After some recent suggestions, I’ve added some new features to the comments sections. I just wanted to make a quick post to let you guys know what exactly has been added and some details on how some of the functions work.

• You may now preview your comment in real time as you’re writing it. This means that you can make sure your comment is formatted properly and that any html tags you’re trying to use are correct. Note that there’s also a spellcheck button (the green checkmark), which you are encouraged to use if you tend to struggle with that sort of thing. If you need a larger comment box, clicking the gray arrow icon next to the spell check button will open up an expanded comment input window.

This is how the comment preview looks and functions!

• If you’re replying to multiple comments (or one really long comment), you now have the option to use a quote function similar to a forum. This won’t be necessary for a lot of people since threaded replies can make it clear who you’re replying to, but it’s nice if you want to make your replies look a certain way. Here’s an example:

Answer: Yes, it is.

• You may also edit your comments in a brief period (five minutes) after making them. So if you messed up and said something dumb and had instant comment regret, or you just made a typo, you have five minutes after hitting ‘submit’ to make edits. There’s even a helpful timer to let you know how much time you have left before you lose the ability to make edits!

To start editing your comment, hit the red “Edit” link below your comment. Also note the timer – it will count down in real time.

When the edit link is clicked, this form will allow you to edit your comment.

• If you really, really messed up and you just want your comment to be gone completely, you can request deletion. Once again, this only works for five minutes after you hit ‘submit’ on your comment. Hit the “Request Deletion” link and fill out the form that pops up, and I’ll handle it when I log in to the comment queue.

For when you instantly realize that you’ve made a horrible mistake.

• You may also now report comments. This is really only meant to be used in extreme cases – I tried to go through all the old comments with certain words and delete anything incredibly offensive, but it’s possible that I missed some. If you see anything that’s racist/sexist/homophobic, really sexually inappropriate, personally abusive, spam that somehow both the filter and myself missed, or revealing personal information of another user, feel free to report it and I’ll take a look at it. That said, please keep a few things in mind before going report-happy:
  • Each comment can only be reported ONCE. If I get a report and deem the comment okay, it cannot be reported again. This is to prevent people who are tempted to go on a troll report spree from wasting my time with dumb reports.
  • Do not report someone simply because you disagree with them, don’t like their username, or any other petty reasoning. If they hate Jeff the Killer and you’re his biggest fan, that’s not a reason to report them.
  • Racist, sexist, homophobic, etc slurs are not acceptable – please do report these. However, don’t waste time by reporting generic swear words. I don’t care if someone said “shit” or “fuck” so please don’t bother reporting comments for cussing.
  • If you ignore these and fill the report queue up with dumb reports, I might decide to ban YOU from commenting. This varies on how bad a mood I’m in and how many pointless reports you decided to send in, so please think before you start spamming that report button, okay?

This would have been a good comment to report if I hadn’t already removed the spam link. Just say no to shilling your scraper sites, guys!

• Lastly – and this isn’t a comment feature, but I’m not making a new post solely for its introduction – you may now keep track of your personal favorite posts. On each individual post page, there will be a link with a heart that says “Add this post to your favorites!” Clicking this link will add a cookie to your browser that tracks it on the View Your Favorite Pastas page. You may access this page at any time via the top menu bar. Note that clearing browser cookies will also clear your favorites, and if you have cookies disabled, this function will not work for you. You can remove a pasta from your favorites via your favorites page or the individual post – just click the “Remove” button. Also remember that the list will automatically add sticky/announcements to your favorites in an effort to get more people to actually read them, so don’t be surprised if you see them on the list without actually having added them! And since everyone loves random data: as people add posts to their favorites, the top ten favorited posts will be displayed on the sidebar.

I fully expect this post to be added to everyone’s favorites.

Disclaimer: These aren’t the only two pastas that I like, of course.

That’s all the new stuff for today! I hope that helps you all to understand what all the new features are, and please enjoy using them. Now I’ll fade back into the submission-reading void…

Since many of you seem to be confused: in my time zone, it is April 1st. This is known as April Fool’s Day in many countries around the world. As a number of you seem to find this a strange and new concept, here you go:

April Fools’ Day is celebrated in many countries on April 1 every year. Sometimes referred to as All Fools’ Day, April 1 is not a national holiday, but is widely recognized and celebrated as a day when people play practical jokes and hoaxes on each other.

The earliest recorded association between April 1 and foolishness is an ambiguous reference in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (1392). Many writers suggest that the restoration of January 1 by Pope Gregory XIII as New Year’s Day of the Gregorian Calendar in the 16th century was responsible for the creation of the holiday, sometimes questioned for earlier references.

