Back in 2009, The Big List Of Overdone SCP Cliches was posted. It was never a particularly well-constructed or useful list (it bears the dubious honor of being removed from the site's required reading and retroactively given the 'joke' tag) and was only up for three years before the user eric_h posted Cliches And You: An Educational Film, which did its darnedest to actually extract value from the page.
A few months after eric_h posted Cliches And You, he posted the Standard Form For Downvotes, which is a tongue-in-cheek attempt at listing out things that commonly get an SCP downvoted. It was vastly better than the cliche list and has been much better received (including the additions made throughout 2013), but being 14 years old at time of writing, it shows its age a bit.
So, my hope for this page is that it will serve as a supplement to the Standard Form for Downvotes (SFDV for short) the same way Cliches and You is to the Cliche List. I'm going to offer context and commentary on everything from the SFDV, with the benefit of a decade of hindsight and my unparalleled intellect.
Note that, while I do disagree with some of the list, none of this is meant as a dunk on eric_h — the SFDV was written in good faith and was never really meant to be taken this seriously.
[ ] You forgot to spellcheck.
[ ] You forgot to proofread.
[ ] You did not read, or decided to ignore "How to Write an SCP."
[ ] You posted an incomplete SCP to the main site.
[ ] Your formatting is incorrect.
[ ] You do not know the difference between its/it's; your/you're; there/their/they're.
[ ] I am not sure if you know how to write in English.
These just refer to problems that happen when people post prematurely — either the article needs more time in the oven, or the author needs more time in school. No shame in that, just come back when you're ready.
[ ] There is a severe deficiency in clinical tone.
Back in 2015, people were a lot squirrellier about articles that deviated from the standard way of presenting articles. An SCP was specifically a Foundation-written document about an anomaly and how they intend to contain it; serious deviations from clinical tone were considered erroneous. Most people also wanted a pretty firm dividing line between what could go in an SCP and what could go in a Tale.
Of course, if you're trying to write an SCP with clinical tone and fail to do so, that's still reason for someone to downvote. It's just that, nowadays, people are a lot more open to articles deliberately ignoring clinical tone.
[ ] You appear to have accidentally posted an article intended for the Shark Punching Center (SPC).
Back before it was like, an actual Group of Interest, 'Shark Punching Center' was a running joke about how people would typo SCP as SPC. That's what the SFDV is referring to here — it's a subset of 'You forgot to proofread.' Generally speaking, the presence of one or two minor errors like this shouldn't be cause for downvoting, but having such a well-known typo is usually a sign that the writing process was rushed, which causes other, more serious problems.
[ ] Self-upvotes are bad form; don't do that.
This actually used to be the case, but then the rules changed and now everyone is allowed to self-upvote. That said, downvoting for things other than the article's contents was against the rules for as long as I could remember, though, so I guess voting specifically to counteract self-upvotes was like… sanctioned as an exception??? The early site was crazy like that, we let people do basically anything. Except self-upvote.
[ ] If you had posted your idea in the Forum, 20 people would have told you not to write it.
These days, it's pretty rare for any idea to be overwhelmingly considered unfit for the site — the main exceptions are ideas that are bigoted or extremely insensitive, or which involve Dr. Bright. If you have an idea that's merely dumb or undercooked or memey, people are more likely to push you to improve it rather than scrap it outright.
[ ] If you had posted a draft in your sandbox, 20 people would have told you not to post it on the main site.
This encompass the things I mentioned in the last one plus just a general notion of "this is totally incompetent" or "that's really not what we do here". Something like this.
[ ] Your SCP is too much like SCP-__, and is not written well enough to get away with it.
Nobody really cares about this anymore unless it's like, one of the more famous SCPs. There's a ton of stuff on the site now and most people are only familiar with a small sliver of it, so it just feels silly to ding someone for playing in the same space as some random +50 article in Series 6.
[ ] Your SCP is a straight rip-off of __.
