This is probably going to be a bit of an Idiot's Guide, so apologies in advance if you feel your intelligence is being insulted. I'm writing this article because I have a dim memory from back in the ancient times (a few months ago, anyway) when I actually attempted to use the 'Help' function of FanFiction.net. Now, maybe it's just me, but it appeared to be singularly unhelpful. If you like it, great, go ahead and use it. If not, and you're thoroughly confused, sit tight. I'm going to attempt to demystify the mystic. Of course, being me, I'm also going to give you the benefit of my experience and hand out a few tips you won't get anywhere else, as far as I know, without actually activating your brain and finding out for yourself. And that's too much like hard work, right?

Registration:

Fairly self-explanatory. Their registration process is more or less the same as most other sites. If it doesn't work for you, check you're doing it right, then contact support if it still doesn't work. One handy hint from me, though: If you're under 13 and lie about your age so you can register, don't then post on your profile something like: "Hi, my name is Ellie and I'm twelve years old!" I don't know if the staff check, but it does make you look a bit of an idiot. Similarly if you decide that Ellie isn't really the name you want to be known by and you want something with an air of mystique about it like, say, Sirena Rosa Elizabeth Potter-Fowl-Rider-Sparrow-Turner (married at various points to Harry, Artemis, Alex, Jack and Will respectively, don'tcha know…), don't register with and display an email address with your name in it, like [email protected]. Take this from someone who has been wielding several identities (no, I'm not telling - most of them were on Neopets, anyway) for over three years now. Don't let the craft down!

You also have to agree to the Guidelines before you can register. You might actually want to take a look at these. They're actually quite useful, and reading them now could save you the frustration of having your story reported and deleted later. The most commonly ignored ones are as follows:

Writers etiquette: This is the bit at the top including the bit about reviewing respectfully and taking it as a compliment that someone has spent time helping you! Honestly, if I had a digital forehead, I'd get a felt tip and write that across it!

Not posting an Authors' Note as a chapter in itself: I know, sometimes you just want to drop everyone a line saying that you've edited something, or that you're going to be in the Bahamas for the next couple of weeks, or that your dog's chewed up your keyboard and you can only afford thirty minutes and a latte in the Internet Café or something. And yeah, it's the easiest way of getting to a lot of your reviewers, because they're likely to have your story on Alerts. My work-around for this is to take down a chapter, add an AN and repost it. The alert gets sent again, and mysteriously, the reviews don't seem to disappear. Strange but true. There are a couple of disadvantages, though. One, it should only be used occasionally since it kind of annoys people (understandably). Two, I don't know why it is, but when I did this recently on a story of mine called Driftwood, I somehow acquired a whole bunch of new reviewers, all saying that they couldn't wait for my next update. I was thoroughly mystified, but I suppose it just goes to show that not everyone reads Authors' Notes. Oh, and three: I don't think it's technically against the rules, but it does bend them an itsy little bit. If you're worried, just write another short chapter to go with the AN!

Writing in script format: This seems a bit mean to me, because there are times when it just works. It's not a lot of good for serious fiction (or…something), but it's great for parodies or general silliness, because it's so much more snappy. However, them's the rules.

"Copying from a previously published work (including musical lyrics) not in the public domain." (copied direct from the Guidelines): A guideline broken on two levels. Firstly, this means that songfics (copying the lyrics of a song or songs and inserting bits of story between them) are against the rules. People still write them. It also means that the act of copying chunks from an original film/book, mentioned elsewhere on the site as a nuisance, is also against the rules. So please don't do it!

Profiles:

Writing these has already been covered in Alyson's article, but I'm going to take it from a slightly different angle. Firstly, never mind what you write in it, how the hell do you get there? I know, I know, I can hear the squelch of a thousand eyeballs rolling even as I type. But when I first registered with FF, I couldn't find the damn thing to save my life! I probably still wouldn't know where it was if someone hadn't told me. So, in case I'm not the only unobservant person on the Internet, I will pass on this valuable piece of information. When you first log in, you are shown the 'Account' page, with options to change your email, password, that kind of thing. In the top right hand corner, right underneath the drop-down menu, there is a link that says Profile. Click it. Sounds obvious, I know, but I could not find it!

