The SCP Foundation

Required Reading

The following guides are required reading for all site members:

• Site Rules: The obligations and rights of users, Senior Staff, Moderators, and Admins, and potential consequences for failing to abide by them.

• Guide to Newbies: A guide that covers site applications, general site behavior, tips for being a good member, tips on writing, and a list of senior staff.

• How to Write an SCP: Exactly what it says on the tin. Covers thought development, containment, tone & censorship, humanoids, formatting , and templates.

• Chat Guide: The guide to the Foundation's IRC chatrooms. Covers registering, connecting, bannable offenses, chat OPs, discussion suggestions, and secondary chatrooms.

• Deletions Guide: An explanation of policy that covers everything you need to know about how, when, and the processes by which pages are deleted from the site.

• FAQ: Frequently asked questions.

Useful Guides

The following guides are not mandatory, but come highly recommended by the staff and users. You must submit a guide for approval to have it added to this list.

• About the SCP Foundation: An in-universe explanation of what the SCP Foundation is at the most basic level.

• Tag Guide: The tag guide is the road map to the tagging of SCPs, tales, and other site pages. In includes a full list and definition of each of the official tags, examples of some odd situations you might run into and a discussion of which tag is appropriate in those situations, and a short explanation of what tags are.

• Licensing Guide: Almost required reading; certainly important for more prolific members. This is a necessary and useful guide for those wishing to make derivatives—be they games, posters, and merchandise—based of the SCP Foundation. It explains the uses and necessities of Creative Commons as it applies to this site.

• Doing the Safety Dance: A guide to making reasonable, interesting containment procedures.

• Zen And The Art Of DATA EXPUNGED: A very useful guide to redaction, expungement, and censorship.

• How to be Scary Without Saying Anything: Elision and the Five Deadly Phrases.

• Technical Writing: Writing about technical matters for the non-technical. Most of us are authors, not scientists. This might be useful if you're wanting to get that technical twist in your writing that you're having problems with.

• Technical Words: Various science-y and engineering-y words and what they mean. Useful for making your writing sound more scientific and professional.

• Expert Witnesses: Which users to go to for certain information, and what their credentials are.

• The Big List of Overdone SCP Cliches: A list of things that have either been done to death or don't fit in with the tone of the Foundation. Done in a comical tone, and certainly not canon. If someone points you to this page and tells you that your SCP sucks without other explanation, you are free to sass back.

Essays

Essays are documents written by members of the site. They are often targeted, niche documents that—while useful— are not necessary for writing on the site. Very good essays are eventually tagged as guides.