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Mail-to-Blogger Can Provide Moderated Posting

Occasionally, someone asks
How can I require approval of any post before it's published?
and my typical answer will be
You can't, using the post editor. Any author can publish a post, and you can only moderate posts after the fact.

The key words there are "post editor".

If you enable Mail-to-Blogger in Settings - Mobile and email, you can have your authors email their posts, unpublished, to you.

You use the Mail-to-Blogger setting, and you publish posts when you approve.

If you set Mail-to-Blogger to save emails as draft posts, all posts emailed will be saved for you to moderate.

In the dashboard Settings - Email page, set "Posting using email" to "Save emails as draft post".

You, or any administrator, can examine draft posts from the Edit Posts menu - and publish only the ones that meet your approval.

Combine GMail and Mail-to-Blogger lets you automate your tasks.

If you use a GMail account to filter and forward to MTB, you can selectively route posts from specific individuals for moderating, and others can post directly.

This allows you to use your time more effectively, only moderate possible problem authors, moderate more effectively, and respond more promptly. If you can respond more promptly, you can selectively moderate based upon need, not just current workload.

Maintain some students as trusted - and keep a close watch on the others.

You can change individual author moderation policy on a moments notice.

Setup 2 Blogger accounts for your blog, each with a different MTB policy (Account A to post after moderation, Account B to post without moderation). Have your authors email their posts to a special GMail account.

Setup the GMail account with a series of email filters, with each author email forwarding to the appropriate Blogger account MTB email address.

Any individual author can be selectively changed between moderation and no moderation, by simply changing the email filter to redirect to Account A or Account B, respectively. You spend your time moderating only authors posting through Account A.

You can publish the posts under the student names, using multiple Blogger accounts.

If you want to publish the posts under the individual author names and profiles, setup individual Blogger accounts, as blog authors - one for each author - and only give the authors the Mail-to-Blogger email addresses. Then, as above, setup each Blogger account to save emails as draft posts.

Since you will be the actual owner of each Blogger account, setup the accounts with secure names and passwords - and keep track of the account names and passwords. Then, moderate the ones who need your attention.

Just observe that posts composed and submitted, using email, won't be as complete and well formatted, as posts composed in post editor. You may have to add content and formatting, before publishing.

Comments

Unknown said…
I am a little confused by the part where you say "just set up 2 MTB author accounts for your blog." There's only one place under Settings to specify an MTB email account, and only one account can be set there. Also, is there any way to onpass keywords via MTB?
Nitecruzr said…
John,

See if my rewrite makes it slightly easier to understand.

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