If you’re reading this and you don’t have a good antivirus and malware scanner/defense program active, GO AWAY and just stick to RSS for now. Actually, that’s probably a good idea anyhow. RSS your hearts out, and I’ll post another update when I’m more confident that the coast is clear.

For those of you not aware, the site has had its butt thoroughly kicked over the past few days. Short version goes like this:

• Malware being injected into the site’s files – but a sneaky kind that only rears its head every so often so as to prolong its lifespan before being detected. It’s why some of you noticed and some didn’t.
• A massive traffic spike later that day caused this site to start using up so many resources that the web host actually disabled it. Certified Hosting later donated (!!!!!!) the RAM upgrade to help keep the site up even with the high load so that we could try and tackle the first issue.
• Things MAY be clean. We found something that seems like it was the cause, but given the aforementioned sneaky nature of this issue, I’m still really cautious about declaring victory.
• If things are not resolved within the next few days, there are two options. One, we give up and just shut it all down because we’ve been thoroughly trounced. Two, we take donations to hire the services of a company that specialize in fixing this sort of issue. It’s not hugely expensive, but it’s definitely more than I can afford on my own right now. However, if this is not even remotely plausible, please tell me and it won’t be considered.

Other Stuff:

• There are currently a few more days of stories scheduled, but as you probably can guess, reading submissions has been low priority over the past few days. To combat this, I am planning on changing the queued dates for accepted submissions and spreading them out a bit longer. I’d wanted to have 4 posts per day all month since it’s Halloween time, but I’m going to drop it down to two per day so that at least you guys are getting new stuff every day. To both authors and readers alike, I’m sorry, I really am.
• Submissions are still closed for what are probably very obvious reasons.

That’s all. Keep your fingers crossed, please, and thank you very much for your patience.

The new theme with the current color scheme seems to be overall well-received, though I did make some tweaks based on your feedback. The red links are now a darker shade, the font has been changed back to Verdana, and highlighting text is not longer that insane red-on-gray crapfest. If you have any more opinions about this topic, you may leave them on the related post – but it seems like the general consensus is that the new look should stick around.

Since I didn’t want to keep adding on to the theme change post with unrelated stuff, here’s a new post about some other changes that you’ve probably noticed.

• First, and most importantly: as many of you noticed and informed me (thanks for that, and I mean it – I’ve had a lot going on IRL and I’m not sure when I would have realized the issue on my own) the form plugin that the site had been using to process both submissions and the contact page has, as of its most recent update, decided it will not play nice with our anti-spam plugin. Thus far, the plugin author hasn’t given any indication that he’s working on making them compatible – and since this site gets so much spam attempts, I’ve got to look for a new way to go about doing things because deactivating the anti-spam part is just not an option. I’ve tried a few things, but so far they all have at least one crippling issue that makes them unfeasible. So for now, submissions are closed while I try to come up with something that works. On the bright side, this should give me some time to catch up on my submission backlog, right?
• You can now subscribe to posts/comment threads via email. So if you’re particularly invested in a discussion or pasta, you should be able to keep tabs on it much more easily.
• Since the previous mobile theme got a lot of complaints and wasn’t working for most people, a new one has been implemented. You should be able to switch between the mobile and ‘real’ themes at the bottom if the site detects that you’re accessing via a mobile product. The new main theme may be more phone-friendly, but I understand that some of you wanted a bare-bones, less data intensive theme with the option to switch to the feature-heavy main version if you wanted. As before, I’m only previewing in Safari developer tools, so let me know if issues pop up in real-world practice.
• Not an actual update yet, but a question: Do you guys want the ability to log in and comment via Twitter and/or Facebook? I personally find it to be an annoyance when sites want me to log in via some other social networking platform, but if you guys want that function badly enough, I am not opposed to seeing what I can do.

That’s about it. Beyond that, if you notice ‘Maintenance Mode’ pop up, don’t freak. That means I’m probably testing something out and just don’t want any interruptions or errors from people stumbling on the wrong thing at the wrong time. Wait a few minutes and try refreshing to see if I’m done!

