 Hey there, Foundation staff, Sherm here, and welcome to Sherm's Declassified Skip Survival Guide. I wanted to talk about a little community philosophy today. Specifically, I want to talk about how to be an upstanding member of the community versus how to be a dick. I'm going to split the community into four arbitrary categories. Variable one is whether you are a newbie or a veteran, and variable two is whether you are a goofus or a gallant. Remember, only you can prevent yourself from being a dick. Newbies. Many of us newbies come from different walks of life. Some of us are in our 50s with varying interests, but always wanted to become writers. Some of us are 15 year olds and really just like the creepy internet stories. Wherever you come from, if you feel new to the community, then I am calling you a newbie today. You are here to learn the ropes to the community, and here's the do's and don'ts of being an SCP Wiki member. A good SCP Wiki member follows basic internet forum protocol, i.e. don't be a dick. Beyond that, a good SCP member can fall into two main categories, the watcher and the creator. If you just want to be a watcher, congratulations, you're done. Being cool in the forums is all you have to do. Like what you like, don't what you don't, your presence is appreciated. If you want to be a creator, you have a couple more rules to learn. Number one is actually pretty sweet. Bad work doesn't mean banned. If you tried your best and posted it to the draft forum, congratulations. You did your job and some veterans will be buying a couple days to critique and help you improve your story. Please take this opportunity to not argue and be a dick to those critiquing your work since they aren't paid to do this or anything. It's literally out of the goodness of their hearts. Related to that, the process of your ascension to authorship can be hastened by spell checking and doing a couple drafts of your work before sharing it. If your writing class wouldn't give you an A, it won't survive on the Wiki in this day and age. But sure, I posted my work for critique and no one looked at it. I hear you saying hypothetical newbie. Yeah, I've been there too. There are only so many staff members and so many drafts going live all the goddamn time. Once you finally get a first look from a staff member, it's wholly possible you'll never get looked at again because there are too many new articles to get to. To combat this, you really ought to take these three steps to heart. Number one, go over your draft several times before you post it. Try to make the article perfect before you put it up for critique. If you're only going to get crit once, better make it count. Number two, make friends within the community. There are subreddits, discord servers and forums where you can post things and people will look at them. Especially if you have taken the time to become a welcome member of the community by chatting in those forums regularly and reciprocating by critiquing other people's works. It's almost like you're actually making friends, improving your critique skills so you can self-critique better and becoming a better member of the community or something. Crazy, I know. Number three, last ditch effort. Most of the site staff is totally cool with being PM'd for a crit. Pick a staff member you see around the forums and link them to your sandbox. You won't be seen as a nuisance as long as you don't make a nuisance of yourself doing it. Don't spam people, just don't. When the critique finally comes, some days you'll receive the wonderful teacher critique, where they take the time to kindly explain their opinions and things they'd like changed. Sometimes you'll receive the grumpy teenager critique, where they just say, meh. If you're very unlucky, you might even cross paths with an angry bear critique, who seems to hate not only your work, but your very soul. It is in your best interest to be as respectful as you can to whatever flavor of critique you get. Even the grumpy gusses can contain some nuggets of writing improvement under their kind of a jerk exterior. Also, the critics aren't getting paid for this, so there's only so much goodness of their heart to go around in the first place. Getting writing critique and criticism is always tough, and you will need to have a thick skin. If your critic is actually being a dick, remember that being a dick back just makes you a dick too. Rather than being one of two dicks, just report them to a mod. As a final note to newbies, I want you to remember that the 2017 Foundation isn't the same as the 2007 Foundation. The same quality of articles aren't going to survive nowadays, and even new articles that evoke the Series 1 flavor are seriously better written than they would have been back in the day. Remember that you are coming in with the challenge of writing to this higher caliber, despite not having been here the whole time. It's rough, but with hard work we can make our mark on the modern wiki. As for the veterans, I want to start by commending the staff, who as far as I can tell have embodied the mantras I'm about to preach. If you are comfortable enough to consider yourself a veteran, I'm referring to you as such today. You have put forth the effort I asked the newbies for, and you've created a community and creative writing wiki that the internet hasn't seen otherwise. As a teacher... dance instructor! Shut up, it's still kind of teacher. I've had many students in my time. I liken the experience best to kung fu movies. The gruff, hates everyone teacher who only takes on students with a particular gift, masters are super fun in cinema, but they are often very alone in their mountain dojos. If you want to build a community, as the SCP wiki claims to be doing, you have to inject patience and kindness into your teaching style. After all, nobody ever took advice from somebody who called them an idiot. They just called the critic a snooty jerk and kept on posting X-Men skips. Part of my concern and reason for writing this essay is a sort of condescension aimed at newbies who claim series one skips is their favorites. As a veteran, I know that those skips are poorly written, and any fans of SCP should appreciate the complex flavors of the later series skips. To this I say firstly, if a newbie wants to be a creator type, they will grow at their own pace based on how much they read and what kind of critiques they get on their writing. Do a good job teaching them, and they'll become veteran creators just like you want. At the same time, you still shouldn't look down on the casual fans who enjoy the series one skips and never move on to the later series. Series one is simple, and sometimes we underestimate the power of simplicity and hitting one emotion that causes a story to stick with a reader. It's hard to deny the emotional effect of 173 or 096. Even if we can tell a more stylistically complex version today, you can't deny the power the classics have. Beyond this, it bears repeating in the community the same way it bears repeating in this essay. If you treat a newbie like garbage, they aren't going to listen to your critique. This is doubly important because we mainly communicate via text, one of the easiest formats for misinterpreting someone's tone and assuming they're being a jerk even when they aren't. And this brings me to my final subject, a place where both sides of this community need to not be dicks. Cold posts. Newbies, I know that it takes a while to get critique. I know that the grand idea you have in your head is burning to be shown the light of day. But just don't, please? Successful cold posts are few and far between, and they are typically the work of veteran writers who've gone over the idea multiple times themselves. A newbie throwing up a cold post with no critique is a recipe for disaster. Not every time, and if you are the golden boy who does the golden cold post, more power to you, but disaster a lot of the time. Speaking of disaster, veterans, we know these cold posts are going to happen. I can't claim to know the percent that didn't pay attention to the wiki rules versus lol being a dick. But I can say that you are probably supposed to be the mature one in the situation. That means following critique and deletion protocol, but also treating the cold post as legitimate and critiquing rather than mocking them. Insults don't help anyone, huh? And that's coming from me, a former Rocky Horror Picture Show performer, the room enthusiast, and a giant fan of So Bad It's Good Media. Sometimes, these things are just goldmines of laughs, and you have to hold that shit in until you get to a more private location. Nobody's perfect, and I understand the need to cackle, but help the newbie first save the jokes for a private locale where you won't insult the author because, damn it, they just might be trying their best. And if you really like what's going on around here, hit up the Site 42 Patreon or the Site 42 store and support the channel that way. See you next time, Foundation staff.