Read This First! Forum Rules, Guidelines, and FAQ
Welcome to the General Advice 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 general writing advice and technical assistance. For brainstorming or discussing rough ideas, please go to the Ideas Critique forum. For detailed feedback or critique on drafts, please go to the Help: Drafts Critique forum.
- Please do not post entire drafts to the forum. Instead, go to the SCP Sandbox Wiki, create a single page with your name as the title, and link that in your thread. Please do not create a new page for each new draft you create. This helps us fight clutter on the sandbox.
- Please read How to Write an SCP first. This guide covers most of the basics of writing an SCP, and should be your first resource for any questions. Please note that there are multiple tabs, including ones for formatting and the standard templates.
- Please consult Wikidot Wiki Syntax if you have questions about basic formatting.
- Please be patient! It can take a while for a team member to get around to your thread. If you need a faster response, please consider the IRC Chat.
Mackenzie's Personal Suggestions
- 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.
- 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.