I’ve mentioned it a few times on Twitter, but a couple of you got me hooked on the Anything Ghost podcast. I listen to it when I’m working on the site or walking my dog late at night and love it! But anyhow, here’s the point. Lex – the man behind the podcast – is working on this year’s Halloween special, and he is accepting both true experiences and fictional ghost stories just for this one episode.

You can find more details at this post, and please do read the rules and deadlines fully before submitting. He has very specific guidelines depending on the kind of content (true or fiction) that you’re sending to him, so don’t shoot yourself in the foot by submitting something incorrectly!

As a disclaimer, I am in no way affiliated with Anything Ghost or Lex, I just really love his podcast and thought that a few of you may be interested in contributing to this year’s special since so many of you seem to enjoy reading creepy stories on YouTube already. Good luck to any and all submitters!

As you’ve probably noticed, there’s a new layout currently up and running. This was created in response to the frequent complaints that I was receiving about the white text on black being abrasive and hard on the eyes. This is my attempt to make things a bit more comfortable for everyone that was complaining. Please keep in mind that this is only a test run, so before you decide to sacrifice me to the lions and send me 10,000 emails about how I’m the most useless human being on the planet because I changed a theme, take a deep breath, calm down, and read the rest of the post!

If you absolutely hate it, please leave a comment on this post letting me know in a polite fashion. If you like it, but would prefer a specific tweak to the color scheme, feel free to suggest that as well. If you prefer this to the older theme, that is also something that I would like to hear about.

There are a couple things to note about this theme:

• It is what you could call ‘responsive’ – it will automatically resize the site based on the size of the browser accessing it. So if you make your browser window smaller or, for example, visit through a phone or a tablet or whatnot, the site should be displaying proportionally to your screen. This way, mobile viewers can still see the various features – like popular posts and random posts – that were missing from the prior mobile theme.
• The header image can easily be changed and we can even set it up to rotate through various images. The one up there right now is pretty much just a placeholder. If you guys decide that you’d prefer this theme, I’m not opposed to having reader-created headers up there! If it’s decided that we’re sticking with this theme, I may even run a contest related to the header.
• The color scheme CAN be changed. So if you prefer this theme but with the old, darker color scheme, that is something worth telling me.

Now, before it’s suggested, unfortunately I have yet to find a ‘theme switcher’ plugin that actually works for our purposes. Most of them are either hopelessly outdated or have specific requirements (will only work on certain themes or will only display the theme switcher for admins) that make them out of the question. So for now, we have to make a choice.

Thanks for your time, and I look forward to hearing your polite opinions.

EDIT 10/5: Since most of the comments seemed to favor at least trying out the new layout with a darker color scheme, here it is. Let me know what you think! It’s light gray on dark gray this time, so here’s hoping that such a combination will be easier to deal with for those with sensitive eyes.

Also, the pumpkin ratings are just a cute thing since it’s October – don’t freak out if you dislike them, we’ll go back to the dark stars once Halloween is over. I just really like Holiday themed stuff, deal!

Also, in bold and reiterated since quite a few of you clearly either didn’t read or didn’t understand the first time: we HAVE to choose one theme or the other. Theme switcher capabilities CANNOT BE IMPLEMENTED right now. Suggest it until you’re blue in the face, but I can’t do it! Trust me, if it was an option, we’d be using it already.

Just a note to make you guys aware that I’ve changed the rules about resubmitting. It’s occurred to me that the way we had it set up before didn’t make much sense, since a huge chunk of you guys were just resubmitting the exact same version of a pasta that had already been rejected, and it brings to mind a certain quote:

“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results.” 

So, short(ish) version is that I now only allow resubmissions if you’ve actually changed something about your pasta. This applies to rejected pastas, pastas I haven’t read yet, and stuff that got posted on Crappypasta. You can submit rewrites of any of those whenever you want, there is no mandatory waiting period now! I do have special steps that I ask you to take if you do this, though, to help make sure that I know which version I’m supposed to be considering! So make sure to read the FAQ before you get all excited and fire off a resubmission, okay?

The other change is that I will now allow you to contact me about possible ‘lost submissions’ after a certain amount of time (it might change, but currently I’m going with two months), but please make sure to read that part thoroughly since if you jump the gun on that and try to exploit it in order to get me to read your submission earlier, it’ll have the exact opposite result that you wanted – I’ll reject your submission completely for wasting my time and trying to abuse the system, you jerk.

