to the top) and Reject.

Adding posts automatically

The owner, and anyone with Manage collaborators, can set Add automatically once to never, 2 people suggest it, 3 people suggest it or 5 people suggest it. Once a post reaches that number of suggestions, it's added to the feed naturally, as if it had matched your rules. Each suggestion then shows how many more are needed.

Working the queue on the desk page

The desk page shows how many posts are waiting, then the queue. Each entry shows the post link and where it came from (manual or candidate feed). Two labels may appear:

someone else is on this: another person has claimed it.
needs a second pair of eyes: the post has been escalated and needs another approval before it can go live.

To add a post by hand, paste its link into Paste a post link to add it to the queue and click Add.

Select a post, then use the buttons or keyboard shortcuts:

Claim (c): take the post for 5 minutes so nobody else acts on it at the same time. A claim that runs out can be taken by someone else.
Promote to feed (p): put the post into the feed stamped with the current time, so it appears at the top.
Pin for 2 hours: pin the post to the top of the feed for two hours.
Reject (x): take the post out of the queue.
j / k or the arrow keys move up and down the list.

People who can only suggest see "suggest only" on each post and don't get Promote or Pin. Recent activity at the bottom lists the latest actions on the desk.

Freezing the desk

The owner, or anyone with Manage collaborators, can click Freeze desk at any time. While a desk is frozen, nothing can be promoted, pinned or accepted, from the desk page or from the Suggestions section, and a banner says "This desk is frozen". Everything else still works. Click Unfreeze desk to resume.

Who can do what

What each person can do comes from their capabilities on the Collaborators page:

Suggest posts: suggest, see the queue, add posts to the queue, claim, reject on the desk page, and pull from the candidate feed.
Add posts naturally: everything above, plus add or reject suggestions, and promote and pin on the desk.
Add posts to the top: also Add to top in the Suggestions section.
Manage collaborators (and the owner): set the automatic-add threshold, and freeze or unfreeze the desk.
Only the feed's owner can create a desk with a name and candidate feed.

Every promotion, pin, rejection and claim is recorded with who did it and when.