Submission Guidelines - General Following is a list of general guidelines for submitting to TV.com. These are in compliance...more »
Submission Guidelines - General Following is a list of general guidelines for submitting to TV.com. These are in compliance with TV.com's official rules . I am posting this to aid anyone seeking to submit, specifically to my guides, in order to preserve consistancy. (If you see any subs in my guides that do not follow these rules or are formatted incorrectly or are in the wrong section, I must have missed it and anyone is free to correct them.) Submission Types: Summary Please do not make these *too* long. A good summary is concise and fairly brief. Only relate the main plot and any subplots, and never ever give spoilers! Ever! Ideally a guide should have consistant summary lengths throughout; it is offputting to go from one epsiode with three rambling paragraphs to an episode with a single, information-packed sentance. If you submit a summary, try to make it more or less match the existing ones (and if the existing ones are currently inconsistant due to myself not yet rewriting them, and if you're willing and able, why not rewrite them all yourself? :D I'd welcome the help.). Recap These are meant to be detailed, and consistancy of recaps throughout a guide isn't really important as far as I'm concerned. Only include dialogue if it is *vital* to the recap, otherwise please restrict dialogue to the Quotes section (unless it is spoilery!). Recaps are meant to contain spoliers so don't try to be cryptic. Make this as long or as short as you wish, as long as you are dealing with every important event in the episode. The following four categories are known as "blurbs": Allusion allude , verb, "to refer indirectly." An Allusion is a reference to something else, whether it be a person, an event, a form of entertainment, anything. It can be a title made to sound like the title of something else (aka the Bobby's World episode "Me and Roger" is an allusion to the film "Roger and Me"). It can however reference other events, persons, or episodes in the same series. You may submit "When Bobby mentions his Aunt Flossie in the airport he is referring to episode #46 Bobby Goes To Florida. ." Please try to avoid using the word "obvious" in an allusion, such as "The character of Nigel is an obvious parody of Iggy Pop." It may seem like that would be obvious to everyone, but it isn't to everyone in the whole world and to state that it's obvious when it may not be is a bit presumtuous and unnecessary. I may reject submissions if I feel that you are going more on your own opinion than fact. Note A Note is anything relating to the episode that does not have anything to do with anything that happens on-screen. That is to say, "Director John Francowitz stated in an interview that this was his favorite episode" is a Note. "A video game was based off of this episode in particular" is a Note. And - this one is a head-scratcher I know - the identity of a musical piece played during a scene belongs in Notes unless the band themselves appear on-screen in which case it should be submitted as a Trivia. (Please ignore the mistake TV.com made in the Notes submission page where it gives the same definition for Note as it does for Allusion. That's a mistake. They should fix it.) Trivia A completely misleading title, this means anything that happens on-screen in the episode. I know that "trivia" generally means "interesting fact," such as the director's favorite episode as mentioned above, but according to TV.com Trivia is where you put anything that happens on-screen. This includes goofs that made it to production, such as an animated character's clothes being colored the wrong color for a noticable amount of time, or someone's mouth not matching up with their dialogue (unless that's the norm for that show!). Recurring events, like commercials or musical numbers that are actually part of the show, or morals given at the end of the episodes, should be in Trivia. If it happened on-screen, it belongs in Trivia. Quotes These are quotes said by characters, that occurred within the episode itself (and not elsewhere, such as in a commercial for the episode for example). Submitted Quotes ought to be amusing, or compelling, or at least interesting, but never contain spoilers! Correct formatting for quotes is as follows: Bold tags should surround the character's name, followed by a colon, followed by the dialogue without quotation marks (do not bold the colon!). Actions should be within parentheses and the action, parentheses included, should be within itallics tags. If the action specifies the character who had just spoken (or is about to speak), the action should be on that same line. Only when an action refers to something not specific to any of the characters speaking should it be on its own line. If you wish to specify that the quote is a Repeated Line you may do so by putting *Repeated Line* in itallics before the quote itself (there is no official rule for repeated lines on TV.com, I am providing this guideline for the sake of consistancy within my guides). Examples: Lydia : Beetlejuice, don't ever change. Beetlejuice : (sniffs suit) Okay, I won't! or *Repeated Line* Casper : I hate my afterlife. or Derek : Relax, dork! What could possibly happen? (A crash followed by Roger yelping) Bobby : Well, the fence could fall over and crush Roger... Remember that the Preview function *still* isn't working on TV.com, so your submissions will show up without carriage returns when you hit submit and you get to the Verify Submission screen. You do not need to add in paragraph or break tags, the subs will go *through* correctly, they just don't preview right. :roll: If you are submitting to an episode that has multiple sub-episodes within it: For blurbs, please make sure you put the title of the sub-episode the submission is for at the top of the submission, within itallics tags. For summaries/recaps, please put the titles in bold, followed by a space, followed by a carriage return, then start the text. The reason for the space before the carriage return is really more for summaries, and it keeps the guide looking neat because the carriage returns don't show up on the guides' front pages. This really only affects the first/last episodes but for consistancy sake I'd like them all the same. If you are submitting to a guide like this, please look at existing entries to see how they were done. You can click on the edit links for existing entries to see the actual tags and everything. All of *that* being said: while I would normally be happy to correct any spelling/grammar etc errors you may make in your submissions, it is actually according to TV.com's policies that editors are only responsible for make minor corrections to subs. If your submission is riddled with errors, it will be rejected. Also remember that as of now TV.com does not have a feature that allows us to move a submission from one category to another. If you submit a blurb to Notes and it belongs in Trivia I cannot move it for you. I will quote your sub back to you in the Comments and ask you to resubmit it in the proper category. I will not resubmit it for you. I want you to get the point(s) for it. I *will* reject submissions if I feel they are unnecessary. If you spot a continuity error in an episode, submit it. If you spot a minor animation mistake, don't. I don't need my guides brimming with scores of "fluff" submissions. And again, only submit quotes that are interesting and/or funny or compelling. Anything else *will* be rejected. Please have a reason for removing or rewriting something major such as an episode summary. If it is plagiarized, that's a good reason, but remember that I run fansites for many of the shows I have guides for, and I often reuse summaries that I wrote myself. Plus *other* sites frequently copy off of my websites. If you aren't sure if the summaries here were written by myself ask me; I won't lie. Some of them were here before I got here and I don't claim them as my own. I am not locking this topic, and if you wish to discuss something about submissions or ask a question and you don't want to do it through PM you are welcome to do it here. :)less «
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