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http://chooseyourstory.com/help/articles/article.aspx?ArticleId=4308

Courtesy of WIBN based on the thread he spontaneously wrote a few days ago. Another fantastic article that no one who needs it will ever bother to read added to the list.

Congratulations on your first article, senpai.

What articles would you guys consider essential reading for a newbie? I'm going to be updating my profile soon and would like to get together like, five. (And I'm not considering any of the scripting stuff necessary reading right now, that's more a general direction to wave interested authors towards once they've mastered some basic level of competency in other ways...)

Hmm it's not easy choosing only five essential ones; I've chosen these ones but there's important stuff missing of course, and others will probably choose different ones.

I've left out the Forum Advice article because it already pops up at the top of the forums' page, and the Profile Settings article because it's all quite intuitive.

• Wibn's new article for newbs

• Ogre's article about CYOAs and paths

• Minimum site standards

• Chapters, pages and links

• Advanced editor (which also links to the articles for items and variables)

I didn't link anything about grammar since you already have grammar links on your profile.

Articles like WIBN's are especially important because honestly you don't need to be good at writing to do well on the site, you just have to be capable of interacting with others and learning.

Articles like WIBN's are also useless because 95% of the noobs that have issues are the ones that just obliviously crap out a failure of a story without ever looking at anything else on the site and then comment 'great story 8/8!!!' on it and never acknowledge advice from anyone else.

It is hard to pick just five but we have so many articles and the way they're arranged isn't the most inviting for reading, I'm really hoping we can pare it down to just the essentials so I guess I'll wait and see on which articles are the most agreed on as useful.

• CYS Website Guidelines
• <a href="http://chooseyourstory.com/help/articles/article.aspx?ArticleId=4140"> CYS Forum Advice and Etiquette </a>
• <a href="http://chooseyourstory.com/help/articles/article.aspx?ArticleId=16"> Rating Games and Leaving Comments </a>
• <a href="http://chooseyourstory.com/help/articles/article.aspx?ArticleId=38"> Minimum Site Standards for Storygames </a>
• <a href="http://chooseyourstory.com/help/articles/article.aspx?ArticleId=4308"> A Newb's Guide for Improving </a>

dito

Well, that is a tad embarrassing. Anyway, I think those are some good articles for newer members.

Lol, it's alright, I'm sure that's readable enough.

Also, next time you should try and fix your post before edit-locking yourself with "fuck".

Yeah, I didn't know about the edit lock, so I kinda goofed this up. Thank you though, I will be sure to remember that for the future.

"After four years of lurking, time to kick off my posting career with a bang!"

Haha, well at least it showed up correctly in my post history.

I'm guessing you have the Rich Text Editor on, because when I go to actually edit the post there's a bunch of weird characters and assorted crud in there. You can use the buttons to make links with that though (probably looks like a chain link) so you don't need the html.

Thanks for the help. Would it be better to turn off the rich text editor or should I just use the buttons in the future?

I personally use the RTE but it's been known to cause problems when writing a storygame, so Mizal will probably suggest you turn it off.

The RTE makes doing stuff on the forum a little simpler but it can cause major issues with the editor so it's kind of a trade off. I wouldn't worry about it unless you were writing a game.

Not sure why people just don't turn off the RTE for writing a story and then just turn it back on when fucking around on the forums.