This is a fantastic site to upload your work and get reviews. If you are active in the community you will get plenty of reviews and thoroughly enjoy your experience.

There is more to WdC than just uploading and reviewing writing. There are loads of official (managed by staff) and unofficial (managed by members) contests. I have ran many in my 5 years with the site and have entered a fair few, too.

The best part of the site in the community. Via the newsfeed, IM, email, and forums I have got to know some brilliant people over the years. Of course there are some members who aren't very helpful and some who are simply not nice. In these instances, the site has easy to use member blocking tools so you won't be bothered by them and can continue enjoying the site. I've only had to use this feature once or twice.

With an upgraded membership you can create your own groups (you can join groups with a free membership). Groups are a great way of bringing like-mided writers together. I run one of the larger fantasy/sci-fi groups on the site and have great fun creating contests and activities.

It is my activity on the site that led to me becoming a Preferred Author (or Yellow Case). It is not because I have spent loads of money on the site. In fact, since joining I've spent most of my time with an upgraded membership that I haven't had to spend a penny on. I've maintained my membership through earning gift points (the site's virtual currency) by being active in the community. And in a couple of instances members have outright purchased my membership for me. I've also purchased their merchandise as contest prizes using only Gift Points. If they only awarded preferred author status to those who spend a lot of real money, I wouldn't have got it!

Some people have commented that coloured cases win more official contests and that those who are 'just' registered authors never win. This is not true. The last official contest was won by a registered author as was the last review contest. In fact the official August contest had only registered authors place in first, second and third.

The reason it can seem like more preferred authors and moderators win things is that they are generally more active (that's why they get the coloured case) and enter more contests.

The people who run the site are amazing. There is a forum dedicated to member suggestions, and sometimes they are implemented. They have always been quick to respond to me when I've asked for help.

Ultimately, if you just upload your writing and expect to get reviews, you will be disappointed. The more you put into the site (in terms of time and effort, not money), the more you will get out of it.

I have not been paid or rewarded in any way for this review, I just wanted to let everyone know how awesome the site is!

I've been a member of writing.com for many years. I've only recently (a year or so) really dug into the community and explored. That's on me, not the website. Work, life and mostly procrastination kept me from doing anything sooner. I've read several negative reviews on here and admit there are smidgens of truth in each one but not like you might think.
SELL T-SHIRTS: Yes, they sell memberships, t-shirts, pencils, pens etc. You pick something dealing with writing and they probably have it with the logo splashed across the surface. None of it is forced down your throat, nor are you inundated with requests. Something noticeably absent from the review is the mention that the website is the livelihood for the operators; its their jobs. So yeah, they'd like you to purchase things so they can pay bills like everyone else. Its a business folks. At least here, even if you don't want to pay anything, you'll still get something out of it.
POOR REVIEWS: I agree somewhat with this review. I've received extremely honest critical reviews before that have helped educate me and given me a better understanding of my strengths and weaknesses. I've also received reviews that were nice and filled with fluff. Its sad, and I wish there were better ways of filtering those types of reviews because it is someone simply trying to boost their review portfolio. But, I read it, I immediately recognize it for what it is and move on. I'm intelligent enough to know when a review is legit or not.
TAINTED CONTESTS: There is no way anyone can verify if a judge is biased or not. For anyone on here to claim such a thing is entirely absurd. I'm more inclined to believe the angry reviewer was nothing more than butt hurt that their piece was passed over for what they perceived as an inferior entry. I claim this because anyone who knows writing.com would be well aware that although their contests are entertaining and many times helpful, the prizes awarded are all in-house; meaning nothing you win would get you a sit down with an agent or publisher. Its usually free reviews, an extended membership, logo'd product, etc. So someone complaining about a contest that's only rewarding within the community is someone that is either a fool, or well... no, just a fool.
BAIT & SWITCH: This one is a crock. Yes, you absolutely get bonus attention when you first join the site. And after a set length of time, that attention is no longer lavished. The site owner explained this easily and correctly. When you first join, you are made to feel welcome and the time is taken to show the newbie how joining can be beneficial with reviews, tools and links. This is a limited timeframe with the hope that by the end, you will have joined a group or two. The reviewer that was negative about this never mentioned he bothered to join anything. That's on him, not the website. I immediately sought out the fantasy groups and became a member of them. I've since enjoyed reviewing and being reviewed on a regular basis. Its not the website's responsibility to find like minded groups for you. You're just lazy.
MY ISSUE: I will wholeheartedly agree with one reviewer who complained about the system tools used for posting, writing, etc. It is difficult getting the hang of how the system runs although once you get active with your portfolio, it does get easier. It's more of an inconvenience in the long run. Example: If I copy my work from WORD or Pages, the text will appear extremely basic. Any indentations, bold print, italicizing, etc. are gone. You have to go back through and redo any and all of these things to the pasted item. Yes, this can be infuriating if you're posting a long entry that contains a lot of these additions. To that I 100% agree.
But overall, the website is excellent. The community is very supportive and every genre is represented in multiple groups, in multiple fashions, so there are plenty of peers and likeminded writers available to help you grow in your writing. They have an excellent pre-NaNoWriMo course that has been more beneficial to me than any other writing course, program etc. anywhere. So sure, there are "kernels" of truth in the bad reviews, but in no way do they come close in accurately depicting this website. People will complain for the sake of complaining otherwise, they'll never have a voice that gets noticed. That's sad for them. You get out what you put in. These reviewers didn't put in squat. And that's what they reaped.

