Tutorial

Membership
Read Stories
Post Stories
Organize stories in your story space

If you are not a member of the site, you can only read stories and other contents, and cannot participate in creating new stories as well as giving comments or voting for stories you like. By becoming a member, you are offered the full features for an online writer to compose stories and to publish your contents to your friends. More than that, as a member you have a private space which is similar as a blog which help you to create a unique looks and feels and manage your contents easier. Fields in the registration form:

User Name: the name you used to log in the Member area. This name is shown in the author information of your stories. User name can contain of alpha-numeric characters (a- z and 0 -9, non case sensitive) and the hyphen (-) character only. Maximum length of user name is 100 characters; however, it would be easy for you to remember if you select a username from 6 to 15 characters.
Password: is the secret string of characters that will be used along with the user name to identify you when you are logging or performing member's .functionalities. Password is alpha numeric and should be 6 - 15 characters in length.
Confirm password: in order o help you to remember your password easier, it is required that you repeat exactly your password in this field.
Full name: your full name, which will be shown in your member profile.
Date of birth: specify the day you were born. This information is required to identify if you satisfy the minimum years of age requirement and helps us to understand more about members of the community in statistical reports.
Gender: your sex.
Email address: please specify a valid and working email address here. This address will be used for announcements of the site to you and when you need to reset your password.
Show my email: If you want to show your email in your profile so that other users can contact you, please check this option. You can change this in your profile after registration.
More instant messaging information: if you like, you can provide your ID in popular instant messaging systems such as Yahoo! Messenger, Google Talk, MSN or ICQ. This helps others contact you easier.
Address: is your mailing address. From time to time, WriteOpenStories.com may need this information as a communication method to you to inform offers or other important information.
Current job and working place: optional information about you.
Confirmation to accept "Terms of use" is required before you can become a member. Please take time to read the terms and make sure you understand them and agree to them. Once all required information are filled, now it is the time to submit the registration request. Just simply click the "Register" link and wait for a few seconds. Most of the time, your registration should be successful. However, there might be cases that you need to adjust some information. In the case of that event, detailed information will be provided. When a member account is created, you can use it to access the forum section, too.

Log in

Once registered, logging into the member space is very simple. Just provide your user name and password and hit the "Log In" link. Wait a few seconds and your member space will be shown.

Log out

Log out when you finish working with your member space is necessary for security reason. This ensures that no one can interfere and use your space unexpectedly when you are not present at your computer. Be sure to save works you are doing before clicking on the "Log out" link on the right navigation panel.

Reset password

When you forget password, you can request the System send you a new password to the current email address in your member profile. After receiving the new password, you can log on and change it if you want. To use this feature, click on the "I forgot my password" link in the Log in page.

Read Stories

Select Stories

You have many ways to select a story for reading: browsing through the categories listing in the right navigation panel or by searching. When a list of stories is shown, choose the story you would like to read by clicking on its name.

Search Stories

In this section you can search for stories using criteria: story title, author, some words in the content of story, and tags. Search parameters will be OR together, which means only 1 match is required for a story to be returned in the results list. Text in search parameters will be looked up in corresponding information of stories in the whole site, regardless of the letter case. For example, if you would like to find stories which name contain "love" or "Love" or "LOVE" , just input "lov", or "Love" are both ok.

Navigate in a story

You read a story from its first chapter. After each chapter if there are more chapters connected to it, there will be a list of next chapters. The description of the subsequent chapters should give you an idea of what they are about and decide to choose one to go next. Keep doing like this, you navigate from the first chapter to the current last chapter in any path of a story. Previous page in the current path are shown, so that you can go back to any chapter. While viewing any chapter, you have an option of showing the full content from the first chapter to the current chapter, which will help printing easier.

Report un-appropriate content

Everyone at WriteOpenStory.com, including you, wants the stories here clear. This was considered in the Terms of use that some contents are not allowed. If you feel any chapter or story, or comment for story violates the Terms of use, please help the community by reporting it as an un-appropriate content. The link is available in any chapter. When you do this, a notification will be sent to our Administrator and moderators, so that they can review the content as soon as possible and decide to keep or remove it from the site.

Give comments for a chapter

While reading a story chapter, you can post your comment if you've already logged in. Just scroll down to the bottom of the chapter and enter your comments to the "Your comment" box. When completed with commenting click "Post my comment" link to save it.

Rate for story

Rate values varies from 1 (lowest - worst story) to 5 (highest - best stories). Select a rate and click on "Save my rating" to submit.

Suggest to archiving a story

Archived stories are ones which selected by Site's Editor Board because of their high rate of viewing and good comments. These stories must be almost completed logically. You, as a reader of site, can suggest a story to this list by clicking on "Suggest to archive" link while viewing full content of a story

Make a bookmark in the story

While reading a chapter, you can make a bookmark at this point to return later. Just click on "Bookmark this story" link. After that, you can provide a note for the bookmark which should help you remember the bookmark easier. Bookmarked stories are listed in the Bookmark section in your member space.

Post Stories

Post a new Story

It is required that you logged in before making any content post. After logged in, you will see "Post stories" link in the menu on the right hand side. Click on that link to open up the new story entry page.

