Behind the scenes: the Studio Desk

Readers see the finished page. Behind it sits the Studio Desk, the workspace where studio staff write, check and publish everything on convergencestudios.net. Here is how it works.

Add something

Most new pieces start with a button called Add something. It offers three choices: a wiki entry, a news story or a world. Each one walks the writer through a few short steps, with a sentence of help beside every field.

While they type, a preview of the page draws itself beside the form in the site's own styles, so the writer sees what readers will see. Drafts save themselves a moment after each change. Every picture needs a one-sentence description, which is what people who cannot see the picture will hear.

Checked before it goes live

A writer finishes by pressing Send for review. A publisher then reads the draft and either publishes it or sends it back with a note. An approval belongs to the exact version the publisher read. If the writer edits again, the approval is cancelled and the new version needs its own.

Publishers can also schedule a piece to go live at a set time. Every save is kept as a revision that can be compared with the current draft and restored.

Dates in the fiction stay as written

Stories set in the Convergence carry dates from their own calendar, such as October 32th, 22 ATF. The Desk stores those exactly as the writer gives them and never turns them into calendar dates. Separate fields decide where a moment sits on the timeline.

Who does what

Contributors write drafts. Editors edit and upload pictures, publishers review and publish, and administrators look after accounts and settings. Staff accounts come by invitation only, and owners and administrators confirm each sign-in with a code from an authenticator app.

The Desk itself stays private. What it produces is all over the site, from the news to the wiki.