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giftstuck2013-09-30 04:53 pm
giftstuck_mods) wrote in giftstuck2013-09-30 04:53 pm
AO3 Posting Guide
Many of you already know how to post your works to Archive of Our Own, but since the site can be complicated for newcomers, this guide should be of some help for those of you who are new.
This guide is for posting your work once it's all complete. If you're looking for instructions on how to sign up, those are in this post.
How to post your work on Ao3!
1. Go to your assignments page. (You can find it from the sidebar on your dashboard. The direct URL should be archiveofourown.org/users/YOURUSERNAME/assignments) There you'll see your Giftstuck assignment. Once you've completed your work, click the "Fulfill" button. This will take you to the "Post new work" page with the exchange-relevant fields filled out.
2. Fill out the necessary fields at the top of the page in the "Tags" section. Some tips:
3. The preface section is where your work title and summary go. You can also add author's notes either at the beginning or the ending of the work.
4. The associations section should have three sections auto-completed if you came here from your assignments page: "Does this fulfill a challenge assignment?", "Post to Collections / Challenges", and "Gift this work to". If these successfully autocompleted, leave them alone. If for whatever reason they did not, then check the ticky box next to the proper open assignment, enter "Giftstuck" for the collection/challenge, and type in your recipient's name in the "gift to" section.
If your fill includes pesterlog formatting, you may want to select "Homestuck Skin" from the "Custom Stylesheet" dropdown. More on that in the next section.
5a. If your fill is a fanfic: Paste the text of the fic into the "Work Text" box. The site won't auto-detect any italic, bold, color, etc. formatting you may have applied, so make sure you include the HTML code for that, too.
If your fill includes pesterlog formatting, select the "Homestuck Skin" work skin from the "Custom Stylesheet" dropdown above. The following coding can be used to make your pesterlogs appropriately Homestucky:
Don't mix up your spans and your divs! The pesterlog
This sounds complicated, but is actually rather simple in context! As an example, the first part of this page would look like this:
If your work doesn't contain any text-color formatting, then your job is obviously a lot simpler. And you can also use text color formatting for other, non-pesterlog reasons, of course.
5b. If your fill is art: Unfortunately, Ao3 does not currently support image hosting. You'll need to upload the art to someplace like Imgur or Tumblr (as long as you make sure not to post the image publicly before gifts are revealed). Then, in the "Work Text" box, enter the following:
Make sure the URL you're using ends in an image file ending—such as .jpg, .gif, or .png—or the image will not appear! Don't enter anything else in the text box, either; artist's notes should be written in the Notes section instead.
If you're still lost, here's a screenshot walkthrough of another method you can use.
6. Make sure to preview your work to make sure everything is right! Once you're satisfied with everything, go ahead and post it. It will go into the Giftstuck collection, where it will be unrevealed until the reveal date -- sort of like a present waiting under a tree!
This guide is for posting your work once it's all complete. If you're looking for instructions on how to sign up, those are in this post.
How to post your work on Ao3!
1. Go to your assignments page. (You can find it from the sidebar on your dashboard. The direct URL should be archiveofourown.org/users/YOURUSERNAME/assignments) There you'll see your Giftstuck assignment. Once you've completed your work, click the "Fulfill" button. This will take you to the "Post new work" page with the exchange-relevant fields filled out.
2. Fill out the necessary fields at the top of the page in the "Tags" section. Some tips:
- If you're tagging your work with any of the four required archive warnings (Underage, Rape/Non-con, Major character death, or Graphic depictions of violence) or with "No Archive Warnings Apply", make sure you also uncheck "Choose Not To Use Archive Warnings". Ao3 doesn't do this for you automatically!
- Enter "Homestuck" (without the quote marks) as the fandom. Just "Homestuck". Not "MS Paint Adventures", not "Giftstuck", not the name of any other fandom, and definitely not the name of the fanwork itself. Just. Homestuck.
- A tip for adding tags: Start typing the tag you want to enter and wait for the dropdown menu to appear underneath, then select the tag you want from there. (If you accidentally select the wrong tag, you can remove it by clicking on the red X next to the tag name once it's added.)
- This should go without saying, but only enter tags for characters and relationships that are actually in your work. If you tag for "brief mentions of Dave Strider", for example, that tag will only wind up being merged with "Dave Strider" -- so anyone filtering for works about Dave will also come across your work. Don't be That Person.