Anyhow, you can read all the new rules in Section 3 of Frequently Asked Questions, so please go do that if you’re at all interested in submitting any time soon.

Also, since I’m sure that at least one of you will have the expected reaction of “BUT WHY SO MANY RULES QQ YOU’RE SO MEAN DERPBUTT”, I’ll just leave this here:

We have the submission process set up so strictly because it’s the only way to keep this whole thing from overwhelming us, so please remember that before you’re tempted to ask for special treatment or want to complain about all the rules.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Yes, I’m aware that some users have issues with not being able to swap between mobile and desktop themes. There are a few reasons that this can happen, so please try these steps before leaving comments about it:

1. Clear your cache if possible. You might have the wrong version of the site cached, and your brower is simply serving you the old cached version.
2. Turn off any ad blocking extensions that you might use. I’m not entirely sure why this works – my theory is that the adblock extention somehow is blocking the script that swaps between the themes – but I’ve had people say that doing this solved their issue.
3. If neither of those work, please leave a comment with your user agent. This website uses a caching module to cut down on resource usage. For mobile browsers, I have to manually block those user agents from being served a cached version of the web page. So for example, if you’re on a phone but it’s not a user agent that has a caching exception, the site may try to continually serve you the same version of the index because that’s the version the site cached last. The cache is automatically renewed every so often, so this is why sometimes the problem seems to solve itself. Leaving a comment with your user agent will allow me to ensure that your mobile device is exempt from being served a cached page; and if the error persists even with your user agent as an exception, I can report this error to the mobile plugin developers. If you need help figuring it out, please visit What’s My User Agent and copy/paste the results.

Anyhow, on to the original post:

A few of you have sent me emails wanting me to make a less data-heavy, more streamlined version of the site for people browsing by phone, since the normal site can be a bit unwieldy and costly for mobile users to browse.

If you’re a mobile reader, you should already have noticed that this has been done! Now, for both creepypasta and crappypasta, the site should auto-detect that you’re on a phone and give you portable version of the site.

If you don’t like it (or if you’re one of those unlucky people whose browser likes to randomly show you mobile versions of sites for some reason), just scroll down to the bottom. You should see this:

As you can probably surmise, hitting the ‘off’ button will magically transport you back to the original version of the site that you all know and (hopefully) love. No need to freak out or leave panicked comments, it’s okay! You can get back to normal with the click of a button.

Now, for mobile site navigation, it’s pretty simple. Hit ‘Menu’ and you can easily access all the pages, tags, and categories that you’re used to. Unfortunately, plugins like popular posts, random posts, recent comments, etc can not be accessed via the mobile theme at this point. Sorry.

That’s about it. I just wanted to announce this so that you guys know that I *do* listen to your feedback (and also to calm some of you who are getting the mobile theme and freaking out about the ‘new creepypasta’). Now, I don’t actually have any sort of decent phone for web-browsing myself, so I’m having to rely on previewing this through developer tools in Safari. If you find that anything is ridiculously broken, please do let me know.

And please don’t neglect the original theme when you’re browsing on PC. Even if you don’t click anything or buy anything through our affiliates, those ads are what pay the hosting bills! Without them, there would not be a site. That’s the sad truth of the internet.

Okay, people keep sending me emails and comments suggesting that I just “get a group of people and email them the stories and let them decide” – I’m going to explain here why I’m rejecting that idea currently.

The problem is, as it stands, that the whole “just email the stories to people!” idea actually serves to produce even more work for me. It adds the extra step of sending out the stories, waiting for people to reply (and given that these would be strangers/volunteers, their reliability is not guaranteed – advertising profits go directly into the monthly hosting bill, so a paid staff of readers nothing more than pipe dreams right now) and having to keep track of what has been read and reviewed and who hasn’t replied, reading the comments that DO get sent back and deciding (which means I’d have to read the stories anyhow), and still having the entire burden of that extra work + what I do already.

People have been saying “but it’s what Literary Magazines / other similar sites do” – they usually have the benefit of having paid employees and more than one person to oversee that process and all the other site/magazine workings, which can make that end up running more smoothly and being a good decision.

