Writing.Com General Discussion

Forums can be of two type:
Group only forum and Open Forum.

Group only forum requires you to be a participant of a certain group in order for you access it and post something in it. While open forums are forum that are open for public posting, such as this that we are in right now. Forums are usually used by writing.com members to run contests, host events, open discussions, and any fundraising activities.

To join a contest, make sure that you already have a contest in mind. You can always find a bunch of active contests here:
"Contest Clues" 
"What should I do?" 
"Writing Contests @ Writing.Com" 

Depending on the contest rules, normally, host will ask you to link your contest entry by using the b-item linking tag. For instance, using my own contest "Personify Writing Contest-CLOSED" , it requires a b-item link in order to submit their entries. But first and foremost, your entry must be written in a Static item.

I'll walk you through the process of creating a static item. By the way, static item is an item that stores or displays your writing compositions in the whatever form. It could be poetry, short story, essay, etc. It's the one you already have in your portfolio. Please check "Static Item"  and "Create/Edit a Static Item" .

To create a static item, Click Portfolio on your left hand side menu, it will pop up a bunch of submenus. Click Create new Item. Or it's directly available in your left hand side menus with the green + icon that says Create New Item. Clicking on that will direct you to a new page which displays available options with your type of membership. Static item must be there on the very first option. Click on that and it will bring you to the page where you need to fill out some information such as the name of your composition, description, the intro rating, the body, and all other required dropdowns. Fill out all that and then save. There you have it, you just created the static item.

Now once you already saved the static item, the system automatically assign an ID number to it. It usually has 7 digits. This ID number is useful in linking your writings around the whole site's public areas such as the forums, newsfeed, etc.


Supposed you already created your static item, go to the contest you want to participate in and find the menu "Post a new Message". Add your subject and start linking your static item in the message area. You can link your item here through the Big Item format or b-item format (actually, there are a lot of linking options available for use). To create the b-item link, simply do it this way:

{b-item:#######}

Replace the #s with your static item's ID number. Make sure that the link tag is enclosed with the braces {} for it to work.See "Newbie Hyperlinking 101 - Bitem Format" 

And there you have it, your link should appear after saving your post.