Guidelines for submitting a story

Thank you for your contribution! Remember that your story will be read by thousands eventually, so here are a few guidelines before submitting it.

• Because of the great amount of juvenile and uncredible stories we receive from teenagers, from now on, only mature, serious experiences will be accepted, preferably from adults.
• The first and most important point: This is a site about real ghost experiences. It is not a site for fiction. Fictional stories will be discarded. It doesn't have to be spectacular at all, but it has to be real.
• The second important point: Please take your time to write to the best of your ability, as you would, for example, when submitting for a school work or a magazine. We have some quality standards (for the sake of our readers), and if it's too badly written (bad grammar, too many spelling errors, no punctuation or confusing story line), we will refuse it.
  
  Remember, this is not a random post in some unknown discussion board, it is the publication of your real, personal story that is going to attract a lot of readers, so your writing style should reflect that.
• Do not copy stories from other people on the web and worse, pass it as your own. First, this site is for publishing your personal experiences, and second, it is a breach of copyrights. We have zero tolerance for plagiarism and it is considered a bannable offense.
• There is a preview page before you finally publish your story. We would appreciate it if you reviewed it at least once for misspellings. If you don't know how a word is spelled, just check with an online dictionary. Even better, modern browsers (Firefox, Chrome, etc) have a built-in spell checker for text boxes on web pages. You could also use a spell checker in any text editor like Microsoft Word.
• Please avoid overusing conversations fillers such as "okay", "like, "well", "so", "anyways", "you know", "all right", "here it goes", "he's like", "then this... then that... then this". This is a written story, not a chat with your buddy on the phone. Written stories don't start with "ok so well anyways it was like you know".
• Please avoid chat room abbreviations ("u" instead of "you", "n" for "and", "coz" for "because" etc) as it is juvenile and unreadable. We want to have mature conversations about the delicate topic of ghosts, using abbreviated language only attracts the intellectually lazy crowd.
• If a picture / video / web link has an significant role in your story, it is important that you share it. Note: you need to own the copyright or have legal permission to use any of the media files you send us so we can have the legal rights to publish them.
• We may change your story's title if we deem it necessary. We may also do minor editing changes in the text in order to improve readability and typos, however, we will not take on the task of a complete editing and correcting job if the story is too badly written. We will simply refuse it.
  
  It will take a few days before we get to read your story and publish it, depending on our life schedule and the number of stories before yours.
• This site is mainly to share your ghost experiences, not some legend or urban myth you may have heard. Ghost stories can rapidly become really distorted and embellished as people use them to entertain themselves, but this site is not about fiction, it is about real experiences. Although we allow stories from a very close relative, like your parents, or child, who shared it with you in intimacy, not to entertain, we cannot allow stories from "a friend of a friend" as it is not reliable.
• This site is not about dream interpretations. Unless something truly paranormal happened in addition to your dream, we won't publish stories describing your dream, no matter how weird or scary it was.
• You must be 13 years or older to publish a story. If you are under 18 yearls old, please do not divulge personal information that could make it possible for someone to find you, for your own safety. If you are 18 years and older, it is up to you, but we still do not encourage the practice. Please use common sense.
• We reserve the right to refuse stories that are too short, juvenile, vulgar, off-topic, very poorly written, stories in all UPPERCASE, stories with no punctuations, stories that do not meet our criteria for defining a ghost experience and anything that looks like spam or promotional material.
• This site is for the general public. No sexually explicit content is allowed. You can mention a sexual experience with general terms, but there really is no need for technical details.
• Unless your story is happening in the present and you are writing updates, there is no point in dividing it on multiple submissions (ghost story 1, ghost story 2, ghost story 3, etc), so please wait until you have completed it before publishing your experience.
• Our users have complained that some organizations are submitting to many sites accepting public content in order to indirectly promote their web sites or their activities, and do not actively participate when users ask questions or offer feedback. Although these stories have been accepted in the past, we prefer to receive unique stories where the authors are directly engaged with the members of our community. We receive a lot of submissions so we are selective about what we publish. As of now, we reserve the right to refuse submissions if it appears to be part of an indiscriminate bulk effort.
• Please be aware that users of our site, many from different backgrounds and cultures, will provide feedback to your story and you may not personally agree with all of their comments. However, it is the nature of the web to have debates with very different opinions, and although you may be the only person who truly knows what happened in your story, you should not take it personally when some users disagrees or ask for additional information, but understand that it is part of normal discussions where people exchange ideas.
• The submission to this site must be original (not copied), in good taste, legal, accurate and true, non-defamatory, non-threatening, non-confidential, non-infringing of copyrights owned by others and relevant for this site. You certify that you have the right to submit the text and photo that you are submitting. Your submission signifies agreement to the above and that you agree to grant a royalty-free, transferable, perpetual license to publicly display your submission on this web site. You also grant this web site the right to pursue anyone who copies your submission. This site may or may not publish your story or use it to promote or provide to the media as we see fit. This includes featured articles in newspapers, magazines news stories and other media representations in print. Once stories are published, they cannot be deleted, unless you present a reason that we consider valid, as deleting a member's stories would damage the integrity of our archive and reduce the value of this resource to members and visitors.