For just one person, it’s simply not going to do anything but slow things down. It also serves to ignore some of the other functions that Predhead helped me with – he wasn’t solely a reader. I’m looking for another CO-ADMIN (please don’t use that sentence as an excuse to spam me with applications, read the entire post before you get ahead of yourself), not just readers, for that reason. However, you guys won’t know that we have a new admin until they’re settled in, had a chance to get a good feeling for their responsibilities and the… “nuances” of the comment section… and are sure that they want to stick around.

The thing you guys have to remember is that this isn’t Cracked or one of those huge submission sites that have gone viral and been bought out by a big company.  Those sites have paid employees and more resources than just “well, let’s hope that advertising brings in enough to pay hosting this month”. I’m sure that many of you realize this already,  but it’s been made clear from a lot of the emails I’ve been getting  that many others don’t actually understand that I’m not backed by some faceless corporation with a bunch of money and employees at my disposal. We are the privately-owned corner bookstore as opposed to Barnes & Nobles. That is to say, Creepypasta is simply not capable of operating on the same level that most of you have gotten used to from places like Cracked or Lamebook… and that’s not the end of the world.

So once again, I’m asking that you guys simply be patient. I never said ANYTHING about the site closing, that’s a rumour that people started themselves. I simply said that the processing time for submissions would increase and asked for your patience. That is all. To the people sending me admin requests, inquiries about pay, frenzied concern about the site closing down, etc – none of that is needed. I’m touched, but it’s unnecessary.

I WILL find someone to replace Predhead, but as I’ve stated multiple times, I AM NOT HOLDING OPEN AUDITIONS FOR ADMINS SO PLEASE STOP EMAILING ME ABOUT IT. I appreciate the thought and eagerness, but please just stop. In the interest of saving time, I’m going to go ahead and say here that if you continue to send me such emails, I will no longer be replying.

The point I’ve been trying to convey is that people who are just readers will probably NOT notice any difference. The publication of stories will continue as normal. It’s ONLY submitters that will notice a slightly longer turnaround time; and even then, around a month for your story to be processed is NOT a sign of the impending apocalypse. I promise you, it isn’t. Submissions don’t die and reanimate into evil zombie submissions until, like, 6 months at least. So we’re still good!

I hope that this makes things a bit clearer.

In closing, I leave you with this message:

Ed Gruberman, you must learn patience.

Just a quick note to let all submitters know that while I deeply apologize, submission turnaround time will NOT be improving any time soon. For the past couple weeks this site has largely been a one-person operation, and today the second admin formally quit. I will be seeing if I can find another admin to take his place, but it may take awhile as it’s hard to find people who are trustworthy, reliable AND who are willing/able to deal with some of the community’s harshness and tendency to attack the admins if they don’t like a pasta.

Currently, the submission turnaround time is 20-30 days. I’m currently working through submissions from the end of July. I’d like to go faster, but after reading a certain amount of submissions in one sitting my eyes sort of start to cross and things start running together. I have to pace myself, so please do not get on my ass about slowness. If the amount of submissions continues to increase, this turnaround time estimate may increase – we may even start approaching the actual publishing industry’s turnaround time, the horror!

And while I appreciate the thought of people offering to help, my stance remains the same: it is too dangerous to just allow some random internet person access to the backend of the submission queue. You may argue that you’re trustworthy, but I do not know you and thus to me, you’re not. Giving a total stranger such access would basically be asking for sabotage. In case I’m not being clear enough, DO NOT SPAM MY INBOX ASKING TO BE AN ADMIN. The answer is no, and while I do truly appreciate the eagerness some of you have, by virtue of ignoring what I’ve already said and sending me requests to be an admin anyhow, you’re already proving to me that you should NOT be considered if I ever do decide to open up applications.

What you guys CAN do is make sure you’re not spamming the submission box with multiple resubmissions before the current turnaround estimation is past. Be patient, and keep track of the date you submitted – I know that the brain has a tendency towards exaggeration when you’re waiting for something; a week can feel like months, but jumping the gun and sending me too many copies of your pasta does nothing more than slow things down.

If you submitted something and then rewrote it, please send a message using the Contact Us form and letting us know the names/emails for the repeat submissions as well as clearly letting us know which one you want treated as the real submission.

