A. Minimum Requirements

1. Cipher only accepts submissions from registered members who have agreed to our Terms of Service.
2. All submissions must abide by the rules of technical writing: grammar, punctuation, spelling, and fidelity to canon spellings and capitalization.
3. Every submission must include all appropriate warnings, rating, characters, genre(s), and summary. The administrators and validation staff reserve the right to add warnings and change ratings at their discretion.

B. Content Restrictions:

Cipher will not validate any submissions containing the following:

• Snuff
• Sadomasochism
• Bloodsports
• Scatology
• Water sports
• Chan
• Self-mutilation (i.e. cutting)

If you require definitions of the above, feel free to contact the administrators.

C. Qualitative Requirements

In Explanation: Cipher was founded upon a desire to house and publish quality fanfiction. Every chapter of every story is viewed by our validation staff before publication. Publication at Cipher is a privilege, a compliment, and never a right.

• Netspeak, computer chat abbreviations, and similar colloquialisms within the text of the story.
• Missing story summary
• Repeated and/or major errors in grammar, spelling, and punctuation.
• Toxic Mary Sues or Gary Stus.
• Repeated errors in canon spellings, usage, and capitalization unless it is pertinent to the story.
• Frequent formatting errors
• Distracting section dividers
• Author’s notes within the text of the story

2. Qualitative Grounds for Rejection

• Major plot continuity errors
• Verb tense shifts
• Unexplained shifts in point of view, i.e. first person to third person
• Distracting repetition and/or consistently poor language use
• AU or OOC colloquialisms
• Characters extremely out of character with insufficient explanation.
• Unexplained and distracting AU aspects of the story

D. Submission Restrictions

1. Each author is permitted no more than two submissions at any given time. This means two chapters of a multi-chaptered story, two drabbles, two additions to a round robin, et cetera. In short, the validators should never see an author’s name listed in the validation queue more than twice at the same time.
2. If an email is sent to an author with corrections to or questions about a submission, and the email address is incorrect, all submissions by that author will be immediately removed from the validation queue until the correct email address is provided.
3. Images included with the submission may include awards from other sites, fanart by the author, or images posted with permission of the artist. There may not be more than three images posted in each chapter of each story, and the maximum size of each image may not exceed 300x300 px.

Amended as of 10/13/2006: Cipher is instituting a new policy of simple acceptance or rejection of submissions. This means that we will validate your submission as is--other than very, very small, infrequent corrections, the administrators will no longer correct, suspend, or critique submissions. Too many authors treated this consideration as a beta service, and we have said repeatedly that we are not betas. Therefore, you will simply receive a yes or no answer regarding validation of your submission. We will tell you why we rejected your submission, and you may try to correct the errors and improve it as necessary, then resubmit. But due to the time-consuming nature of validation, we simply do not have time to perform quasi-beta service. More often than not, the administrators ended up being actual betas. For a site of this size, that amounts to a second, full-time job. An unpaid full time job.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause, and we hope that Cipher authors will remember that this is done out of the desire to maintain high standards for the site.

Please note that most of the instruction, how-to’s, FAQs and tutorials may be found in our forum. The forum is the first resource for all members, and a great deal of information on all facets of writing, submitting, and Cipher in general may be found there.