Read This First! Forum Rules and Guidelines
Welcome to the Drafts and Critiques forum!
Please read the following rules and guidelines to better help us help you!
Forum Rules
- Read all of the required reading first. This should go without saying.
- This forum is for full drafts only. For brainstorming or discussing rough ideas, please go to the Help: Ideas and Brainstorming forum.
- Please do not post entire drafts to the forum. Instead, go to the SCP Sandbox Wiki, create a single page with your username as the page name, and link that in your thread. Please do not create a new sandbox page for each new draft you create. This helps us fight clutter on the sandbox.
- Please use the standard template(s) in How to Write an SCP. This isn't just to get you in the practice of using said templates, it's because not using them can make SCP articles difficult to read.
- Please use spell check! Almost all modern word processors and web browsers check spelling for you, so having a huge amount of spelling errors is inexcusable. Not to mention, it also makes you look extremely rushed and it affects how people react to your writing.
- Please be patient! As with all forums, there is often a turnaround time before people have time to notice, read, and critique your draft. Give it a few hours, preferably a day or so for everyone to get around to reading and processing your draft.
Mackenzie's Personal Suggestions
- Please remember that this forum is for detailed feedback. Needless "me-too" posts are not only unnecessary clutter but generally rude as well. If you have nothing further to add, don't jam up a thread just to say you agree with someone else's advice or sentiment.
- If you are new or not an established contributor yet, please defer to more experienced authors. We value everyone's opinion, but advice from established authors and senior staff is much more valuable to someone asking for feedback for the first time.
- Please do not jump on new threads if you are new yourself. Give the veteran members a chance to respond first to draft threads. Not doing so can result in a harmful newbie feedback loop.
- If you are presenting personal opinion, please do not use authoritative or absolute language. If you dislike something personally but the author has not done anything objectively wrong, it is rude to say that they should "never" do something.
- Be concise. Please don't spam threads with line-by-line breakdowns if all you're going to do is to mock individual lines without actually giving useful feedback, or if there's only one or two points that you're making. The longer and more verbose your post is, the less likely anyone's actually going to read it.
- Use SCP-XXXX instead of a specific number in drafts. This is a good habit to get into as you aren't allowed to reserve a specific slot and this lets you search-and-replace "XXXX" with your final number when you are ready to post, in the case that someone took the slot while you were writing.
- However, don't put "SCP-XXXX" in the title of your forum thread. It's kind of pointless, and just clutters up the directory. It also doesn't help to put "New Draft" or anything similar, as all drafts in this forum are, by nature, pretty much all new. Please put the name of your SCP (as it would appear on the Series list) as the title instead.
- Don't be discouraged! We are a well-established community with extremely high standards. Don't be discouraged if your early work is rejected; instead, learn from your mistakes and make yourself better. That said…
- Take feedback to heart. If a large number of people, especially senior staff, try to convince you that your idea isn't viable or won't work out, you need to seriously consider their advice. In the case of senior staff, these are people who were promoted for their community contributions and are generally able to tell when something has no chance of survival.
- Please be patient! Stated twice for emphasis: It often times takes days or even weeks to polish a viable idea into a good final draft. Impatience and/or believing that you can crank out a high-quality piece of work in under an hour is not a good mindset to have, and will likely result in poor reception.
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