Moksha

The Moksha Submissions System

Documentation

Here you will find documentation for the Moksha system. Use the search bar to find help on a specific topic.

AI Blocking, Filtering, and Tagging

Moksha has several features to help you deal with AI-generated submissions. While Moksha remains firmly agnostic about AI-generated works, we recognize some publishers wish to either block AI-generated submissions outright, or allow them through in certain limited cases. In the text below, we will show how you might use Moksha’s tools to block, filter, or flag AI-generated submissions.

To begin:

  1. Visit your Submission Type you wish to enable AI blocking, flagging, or tagging.
  2. In your Submission Type, click the “Edit” button at the top right.
  3. Then click on the “Form Fields” tab on the left.
  4. Scroll down to the “AI Blocking and Flagging” section.

Let’s go over each option in detail.

Enable AI blocking, filtering, and tagging
This option turns on a section in the submission form asking the author to affirm whether or not they used AI. This section is titled: “Author’s Affirmation on the Use of AI” and the text choices will be the two fields, explained below: Negative affirmation (the author DID NOT use AI), and Positive affirmation (the author used AI).

It will look similar to this:

Block all AI-generated submissions
If this option is set to YES, an author will not be able to submit if they affirm they used AI. If set to NO, the author will still be able to submit, however their submission will be flagged with the text from the Positive affirmation (the author used AI) field.

Tag human-created (non-AI) submissions with
Author-affirmed human-created (non-AI) submissions will be tagged with this Tag for easy filtering and searching. Chose the Tag from the dropdown list. Click on the “Add or Edit Tags” to add or edit existing tags.

Tag AI-generated submissions with
Author-affirmed AI-created submissions will be tagged with this Tag for easy filtering and searching. Chose the Tag from the dropdown list. Click on the “Add or Edit Tags” to add or edit existing tags.

Negative affirmation (the author DID NOT use AI)
This text is displayed as one of two affirmation options on the submission form. For best results, this text should ask the author to affirm they DID NOT use AI or other text-generation tools in the creation of the work. Moksha creates the default text of: “I submit that I DID NOT use AI or machine-learning tools to generate part or all of this work, and that this work IS fully my own human creation.” The text in this field will appear prominently on the reader’s/editor’s view of the submission.

Positive affirmation (the author used AI)
This text is displayed as one of two affirmation options on the submission form. For best results, this text should ask the author to affirm that they USED AI or other text-generation tools in the creation of the work. Moksha creates the default text of: “I submit that I USED AI or machine-learning tools to generate part or all of this work, and that this work IS NOT fully my own human creation.” The text in this field will appear prominently on the reader’s/editor’s view of the submission.

For best results, we recommend placing additional instructions in the Submission introductory message (Messages tab in your Submission Type) and your Guidelines page (edit link in Messages tab), describing one or more of the following:

  • Whether or not you accept AI-generated submissions
  • Whether or not you wish authors to explain how AI was used in their work in their cover letters
  • Why lying about using AI is plagiarism (i.e. representing work that isn’t your own as if it were) and how this might result in a permanent ban
  • What other repercussions there might be for lying about the authorship of the work

If you plan to block all AI-generated submissions, we suggest a statement similar to the following:
“We are not interested in stories for which the ‘traditional elements of authorship,’ as the U.S. Copyright Office describes it, were performed by AI or machine-learning tools. Spell-check, grammar-check, and AI-generated prompts that you then wrote your story from are acceptable, but we are not interested in any story where AI tools or text generators wrote or drafted any portion of the text. We consider authors who represent work as their own which is, in fact, machine-generated, whether whole or in part, to be plagiarism, and grounds for being permanently banned from this magazine. In short, DO NOT submit AI-generated works.”

Alternatively, if you plan to allow AI-generated submissions, and flag them in Moksha, you might ask the author:

  • Can you explain in detail how AI was used in the creation of the work?
  • Did you ask an AI for story prompts?
  • Did you have an AI translate the work into English?
  • Did you use machine learning to improve the grammar?
  • How much of the work is your own?
  • Anything else you’d like to disclose about the use of AI?

As this is a rapidly evolving topic, this page may change.

Hotkeys

Moksha has several hotkeys that you can use to quickly maneuver around submission pages:

Note that on a Mac the “Alt” key is known as the “Option” key.

  • Alt + N – Show/Hide Anonymized names
  • Alt + R – Reject submission (scrolls to reject form)
  • Alt + A – Accept submission (scrolls to accept form)
  • Alt + M – Leave comment (scroll to comment form)
  • Alt + B – Blocks submission (opens confirmation dialog)
  • Alt + P – Preview file (opens in new window)

Author Comments

Sometimes you may wish to give authors the ability to leave a comment on their submission, just as readers can. To do this, first you must enable Author Comments in your Submission Type:

  • Visit your Submission Type and click on the “Edit” button at the top-right to go into edit mode.
  • On the General tab, scroll down to Author-Facing Settings, and set “Allow author comments” to YES.
  • Click on the Save button at the bottom.

Now, when an author (who has submitted to this Submission Type) visits their submission status page, they will see a “Leave a comment” button that enables them to leave a comment on their submission.

When an author leaves a comment, the following people are notified via email:

  • The author themselves
  • The reader who has been assigned the submission, if any
  • If no reader is assigned, then the Submission Type editor(s) are notified
  • Any readers who are following comments on this submission

Important notes:

  • When the submission is marked closed, authors can no longer leave a comment
  • Authors can see all their comments on their status page, but no one else’s
  • Author comments are marked and highlighted on the submission page
  • Authors are limited to two comments every twenty-four hours

Adding Legal Names to Submissions

Sometimes authors or publishers need to know an author’s legal name, which may be different from their byline. For example, the legal name of the byline “James Tiptree, Jr.” was “Alice B. Sheldon.”

Moksha allows you to store author legal names in addition to author names (bylines) of submissions.

To enable this feature, do the following:

  • Visit the Submission Type where you want to enable the storing of legal names and click the “Edit” button.
  • On the “General” tab, under Legal Name, set “Ask for Legal Name:” to “YES”
  • Click “Save” at the bottom of the page to save your Submission Type settings.

Now in your submission form, you will see two fields for the author name instead of one, Byline and Legal Name:

In addition, submissions within that Submission Type will now display the Legal Name and Byline in the Details section:

Important Notes:

  • If the Legal Name exists for an author, it will be shown in the submission details, even if the option has been turned off for that Submission Type
  • Legal Names are associated with an author’s email address

 

 

 

New Submission Notifications

You can have Moksha automatically email one or more addresses each time a new submission comes in. This might be useful, for example, to have your new Moksha submissions appear in your Discord server **.

To configure this, do the following:

  1. Go to your Submission Type you wish to forward to Discord and click the “Edit” button at the top right.
  2. Click on the “Workflow” tab on the left.
  3. Scroll down to “New Submission Notifications” and click “Add Notification”.
  4. Choose the email/reader you wish to send to and whether or not you want to send an attachment.
  5. Click the “Add” button to save.

Now when any new submission comes into this Submission Type, it will be automatically emailed to this address with or without an attachment.

A few notes:

  • You will need to create the reader account if it doesn’t already exist.
  • The reader account must have access to the submission type to receive a notification from that type.

** to integrate email with Discord, see the Zapier integration tool.