Knowledge Base

Behaviour

Please be nice, polite and considerate. Respect other people's opinions. If you disagree, you may express that but do so politely. Personal attacks and comments do not belong on CC and will not be tolerated. Hate speech (meaning HERE) of any kind will result in immediate ban from our website.

Bullying

Any form of bullying will not be accepted or tolerated on CC.

Examples of bullying include:

• Verbal abuse
• Gaslighting (meaning HERE)
• Arguing in bad faith
• Sealioning (meaning HERE)

Diversity

We accept and welcome everyone on CC. We're proud to have a diverse community on our site and celebrate each individual for who they are.

Content

You can only post your own content on CC. It is forbidden to post content from other people without their permission. Posting links is allowed as long as it is relevant to the discussion but posting links simply to drive traffic away is not. Please note you are allowed to post link to your own website and published books.

CC is a writing community, therefore, we ask you to keep the focus on topics that are related to writing.

On the forums, please make sure your comment is on topic. If you derail the conversation, you may expect your comment to be removed from the conversation.

AI generated content

AI generated content of any kind is prohibited on this site, whether it is stories, crits or forum posts. This includes use of AI applications such as ChatGPT. Submitting another author’s story to ChatGPT (or similar technology) in order to generate critiques is a violation of CC rules and grounds for immediate termination of your account.

Privacy

Please respect other people's privacy. If you know personal information about someone, you may not disclose this without their permission. Critique Circle is a private password-protected site. What happens on CC stays on CC. The forum chatter is not to be used for blog fodder.

If you have an issue with a specific story or critique, please send a message to the Moderators and let us know. Discussion about a specific story or critique is not allowed on the forums.

Advertising

Advertising is not permitted on the forums or on our website. Authors can list their published books and website in their signature. Please contact the administrators if you believe an exception should be made regarding other advertising.

Help us keep the forums organized

Please take a moment to search in the forums for your topic before you start a new thread to make sure the thread doesn't already exist. Place your thread in the right category and make sure the subject line describes the topic accurately.

Report forum post - we need your assistance

We kindly ask you to let us know if you notice anything that we should look into by using the report forum button. Our moderators monitor the forums, but it can happen that we don't know about a situation that needs our immediate attention. We appreciate all notifications so we can evaluate each case and take appropriate action. Note that the administrators are not obliged to take action at members requests, each case will be evaluated.

Moderators and Admins

Please treat our moderators kindly! Our amazing and brave team of moderators are volunteers and any kind of abuse toward them will not be tolerated.

If you have a problem with the administrator's individual decisions, please contact us directly through the message system or email, not through the forums.

Disclaimer

We encourage a lively debate but Critique Circle is not responsible for individual messages. Critique Circle reserves the right to delete, move or edit any messages that are harmful, hurtful, indecent or generally unacceptable. If a discussion has turned into a flame war, we may delete or lock the thread.

Individuals breaking the rules may receive a warning, temporarily lose the right to participate in the forums, indefinitely lose the right to participate in the forums or be expelled from Critique Circle.

Consequences are at the discretion of the administrators and will depend on the severity of the violation. CC administration reserves the right to deny or revoke membership at their own discretion.

Yes you can! The CC blog is a community effort and most of the blog posts are written by members just like you.

To be eligible to write a blog post, you need to have been a member on CC for minimum 3 months.

If you want to write a blog post for our website, please send a message to the administrators and tell us what you want to write about (few words about your topic/your idea).

Note: Your topic needs to relate to writing since we are a writing site after all!

If we like your idea, we will add an empty blog entry to your account where you can write your blog.

There is no timeframe or structure, but you will get a reminder after some time if we have sent you a blog entry to remind you to finish your blog post. Our members are our bloggers and can write as much as they like, we will send a new blog entry for each new request.

Please note we do not pay our writers for writing a blog post on our website. You get free exposure of your work on our website (anyone can see our blog posts, not only members) and we also advertise all new blog posts on our social media platforms.

If you are interested in writing a blog post for our website, I recommend reading our previous blog posts (excluding posts from our staff) to see what kind of material we are looking for.

You find all our previous blog posts HERE.

