General conduct

General

  • No personal attacks, in public or otherwise.
  • No attacks directed at individuals or groups due to race, gender, gender identity, religion or sexual identity.
  • No spam. This includes chain letters, referral links, posting the same thing many times in different places, and anything that involves, or encourages other users to, repost identical or similar content. This excludes posting information about your new story in groups that explicitly allow it.
  • Following an excessive number of users is not allowed, nor is any behavior that rewards users for following you. Following is for users to use because they want to see updates in their feed, not as a reward or otherwise.
  • No celebration, glorification or encouragement of real life criminal activity.
  • Illegal content is not allowed. This includes links to unofficial uploads of episodes or other copyrighted material.
  • Posting of anyone’s personal information other than your own without permission is prohibited. This includes name, street address, email address, IM screennames, etc.
  • Posting your own personal information is not recommended and done at your own risk, and we cannot help you with any problems this might result in.
  • You may not expose a link between two profiles on or off Fimfiction, that the profile owners did not already document. If both profiles are on Fimfiction, a report should be filed on one of the users in question if the user is violating our secondary account rules.
  • Comments should obey the rating of the thing they are a comment on, this means comments must be SFW on SFW stories.
  • If someone is bothering you, block the user before it devolves into a big argument. Block evasion should be reported to the admins.
  • Signatures at the bottom of your post are unnecessary and make the page harder to navigate, especially on mobile. Please refrain from using them, if you have any information you want everyone to have access to, place it on your profile page instead.
  • Intentionally exploiting the site is grounds for a ban, please report any found exploits with reproduction steps to admin@fimfiction.net immediately.
  • Fimfiction is not a place for public criminal accusations. Please go to the police or talk to staff about criminal matters.
  • We reserve the right to remove or restrict content for other reasons, at the discretion of site staff. This may include banning users in more extreme cases.

Registration and Account Security

  • You must not share your password or let anyone else use your account.
  • You must not transfer your account to anyone else without explicit prior written permission from a site moderator or administrator.
  • You must be at least 13 years old to use this website.
  • If you are banned for any reason, you may not use the website through any other account until the ban duration is up. Using the site while logged-out is fine.
  • Bans may be appealed by sending email to support@fimfiction.net
  • Secondary accounts for isolating posted content (stories, blog posts, public bookshelves, etc.) are tolerated, but they must not be used for anything other than posting said content, including but not limited to voting on stories. Secondary accounts for other purposes are not allowed.
  • Secondary accounts will be treated as the same person under the rules for the purposes of bans and other punishments.
  • Multiple people sharing the same computer, mobile or other internet-capable device or internet connection may be subject to increased scrutiny of their behavior if the activity between the two overlap.

Stories

Don’t Post (Content)

  • Stories that plagiarize other stories. This means intentionally copying another author’s words and presenting them as your own.
  • Stories you did not write. If you are not the original author or a co-author, you cannot post it, even with permission. This includes “novelizing” a comic, movie, game, etc. that you did not create. For example: a Halo crossover with the same plot, scenes, dialogue, etc. but with the characters replaced by ponies.
  • The same story twice. This does not include variants of the same story where the two versions differ on a rating tag, such as a Teen version and a Mature version.
  • Stories you have deleted and are now resubmitting. Please contact a moderator to have your original deleted story recovered.
  • Stories that are not related to My Little Pony. Your story must be related to the MLP universe at the time of submission, or else it will be rejected.
  • Stories containing copyrighted song lyrics. Lyrics from MLP songs are allowed.
  • “Rewrites” of an old story posted as a new story, unless the changes are substantial. If you are not rewriting your story from the ground up, please just edit your changes into the original story.
  • Multiple chapters of a story as separate stories.
  • Sexual content involving human/anthro characters under the age of 18.
  • Stories written in chat or script format. This includes stories in which dialogue is indicated like this: “TWILIGHT: I sure do love books!”
  • Stories with barely any punctuation/proper spelling. We don’t judge stories on their content, but stories without a basic level of grammar will be failed.
  • Non-English stories.
  • Chapter updates that aren’t part of the story itself, such as chapters notifying readers of sequels, hiatuses, etc.