OK, so you've now actually managed to find the thing for editing your profile. Just in case this is your first encounter with it, by the way, this is the basic text editing window that you'll find on FFdotnet, um, anywhere you have to edit text. Heh. No, it doesn't do different fonts, funky colours, backgrounds, music, images or emoticons. This is probably a good thing, since otherwise FFdotnet could well be a very scary place. You can do bold, underline and italics. Be happy!

OK, Belle's guide to not making a complete idiot of yourself with your profile. Basically, think before you type. Firstly, chat speak is a big turn-off to many readers. I know it's easier, and it's fine for talking to your like-minded friends over IM or whatever, but FFdotnet is a writing website. Whether or not you find text language easy to read, I think I speak for a fair number of people when I say that it can be quite exasperating trying to plough through a whole story written in it and it's normally not worth the effort. Writing like this on your profile can give the impression, accurate or not, that you will write stories like this. Writing 'you' instead of 'u' might be worth it in the end! Also, there's the personal information thing. Don't give it out. A classic example: my profile used to say that my email address was [email protected] (well, not quite, but you get the picture). It also still links to a book I wrote which has "Isabella Tyler" written on the front of it. If Tyler was really my surname, that would have been supremely stupid (and yes, that was previously unreleased information. Gasp in awe, my dears). I have also, at various points and to various people lived in a wide and varied selection of towns and counties throughout England, without ever actually having moved out of the county I was born in. Nifty, huh?

Uploading a Story:

Initially, this sounds really complicated, but once you get used to it, it becomes surprisingly easy. Basically, on the left of the screen, there are two links you'll need for this: Documents and Stories. You'll need to go to Documents first. Scroll to the bottom of the page and browse for the document that has your story in it (you have to upload the chapters one at a time). Type a label (title) for it to be stored as, then hit 'Submit Document'. Depending on your connection speed, blah blah blah, it could take a while to upload. I love my broadband. Anyway, once it's uploaded, you might want to click on it and have a look. I know, I know, it was all beautifully formatted when you uploaded it, with lines and italics and everything. Just check. Perhaps the site just has a pathological dislike for me, but my lines between sections disappear without fail with every chapter I upload.

You'll now want to go to Stories and select 'New Story' at the top. You might be asked to take another look at the Guidelines. As mentioned above, if you haven't read them, read them! Anyway, once you've done that, you can go ahead and select the category for your story, name it and all the other bits and bobs. I find this quite good fun, but then, as anyone who has ever seen me with bubble wrap will attest, I'm easily entertained. Ahem. So, once you're done, submit the form and you're all done! It usually takes a little while for the new story to show up in your chosen category, particularly if the site's on the blink (this happens, see below), but you can use the 'preview' option either in Stories or Stats to see how it will look to anyone clicking the link. The Stats page, incidentally, is the most interesting page on the site. Here, you can learn all kinds of interesting things about how many people have loaded your story's page (bearing no resemblance whatsoever to the number of reviewers in any circumstance, so don't assume that 30 of your 36 hits are ignoring you. Chances are that a few people had to reload the page, a few decided it wasn't for them, a few didn't have accounts but will be watching you quietly, a few didn't like it…you get the picture), how many C2s your story has been added to, how many reviews you have, etc. Perhaps this is why you now get presented with a full page ad before you can go there, who knows?

Updating a story (i.e. adding another chapter) is very easy. First, upload it into your Docs. Then go to Stories, select the story you want to add it to and use the 'Add New Chapter' function. It's as easy as that!

Of course, if this doesn't work, the infamous Uploading Bug may have struck. See below. And don't panic!

