Big Blogger Mistake You Shouldn’t Repeat

April 29, 2008

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Yesterday, I published a fairly technical article yesterday over at PCMech. It was a post about DirectX 11 and what’s coming in it. It was a guest post by a guy named Nathan (I’ll just leave it at first name). Being as busy as I am, I gave the article a quick scan, made a few edits just to make it a little more web ready, and I published it.

Big mistake.

As the commenters on that post correctly pointed out, the entire premise for that article was from an April Fool’s joke. In other words, it is a complete load of horseshit.

Yet, I published it yesterday and, in the process, made PCMech look a bit like an idiot.

Today, I made an edit to the post to announce this. I also made a comment on the post to the same effect. I don’t want to delete the post because there’s already been many comments on it and other sites have linked to it. So, I’ll just leave it up there for posterity. I have emailed Nathan and essentially fired him. He was a guest contributor and doesn’t work for me, but despite my oversight, the fact remains he passed on a BS article to me as fact and that doesn’t fly with me.

To any bloggers that accept guest posts, don’t repeat my mistake. Don’t take for granted that a guest post is accurate. Do fact check it unless the person has built up a record of trusted content with you. If you publish BS content, it affects your site’s reputation.