There are 2 different urls that are used for users to contribute articles, so i hacked every mention of "/submit.php?type=story" and "/submit.php?type=story&topic=topicname"
into
/submit/story/
and
/submit/story/topicname/
Then created a new folder called submit and then created a .htaccess document in this new folder. the Mod_Rewrite rules in this doc are:

RewriteBase /submit/
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^(.*)/(.*)/$ /submit.php?type=$1&topic=$2 [NC,L]
RewriteRule ^(.*)/$ /submit.php?type=$1 [NC,L]