Private Messaging

Let's face it. If you're anything like me, new site features bring with them new ways of making yourself look a complete idiot. Basically, as with your profile, think before you type. If you're taking all this seriously, you're going to want to be nice to people. Network, if you will. If someone PMs you, PM them back. If they compliment your writing, thank them and, if you want, strike up a conversation. If you think you have a fair bit in common, try to make friends. This does work. Back in the days before Private Messaging, Kenzie sent me an email to talk about Disney. Now we're really good friends and have met in person. But don't go around handing out personal information. Be sensible. Also, if you're complimented, don't let it go to your head. The fact that someone admires your writing style does not mean that they are kissing the ground at your feet, so don't talk down to them. Basically, treat everyone as equals, whether you think they're a better or worse writer than you, whether or not they own a yacht (or say they do) and wherever in the real world they're from. And learn the difference between heated debate and an argument that's going nowhere. If all else fails, don't message them back. It's your computer (well, or your parents'/sibling's/friend's/other sucker's computer). In real life, you need to know when to walk away. On the Net, it's even easier!

Forums

Mmph. A bit of a grey area for me, forums. The basics though, are that they work the same way as a regular internet forum (find one you like and lurk on it for a little while if you don't know a lot about them) and that you can set one (or more) up by going to the Forums link on the left hand side of the screen, and, ah, clicking links until you work it out for yourself. I won't walk you through it because I've never tried to do it. Again, the same applies: Be respectful of other people's points of view, don't shamelessly promote your own material more than is humanly necessary and don't abuse any administration powers you have. Oh, and have fun!

C2s

I did have one of those, once, but not for long. I'm not quite sure what to say about them. The FFdotnet knowledgebase says, "Think of C2 as the "favorite stories" feature on steriods." I am not, however, quite sure what to make of that. What I will say, though, is that what that same entry says about it being different things to different users is quite accurate. To me, for example, they seem a little pointless, though I'm always happy when something of mine is added to one. This is probably because they're not widely used in the categories I frequent. Well, I lie. There are quite a few in the Fairy Tales category. They just never seem to be a big deal. I'm making a real hash of this. I'm going to ask Kenzie to write something sensible at a later date.

Bugs

Like all big sites, FanFiction.net is not immune to bugs. And like all big sites I use, it tends to malfunction just when I don't want it to. Like, when I've stayed up late to finish a chapter and want to get it online before I go to sleep. This would be the Uploading Bug, by the way. What happens here is that you go to upload a chapter, and you either get an error message or nothing happens. This probably isn't just happening to you, when it happens, lots of people complain. My work-around, as posted on a couple of forums, is not particularly ingenious, but it works, provided you already have at least one story posted (if you don't, you might just have to wait until it gets fixed, sorry about that). You will need to go to the Story menu, select a story and export a chapter by going to Content/Chapters and then clicking 'exp' next to a chapter. A copy of that chapter will now be in your Document manager (don't worry, the original will still be online where you left it!). Now you can open it, delete its contents and copy/paste your new chapter in there, remembering to save your changes. Check the formatting, and then you're ready to go, no problems!

Another problem the site had a while ago was the freezing stats counter. Now, this may well never happen again, but I will explain it anyway. Basically, what happens here is that, for some reason, the stats counter just stops counting hits. When it first happened, I just thought I was being ignored, but when I realised that, a day after posting it, one chapter had something like six reviews from my regulars and no hits on the counter, I sorta figured something was broken. There isn't a lot you can do about this, but it's not a serious problem, and if you're as weird as me, you might like to screenshot the page showing your hits outnumbered by your reviews. For some reason, I was highly entertained by it. This bug is not to be confused with the fact that every so often the FF team do something (not sure what) to the site and your hits get completely wiped. This has only happened to me once in the year I've been a fanfic writer, and it was a good long time ago. I wouldn't worry about it.