I just got a note from a staff member, who rejected a perfectly good summary for a show episode, and their reason was because of something called a Hard Return, which this person said they had been seeing in my submissions a lot.

They did not inform me what a hard return was so I had to find out by doing a Google search. Apparently it is a carriage return such as hitting the enter key after a sentence is finished. The staff person could have at least told me that. So now I know. But I am not adding a hard return after any sentence in my submissions. So I wrote back and told them that they should be overly specific in their explanations of things. This should go without reason and we ask all staff who are the ones who approve submissions to please do that. Never assume we know what you are talking about. But I also think that the submission should not have been rejected for this. There were no spelling errors. The grammar was perfect. And the summary was well written.

A technical glitch is no reason to reject my submission and put another rejection in my stats! Are these staff members trained at all? And since we can't respond back to them, there's no way to correspond to find out what the heck the reason was or what can be done!

In my note back to the staff member that I included with my resubmission of a carefully written and formatted summary, I suggested that it may be a problem with the way the form was reacting to Firefox, since we've had some real problems submitting lately. Or that it may be the site software here considering all the bugs we've experienced lately. I have not heard back from them yet.

Anyone else experiencing this? Anyone else gotten a PM from staff about Hard Returns? And do you think this is a good reason for a perfectly good submission to be rejected?

*****

UPDATE!!!

In the time is took to write here in the forum, the staff member did return my message. Here is the response:

"No error, we see it from a number of people who confirm the problem. What it means is that the last character in your summary is not a period, but that you've entered a hard return (or Enter, or Return, or whatever the key is labeled on your keyboard when you wish to start a new line) at the end of it, generating white space between the last line and the bottom of the frame, as confirmed on many occasions.

---

You get a gap as above between the last line and ---. best way to fix is to put the cursor to the right of the period and hold down the delete key, removing everything to the right of the cursor. Thank you for your time."

Well, I can guarantee that there is NO other character or white space to the right of my final period. So it must again be a problem between the forms here and the Firefox browser, or just the site software in general, especially if it is showing up from multiple editors, most of who use FireFox! This should be looked into by engineers.

* * * UPDATE 2

I've been told that it is hard to read my posts! So I have changed the font from Comic Sans, which many folks may not have, to standard Arial and now at 10pt font size! So you should be able to read it. Let me know if you can or can't!