S3 Posting Instructions

Now that you've finished your work, you'll want to share it with the community! Here's the Dovecember Guide on how to submit your work to the S3 Fest Collection!

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Overview

If you're an AO3 veteran, then you can just breeze through this overview.For everyone else, we've written up a detailed guide on how to post your work to the S3 collection!

  1. To submit your work to the collection, please go to our Collection Page and click on 'Post to Collection' in the top right corner.

  2. Fill out the 'New Work' page. Be sure to include any tags for the dark, taboo, or controversial topics in your work - please be as detailed as possible.

  3. Add the Dovecember account as a co-author. This will only be a temporary addition, so that we can add an official endnote and set up a proper posting date.

  4. Click post <3

Your work will then be awaiting its approval to the collection. This may take some time, so please be patient with us.Once accepted into the collection, it will be added onto our posting schedule, where we will stagger posts until every work is revealed. Those of you who have selected to remain anonymous will remain that way, and those of you who are posting publicly will be revealed along with your work.Should you ever want to change the anonymity status of your work, please contact the Dovecember Team and we can adjust that for you.If you need to make any changes to your work at any time between your submission and when it's posted, please let the Team know ASAP, as we will be making any posting graphics and information posts from what has been sumbitted initially.And that's it! Once your work is submitted, you can just sit back and relax. Grab some soft serve and enjoy the Summer Fest!

Mandatory Tags

The first section to fill out in a New Work is 'Tags'. AO3 highlights part of this section as mandatory, and others as not. However, there will be selected tag typs that are mandatory for your submission to this Fest.

These sections highlighted with the pink box are mandatory fields for uploading to AO3.

Ratings:
Select your rating from the drop-down list. Due to the nature of this exchange, you will likely require a Mature or Explicit rating - please select the one that best suits your work.Both Mature and Explicit tags indicate that the work is for adult consumption only. However, Explicit tags should be used if any adult themes are graphic (detailed) in nature, e.g., explicit sexual content/porn, detailed violence, gore, etc.If you are unsure whether your work is Mature or Explicit, please reach out to the Team for guidance.Archive Warnings:
The Archive of Our Own mandates that users either warn for — or explicitly choose not to warn for — a short list of common warnings:

  • Graphic Depictions of Violence,

  • Major Character Death,

  • Rape/Non-Con, and

  • Underage

If your prompt included tags that also appear in the "Archive Warnings" section, we strongly advise you select them.Should the Dovecember Team feel like your work needs an Archive Warning, we will contact you as the creator to understand why you haven’t selected an Archive Warning, as there may be cases (e.g., MCD) where it may spoil the plot you’ve crafted.If you do not need to use the Archive Warnings, select 'No Archive Warnings Apply'.Fandoms:
The nature of this Fest means that "Call of Duty (Video Games)" will be the only fandom tag.To find COD on the list, simply start to type the name of the fandom and a drop-down list will appear. Click on Call of Duty (Video Games) and this will select that tag.

Supporting Tags

The below part of the 'Tags' section is not mandatory for posting to AO3, but will most likely need filling out for your work to be appropriately tagged for this Fest.

Categories:
These Categories denote the relationships that are the focus of your work.

  • F/F - Female/Female relationships

  • F/M - Female/Male relationships

  • Gen - General: no romantic or sexual relationships, or relationships which are not the main focus of the work

  • M/M - Male/Male relationships

  • Multi - More than one kind of relationship, or a relationship with multiple partners

  • Other - Other relationships

If any of these apply to your work, please select them.

Relationships:
These are the relationships that your work predominantly focuses on. There is a difference between tagging romantic and / or sexual relationships, and tagging platonic ones. There can be more than one of these tags for a fic, so please apply any that you believe are relevant.Examples:A fic that is focused on a romantic and / or sexual relationship between Soap and Gaz would be tagged: John “Soap” Mactavish / Kyle “Gaz” GarrickA fic that is focused on a platonic relationship between Soap and Gaz would be tagged: John “Soap” Mactavish & Kyle “Gaz” GarrickYou can find these tags by typing in their names and selecting the relevant ones. These rules also apply when a work has 3+ people included in a relationship, just select the appropriate tag.

Characters:
This is exactly the same as selecting the relationship, but just type in the name of the character(s) who appear in your work and select them. Please select any characters that you believe are relevant for your work.Additional Tags:
This is one of the most important sections for tagging that is available to you. It is where you can tag for themes, AUs, and any other warnings - so if your work is a Mermaid AU, this is where you would place that information.Search for what you would like to tag by typing it into the box, then select the appropriate tag(s) from that list.Like with the Archive Warnings section, we would like you to tag what is included in your work from your prompt.For example, if your prompt included Breeding, Stalking and Teratophilia, and these appear in your work, please use the ‘Breeding’, ‘Stalking’ and ‘Monsterfucking | Teratophilia’ tags.You don't have to tag for anything that doesn't appear in your work.Some things to consider:

  • Use different phrasings of something to find what you would like to tag (ie. Watersports instead of piss, Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics instead of Omegaverse)

  • A broad tag may have other applicable subcategories, ie. Torture can break up into:

  • Psychological Torture

  • Nipple Torture

  • Cock & Ball Torture

  • etc.

