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How the site worked: Story journey

1. Story would be submitted via the Contribute template, and would automatically appear as a link at the Editorial Desk.

2. Categoriser would read the story and put it into one or more relevant categories. The story would then be removed from the Editorial Desk, but a link to the story would appear in all its categories. The author could also access the story from his/her Personal Page. Due to the volume of stories coming in, not all stories were manually categorised. During the archiving phase of the project, unclassified stories were automatically classified with a naive Bayes classifier.

3. Some stories were marked as Editorial Picks - these are the ones which are starred in the archive as Recommended Stories. Stories marked as Editorial Picks could no longer be edited by the original contributor - they are thus 'locked', as they were at the time they were read by an editor. No stories were deleted from the site unless they broke the House Rules. Stories marked as Editorial Picks appeared at the top of their categories.

4. Editorial Picks were promoted from the front page in groups of 3 themed stories.

In addition to themes like D-Day, Rationing, British Army and Dunkirk, we tried to pick some unusual themes to reflect the varied topics covered by stories on the site:

Brothers

• My Brother the Hero: Killed Serving with the South Staffordshire Regiment
• Sixty Years On and Dad Still Misses His Brother Albert
• Lucky: Twin Brothers at War

Keeping clean

• Keeping Clean on Active Service
• The Jungle Bath Unit
• Soldiers' Bath Day

Penicillin

• I was a Penicillin Guinea-Pig
• Rome 1945 - Something Called Penicillin
• Wartime Nursing in Manchester

Telegrams

• A Devastating Telegram in PoW Camp
• The Telegram
• A 14-year-old Telegraph Boy in 1944

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