The morning starts off full of promise. The coffee is strong, the sun is shining but it’s nice and cool in the house thanks to the invention of air conditioning, the dogs haven’t knocked everything off the coffee table during their morning WWF regime and ideas for new articles are stewing in the front of your brain for once rather than the back of your mind.

The keyboard awaits your arrival. As soon as you set your coffee cup on the desk the computer’s light flashes green accompanied by an all to familiar beep and the screen jumps to life. It’s ready to satisfy your every whim. There’s not much else on the planet that compares to the comfortable and cozy relationship you have with the computer.

You get settled into your chair, ready to ride the wave of inspiration. Today you will submit not just one, but multiple articles. You will build your que and fill it content that you know will well.

So you sign into Associated Content and check the C4Cs for anything that looks good and within minutes your googling your way into internet space on a quest to find out what the top 5 fashion magazines in Europe are.

All is going well. The writing flows, the editing is fairly easy and painless and then you go to submit your article.

For some reason the submission template is out of whack and it starts eating your article. Oh crap. Better look and see if anyone in the forums is experiencing this problem.

That sounds easy enough. Or so you think. As soon as you get to the forums you quickly realize there are other people having the same problem. So you post a reply to one of the threads and go off on your merry way to read one of the other 200 posts about submission template problems.

After reading 198 threads you decide to return to the original post where you read. You can’t find it. You’re tired and have all but given up submitting your article. Only after letting your eyes drift to the banner ad on the left side of the screen did you see a link to your latest posts. If only you had known that was there.

If only there weren’t so many forums to sift through to try to find threads I’ve visited before. If only there weren’t so many forums that everyone is posting the same thing in several different forums.

Several tries and several hours later you at last manage to get the submission template to work. You article goes through and you keep your fingers crossed that your CM will review it soon.

I wonder how the content producers who do not visit the forums deal with the issues AC is currently experiencing. How are they notified of changes that take place that are only announced in the forums? I wonder how the recent forum changes have impacted their experience as a content producer if it does at all.

There are plenty of experiences at Associated Content. Unfortunately this is a look at what it’s like to deal with AC. Some CPs have it worst and some have it better. I find that to be strange.

While one content producer may not be getting email notifications another might be getting duplicate notifications. We are all dealing with the growing pains Associated Content is experiencing so let us all endeavor to create the best AC possible and keep our fingers crossed that when we come out on the other side of these “updates” that it all works out in the wash.

I’d like to think it will anyway.