MetaFic

The first day of MetaFic going live is almost over (and for me it already is over, for like four hours). Users are registering slowly but surely, and they're sniffing around.

It makes me feel all warm inside. Well, it's either that, or the glass of Whiskey I just drank.

Either way, it feels good to see some activity here. This place was lonely while we were working on it.

Dave's welcome post probably told you enough about the site, but I'm going to add a few pointers of my own anyway.

The FAQ has all the information you need about posting challenge stories. Currently, other then holding challenge stories, we'll only archive stories by a small group of people. That's also in the FAQ. Now, I know that some of you might think: "Hey, what about me and my stories?"

Bear in mind that MetaFic is a brand new site which still might have a few bugs and lots of space for new expansions and experimentation. This doesn't mean the site will stop working, far from it. It's just that we need to figure ourselves how we want to proceed, and where exactly we want to go.

Due to all those reasons I mentioned (and many more which have eluded me at the moment) that rule currently stays and won't be changed soon.

Now, about the challenges. They're rather easy to access. They're on the top right menu, just between the Blogs and the Forums. If you follow that link, you'll see the list of all the challenges (there's only one now since we barely started). If you click on it, you'll see all the challenge rules. Once the challenge is over, that page will also hold all of the submitted challenge entries. That way it'll be easy to find them later.

A few words about your user profiles. User profiles hold some basic information about yourselves, just like the other sites. If you're an author, that will also show on your profile (along a short list of your stories). The fun part of MetaFic is that if you betaed for someone, and he entered your user name while posting his story, those stories will also show on your profile. It was about time to show some more recognition for betas and hard work they do for the authors.

Oh, another thing. I noticed some of you entered your profile links (SIYE, PS, FFnet, LJ) incorrectly. For LiveJournal, you should just enter your user name. For all the other archives, you should enter your user number. To find it, go to your profile and on that page note the URL (address) of your profile. For SIYE it would be something like http://www.siye.co.uk/siye/viewuser.php?uid=XXXX, where XXXX is your user number. There's one at FFnet and PS too. You should just copy those numbers and enter them in the appropriate forms on your account settings here. Otherwise, those links just won't work. It might sound a bit complicated, but SIYE has almost same settings.

Oh, we have a chat. Again, the link is in the top right menu. Currently, there's only one chat room, but it can hold many chats. You can either join existing chats and see if someone's there, or create a new chat and hopefully someone will join you. Or you could just call them over Private Messages. Yes, we have those too. You can read yours on the left panel menu. The link is "My Inbox". Simple really. That link will also display a number of your unread messages (if you have any).

Now, that the boring stuff is out of the way, enjoy your stay here, explore the site, and what's most important: post some challenge fics! We're looking forward to reading them.

If you hate something, or like something, leave a comment. Either on the page of the item you hate/like, or you can always use the Forums. We created them as it was our idea to replace the Cracked Muggle group. (Although, I'm sure Dave will keep running it if you insist.)

That's about it. Oh, I'm sure I'll remember something else later.

Enjoy your stay, and have fun!

Dino