Fanfic Forum Rules and Guidelines

This board is only for fanfic. The board is moderated, meaning that any post you make will not be visible to anyone but yourself and moderators/administrators until it is approved by an administrator or moderator. We will check the board at least once every 24 hours to approve posts, but between the group of us, posts are usually approved much sooner than that. The rule is very simple: If it's fanfic (Buffy or Angel related), we'll approve it. If it's not fanfic, we won't approve it. If your post isn't approved within 24 hours or so, you can assume that it wasn't approved. If you question this, please PM or email Jamie Marie ( ) with details.

This also means that replies to posts will not be approved (unless they are a continuation of the fanfic). So if you're a writer who desires feedback, please post your email address for users to send feedback to, or invite them to private message you.

Before your post is approved, it will be visible to you (but NOT to other users). You may edit it or delete it before it's approved, if necessary.

If you wish to discuss another aspect of fanfic (for example, to request a topic of fanfic, or ask for ideas), please use the Watcher's Diary. This way, the post can be deleted automatically after a certain amount of time (something which happens in all forums except for the fanfic forum).

Fanfic with multiple parts: If your fanfic is very long (more than 3,000 words), you'll probably wish to divide it into multiple parts. Please post the parts as replies to the first part. For example, post Part 1, then hit Reply and post Part 2. Then hit Reply again and post Part 3. This serves multiple purposes -- it allows more stories (and more authors) to fit on each page of the forum, it allows readers to easily find all the parts of a story, and it allows the reader to read it all at once, in flat mode, if they so desire. When you post a new part, the post will automatically rise to the top of the forum. If you wish, you can also edit the subject of the first part to indicate that a new part has been added, or that the story is complete.

Subsequent parts of fanfic (parts 2, 3, etc.) will only be approved if they are posted as replies to the first part. This means that you can't post subsequent parts until the first part has been approved. However, once the first part has been approved, you can post each subsequent part as a reply to the FIRST part. (We strongly suggest posting them in chronological order, so that readers can view the fanfic in flat mode and read it all at once, in order.)

Please divide the fanfic into reasonably sized parts. Each part should be at least 2,000 words (unless it's a short one-parter), and not much more than 3,000 words (not including markup). If you have a program such as Microsoft Word, you can simply paste the fanfic in there (or type it there in the first place) and do a Word Count (in most or all versions of Microsoft Word, this option is directly under Tools). To help you visualize this, check out the following links: This one is a little over 3,200, and this one is a bit less than 1,000.

No pornography, extremely graphic violence, ridiculously excessive and graphic swearing, or anything else that, if it were a movie, would keep it from getting an R. Anything up to and including R-rated is fine, but if we feel that it's more like X than R, out it goes. No, we don't have a good working definition of what's OK, but we know the bad stuff when we see it — and most of you probably know it when you write it. If you're concerned, send us an excerpt of the more graphic parts, and we'll let you know. Don't worry too much about it and censor yourself unnecessarily, just keep it at the back of your mind.

Nothing even remotely verging on "kiddie porn." That means no smut or sexual content involving Dawn, or anyone else under the age of 18.

Subjects: Your best bet is to make the title of your fanfic the subject of your post. Also please state what realm you'd place it in (Comedy, Action, Drama, Romance, etc.) and what rating you'd give it (R, PG, etc.). (See Ratings.) This way people with limited time can choose which ones they are most interested in reading. For example: "Willow Goes to Hollywood" - Comedy/Romance - PG-13. That particular example is only 51 characters — you have 80 to work with, so you should be OK. If you have trouble fitting it, try eliminating any unnecessary characters (such as quotation marks and hyphens), abbreviate the category (Cmdy/Rmnc) or abbreviate your title somehow ("Willow...Hollywood" or "Willow Goes...").