We read all blog posts before we publish them and do reserve the right not to publish the article if it does not fit the vision for our site. If we like your blog post, we will schedule it and post it on our site for next available date. Your finished blog will go into our queue and you will be sent a message when it gets published. The waiting time is typically a couple of weeks.

If you want to write a blog for CC, click HERE.

Welcome to Critique Circle

How to Critique a Story

How to Submit a Story

How to Create Private Queues

Novels

Using the Novel System

The Outlining Workshop

Premium Introduction

Using CC's message system is the best way to contact us. Click HERE to contact the Moderators.

Using CC's message system is the best way to contact us. Click HERE to contact the administrators.

You can also send us an email: info@critiquecircle.com

Everyone who wants to write, be it novels, short stories or articles. 😀

Critique Circle doesn't have an age-limit and everyone is welcome to join as long as they agree to our rules and policies, and are interested in actively participating.

Every new account starts with 2 credits. Therefore, you need to critique at least one story before you can submit your own story, as the cost of submitting a story is 3 credits.

You earn credits by critting stories. If your crit reaches 150 words you earn 0.5 credits, and if it reaches 300 words you earn 1 credit. Longer crits produce even more credits, up to a maximum of 2 credits per crit for 900 word crits. No credits are given out for crits under the 150 word limit.

To start, go to the story queue page and pick a story to crit! 😀

Our brave and amazing team of volunteers:

Aries75

Brinker

Jeffmoore

Excellent question! 

You can help by critting frequently and well, submitting stories and being active on the forums.

You can tell your friends about Critique Circle, mention us on your mailing lists, or any forums you frequently use.

You also help Critique Circle to develop and grow by becoming a Premium member. You'll have access to a lot of extra features, as well as the pleasure of knowing you're helping Critique Circle to stay alive 

The activity rank is a measure of how much each member contributes to Critique Circle through stories, critiques and forum posts. This is a very simple indication of a member's overall activity. Someone with rank 1 is the most active member on CC, plain and simple. 

Each type of activity contributes differently to your rank calculation. For example, you will get much more activity points by sending in a full-credit crit than you will by starting a new thread. The exact ratio has been determined through heuristics and is a well kept secret.

As the activity rank is calculated in relation to other members, you can see at a glance how you compare to others. This information is accessible from your dashboard page. You can also view the activity rank of other members from their member pages or by hovering over their name elsewhere on CC.

The activity rank takes into account activity for the last 30 days. Anything that is posted before that time will not contribute to the current activity rank. Therefore, this is a very good indication of just how active a member is right now.

If you do not want others to see your activity rank or other indications of activity (such as number of stories posted or crits given), you can check "Hide Activity Information" in your account settings page.

Some pages such as stories and critiques have a "Printer-Friendly Version" button which allows you to print out a page that has a specific layout for printers, but even if the page you are on does not have such a button you can still print it out in a pretty nice way without any menus or other extra elements.

Simply print the page as you would normally do (through File->Print or the Print button on your browser's toolbar) and the layout in your copy will be tailored for the printer. You can also select "Print Preview" in your browser beforehand to see what the printout will look like.

It is recommended that you enable "Print Background color and images" for best effect, whether you are printing in colour or black&white. This is enabled through Internet Explorer's "Options" page or Firefox's "Page setup" page. This step is not crucial but your printouts will look nicer. 

There are many reasons why a certain user account has been closed. The most common reason is that user accounts are automatically closed after a one year period of inactivity. In those cases the account is automatically reopened if the user logs in again.

Other reasons include requests from the user to have the account closed or due to violations of the CC rules.

CC isn't perfect and there might be a few bugs strewn about here and there.

We would appreciate it if you would report any issues that you find by sending a message to Moderator from your message box.

Thanks!

On CC, you have the possibility to choose from 3 membership options:

• Standard (free)
• Premium (monthly/yearly subscription)
• Premium Gold (monthly/yearly subscription)

Standard (free)

When you sign up to join CC, your account will start as a Trial account (some restrictions will apply). As soon as our Moderators have accepted your application, your account will change to a Standard account on CC. This means you can use our site for free with basic access to everything we offer our Standard members on our site.

