Nothing publishes without a human clicking Approve. This is a hard rule in MAEL, not a setting you can turn off — every content workflow stops here before anything goes live.

Where to find things waiting on you

Approvals

Sidebar → Approvals. Every pending decision across your whole workspace — content, technical changes, anything that needed a human checkpoint.

Content → Review queue

The same list, narrowed to just content awaiting editorial sign-off. Reachable from ContentReview queue button.
A red badge on the Approvals sidebar item shows how many items are pending right now — you’ll always know at a glance.

Reviewing one approval

[SCREENSHOT NEEDED: An approval card showing the artifact snapshot, comment box, and Approve/Reject buttons] Each pending item is a card showing:
  • What it is (the title)
  • When it was requested, and by which check
  • What level of approval it needs (a badge, e.g. content, publishing, technical)
  • An SLA deadline, if one applies — turns red if it’s overdue
  • The actual thing you’re approving — for content, this is the article itself (or its evaluation summary), shown right in the card. You are never asked to approve something blind.

Making a decision

1

Read what's shown in the card

For content, read the draft (or its evaluation scores/findings) before deciding — see Understand Your Results for what the scores mean.
2

(Optional) Add a note

The comment box under the content is optional but recommended, especially if you’re rejecting — it’s saved to the permanent audit trail and (for rejections) is the only signal anyone gets about what to fix.
3

Click Approve or Reject

  • Approve → the workflow resumes and continues toward publishing (or whatever the next step is).
  • Reject → the workflow stops that path — for content, it does not silently retry; someone needs to decide what happens next (re-trigger a refresh, edit manually, or abandon it).
Once you decide, the card disappears from your queue immediately.

Common mistakes

Approving without reading the artifact. The whole point of this checkpoint is a real human judgment call — especially for medical/YMYL content, where an unchecked factual error has real consequences.
  • Rejecting without a comment — the workflow stops, but nobody (including future-you) will remember why. Always leave a note.
  • Confusing review_required with a pending approval — an article that failed the automatic quality gate becomes review_required and won’t appear in your approval queue at all until someone investigates why it failed first. See Understand Your Results.

Next: Dashboard Features