…All that is to say, yes, if the date somehow didn’t already tip you off, the floating creepypasta, numbers station playlist, and steady stream of parodypasta is our way of celebrating April Fool’s Day. Ex-admin Predhead helped me out with deciding what to do, so he gets a portion of the credit (or blame?) as well!

For those of you having heart attacks all over the comments, it’s okay. The floating stuff and autoplay will be gone once the day is over.

For the time being, if you really just cannot handle even one day of this, scroll all the way down and you’ll find the audio player. You can stop the numbers stations there (or listen to more of them if you find them appealing). The floatypasta effect ends after 20 seconds on any page, so you don’t have to wait too long for Jeff and his posse to leave you alone and let you read some pasta.

If you haven’t, yet, I suggest that you pay Crappypasta a visit as well. It’s looking particularly special today too, though it might take a moment to sneak up on you.

I hope that calms the anxieties of all of you either aren’t familiar with the holiday or just were unable to put two and two together, and for the rest of you – Happy April Fool’s Day!

Here’s the current situation: due to certain circumstances, I am mostly reading submissions via a tablet right now. This makes it pretty easy to get through submissions, but getting them scheduled/pasted to crappypasta/replied to is definitely better suited to be done at a desktop. For the next few days, I’ll still be mostly using said tablet, so I’m focusing on just reading and sorting, reading and sorting – well, truthfully, there’s not much more to be done on that particular side of things.

In the next week, you should all expect to get responses if your pasta was approved or if it made it on to Crappypasta. Note that I am trying not to overload Crappypasta, so those of you who are ending up there may get your reply even later than everyone else. I don’t like to spam post on Crappypasta, since I like to give each author time to be on the front page and get advice and attention, and it’s easier for me to just send people replies once their pasta has already been uploaded. So for those of you who wondered if the 15-pasta per day thing was intentional: yes. I want to make sure the regulars over there have the chance to take a look at every pasta, thus hopefully encouraging more critiques and advice.

So that particular delay is explained, and I don’t foresee that anyone will still be waiting on their response by the time of the next open period. Speaking of which…

Here is the new submission open/closed schedule for the next few months!

SUBMISSIONS OPEN: April 6, 2013

SUBMISSIONS CLOSE: May 11, 2013

SUBMISSIONS OPEN: JULY 1, 2013

SUBMISSIONS CLOSE: AUGUST 1, 2013

Of course, this is tentative. If any huge emergencies or hacks or anything else – knock on wood – happen, the schedule may be altered. But you guys now have a general idea of when you can plan to submit and when you can plan to write, rewrite, edit, etcetera.

And yes, I am intentionally closing submissions around finals/exams time and when people need to be working on their summer homework that they probably put off all break. Concentrate on school/college during those times, guys! Consider this a special message from a certain teacher friend of mine =P

That’s all I’ve got to say for now. Derpbutt out.

UPDATE: ALL PRIOR SUBMISSIONS HAVE BEEN PROCESSED. If you have not received a reply and you know that you submitted during the previous open period,  you probably fell into one of the following categories:

1. My email ended up in your spam folder (very common, it seems)
2. You checked “no” on Crappypasta and your story was rejected
3. You messed up the submit form somehow (a lot of people sent me “pastas” that were just a few words for some reason or one word and lots of blank space)
4. You entered your email address incorrectly (also very common, and there’s no way for me to tell people they’ve done this as I don’t magically know people’s correct email accounts)
5. It simply didn’t make it for whatever reason (sometimes our firewall blocks submissions if it thinks they have suspicious/spammy phrasing or are an attempt to inject malicious code/exploits, sometimes people leave the submit page before the form submits, sometimes the site just plain brainfarts)
6. And lastly (but rarely), if your submission was an obvious troll (personal or racist attacks) or really offensive (see FAQ), it would just be deleted and the sender added to my block list.

UPDATE 2/4:

I’m working on reading submissions and getting things scheduled. Expect to see new pastas on the main page starting on February 8th, and please do visit Crappypasta if you’re really starving for new pastas! I’ve been updating it for about a week now, and I’m sure the authors would appreciate some constructive criticism. Remember, the more we can improve the community’s overall skill level, the easier it will be for me to find new main-site pastas! Most of the holdup right now comes from the simple fact that I have to get through roughly 50+ unpostable submissions to find one acceptable submission. Please remember that I can only work with what I’m given, and I have no spider-sense that will allow me to bypass the slush and zero in on the good stuff. It’s my hope that if the community legitimately helps the Crappypasta authors, this ratio of crap:creep may become a bit better in the future.