Writing.com offers a whole lot of tools for a budding writer, but is really more interested in selling you t-shirts and artificially inflating their participation numbers.

A wealth of tools, contests, prompts, and inspiration? Good. Locking 90% behind a very pricey pay wall? Bad. Membership fees range from $20 to somewhere around $450 per year, the numbers listed above with the discounts applied to purchasing a year all at once. I'll let that sink in. Of course, the more you pay, the more you get. That applies to a lot of aspects in the site, from being able to store more than 10 items in your portfolio all the way to your work actually being visible to the rest of the community. That's right. If you actually want those disinterested glances and forced reviews, you have to pay for it.

In addition: their membership seems to function in a caste system. First, you have the free members - the unwashed masses with their unheard voices and unseen creativity. Then come the paying members - good for receiving a robotic review or two, and access to the 'premium' contests they will never be allowed to win. (This is no exaggeration: I just checked their news excerpts for the past year and didn't see a single winner that wasn't of preferred status or better). Lastly, we have the 'preferred' members and moderators at the top of the rung. They are the ones who help run the site, the contests, and choose which of their friends gets the cash prize that month. This final run is hand-chosen by the owners of the site based on the amount of money one puts forward or the quality of their oral relaxation techniques. On the bright side, you are now qualified to win the contests you pay to participate in. The most common prize? A small pile of non-redeemable, fake cash that you can exclusively use on their own store to buy pencils and really lame t-shirts. Does that really sound worth it to you? Did I also mention they really, REALLY want you to buy their t-shirts?

An active, thriving community? Good. A community that has voluntarily split itself into a million tiny factions? Bad. I cast out one decent item that somehow attracted the attention of a few people even though I only put 15 bucks into the pyramid scheme. I checked my account a few days later and found myself accosted with JOB APPLICATIONS for the Joyous Joy of Joys group, and the Fornicating With Your Neighbors Kitten group, and the Using Your Left Eye Socket as a Pencil Sharpener group. Most of those names probably aren't entirely accurate, but there's nothing more alienating than to see gangland America on a website about writing, no matter the intention.

Being able to review the work of your peers? Good. A community that only uses this tool with the promise of a cash reward if they do? Bad. All this has done is creates a massive pile of hasty, insincere garbage that almost feels like it could have been automatically generated. I've seen way too many reviews with attached images from whatever writing.com street gang the reviewer belongs to actually taking up more space than the review itself. It's sad.

So here's my bright, shiny one-star review, spit polished and dragged through the dirt as a warning to anyone who may be tricked into parting with their well-earned cash. In closing, I just thought of one final question you can ask yourself: Why are 17 of the 22 five-star reviews from the same 4 days in January of 2014?

Writing.com touts itself as a website written by and designed for writers of all ages, styles, and skill levels. But after over a year of stumbling around the site at fairly regular intervals, I slowly grew to realize that all I was doing was enabling a small cult of arrogant psychopaths who built a pyramid scheme around their own personal interests. It hides itself well, but the longer you spend with it, the more you will realize that it is just a scam, aimed at your wallet and your personal time. And if you aren't in that special little circle, you're wasting both.

When I first joined the site, I was optimistic with my free account. I spent some time learning how to navigate the website, customize my page, and set up my own portfolio. I learned all of the quirky controls, the awkward categorization and folder systems and everything in between. The bulky pages and scattered controls scream of a site that is long overdue for a serious overhaul, and the layout for the main page looks bizarre even with the ads disabled. Compound the difficult navigation with a coding language semi-unique to the website, and you're looking at a pretty steep learning curve. If you were hoping to just whip up a story to share on a sudden creative impulse, you better read some tutorials first. The web design is about as welcoming as a jar of spiders.

