One of the reasons that user submission may be waxing and waneing is because, users are not feeling like they are part of a blogging community. When it appears that all changes that are made within the Revelife staff, serve to promote and feature Revelife staff writers soley, as opposed to promoting the Revelife community, user submissions will decrease. It just seems that Revelife bloggers should be just as important as the Revelife staff and it should show. And if Revelife is saying that the majority of bloggers who are submitting posts fail to meet Revelifes standards, that is scary! And if this is the case, then maybe the standards are based on criteria that is biased and based too much on the Revelife staff's individual taste.

 And if you are receiving submissions of posts that don't meet your criteria, but meet God's criteria, then you should give some of those posts a chance. If these posts are about christianity and reflect a message worthy of God, then they don't need to be of good enough to be published in a book, they just need to have a christian message of substance. People are looking for truth and transperancy.   

Several people commented about wanting to know more about how feature posts are decided upon and more importantly, what kind of content makes front page? There was no response to these questions. One reason an answer to these questions is so important is because, people are confused! When we see posts with photos of women in black fishnet stockings and a title suggesting that there is a question about appropriate christian attire, we scratch our heads.

When I read a featured post about Ted Haggerty's fall from grace and how he lost everything, I scratched my head! Ted Haggerty walked away with over $300,000.00, his wife stayed with him, they moved away and purchased another home and he was hired at another church. To most of us, this does not constitute loosing everything and in addition, the post featured incorrect misleading information. It was a pity post, where no pity is due, but for some reason it was featured.  

And on the diversity thing, the post about whether or not we think that a pastor in New York, (the state that has one of the highest costs of living in the nation), is worth $250,000.00?  This one is yet another head scratcher. Here you find a picture of the African American pastor plastered on the post. Yet pastors like Paula White and her husband were paid over $3 mil a year in salary and own more than two luxury homes. Joel Olsteen was making $200,000 several years ago and of course Ted Haggerty and more of the mega pastors are paid 5 or 6 times more than the African American pastor that is featured in this feature post. So I had to wonder, what made this post feature worthy?

As you stated Revelife has a small skeletal crew and we understand that. I am sure that you work very hard at what you do and you do a good job. But, perception is important and when people vent there is normally a reason. I believe that Revelife needs the community, just as we need the staff. The community should not be shut out, in an effort to showcase the staff. We like seeing what the community is blogging about, just as much as Revelife likes seeing itself, all over the front page.

For most of us, it is an overkill.     

I've been with Revelife about six months now and I really love Revelife as a Christian blogging site. But, I also know that there have been numerous featured posts that lacked quality or substance in a christian sense.

Also, the quality of content should not be based soley, on a whether or not it meets the standards of mainstream writers. This is not what blogging is all about. So in essence, many of the featured posts are just filled with philosopy, skewed bibical jargon, and things that have no bibical or Christian relevance. God is not an author of confusion and He is not a respector of persons. For this reason, it is important to understand the purpose of blogging and it's intentional lack of guidelines, before imposing a set of mysterious factors, intended to rule out less than desirable posts. When you look at this site now, it feels like you are just a visitor passing through, forced to read a select group of Revelife staff posts.

For this reason, people want to know and deserve to know how the Revelife staff defines quality content. In other words, would God select the posts that Revelife selects to be featured and if so why would He have selected those instead of the rejected submissions?

Most of us really enjoyed being able to look on the Recent Update blog roll to see what posts had been recently entered by Revelife COMMUNITY BLOGGERS!  Changing this may seem miniscule to the Revelife staff, but it is major to your Revelife community of bloggers.