Please pay particular attention to the Just Needs Polishing, Shows Promise and Undercooked Pasta categories, as they generally include the submissions that can benefit the most from a lot of feedback and suggestions.

As before, I’m putting the older updates below the “read more” to avoid causing confusion.

FROM NOW ON, IF YOU IGNORE THE FAQ AND ASK ME FOR ANY SPECIAL TREATMENT, YOU FORFEIT YOUR SUBMISSION.

Did I get your attention? Good. For the sake of the main page, the rest of this post is under the ‘read more’ button – however, that does not mean that you can claim ignorance. If you’re considering submitting, make sure that you read this post.

As many of you are aware, I use a blogging platform called WordPress to run this site. This means that I use an externally created plugin to process certain aspects of the site. For example: the rating system and submission forms are both operated by plugins.

The author of the plugin that we use for the submission and contact forms updated it today, and after that update was applied, the forms have completely disappeared. I wasn’t warned of this, so I’m more than moderately annoyed about this development, trust me.

I’m poking around the “new and improved” control panel of this plugin, and I’m having trouble actually creating a new form or getting anything to function at all. I’ll be looking into this more over the next few days, but submissions may be down for a few days while I get this worked out. Once everything is up and running again, I’ll add time on to the submission open period to make up for this downtime.

Luckily, I have a backup of the submission queue, so you don’t have to worry about your submissions being part of the vanished data. We dodged a bullet there, though, because if I wasn’t annoyingly control-freaky and didn’t have all the submissions emailed to a special account as well as added to the queue, we would have been screwed. Like I said, really pretty frustrated about how this “upgrade” came with an unexpected total data wipe. But to reiterate for those of you who get easily confused, your submissions ARE safe, because I took an extra step to preserve them.

There are currently 950 submissions in the queue, and I do have to focus on reading those as well. I’ve mentioned this already in the comments and on twitter, but though we have a higher VOLUME of submissions than ever before, the amount of postable submissions is incredibly low. Because of this, we are only scheduled a couple days ahead, which means that I can’t abandon the submission reading process to fix the form – you guys would be without any new pastas to read if I took a break, and I feel that having daily pastas posted is the more important of the two.

All that is to say, it may be a few days before the form is up and working again. Of course, it might also be just a few hours, or I might find something else that works better and has an author that makes sure their upgrades don’t nuke all data before they make it go live. I don’t really know yet, as I’m still having my morning coffee and need to look into this mess a bit further (shh, I know it’s the afternoon, but I’m on a heavy round of antibiotics right now and they make me sleepy). I’ll keep you guys updated and will try not to rage TOO hard.

…until January 15th, 2013. Then the form will be closed again (I am not sure how long the closed period will be next time, as it will depend on how many submissions have come through and how far in advance we’re scheduled at the time of closure).

The new submission form is up and running, and after a small hiccup where I discovered it was actively removing formatting from submissions (so everything was looking wall’o'texty – I mentioned it on twitter, but if you were one of the few who submitted in the first 30 minutes after midnight EST, please resubmit as the form totally broke your submissions and made them ugly), it seems to be functioning properly now.

If you did not receive a response to your prior submission at this point, you either checked ‘no’ for crappypasta and were rejected, or your submission did not make it through properly. This new form SHOULD be sending confirmation emails – though do make sure to check your spam folder, I know that Gmail at least already shunts our emails to spam – so we should be able to avoid lost submissions more easily. Due to the amount of people who seemingly refused to pay attention during the submission process, confirmation emails have been turned off. People were repeatedly clogging up the submission queue with pointless replies to the confirmation emails even after I added BIG RED LETTERS to the confirmation message telling people NOT to reply to the confirmation email. Congratulations, your refusal to read a couple sentences ruined it for everyone else. 

Other changes:

• There are now tooltips. If you’re confused about what to enter for a certain field, hovering over the tiny “?” boxes will pop up a little explanation about that particular part of the form.
• You can now (optionally) choose tags! This means that if your pasta is about a common topic, like Slenderman, or is a parodypasta, you can now tag it as such. This will allow your pasta – if accepted – to appear when somebody clicks the relevant topic in the tag cloud. Tags currently only exist for popular and recurring Creepypasta topics, so if none of them apply to your submission, simply ignore that option entirely.

The shiny new submission form is up and active here!

IMPORTANT UPDATE: THE RICH TEXT EDITOR DECIDED TO DO THE EXACT OPPOSITE OF ITS INTENDED PURPOSE AND INSTEAD BROKE ANY SUBMISSION THAT USED IT. IF YOU USED THE RICH TEXT EDITOR [ONLY POSSIBLE IF YOU SUBMITTED ON THE 15TH], PLEASE RESUBMIT. THE RICH TEXT EDITOR HAS BEEN REMOVED FROM THE FORM. HOPEFULLY THIS TIME, THINGS ARE ACTUALLY GOING TO WORK CORRECTLY!