Title field: think about a good name for your story and enter it here.
Category: classify your story under a category.
Upload image for your first chapter: this is not required, however an image will make your story looks more interesting. To upload, click "Upload an image file" link and select a file in your local computer. Supported file format is jpeg and gif. You should not upload image that is larger than 500KB in size since it may be slow and take resources unnecessarily.

Another way of attaching an image to your story is using an existing image elsewhere on the Internet. Just type / paste the link to the image into the text box before Browse button.
Description: you can give brief about your story here, or write some quotes for the chapter, or even stating your idea on how the story should be developed ... Description helps readers understand your story or your chapter easier and a good content in this place will invite more readers for the entire story.
Content: write your story here with a full featured and easy to use editor. You can paste content you prepared in another place here, too.
Source field: This field is very important and it is required that you specify the source of content you taken, in case the content is not of your own. This shows your respect to other's copyrights.
Show current story: if this check box is marked then your story will be shown to the public, otherwise it will kept in your private member space and not published until you decide to do so. Leaving this option unchecked gives you more time to review or write your story in case you cannot complete in one step.
Allow continue my story: there are many options for you to decide if a story / chapter should stopped at the current point or if it should be continued more, who should do this.
Tags: you should give tags for your chapter. Tags are words which you consider as important when referring to content of the chapter. Giving tags will help organize your stories better and make them easier to be found by other users.

Once completing above fields, you can choose to post the first chapter of the story right now by clicking on "Save" link, or want to review it in advance by clicking on "Preview" link.

Post video story

Currently WriteOpenStory.com offers users the functionality of creating links to video clips posted elsewhere. There are many sites allowing posting and sharing video clips that you can use to host your video before linking it to a video story at WriteOpenStory.com. Posting a video story is very similar to other story types, except that in the Content field, you have to switch to HTML editor mode. To do this, click on the "HTML" icon on the tool bar of the Content editor. A new window will be shown up (please turned of the pop op blocker feature if it is being used).

Find the website that hosts your video. On that site, you should be able to find instruction on how to link to your video from other sites. What you will need to find is a segment of HTML code contains the link to your video. Copy that code and paste into the HTML Editor window above, then click "Update". It's done.

Guide for linking to videos hosted at Youtube.com

Choose the video you want to link to
Select entire content in the Embed box and copy the code
Paste the code into the HTML Editor window

Guide for linking to videos hosted at Google Video

After select a video, click on the Embed HTML link. Do next steps as above.

Write a new chapter

After logged in, you can post new chapter to continue a story after any chapter if the author of that chapter didn't specify to not allow continuation. Just click the "Continue current story with a new chapter" link and do similar as if you are posting a new story.

Edit a chapter

You can edit your own chapters in any story. Locate the chapter and then use "Edit" link to open the editing page. Do the modifications and Click "Save" to update.

Remove a chapter

You can remove your chapters, however please think carefully if you really should do this, because the entire story might be affected in its continuous.

Organize stories in your story space

After logged on, you will be brought to your story space where you can customize some looks and feels settings and organize your stories your way.

Organize stories your way

When post a story, you can select a category the story should go under. However this is not the only way for categorizing stories. You can define your own categorization for your stories using tags. After you defined a tag, your stories which also tagged the same will be listed together when you click on a tag in the "My stories tags" section.

To define your tags list: in your member space, click "My settings" link in the right hand side menu, then enter tags, separated by commas (,).
To specify tags for your chapter: while editing or creating chapter, enter tags in the Tag text box near the bottom of the page.

Favorite stories

In the member space, there is a link named "Favorite stories". Clicking on that link you'll see a list of high rating stories of that member.

Search inside stories of a user

While you are viewing a chapter, you are at the member space. You can search for stories of that member by clicking on "Search my stories" link. Only stories of that member that satisfy search criteria will be returned.

Specifying your settings

You can change password, select a theme for your space, or edit profile.

Select "Settings" link on the right menu of your member space. Everything is self-explained. Some important settings you should take care of:

My space can be seen by: decide who should be able to see your space.
I want to show my stats on story space: if you select this, number of visited time of your space is shown to people who visit your space.
I want to show my messenger status: if you check this and specified a Yahoo nick in your profile, others will know if you are online on Yahoo !Messenger

Deliver your contents

You can get the address of your space by clicking on "Publish my story space" link, copy the link and send to your friends.

Another way is sending them a RSS link of your space so that they can see your update in the space via web feeds. On top of the right menu, just before your nick name there is a RSS icon . Mouse over this and right click, choose to copy the location of the link. Send your friends that RSS link. When the link is added to their RSS reader, they can see your new stories instantly.

Manage relationship with other members

If you are interested in making friends with other writers in the WriteOpenStory.com community, just add them as Friend. Just open a chapter of that writer and find the "Add" link below their user name in the right hand menu. Click on this to send a new friend request to the user. If that user approve your add friend request, their name will be listed in your Friend list.

The "Friend list" link in your member space menu is your entry point to the Friend list management page. All friends will be shown and you can decide to view profile or remove them from the list if you want.

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