People do still care about this, but luckily it's kind of impossible to do it accidentally, so you shouldn't have to worry about it if you're acting in good faith.
[ ] Your SCP is on the Cliche List, and is not written well enough to get away with it.
Nobody cares about the Cliche List anymore.
[ ] You need to send your D & D monster/artifact/magic item/cursed magic item back to the Forgotten Realms.
This kinda has two components:
- Things that obviously take aesthetic and thematic inspiration from very common fantasy settings (Lord of the Rings, Dungeons and Dragons, things of that ilk) need to do more to stand out.
- There's generally an aversion to SCPs that seem to exist more as "things that would be interesting to have in a game" than "things that are interesting to read about on their own".
You can actually get around this one pretty easily by just writing the story to be about people having the kind of interesting fantasy interactions with the monster/artifact/magic item that they would normally get in a game, but you do have to write that story.
[ ] Rape is just not a good SCP topic/effect.
Back in the early days of the site, some people would casually include rape in their articles for shock value. It didn't take too long before we collectively realized that this kind of writing was neither good nor respectful, and collectively applied social pressure to keep people from writing more about rape. Eventually, writers started wanting to write SCPs about serious issues, and thus wrote about rape with the intent of actually reckoning with the reality of it. Some of these articles did so successfully, to great effect; others, in my estimation, aren't particularly better than the insensitive schlock we were getting back in the day.
You probably won't get downvoted just for writing about rape, but just because you can write something without it getting deleted, doesn't automatically mean you should. If you write about sexual assault and post it to the SCP Wiki, it will probably be viewed by at least one person who has experienced that kind of sexual assault. Try to do right by those readers in particular, not just your voters in general.
[ ] Neither is necrophilia. Your SCP should keep me up at night, but not because I'm wondering when you'll be arrested.
I assume the bit about wondering whether you'll be arrested is flippant, because I don't think anyone ever seriously thought that people were writing about necrophilia because they're necrophiliacs. They shouldn't think that, at least. But yeah you're probably fine to write about necrophilia if you really want to. Really the only sexual topics I can confidently say the readership will expect you to tread really really carefully on are rape and pedophilia.
[ ] There is no hook.
[ ] Meh.
[ ] It just didn't grab me; sorry about that.
These cover an article's failure to make readers care. That's a really nuanced and subjective topic that I don't really have the inclination to give advice about, but suffice to say that this will net you some downvotes and a lot of novotes. It won't get brought up in the discussion page very often, because people who don't care about an article are usually not interested in spending more time on it to leave a comment, but I think it's a very common problem.
[ ] Your -J isn't funny.
[ ] Your -J is really just a bad mainlist SCP.
Nobody writes -J's anymore, but "your comedy article isn't funny" is still a salient problem.
[ ] Your "Keter" SCP is just dangerous, not interesting.
Nobody cares about object classes anymore, but writers do still conflate 'dangerous' and 'interesting' sometimes. Danger can make things interesting, but it's not always the case, especially if you're describing a dispassionate SCP document.
[ ] The Description area doesn't describe your SCP.
[ ] I had to read half of your SCP before I could figure out what it does.
[ ] I read your entire SCP and still don't even know what it IS.
These are all about basically the same thing, but there's nuance here. The Description area not describing an SCP can be completely fine if you're playing up the Foundation's unwillingness or inability to deal with that topic, but for most SCPs, yeah you should probably use the Description section to describe the SCP. Pushing the SCP's actual anomalous properties or behaviors or whatever to later in the article is literally fine. Not really saying what the SCP is can be done for artistic effect and that's all good, but it can definitely be a problem if the information is just poorly communicated.
[ ] If your SCP "appears to be" an X, it should not actually be an X.
Basically, we all agreed that having an SCP document say the SCP "appears to be" an X, in the absence of any indication that it isn't X, was ascribing unnecessary skepticism to the Foundation. They'll believe their eyes until they're given a reason not to.
[ ] You [REDACTED] part of the containment procedures.