(Also: 160 submissions so far in less than a day, I really hope this slows down because I don’t think I can handle it if I end up with almost 5k submissions in one month, holy crap you guys)

It took me a lot longer than I expected, but I’ve finally found a submission form that actually works for our intended purposes without having any fatal flaws like not working with my spam protection service or not allowing custom fields or simply not working at all when tested (I truly did not expect this to be such a challenge, and I’m glad that the search is over).

Barring any catastrophe, I will be re-opening submissions on December 15th – yup, just in time for winter break. I am letting you guys know in advance in hopes that you will all take the time to proofread and edit your submissions before sending them my way!

As suggested by some of the community, submissions will open/close at regular intervals. This is to both allow me time to read everything without getting overtaken as well as – hopefully – encourage a bit more effort in submissions. With this in mind, know that submissions will close again on January 15.

For those of you who may not have received a response to your submission, don’t worry. Everything is sorted and I am currently in the stage of replying and scheduling all submissions. Everything should be finished up by the 15th – if, at that point, you still haven’t heard from me (and you didn’t check no on crappypasta), feel free to resubmit because your submission likely never went through.

Now, moving on, I’ve been encouraged by a lot of the readers over at Crappypasta to make a post about this next topic, and I agree that it’s necessary at this point. So let’s have ourselves a little chat, yes?

I don’t mean to sound ungrateful, because I really do appreciate everyone’s work and recognize that without you all, this site would have little purpose. However, I do find it frustrating that the vast majority of the 1k+ submissions that I spent the past few weeks going through were clearly not ready for submission.

I’d appreciate of it if you thought of it like this:

If you expect me to take the time to read and seriously consider your submission, I expect you to actually put forth some effort and take the time to make sure it’s actually finished.

This means that you should:

1. Make sure that you didn’t leave it on a “to be continued” or “if this gets enough votes I’ll finish it” or “part one maybe more to come” type of note. If your story is not finished, it will not be approved. I suspect that many of you are actually writing the stories in the submission box and sending it through immediately even if it’s not finished – please don’t do this. Save your pasta in a text file, an email to yourself, a tumblr post, whatever, and work on it later, then submit when it is done.
2. Proofread. I say this all the time, but for some reason it seems many simply don’t pay attention. If your story has atrocious spelling, walls of text, is written entirely in txtspeak, and/or has no capitalization or punctuation to speak of, please don’t submit it until you’ve fixed these issues, because you have no chance at acceptance.
3. Ensure that it’s an actual, fleshed out story, not just a vague idea. You can submit prompts at the page set up specifically for that purpose, you don’t need to send me a 1-2 sentence fragment of a story because that accomplishes nothing.
4. If you’re writing a pasta based on a legend or story that you’ve heard before, please make sure that it’s not already posted. There’s a search function on the sidebar that will help you figure this out.
5. Generally, try to avoid any of the negative categories outlined here. Crappypasta exists both as a tool for writers to get feedback on rejected pastas and as a way for aspiring writers to see what not to do. If your pasta is similar to ones published on Crappypasta and you suspect it might trip any of those category flags, it’s not ready for submission.
6. Pay attention to the submission rules, FAQ, and the tooltips that will be on the new submission form. 99% of your questions have already been answered. I took the time to answer it for you and try and make the process easy, please take the time to read this before you request more help. It is incredibly frustrating when somebody claims to have “read everything” and then proceeds to spam multiple comments sections – or worse, the submission form itself – with questions that have been clearly answered on the very same pages that they’re commenting on.
7. If you don’t know what the credit field is for, leave it blank. This note included by special request from the folks over at Crappypasta!

If you guys take the time to actually listen to those guidelines, it will be very much appreciated and make things far, far easier on me as well as improve turnaround time. Remember that when you submit a low-effort, unedited mess, you’re basically implying that you don’t respect my time at all – you’re adding to the pile of work without any actual contribution. This slows me down and also makes the other writers – who have actually put a lot of hard work, time, effort, and respect for the rules into their submissions – have to wait longer to get their stories read.

I know that some of you will read this and feel like “jeez that derpbutt is such a mean guy why does he take this so seriously its just creepypasta im gonna sumbit a bunch of jeff/slenderman slash fanfic that will show him” – but please, don’t. I have to be a hardass only because it’s become such a problem. I am not joking when I say that the crap to creep ratio is something like 15:1 – if not worse.

