I'm currently considering Save Yourself, which is 2,561 words long. On the one hand, that's technically a smidge over the limit. On the other hand, our Tragedy section is pretty bare, and it would be nice to add another story.

What should be done in edge cases like this? How strictly should the rules be enforced? (You may have noticed that I've already allowed multi-chapter fics with one and only one chapter over 2,500, but I don't remember adding any single-chapter fics that went over.)

Having a strict cutoff is nice, because the criterion for inclusion is clear.

Looking the other way if people go slightly over that limit is also nice, because why lose sleep over 61 words?

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It is also worth noting that FIMFiction is not actually very good at counting words; that story says that it has 2561, but in actuality it has fewer than 2.5k words because of how FIMFiction counts words - FIMFiction always inflates word counts.

This story, for instance, has 2,299 words in it, but according to FIMFiction has 2,533. This is because for whatever reason, FIMFiction counts some coding/HTML elements as words.