Don’t Post (Genres)

  • Things that obviously aren’t stories: lists, polls, previews, author notes, chat logs, etc.
  • Meta stories, defined broadly as any story about the site or its users. What constitutes meta is largely up to staff discretion.
  • Stories written as an in-joke between a small group of people, with little relevance to anyone outside that group. Colloquially known as “circle-jerking.”
  • MST3k-style fics — for example, inserting comments between the lines of a copy-pasted story.
  • “Manuals” or “User Guides”
  • Greentext stories, or stories that are written essentially in bullet-point format. It doesn’t matter if the text isn’t green, or if you’ve omitted the > (greater-than) symbol. If it’s in the general format, it’s not allowed.

General rules

  • Tag your stories correctly! There are general descriptions of each category in the FAQ. Crossover stories or stories involving Humans must have the corresponding tag.
  • Make sure your story has the correct content rating.
  • Make sure your story has a short and long description. These should describe what your story is actually about, rather than just saying things like “This is my first story” or “Based on X.”
  • Do NOT copy the story itself into the description.
  • Stories must be at least 1000 words before being submitted to the site. Lyrics, footnotes, and other padding DO NOT count toward this minimum.
  • If you want to add author’s notes to your story, be sure to put them in the designated Author’s Notes box, rather than the story-text.
  • Use proper formatting. Indent or space out your paragraphs, and be sure to begin a new paragraph when a new character starts speaking.
  • The title/descriptions of your story may not contain profanity unless the story is rated Mature.
  • Do not post NSFW images or links to NSFW images in your story. This includes the cover art, description, and text of the story itself.
  • We reserve the right to decide what goes up. A story may be failed even if it doesn’t explicitly break any of the rules listed above if we deem it shouldn’t be posted on the site.

Incomplete stories and off-site hosting

  • You may not have chapters exclusively hosted on an external site that are required for the understanding or enjoyment of the story. Users should be able to read through your story without having to leave the site.
  • If your story is not complete, then new chapters should be published when they are completely written, edited, and proofread.

Unpublished stories and chapters

  • Sharing access to unpublished stories or chapters is only allowed for the purpose of help with editing or other stages of the writing process.
  • You may not sell access to unpublished stories or chapters.

Groups

General

  • Do not make groups designed specifically to attack another user or group of people.
  • Caveat: It is okay to make groups attacking fictional characters. I.e. “We hate Rarity”
  • Do not make groups designed to attack or organize hatred against a user’s story.
  • If your group deals with mature-rated subject matter, be sure to mark it NSFW in the Group Options.
  • Do not post NSFW images in groups, even if the group is marked NSFW.
  • Roleplaying is not allowed on Fimfiction. This includes carrying out RP scenarios with other users and acting out online personas. This ban applies to all site functions including PMs. Consider using email or an IM client, the UI is better suited for these tasks. For more information, you can read knighty’s post about this subject.

Folders

  • Do not add stories to group folders unless they meet the criteria for the folder, as set by the group.
  • Intentionally adding stories to folders they obviously do not meet the criteria for will be treated as spam.

Blogs

General

  • Do not make blogs attacking another user or encouraging people to attack another user.
  • Do not use the tagging feature to tag your blog with a story unless the blog is about that story.
  • Do not post NSFW images or link to NSFW sites in blogs.
  • You may link to Mature-rated stories hosted on Fimfiction in a blogpost only if the blog is tagged with a Mature-rated story.

NSFW images

General

  • NSFW images are defined according to two basic categories: Banned and Borderline. Banned defines content that absolutely won’t be allowed, and should be easy to identify at a glance. Borderline defines content that exists somewhere within a subjective gray area between SFW and NSFW images.
  • Images containing borderline content are not expressly forbidden, but the staff retains the right to exercise its own discretion on whether a given image is too much. You should not be surprised if an image containing borderline content is removed, or rejected if used as artwork within stories.

Banned content

  • Depictions of outright sexual acts
  • Genitalia/full nudity
  • Visible nipples (whether bare or poking up through clothing)
  • Cameltoe
  • Sexual fluids (whether obvious or heavily implied)
  • Urine/feces
  • Gore
  • Sex toys

Borderline content

  • Heavily sexualized depictions of pony butts
  • Functionally bare human/anthro butts (including panties so small they hardly cover anything)
  • Excessive cleavage
  • Cropped/censored banned images
  • Blood
  • Pictures appealing to fetishes (diapers, weight gain, vore, etc.) which don’t contain outright banned content.

Asking staff

  • If you’re unsure about a picture and it seems like it might be too much, consider something a little on the safer side instead, or ask a staff member if it might be okay. In general, please try to exercise discretion when posting pics or submitting cover arts that involve borderline content.