I hope that this will not dissuade any of you from submitting completely, just motivate you to try a bit harder and maybe pull your punches when it comes to what you send through the submission queue.

For those of you who listen to this and actually heed my request, you have my gratitude.

That’s all, and I look forward to seeing what everyone’s been working on over the past month and a half!

Just a general update for those of you who are still confused:

1. As has been said many times, the site was a victim of a malicious hacker. With the help of our hosting company and Sucuri, this has been taken care of. A few of you also helped me to raise the money necessary for a year-long Sucuri site-monitoring package (a million thanks to you all), and this was successfully purchased yesterday. Sucuri’s verdict is that the site is now clean, so those of you who were sticking to RSS should be able to come back now!

2. During the issues with the hack, I literally spent almost every minute of my free time trying to fix that issue. Most of that time was playing catch-up with the malicious script, since until I found the actual root of the issue everything that I cleaned just kept getting re-infected. Because of this, I did not get to read one single submission for almost an entire week even though I was absolutely glued to my computer. I’ve been reading them in my spare time over the past few days, but I am still INCREDIBLY behind, to the tune of still reading things from the last week of August.

This means that submissions will REMAIN CLOSED for awhile, until I can process the ENTIRE SUBMISSION QUEUE – currently stacked 758 submissions deep. I will be reading them as quickly as I can, but there are a few things that I ask you guys to keep in mind:

• I am reading in my free time. I do have many other things that require my attention and time on a day-to-day basis, so do remember that I still live a life beyond the computer screen that interrupts the submission-reading-robot persona that most of you seem to imagine! This is also the same reason that I am hesitant to give anyone concrete, ‘I will be done by __’ types of answers. Life is too unpredictable for that kind of guarantee.
• I do need to take breaks every so often. As anyone who has ever tried to cram before a test can probably sympathize with, after reading for a certain amount of time, words tend to run together. When I hit this point, I have to stop. For whatever reason, when I hit that point of not absorbing things correctly, I tend to start reading submissions as worse than they actually are. Like, I’ll see run-ons where they don’t exist, that sort of thing. So in order to keep myself from rejecting perfectly good pastas solely due to my tired brain, I have to pace myself.
• Because of this insane backlog, the whole ‘ask me about missing pastas after two months’ is kind of on hold. I’m almost exactly two months behind right now! What makes more sense is to wait until I finish the entire queue, then if you haven’t received an answer one way or the other (and do make sure to check your spam filters, guys, I’ve had reports that my emails end up there sometimes), THEN you should ask me. Right now, if you haven’t received an answer and you submitted after mid-August, there is a 99% chance that I just simply haven’t gotten around to reading it yet. Asking me over and over to check on submissions that were submitted in late September, for example, is sort of pointless and time-wasting when I’ve been telling you guys that I’m still in August.
• I am not reopening submissions until I am done. Please respect this; stop trying to submit via comments. Prefacing such comments with “I know you said not to do this, but [insert submission anyhow]” is just plain rude and I’m just going to delete your comment for feeling like you’re somehow a special snowflake whose submission is more important than everyone else’s. It will NOT kill you to wait for a little while as I go through the veritable mountain of old submissions.
• Please use this time to refine, proofread, and edit any pastas that you’re waiting on submitting. As anyone who frequents Crappypasta can tell you, 90% of pastas are rejected because the author simply didn’t bother to proofread at ALL. Sending your pasta to me in such a state does nobody any favors, least of all you. Post it on forums like Terror Tortellini, /x/, or any of the other forums on the sidebar links section. Have a teacher, friend, or parent peer-review for you. Sometimes all it takes is just you re-reading the story even once to notice glaring errors! By proofreading and editing BEFORE you submit, you both increase your chances of being approved as well as help reduce the clutter in the submission queue.

Thank you for your time, and I will inform you when I’m done clearing the queue.

You guys hit the $200 within just a few hours (!!!!!!!), so once that’s all processed and paid out, we’re good to go with Sucuri. Thank you so much to everyone who donated! I’m removing the link to the donation site since we hit the goal, I’d feel weird and greedy if I were to continue linking it after reaching our goal =P

Anyhow, we’ve had 3+ days without the malware rearing its ugly head again, so I think it’s safe for those of you who were going RSS only to return. I’ll be getting back to work on getting through submissions since up until yesterday I was far too distracted by the infection to actually read any stories.

Which I’m going to get started on after I’ve had my coffee and breakfast! As an aside, anyone have suggestions for future discussion posts? I haven’t created the November one yet and I am totally blanking. SEND HELP.