Heads up! This week, we are implementing a new quality-related policy change.
Until you have published five simultaneously-Featured Hubs, new Hubs that do not pass the Quality Assessment Process (QAP) will be unpublished rather than simply being not Featured.
The period before one has published five Featured Hubs will be known as Boot Camp, as Hubbers who have yet to reach the five Featured Hub milestone have to engage in some training and hard work before passing.
While this policy is designed primarily to help us deal more efficiently with spam, we hope it will provide new Hubbers with a gentle notice of HubPages’ high quality standards and to help them produce the sort content that is likely to succeed.
More on the Five Featured Hub Minimum to Fight Spam
Until you have published five Featured Hubs and passed Boot Camp, Hubs that would not otherwise be Featured will be moved back to an unpublished state after going through the QAP.
Additional details on how this works:
- Before you have met the five Featured Hub minimum, Hubs you publish that pass our Quality Assessment Process will still be published and Featured on the site. Only Hubs that do not pass the QAP will be transitioned back to draft mode.
- Once you have five Featured Hubs and have passed Boot Camp, Hubs you publish that do not pass the Quality Assessment Process will no longer be blocked from publication (though until you improve their quality, they will not be made available to search engines or be shown on related Hubs and Topic Pages).
- Hubs that were unpublished because of quality reasons before you met the five Featured Hub threshold will remain unpublished until you change them and re-publish them (we recommend making significant improvements or else they’ll just not be Featured, which is somewhat of a waste).
- Should you reach a point at which you have five Featured Hubs but then dip down to a point at which you only have four Featured Hubs, you will still be able to publish Hubs that aren’t Featured (in other words, you only have to prove yourself once).
This new policy will keep spammers from progressing on HubPages by preventing their work (which very rarely passes the minimum quality threshold required to be Featured) from being published.
A New Accolade for High Quality Hubbers
In addition to using Boot Camp to hinder spammers, we are using it to reward awesome content creators on HubPages who really do want to improve their skills and make a name for themselves online. We are doing this via the introduction of a new Accolade that highlights the number of Featured Hubs you have.
Our Featured Hub Accolade, shaped like a bullhorn (because we like to amplify Featured Hubs by making them available to search engines and featuring them throughout our site) is HubPages’ newest badge indicating a Hubber’s ability to create useful, valuable, and high quality content.
You will first earn the Accolade as soon as you reach the five Featured Hub minimum. The Accolade’s number will continue to climb as you create and publish more Featured Hubs. As we care ten times as much about the great articles people write, we’re far more interested in seeing how many Featured Hubs authors have versus their total number of Hubs. For this reason we find the Featured Hub Accolade to be a helpful reference point (not to mention a good motivator). We hope you find it to be rewarding, informative, and motivating, too!