  • A tag may not exist on AO3:

ie. Mind Break / Mindbreak is not an official tag on AO3, but you can still tag it as ‘Mind Break’ or ‘Mindbreak’ by typing it in and then pressing the comma button, and this will upload it as a freeform tag, which is still searchable.

  • Using the ‘Dead Dove; Do Not Eat’ tag:

Whilst the DD;DNE tag does not indicate what is contained in the work, it is a supporting tag to let those viewing the work know that the other tags – usually hard kink or taboo related – are to be taken with the utmost seriousness.Put simply, it declares that what is explained in the other tags is exactly what you will see in the work.Whilst this is a Dead Dove Event, if you find that your work may not necessarily need a Dead Dove tag - ie., it is a BDSM fic that only features mild spanking, or art that only features a snapshot of sexual content based on your prompt, you do not need to include it in your tag list.

Mod Advice: When it comes to posting your work, it is always best to over-tag than under-tag.

Preface

As seen in the image below, this is where you put in the title of your work and where you will add the Dovecember account as a co-creator.

Once again, the mod account will remain a co-author only until the reveals — after that, we will remove ourselves as a co-author!We need the access to add an official endnote, set up a proper posting date, take the work off anon if needed, and make any last-minute typo corrections if we find any.Your work summary / blurb will go into the ‘Summary’ box - this can be as detailed for your work as you would like it to be.You can also see in the ‘Notes’ section with ‘at the beginning’ and ‘at the end’, if you click on the most appropriate one for you, then you can add in a shoutout to your beta/editor/proofreaders/ cheerleaders.If you or your supporters would like to remain anonymous, please keep revealing details to a minimum - ie., use initials instead of names / usernames.You are also welcome to shout-out the prompter as a little treat, but this is not necessary. The Fest works are not Gifts!

Associations

As you are uploading from the 'Post to Collection' section of the Collection Page, it will automatically assign the Fest's collection to the ‘Collections / Challenges’ section, so you will not have to do something there. You can see this in the screenshot embedded below.

If you are breaking your fic up into chapters, please select the ‘This work has multiple chapters’ section.Reminder: all of your work must be completed before you post it to the collection, so ensure all the chapters have been added on before submitting it.If you have questions on how to make your fic chaptered, please reach out to the mods.You must select a language that your work will be listed as featuring - this is most likely to be English for your work.

Privacy

In this section, you can apply certain privacy settings to your work. As the creator of potentially taboo / dark / heavy subjects, please do not hesitate to select one of these options, if you would like.However, these are not mandatory to select, apart from the ‘Who can comment on this work’ part.

What all of these options mean:

  • ‘Only show your work to registered users’: This means your work will only show on AO3 search pages if someone has an AO3 account, and if it is linked to someone, they will need to log into their account to view it. No one without an AO3 account will be able to view the work.

  • ‘Enable comment moderation’: This means you are sent every comment that is left on your work in an email but it does not immediately show publicly. With this option, you have to approve whether or not their comment can be seen publicly on your work, so you can vet the comments you receive.

  • ‘Who can comment on this work’: This is where you can select whether only people with AO3 accounts can leave comments, or if you will let people who do not have an AO3 account to leave comments, or if you do not want to receive any at all.

We recommend not selecting ‘No one can comment’, so that the community can send you some love and support <3

Work Text - Fic

This is where you upload your work!HTML:
This is the section you will upload your fic to if you have already formatted into HTML, by pasting it in, like shown below.

Rich Text:
By clicking the highlighted rich text button, you can upload your formatted work (e.g., with italics, bolds, etc. already applied in your working doc) to this section without uploading it in HTML formatting, and it will look like the below.

Work Text - Art

To upload images onto AO3, you will need to click onto the ‘Rich Text’ tab and then click the Image icon, as shown below.

The Source refers to the Image URL. We suggest leaving a short, detailed image description and setting the 'Width' to 100%. This way, your image will Autoscale on all views.

Note: You will need to host the image on another site to optain the Image URL and upload from the image link there.

We suggest Squidge Images, but you can also use Twitter, Imgur, Tumblr, Pixiv, etc.

If you are posting art anonymously, the mods will take care of hosting your image.

Post

There are three options here, Preview, Post, Cancel.

Preview:
This allows you to see how your work will look when it is posted, before it is posted to the collection.On this page, you will be able to scroll to the bottom and click ‘Post’ if you are happy to submit it to the collection for the Team to receive it, or click ‘Edit’ to go back to the ‘New Work’ page where you can adjust everything.Post:
This will submit your work straight into our collection ready for the Team to preview it and add it to our posting schedule.Cancel:
This will take you back to the previous page, without saving the details input on this ‘New Work’ page.So, please be careful and do not click this unless you are wanting to start this posting process from scratch.

And with that, you've submitted your work!