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 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 of specific critiques is not allowed on the forums. Discussion of specific stories is only permitted in that story's dedicated discussion thread.

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 flag icon. 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.

How to access the forums

There are 2 options to access the forums:

1. Choose Forums: New Forums.
2. Choose the icon on top of the page, to the right. Click on View notifications/View more.

Search

To search the forums for specific topics, posts, users or categories, click on the search icon on top of the page to the right. Before starting a new thread on a specific subject, please check whether someone has discussed it before.



Change notifications

Go to the forums through the icon on top of the page on the right side, click on the icon, then View notifications/view more. Choose Preferences. On the left side, you are able to change for example your notifications for Categories, Users and Tags. You can also change your email preference on the left side by clicking on Emails.

Return to CCs front/home page

On top of the page, click on the Home button to return to CCs front/home page. You can also go to Stories, Community, Tools or About to return to CCs front/home page.

Each topic on the forums is a thread. Click on "forums" and choose a forum, for example "Hot Discussions". Then you'll see a list of subjects being discussed — a list of "threads".

If you notice anything our Moderators should be aware of, please flag a post by clicking on this icon below:

In case the flag doesn't appear below the message, click on this icon first to get access to more options:

Admins will be merciless in deleting off-topic posts. Don't take it personally if your post gets deleted because it was deemed off-topic, it happens. 

If it is used with the permission of who it belongs to and is accompanied with a proper source (link), then a few lines to help illustrate a point being made is permitted. Longer information should simply be offered as a link for readers to go and see for themselves.

No, once you post something on the forums it's there to stay. While CC claims no copyright on the forum posts we cannot mass-delete them upon request since this would damage the threads in which they belong and could derail an ongoing discussion completely.

However, if you post something like a short story or a poem in the forums and want that sort of material removed please send us a request with the url of specific threads and it's certainly something that we will look into.

Keep in mind that we will not do this for people willy-nilly. We will only do this if you intend to close your account and stop using CC.

Premium members can delete posts from the forum that they own.

You can click on the marker and drag it up and down. If you are at the bottom of the thread and want to go on top, you can click on the date. See picture below:

If you look at the notifications, you will see a symbol in front. Here below are the basic symbols and their meanings:

Heart = Like

Arrow = Reply

Quotation mark = Quote

Pencil = Edits