[ ] You [REDACTED] an entire incident report. Just because SCP-087 did it doesn't mean you should.
[ ] You [REDACTED] your main effect. Just because SCP-231 did it (more or less) doesn't mean you should.
[ ] You [REDACTED] the hook.
[ ] You [REDACTED] other things in a way that is silly.
I have… strong opinions on redaction, which I've stated elsewhere. I'll just paraphrase myself, actually:
The truth is that expungement, redaction, and blackboxing are really cool, and if you have five or six brain cells to rub together, you can do really cool stuff with them that more conventional forms of storytelling simply don't have access to. And if you're writing SCPs, you should be really interested in using the unique perks of the SCP format to craft unique reading experiences — why are you here otherwise?
I could take this opportunity to tell you what kind of redactions people do and don't downvote for in 2026, but I would rather you use this information to redact as you see fit.
[ ] You keep using the word "memetic." I do not think it means what you think it means.
Is this still a problem? I feel like people have moved on to other in-universe jargon to overuse. Thaumaturgic and the like. I'm willing to bet there are people who've referenced thaumaturgy in their articles without knowing what it is, because I'm one of them.
The phrasing here is a reference to The Princess Bride (1987). I haven't seen that movie, but every line from it has been quoted at me repeatedly, so I'm pretty sure I get the gist.
[ ] Your SCP compels people to use it for no reason.
[ ] Your SCP is just a __ that kills people.
[ ] Your SCP is just a __ that makes the user crazy. Or makes them crazy and then kills them.
The key words here are "for no reason" and "just". You can compel people or kill them or make them "crazy" as much as you want as long as you actually bother to say something interesting about it. That said, I think it's important to note that people on the site are expecting SCPs with mental compulsion effects to reckon with the gravity of the effect in question (i.e. if an SCP compels someone to disrobe, that is considered a very big deal) and for SCPs that affect a person's mental state generally to not play into ableist portrayals of "crazy" people.
[ ] Your "real life" SCP is less interesting than the real thing that it is based on.
I don't know how common this exact problem is, but you should expect your article about a Real Thing to be judged for its depiction of / relationship to that Real Thing.
[ ] Your SCP is a lame attempt to explain: [ ] Katrina [ ] Fukushima [ ] Tsunami in Indonesia [ ] (some other real-life disaster)
You can really tell when the SFDV was written, huh. I haven't seen people try to write "this real current event was actually caused by an SCP" in a while, and I imagine people would still balk at that, but you can get away with direct commentary about current events just fine. I'm probably one of like a handful of people on the site who actually get annoyed by articles which are ripped from the headlines.
[ ] The dialog in the interview log makes all of humanity look like complete morons.
That's an odd way of putting it, but yes, people don't like it when dialogue is stupid. There are resources for making your dialogue be non-stupid, go look for them or something.
[ ] The lack of common sense by all characters portrayed makes me want to light fire to my computer.
You can really tell when the SFDV was written, huh. But yeah, characters / organizations that are theoretically supposed to be competent probably shouldn't be shown doing obviously stupid things. It's the risk you run when writing characters who are smarter than you, and it can only be truly avoided by only writing characters who are dumber than you.
[ ] Your SCP enters a "rage state" and you were not writing about it visiting New Jersey.
New Jersey is one of the fifty eponymous 'states' in the United States of America. It is held in low regard by most Americans, and its residents are commonly stereotyped as being prone to bouts of anger.
Oh, the SCP thing, right. Yeah people will generally get annoyed if an anomaly that is stated or implied to be a sentient being instead has distinct states where it engages in rote, predictable behavior like it's a video game NPC. We stopped liking that sort of writing very early in the site's history and, with few exceptions, make few exceptions. "Rage states" were a particularly common thing for SCPs to have for some reason, maybe they still do have those I dunno.
[ ] The story of how your SCP was found is unbelievable.
Look up 'suspension of disbelief' if this confuses you.