- The relationships and characters fields are independent of each other, and neither auto-populates from the other. What I mean by this is, even if you tag your fic with "Rose Lalonde/Kanaya Maryam", you still need to manually enter "Rose Lalonde" and "Kanaya Maryam" separately into the characters field. Also, don't mix these two fields up; if you put "Rose Lalonde" into the relationships field or "Rose Lalonde/Kanaya Maryam" into the characters field, neither tag will work for searching purposes. While Ao3 has a dedicated volunteer team of tag-sorters called tag wranglers, they aren't able, or allowed, to fix users' tagging errors.
- The "Additional tags" section is for tags that don't fit into any of the other categories: Genres, kinks, further warnings, etc. If you're filling a prompt with art, you should tag your work with "Fanart" so people can find it! Otherwise, you can tag with basically whatever your heart desires. Please try to keep the tags relevant to the work, though, and make sure they'll actually be useful for searching purposes, because that's what tags are for. As an example, a work tagged with "Rose is classy", "and Kanaya is too" violates this axiom. "Rose is classy" might be a useful search tag, but "and Kanaya is too" is completely useless for filtering purposes and only makes extra work for the tag wranglers.
3. The preface section is where your work title and summary go. You can also add author's notes either at the beginning or the ending of the work.
4. The associations section should have three sections auto-completed if you came here from your assignments page: "Does this fulfill a challenge assignment?", "Post to Collections / Challenges", and "Gift this work to". If these successfully autocompleted, leave them alone. If for whatever reason they did not, then check the ticky box next to the proper open assignment, enter "Giftstuck" for the collection/challenge, and type in your recipient's name in the "gift to" section.
If your fill includes pesterlog formatting, you may want to select "Homestuck Skin" from the "Custom Stylesheet" dropdown. More on that in the next section.
5a. If your fill is a fanfic: Paste the text of the fic into the "Work Text" box. The site won't auto-detect any italic, bold, color, etc. formatting you may have applied, so make sure you include the HTML code for that, too.
If your fill includes pesterlog formatting, select the "Homestuck Skin" work skin from the "Custom Stylesheet" dropdown above. The following coding can be used to make your pesterlogs appropriately Homestucky:
<span class="john">this text will show up in blue courier! hehe</span><div class="block">This class can be used to apply a grey pesterlog background to text. You don't have to use it, but it's useful for prettifying your pesterlogs and for making some of the more saturated text colors a bit easier to read.</div>Don't mix up your spans and your divs! The pesterlog
block class will only properly work as a div; the character name classes (you can view a whole list of them here) may work as divs, but can be a little buggy, so it's best to keep them to spans. Except in one instance, which is the following: If you're using the block div to apply a background, the first line of the pesterlog contained inside should use <p class="charactername"> instead of a span. This is because Ao3's HTML parser is weird around divs and can add extra white space where you don't want it.This sounds complicated, but is actually rather simple in context! As an example, the first part of this page would look like this:
<div class="block"><p class="pesterlog">-- turntechGodhead <span class="dave">[TG]</span> began pestering ectoBiologist <span class="john">[EB]</span> at 16:13 --<br><br>
<span class="dave">TG: hey so what sort of insane loot did you rake in today</span><br>
<span class="john">EB: i got a little monsters poster, it's so awesome. i'm going to watch it again today, the applejuice scene was so funny.</span><br>
<span class="dave">TG: oh hell that is such a coincidence i just found an unopened container of apple juice in my closet it is like fucking christmas up in here</span><br>
<span class="john">EB: ok thats fine, but i just have one question and then a word of caution. have you ever seen a movie called little monsters starring howie mandel and fred savage?</span><br>
<span class="dave">TG: but</span><br>
<span class="dave">TG: the seal on the bottle is unbroken</span><br>
<span class="dave">TG: are you suggesting someone put piss in my apple juice at the factory</span></p></div>If your work doesn't contain any text-color formatting, then your job is obviously a lot simpler. And you can also use text color formatting for other, non-pesterlog reasons, of course.
5b. If your fill is art: Unfortunately, Ao3 does not currently support image hosting. You'll need to upload the art to someplace like Imgur or Tumblr (as long as you make sure not to post the image publicly before gifts are revealed). Then, in the "Work Text" box, enter the following:
<img src="PASTE IMAGE URL HERE">Make sure the URL you're using ends in an image file ending—such as .jpg, .gif, or .png—or the image will not appear! Don't enter anything else in the text box, either; artist's notes should be written in the Notes section instead.
If you're still lost, here's a screenshot walkthrough of another method you can use.
6. Make sure to preview your work to make sure everything is right! Once you're satisfied with everything, go ahead and post it. It will go into the Giftstuck collection, where it will be unrevealed until the reveal date -- sort of like a present waiting under a tree!