Premium (monthly/yearly subscription)

Our Premium members get access to benefits in exchange for a small fee. Below we have listed the benefits of being a Premium member on CC:

Private Queues

You can create your own private queues. You can choose to create several types of queues and invite people to them. The queues can run on CC´s credit system, or without credits, depending on what you and your critique partners prefer. The queues can be many-to-one which means you submit stories and other people critique them, or many-to-many, which means all the people in your crit group can submit stories and critique each other. This is the ideal setup for critique groups, or for a dedicated reader system for a novel. It's also the ideal system for those who prefer to keep their manuscripts private, only viewable by selected few. You can even create a queue only viewable by yourself, and store your chapters there as backup.

The Novel system

Access to the Critique Circle Novel system, allowing you to structure your submission into a single cohesive novel, providing you with a marvellous way to keep your readers interested and critting.

Full Manuscript crit

The Full Manuscript crit feature enables you to give and receive macro crits on an entire manuscript, at a credit price that you and your critter mutually agree upon. Click HERE for more details.

Revise story while it's in the queue

You can edit your stories while they're still in the queue before they come up for review. Please note that placeholders are not allowed at Critique Circle.

Discount on submitting consecutive stories

You get a one credit discount when submitting a story in the public queues while you already have a submission in the queue or up for review, making it more affordable to stack submissions.

Outlining Workshop

You are given complete access to the massively useful Outlining workshop. You're able to create an unlimited number of characters as well as create your own templates for character creations. You're even able to publish your templates so others can create characters with your help.

Full access to all tools

You get full access to all the tools here at Critique Circle. You're for example able to create an unlimited number of characters in the character workshop, you're able to save names from the name generator, and use of the manuscript progress tool is unlimited.

Buddy List

Premium members are able to utilize the Critique Circle's powerful Buddy list feature. This enables you to receive notification if a friend of yours submits a story for review, solves an exercise, writes on the board, etc. This is for example useful for private crit groups where the members don't have much time to socialize, but want to keep track of what their buddies are up to. Your buddies are also only a click away when sending messages. You can have up to 24 buddies on your list.

Change your Profile Header

When you sign up as a Premium member, you have the exclusive choice of being able to change your profile header. Click on your username on top of the page in the right corner and choose Public profile. Then click on Edit my profile where you can change your profile header.

Access to Premium Forums

The Premium Forums are exclusively for the use of our Premium members.

Arrange Queues

You can arrange your queues any way you choose. Don't let CC's automatic Queue ordering bog you down, take charge of your own queue arrangement!

Huge message box

Our Premium members message box can handle up to 250 messages in either the inbox or the outbox (up to 500 in total). Additionally, messages never expire, so you don't have to worry about losing messages.

Unlimited number of books in the library

As a Premium member, you don't have a restriction on how many books you can have in the library on your profile page. The sky's the limit!

More information about our Premium subscription and price HERE.

Premium Gold (monthly/yearly subscription)

Our Premium Gold members get access to ALL the benefits we offer in exchange for a small fee. Below we have listed the benefits of being a Premium Gold member on CC:

All the benefits of a Premium membership

Premium Gold members receive all the benefits our Premium members receive.

Revise story while it's up for review

While both Premium and Premium Gold members can edit their stories while they're still in the queue, only Premium Gold members can make minor edits to their stories while they are up for review. This can be an invaluable feature for getting rid of that misplaced comma or typo once you can see the nitpicks rolling in.

Unlimited message box

You never have to delete a single message on Critique Circle again. You can have as many messages as you want in your in- and outbox without having to worry about CC deleting any of them. This can be especially important when tracking conversations about a particular story.

No advertisements

Premium Gold members have the option to configure or even turn off advertisement completely through your settings panel. We do appreciate you visiting the sponsors from time to time though as it helps to run CC.

24 member queues

Your private queues are no longer limited to 8 members. You can have up to 3x24 member queues on your account.

No archive of stories

All stories on CC might get archived after a certain period of time (couple of years) and removed from the site in order to conserve space. If you're an honoured member your stories don't get archived (unless you want to), so you can always access them.

Twice as many buddies

You can have up to 48 members on your buddy list instead of 24 which is the limit for Premium members. Never lose track of a friend you've made on CC.

More information about our Premium Gold subscription and price HERE.