Big Blogger Mistake You Shouldn’t Repeat

1 | Posted In Blogging by David

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.

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  • http://www.tux-crazy.com Tux Crazy

    Even this article is full of BS. Firstly, you publish an article that you didn’t bother to check properly and an article that clearly is an April Fools joke, created by someone who spent time on it and then you fire the guest poster. Wow. Just because you couldn’t respect your readers enough to properly check the article and publish it means that someone else has to suffer for it. Ideally, you could have published it if you thought that it was a funny April fool’s joke or politely declined the article if you thought that it was inappropriate. The only person that should be fired here is yourself for not giving enough of a damn to properly check the article. Someone creates content for your website because you are too lazy to and then you don’t even bother checking it. It’s what you deserve, I guess.