[ ] Please remove:
— [ ] the incorrectly-edited title
Got a lot of entries here that are things which can, in theory, simply be removed from an SCP without requiring serious adjustments. An incorrect title (probably in reference to how wikidot defaults to something like "Scp 9999" when you go to create a page at /scp-9999, and you have to manually change it to "SCP-9999") is a bit off because you do actually need to have a page title for technical reasons, even if you use CSS to not have it on the page.
— [ ] the boring test log
— [ ] the boring supplemental pages
There's a particular art to incorporating test logs and supplemental pages into an SCP (I talk about it in my untitled essay) but a good rule of thumb is that SCPs shouldn't have boring sections.
— [ ] the non-metric measurements
This used to be more of a problem back when people, like, bothered to put measurements in their articles. But yeah metric should be the default for a scientific organization.
— [ ] the lolFoundation addendum
You can actually get away with this if it's genuinely funny and tonally appropriate to the rest of the article. "lolFoundation" is a term I don't particularly care to define, you'll pick it up somewhere.
— [ ] the "Tags" that you made up yourself
I'm pretty sure you're not allowed to downvote an article just for using unofficial tags (the tagging team will rectify it eventually), but if someone uses official tags to recontextualize the SCP in a way that you find disagreeable or puts it in a series/canon whose rules it doesn't follow, then I think it's allowed? There's nuance here.
— [ ] the Telekill reference
— [ ] the crosslink to SCP-173/500/682/914 (circle as appropriate)
Yeah nobody cares about this anymore. In fact, as the author slash co-author slash rewriter of Telekill, I give you permission to use it in any context you see fit.
— [ ] the random/excessive references to Clef/Bright/Gears/Rights/Kondraki/(insert other misused "canon" character here)
It's interesting that the overused Series 1 SCPs are a total no-go on the list, but the overused Series 1 author avatars are only downvoted for "random/excessive" usage. The only one of these you definitely shouldn't use is Dr. Bright, and like lowkey I think Dr. Rights was never a good or interesting character so you're better off ditching her, but otherwise nobody cares if you wanna use the rest of them. It will put your SCP in dialogue with all the other uses of that character on the site, though, so watch out.
— [ ] the lame joke about sharks and/or bees
The site has a particular history with sharks (the Shark Punching Center + a bad coldpost that mentioned someone's teeth 'becoming "shark"') and bees (Bees) such that people used to think it was especially funny to bring them up. I don't think people would hate a joke about sharks or bees as long as it doesn't rely on the reader finding those animals inherently funny.
[ ] Your SCP breaks my suspension of disbelief. Specifically, because of:
— [ ] Incorrect science
— [ ] Technobabble
— [ ] Anachronisms
— [ ] The combat scene that should have "Yakety Sax" playing in the background.
— [ ] an Agent finding the SCP: on his doorstep/in a weird little shop/on the beach while vacationing/(insert ridiculous story here).
The only one of these I would say you should definitely avoid without a very good reason is 'incorrect science'. I'm personally not the biggest fan of technobabble, but objectively, it probably won't get you downvoted unless it's like really really egregious. The rest are things you can totally get away with if you're self-aware about it.
[ ] Your SCP has a containment area that is:
— [ ] a vastly-oversized cube
— [ ] 2-dimensional
99 times out of 100 you shouldn't need to specify the height of a containment area. The exception is if verticality is important to the anomaly, like if it needs space to bounce around or something. Hell, people will usually just say something like "standard containment locker" or "standard humanoid housing" or whatever and give no numbers at all.
That said, when people do see fit to specify a size for a Containment chamber, they often choose weird numbers because they don't have a good sense of scale. So I guess just like, do your research before you write down numbers.
— [ ] 6-dimensional
Someone once made a coldpost where the containment chamber had six listed spatial dimensions. Like it was 2m x 2m x 2m x 2m x 2m x 2m or something. This is a reference to that.
— [ ] made of titanium (or other inappropriate materials).
