What is a Glowfic?
This is a description for first-time glowfic readers who are unfamiliar with the format.
A glowfic is a fictional story written by multiple authors who roleplay as the characters. A typical glowfic will appear on glowfic.com and looks like an internet forum where fictional people will post comments back and forth which end up telling a story. To read it, just start at the top and read each comment, just like a regular comment thread. Each comment usually includes a photo of the character to convey their facial expression, dress, or other details. For more information, see the community guide to glowfic.
The layout of glowfic.com is unnecessarily confusing. To read the story in order, read the top post, then all the comments underneath it, then click the “next” button to go to the next page of comments. Do not click the “Next Post” button until you have read all of the comments. “Next Post” takes you to the next part of the story (like going to the next chapter). It will not take you to the next set of comments (which are also called “posts”). Yes, it’s unnecessarily confusing. No, I don’t know why they do it that way.
Happy reading!
You can also add “?view=flat” to the end of a glowfic url to get the entire story on one page.
glowfic.com/posts/####
Becomes:
glowfic.com/posts/####?view=flat
Where “####” is a stand in for the story ID number.
If you click on the menu bar shown in the top right of the screenshot on this post, then you’ll also see a drop down option to view the flat html.
I though this was going to talk about the style of glowfics more. Upon reflection, this is perfectly clear, I had this expectation because of the title:
I assume they started the website by taking some generic forum software (such as phpBB or vBulletin; I haven’t been able to figure out the name of what they started with) and changing it just enough to fit their purposes; that would be the most obvious way to do it. The pagination scheme and “next post” links likely came by default.
no, they are not they are called tags