Title: "Willow Goes to Hollywood"
Category: Comedy/Romance
Rated: PG-13 (some making out)
Characters: Willow, her mother, a new man (no pun intended)
Summary: When Willow's mom suddenly wants to bond, the two head to Hollywood for the weekend. Willow ends up separated from her mother, and has to make her way around Holly-weird on her own -- until she meets an interesting man who shows her the way. Takes place after "Goodbye Iowa," and therefore includes spoilers up to that episode.

The rest is pretty much up to you. You'll probably want to make some effort to make it easily legible by readers — make the names bold, make each name a different color, double space, etc. See the this page for details on all the markup tags you may wish to use.

The way to do this is to use the Search function:

1. Click on the "Search" link from below the banner.
2. In the first drop-down box, labeled "Forum to search," choose "Fanfic Forum."
3. In the "Words to search for" box, type the Username EXACTLY as it appears on their posts.
4. In the drop-down box labeled "Search options," choose "By Username."
5. In the last drop-down box, labeled "Date Range," choose whatever time frame you desire. If you want to make sure you find all of their posts, the simplest way is to choose "All posts."
6. In the very last box, type in the number of results you wish to see on each page.
7. Click "Submit." You will be taken to all of the posts that the given username has made in the Fanfic Forum. Directly above the resulting posts, at the right, you will see the "Up One Level" button — this will take you back to the search page. You may also see the "Next" button. If you do, this means that there are more posts; click it to go to the next page of results.
8. Note that there is another way to see ALL of a user's posts — click on their linked name to go to their profile, and click "Show all user's posts." Of course, this will show all of their posts from ALL of the boards, so you could end up with a very long list to search through.

Perhaps you wish to create a link to your other fanfics, or to a previous part of your fanfic (if it was posted before the Reply requirement was implemented). Here's how:

1. First, find it. You can use the Search function exactly as above to find all of your posts in the Fanfic Forum, or use it to search for that specific post — choose the Fanfic Forum, enter a couple of the words from the title or a couple of descriptive words that you KNOW are in the text, choose the Search Option "And" or "Entire Phrase" (only if you're certain the words appear together), and choose the Date Range you think it falls within (or "All posts"), and click Submit. Or you can view your own profile and click "Show all user's posts," but again, you'll probably get a much bigger results list to wade through.
2. Once you've found it, go to it. Make sure you're at the exact post that contains the fanfic you wish to link to. Copy the full URL exactly as it appears in the location bar of your browser. Go back to (or go start) your new post.
3. In the spot where you wish to place the link, type the following:
   
   [url=COPY THE EXACT, FULL URL HERE] Type the text you want users to see here, such as "My other fanfic" [/url]
   
   For example, [url=http://www.buffyguide.com/cgi-bin/wwwthreads/showthreaded.pl?Cat=&Board=test&Number=17267&page=0&view=collapsed&sb=5]Click here[/url] results in: Click here.

   Note: You do not have to include the full URL — all you really need is everything up to and including the post number. So, using the sample URL from above, you could remove everything after the post number, resulting in:

   Please view [url=http://www.buffyguide.com/cgi-bin/wwwthreads/showthreaded.pl?Cat=&Board=test&Number=17267] this post [/url].

   However, be very careful to include the FULL post number — if you accidentally delete any of the digits, your link won't work.

4. To save yourself the trouble of having to find the other parts, you may wish to bookmark them as you post them; perhaps even creating a separate folder for them. This could be easier in the long run.

G = Suitable for all ages.
PG = May not be suitable for young children.
PG-13 = May not be suitable for persons under the age of 13.
R = May not be suitable for persons under the age of 17.

You do not have to use these ratings (though they're probably easiest to squeeze into the subject) if you don't wish, especially if you're not exactly sure which it falls into. You could simply describe it, such as, "Rating: I would let my 12-year-old read this, but not my five-year-old" or "I would be terribly embarrassed for my mother to know that I wrote this smut!" Whatever you're comfortable with, as long as you give the reader some idea of what to expect. Some only like to read the slightly naughty stuff, some only like to read the clean-cut stuff, etc.