Formatting stories
All stories on GSS use a very simple formatting follow these two rules:
- Write continuously within one paragraph (no manual line breaks)
- Separate paragraphs with an empty line
Please make sure to separate the paragraphs, otherwise you’ll get an unstructured “wall of text”, which is very hard to read.
Additional formatting (like italic or bold text) can be done using so called “Markdown” marks.
Character formatting examples:
| What you want | What you write | What will be displayed |
|---|---|---|
| Italic | *some text* | some text |
| Bold | **some text** | some text |
| Italic + Bold | ***some text*** | some text |
To separate parts of your story, put create a line which contains only three asterisks to create a horizontal ruler:
***
Check this guide for a short overview of the possibilities and some examples how to use them.
You could write your text in an online Markdown editor and then copy and paste them into our Story Submit Page.
A good online editor is StackEdit.
Images
Markdown also allows you to add images and links to your story. We’ll allow the usage of those if you follow a simple set of rules. Any story failing to follow these rules will NOT be approved!
- Images must be taken from a public site which allows to republish their images (like tumblr)
- The images must have a reasonable size (currently our Markdown parser doesn’t support scaling)
- The primary purpose of an image is to illustrate a person’s look. That should NOT replace a written description of persons!
- Nudity and even sexual images are allowed within reasonable limits. We won’t accept porn, though.
- Short animated gifs are fine, but no inline videos.
- If you use images, use them sparsely!
Links
Links can be added just by inserting the URL into the text. They will be replaced by a “Click Here” link. This option has always been available on GSS and will continue to work.
You now can also create links using Markdown with a bit of more control. Check out the Markdown guide to learn how to add links to a text.
If you use Markdown links, you have to untick the “Automatically generate clickable links” option on the story submit page! Otherwise the old mechanic of converting links will interefere!
Again, there’s a short list of rules for using links:
- Links to images (on a public site) are fine, the images should also follow the above rule set for inline images.
- Links to your own site is fine in general (like “see here for more of my stories”). If you use Patreon or something similar, we will accept that, but not if you link to a commercial pay-for-use site!
- No linking to plain porn or videos!
- Nothing unrelated to this site, its content or your story!
We will always reserve to deny a story if it contains inappropriate links.