Rules and Posting Guidelines

TL,DR: Don’t steal other people’s stuff, don’t harass anyone, and don’t post random romance novels with Buffy character names.

• No plagiarism. Reports of plagiarism will be fully investigated by the administration, and anyone found to have plagiarized will be banned from the site.
• Be respectful of others. There will be no discrimination (based on someone’s race, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, religion,  diet, etc.) within comments.
• No all human fics. If, during the course of a story, the characters are turned into completely normal humans, that’s allowed. The world of Buffy the Vampire Slayer is just as important as the characters themselves, and many fans were drawn to the show in part because of its paranormal elements. Please keep those elements intact.
• We do not allow fanfics that feature the actual actors, just the characters themselves. The actors may exist and possibly randomly stop for coffee in Sunnydale, but should not be a major component of any story.
• No depictions of underage sex.
• All fanfics must be properly rated.

• Free speech and the expression of opinions is encouraged, but hate speech is not allowed.
• Be respectful of others. There will be no discrimination (based on someone’s race, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, religion,  diet, etc.) in the chat room.
• No screen capping of the chat room and sending it to others without the express permission of everyone whose words are shown. You are more than welcome to screen cap to keep an easy to find record of fanfic ideas, or as proof of harassment to send to the chat admins (the chat room is a separate entity from the WotS site, so please contact the chat admins if harassment occurs, not the WotS admins), Screen capped snippets can also be shared one-on-one to a friend to show them what is the chat is like if they’re considering joining. They cannot be sent to third party people/groups, even if they’ve been mentioned. If they want to know what is being said, they can join themselves. Screen caps cannot be posted to online areas, unless the express permission of everyone shown speaking has been given. This is a zero tolerance policy that will result in immediate banning.

• When adding a new story, it’s recommended that you click on the Screen Options tab on the upper right side and set the page as one column.
• A disclaimer is not necessary, as one automatically shows at the bottom of every story’s table of contents page.
• Genres, Ratings, and Spuffy Levels are mandatory. Categories and warnings are not.
• If none of the genres currently available feels right for your story, feel free to contact an admin about the possibility of adding one that does. There is a contact page under Site Info, and one of us can usually be reached in the chat room linked under Community. The chat room option allows for more back and forth conversation, as we currently can’t respond directly to feedback left on the Contact page.
• Please DO NOT rate your stories based on language. If the only thing in your story keeping it from getting a PG-13 rating is swear words, then the 13+ rating is fine. This is fanfiction, not film or TV, and no one is going to be traumatized by reading the word “fuck” more than once.
• Under categories, we have both AU and Divergence as options. On this site, an AU is considered a story where there is a fundamental change to canon. Such as Willow or Cordelia being the slayer instead of Buffy. Or Spike being a modern day human instead of one born in the 1800s and turned into a vampire. Divergence is a story that veers off-canon due to someone doing something different/making a different decision, even it’s a non-canon character who never even shows up in the story.
• A reader interaction link is not necessary. Authors cannot reply directly to reviews, but they can create a thread for their stories here on our forum (no signup/registration is necessary to create threads or comment on the forum). The Reader Interaction Link for each story would go to the thread created for the specific story and allow authors and readers to directly interact.
• Story covers/banners are not required. Nor are series names. That’s only for if your story is part of a series that you are writing.
• When putting in a banner for your story, all you have to do is paste a link to the image in the blank line under Story Cover
• After adding your first chapter, be sure to scroll up and hit the publish button.
• Some word processors don’t play nice with the chapter editor, but there’s a fix for that. If you don’t like how your chapter looks, go to the All Chapters section under Stories (where you go to create your story and add chapters) and find the chapter you want to change. Alternately, go into that chapter from your story table of context and scroll down to the bottom. Press the edit button and simply cut and then paste what’s already there. It should be fixed (expect for extra spacing. That’s an issue with many fanfiction sites, and the fix for that is to go into your story document and replace instances of a double space with a single space. In Word, this can be done by replacing ^p^p with ^p ). Italics and such are kept, but scene breaks might need to be centered.
• We do not allow All Human stories (unless it is a situation where something happens in-story that turns the characters into normal humans as part of a major plot point) or stories that are about the actors instead of the characters.