Hi all - not sure if this is the right place to ask, but I've got a Medium publication on which I've published a number of submissions from other authors. That is to say, they write a "draft" on their own Medium account then submit it to my publication. I then publish it to mine. I have two questions about this, to which various Google searches have failed to provide answers: 1. I assume that it is not a good idea for the submitter also to publish the article they are submitting to me on their own Medium as well. I'm not sure why it would be bad exactly though, and I note that Medium does not prevent it. Does anyone know of any pros/cons of having the article on both places? 2. As far as I can tell, if the submitter edits or deletes their article, it is also edited/deleted on my publication. Is that right? If so, that's a bit of a problem if (for example) their account is hacked and the hacker edits their article with something embarrassing or illegal. Is there some way I can control that (ie stop edits from appearing on my publication)? Thanks for any help!
Having done some further investigation on this , the answer to 1 is "probably", since it would produce duplicate content so the Google bot might rank you down. Unfortunately, once a story has been published on Medium, it can only be deleted (not un-published). So if a submitter has published in two places, they have to delete and submit again. And you as the publication owner can't tell if they have duplicated or not without looking at their home page (and if they don't publish during submission, they can publish at any time later). The answer to 2 is "yes". So if you have a publication and one of your submitters edits or deletes an article, there's nothing you can do about it. I haven't found any publication owners complaining that they have suddenly seen embarrassing or illegal content appear on their sites, but it could happen in theory. One to watch. You can delete articles once you discover the issue though, luckily. Incidentally - along the way I have concluded that Medium is perhaps the most ridiculously badly designed system I have ever used on the web. Endlessly confusing, it forces you to hunt down commands that are then very hard to remember how to get back to. It adopts the practice of mostly hiding features you don't have permission to access rather than showing them in a disabled state, and generally feels like it's been designed by somebody who has never designed a website before. Very strange.