You usually shouldn't need to specify what a containment chamber is made of, and if you do, anything that isn't obviously stupid will let you avoid downvotes. Titanium is, in most cases, obviously stupid.
— [ ] excessively specific for no reason
This is still correct.
— [ ] nonexistent; the SCP is allowed to wander around the site.
If a sentient anomaly is like, obviously not hostile and not dangerous, you're probably fine to let it wander the halls, but you should specify its housing situation even if the anomaly doesn't have to be there all the time. Up to you though, people aren't too harsh about containment procedures these days.
[ ] The containment procedures make no sense, or are completely inappropriate to what the object does.
People generally expect articles to make sense unless you signpost that Something Is Wrong With This Article by using, like, really jarring and strange nonclinical tone.
[ ] Your SCP is only "uncontainable" because you were too lazy to think of something.
People generally expect the Foundation to try pretty hard to contain anomalies, so it does come off as lazy if they don't at least give a good reason why something isn't contained.
[ ] Your humanoid SCP is:
— [ ] an "X-Man" or super-villain.
— [ ] just another D & D monster.
— [ ] using the Foundation like it was a hotel.
— [ ] getting what it wants because we wouldn't like it when it's angry.
People used to be so picky about what you were allow to do with humanoids. I think we just didn't like the kind of people who wanted to use the site to write about cool characters, which isn't really the case anymore.
I think if a humanoid posted today was merely any of these things it would probably still get downvoted, but it's very obvious to me and fairly obvious to most people that these are all perfectly viable plot elements that can be used in service of a larger story, or which can be the subject of interesting subversion or commentary.
— [ ] a bad self-insert/"Mary Sue."
I dunno, I wanna say Mary Sue-ness is a "you know it when you see it" thing, but I've seen people call Able a Mary Sue which is fucking ridiculous if you actually read the article, so I think this might just be shorthand for "any humanoid a normal person might want to be"??? I'm sure there are a million billion blog posts online about what a Mary Sue is and isn't, you don't need to hear my thoughts on it. Anyways yeah people do get annoyed at this sometimes.
— [ ] something really obvious from another medium, in SCP form. Slenderman, this means you.
Yeah you shouldn't do this. Unless it's like, commentary on that thing. But even then you'll probably get downvotes.
[ ] Your picture is:
— [ ] A hand-drawn "artist's impression" of your SCP.
You can get away with this if there's an in-universe reason not to have a photo or if it's like, a really really good drawing. Otherwise, no.
— [ ] 27MB, and hosted off-site.
— [ ] Borked.
Tech team probably has guidance about this. I can't be bothered to find it and hotlink it. Follow that.
— [ ] Something another SCP already uses.
I've actually done this and I know for a fact that nobody cares unless it's a really well-known article.
— [ ] Completely different from what is described in the text.
Yeah, generally if you have a picture that's captioned "this is the thing in the article" and it doesn't match what's described in the article, people won't like that.
— [ ] A movie still, or some other well-known thing.
A movie still specifically would get ganked for Creative Commons generally, but other immediately recognizable stuff should still be avoided unless you're like, also offering commentary on that thing. If someone does happen to recognize a photo you used, they'll give it a pass as long as it's relatively obscure.
— [ ] Watermarked.
— [ ] Obviously computer-generated.
— [ ] Too photoshopped.
— [ ] Not photoshopped enough.
— [ ] Not photoshopped at all, but looks photoshopped.
Lowkey as long as people like the rest of the article they'll give you a pass on pictures having something like, moderately wrong with them. They know how hard it is getting good pictures under the Creative Commons regime, they know this is all fictional, they're not gonna be too harsh unless it's impossible to ignore.
… and the form just kind of ends there. It's a really interesting time capsule and I definitely enjoyed meditating on it. I think the most glaring omission from a modern perspective is anything relating to CSS, which was basically never used back in 2012 but would certainly be mentioned in a present-day iteration of the Standard Form for Downvotes.
A Final Note
If you get downvoted on the SCP Wiki you die in real life.