It is your software. Change it.

Every editor who has used a hosted submission platform for more than one reading period has a list. Small things, mostly. The rejection email says something you would never say. The scoring is out of five and your readers think in threes. There is nowhere to put a content warning. The form asks for a cover letter you do not read and does not ask the one question you actually need answered.

On a platform, that list is a wish. You file it, someone thanks you for the feedback, and it joins ten thousand other wishes from customers who pay more than you do.

What magazines actually want to change

Not much, is the funny part. After running eight journals on this software, the changes that matter are nearly always the same handful.

Rejections that are not all the same rejection

The most common one, and the most human. Most magazines end up wanting at least three ways of saying no: the form decline, the one that says this was close and please send again, and the one that names the piece and means it.

A decision status and a message template are just rows and text. Add the tier you need, write the words you would actually say, and stop sending a poet who nearly made the issue the same paragraph you send to someone who submitted to the wrong genre.

Scoring your readers will actually use

Some magazines want a number. Some want yes, no, and argue about it. Volunteer readers will use a scale that matches how they already think and quietly ignore one that does not, which means a scale you cannot change is a scale you cannot trust.

The fields that are yours

Content warnings. Whether the writer has appeared in your pages before. Whether it is simultaneous, and where else it is out. Word count for a form that pretends everything is a poem. These are the questions that make a slush pile sortable, and they are different for every magazine.

Wording you can live with

The confirmation, the acceptance, the decline, the nudge when a revision has been waiting a fortnight. These are your magazine's voice speaking to writers at the moment they are most attentive to it. They should not be somebody's default copy with your name pasted in.

The thing you cannot do on a platform at all

Everything above is a preference. This next one is a capability, and it is the real argument.

Your submissions live in a MySQL database that you can query. That means you can ask your own magazine questions, and get answers, without asking anyone's permission:

• How many of the pieces we took last year came from writers we had never published before?
• Which of my readers' recommendations end up accepted, and which reader is quietly the best in the room?
• How long, honestly, are we making people wait, and is that number worse in the third month of a reading period?
• How many writers we declined in 2023 came back in 2025, and how many of those did we take?

That last question is the kind of thing a magazine's whole editorial character is made of, and on a hosted platform you simply cannot ask it. You can look at what the dashboard chose to show you. That is not the same as knowing your own operation.

What this actually takes

Green Submissions is plain PHP and MySQL, on purpose. There is no build step, no framework to learn, no compiled anything. The files that draw a page are the files you edit.

If you write a little code, the small changes are a text editor and ten minutes. If you do not, this is an hour of a freelancer's time, and any competent PHP developer can do it. Compare that against a year of subscription fees and it is not a close call, and unlike the subscription, you only pay for the change once.

Three rules, learned the hard way:

• Copy the file before you touch it. Keep the original next to it with a date on the end. When something breaks at eleven at night during a reading period, you want to be one file-rename away from working again.
• Do not undo the security. Every database query in this software uses a prepared statement, and that is what stops an injection attack from walking in. If you add a query, use a prepared statement too. Copy the shape of the ones already there and you will be fine.
• Write down what you changed. A text file in the install folder listing what you altered and when. Future you, or whoever inherits this magazine, will need it.

Make it look like your magazine

The submission pages carry your fonts, your colours, your logo, your header, because they are pages on your website rather than a tenancy inside someone else's product. A writer submitting to you should feel like they are still in your magazine, because they are.

That is not vanity. The submission form is where a writer forms their first real impression of how a magazine treats people. Yours should sound like you, look like you, and ask the things you care about.

You would never let a printer rewrite your masthead. Do not let a platform write your rejection letters.