I apologize for the delay, but know that your submissions ARE being read and that pastas are still being posted. Once I find at least one more person, I’ll update and let you guys know when the submission pace changes. Thanks for your understanding!

You can subscribe and see the rest of their videos here: https://www.youtube.com/user/1000MasksandDeadAces

Now, it might just be that I found this at around ~3AM my time after a long day, but these videos had me in tears – I was laughing that hard. 1000Masks and DeadAces, we salute you.

Since it’s late for me and I’m feeling lazy, I am just copypasting from crappypasta’s ‘about’ page:

So yeah, CRAPPYPASTA.COM -

You’re probably wondering wtf this is, right? Let us try to explain.

Currently, we receive a whole lotta stories through creepypasta.com’s submission process. While many of them are obviously approved and posted to the main page, many more are rejected due to the same few glaring issues:

• Terrible grammar, spelling, lazy writing, an absolute lack of proofreading/editing – these are all issues that can cause even the most creative pasta ideas to be completely unreadable and unenjoyable. You may have ideas to rival the classics, but when you express them via a giant, typo-heavy wall of text, nobody is going to read far enough to realize that, sorry.
• Blatant rip-offs and rehashes of famous urban legends and stories already published on the site. This tends to happen when somebody sees a certain pasta getting lots of positive feedback – they think, “I can do that” and proceed to send us a very thinly veiled “remix” of the original pasta. A good example of this would be how Dead Bart spawned a thousand knock-off attempts. Everything from My Little Pony to Family Guy now has its own version, but unfortunately, most of these copies are not very good. Plugging in your favorite cartoon + mysterious animator + clinical description of gore without adding anything new or interesting to the formula just results in people rolling their eyes and wondering whatever became of creativity.
• Obvious trolls or attempts at burning people you know IRL with stories about them. We hope that you guys high-fived before you rode off drinking Hi-C on your tricycles or whatever it is the kids do nowadays, but for the most part we barely even process these before they’re discarded.
• Authors who mistake by-the-book gore, skeletons popping out, “beautiful monsters” (think a 13 year old goth girl’s bad poetry for what we mean by that), and “THEM” watching you for actual creepiness. We’ll pass over lazy writing that depends on cheap cliches any day in favor or authors who put in some actual effort.
• Stories that are not quite bad, but just lacking that certain something to make them truly delicious pastas.

We were getting so many requests for feedback, but when we’d log into the submission account and see 95 new submissions… even if we want to, there’s just no way that the two of us have the time and mental energy to give thoughtful critique to each rejected submission. Trust us, sometimes it’s hard to hold back when something is SO CLOSE to being approved – but we know that it’s a slippery slope and we need to pace ourselves. We can’t be all of the creepypasta fandom’s creative writing teachers, no matter how much we may love you guys!

So our attempt at a solution – and a mix between lol and actual helpfulness – is crappypasta. Here, we’ll post submissions that would otherwise have gotten tossed into our “crap festival” rejection folder and never looked at again.

Why? For a few reasons – here comes another list!

• For the lulz. Because really, some submissions ARE just that bad.
• So that people can comment, rate, and provide feedback on the stories that aren’t quite right, but could be postable to the main site with some editing and rewrites.
• Sometimes we’re just wrong and might reject a story that actually wasn’t that bad.
• Because you tried, and you deserve that gold star, dammit.

So that’s basically it. Don’t worry, every submission that is posted on crappypasta is here with the author’s EXPLICIT permission; we have a nifty little check-yes-or-no question about this site in the creepypasta.com submission form.

If your submission is posted here, don’t get mad. Learn from the comments. If you have the drive and patience, take the advice given by the readers here and rewrite your story and re-submit it to the main site; we have no objections to upgrading a crappypasta into a creepypasta if you put in the work and truly make it better, or if the vast majority of readers think that it was not, in fact, a crappypasta in the first place.

There’s also a function to get pastas that we may have passed over but the community at large enjoys posted onto the main site, detailed here:  http://www.crappypasta.com/crappy-or-creepy/

So enjoy the crappypastas, and we hope that this is an entertaining and educational experience… or something like that.