So I bit the bullet. I figured it all out, and I whipped up a fun little poem just to see if the community could redeem the terrible site design. I was pleasantly surprised. In a matter of hours, I found four reviews of my poem by four different authors. Their feedback felt very valuable to me, and it indicated a large, active community of readers and writers. I grew more excited as a few more days led to more reviews, and it was even featured in one of their newsletters. For a moment, I thought I had found my happy place. But then again, so did the residents of Jonestown.

Happy with the community of reviewers, I moved on to do some reviewing of my own. This is where my fall from grace began. I learned very quickly that the general rating scale (one to five stars) was alarmingly inflated, and most veterans of the site would become emotionally distraught if they saw a review with a rating lower than they felt they were entitled to. My first review ever landed the writer (also a moderator) in question 2.5/5 stars. To me, that was the middle of the road, not necessarily a bad piece but also not something that will be in my mind for weeks to come. I got a response almost immediately by a strangely dismissive retiree with too much free time who informed me that I didn't understand how to rate yet because I was new, and that it was ok because all of his friends bumped up his overall rating to 4.5 stars. Needless to say, that was the last review he ever got from me. I was there to give honest feedback, not massage a geriatric's ego that was as swollen as his prostate.

I continued to review, however, and I enjoyed it quite a bit. It was fun handing out feedback, and became a great writing exercise for me as I insisted that every review be personally tailored to its target author, including jokes and jabs that could only be made by somebody who was really paying attention to the story. Many of the writers enjoyed the personal feedback, and I had a pretty good time with it myself.

Then came the biggest surprise. Seemingly at random, an anonymous member bestowed upon me three free months of an upgraded subscription. I was ecstatic. It meant I could expand my portfolio and add even more stories. I had some work to do.

In no small amount of time, I had a good number of reviews as well as stories in my portfolio. It seemed like everything the site had promised had come true. I found myself able to brush off the crappy web design and the emotionally unbalanced veteran authors as I carved out my own corner of the muddled website.

This honeymoon lasted about 60 days. Then I discovered some unpleasant surprises that all seemed to build on each other and helped me draw the conclusions that I draw now.

For the first two months after account creation, you are a newbie. In that period of time, it is very apparent that your writings and reviews are actually on a higher profile than many others. The reason I was seeing so much activity was because the experience was tailored that way. After my time in the newbie spotlight was over, I found myself in the pit with the rest of the rabble in free account hell. While I managed to double the size of my portfolio in this time, I never saw another review, and all of my story views never broke the single digits. That's what it's really like to not have a yellow, purple, red, blue, green, or whatever color tag after your name. You're forgotten.

To put it simply, the sense of community was a sham. There is a button on the main page that brings you to a random piece to review. Nine out of ten times, this was an 'elite' member who had obviously put a lot of money into their accounts (I know those 'preferred' author tags don't come free). Seeing a piece of writing from a non-newbie, standard author via this tool was very few and far between, which is interesting considering that this is the bulk of the members. After seeing the same author (blue name) show up three times in a row with three different stories, I stopped making reviews for preferred authors and above entirely. They got enough exposure as it was, and were much higher on the pyramid.

What made me stop reviewing in its entirety was when I began to see the quality of the reviews of these preferred authors. What I saw time and again were dozens upon dozens of pre-made templates full of flowery pictures and enormous, spiritless introductions filling most of the page. These 'reviews' were being churned out dozens at a time by none other than writing.com's much-esteemed preferred authors and above, with the actual body of the review being nothing more than three sentence fragments or less. I've seen robots with more emotion. I compared their efforts to my own and almost felt ill. While I tried to make an author feel special, they were merely bolstering their review numbers. After I entered one of their monthly contests and received this exact same treatment from a handful of disinterested judges, I lost all interest in the site entirely. I feel that if writing.com is going to require their members be on a paid subscription in order to partake in these scams, they should at least set a standard for their judges. They don't, and they probably never will.

If there is one thing I did to make this terrible place a little bit better was to call out a very bogus practice of their on their Facebook page. Simply put, the monthly contests are rigged. Within the contest description, the names and contact info of the contest's judges would always be listed prominently. That's how you know if one of your friends is judging, and who else you need to butter up like a Paula Deen Christmas turkey. Though they did remove this feature when I called them out on it (They never acknowledged it, but it disappeared mysteriously the next month and never returned.) I still feel that all those emotionally-demanding 'authors' in that inner circle are aware of who is judging what.

If you need a tldr for this blob of rant: Writing.com is a top-heavy pyramid scheme that is collapsing hilariously inward upon itself. It feeds on new members, at first giving them a false sense of belonging in the community, and then later rejecting them until they pay them enough money to be reviewed by robots and interact with conmen. Pay attention to it! It needs your money!

EDIT: I believe the site's owner, who commented below, meant to use the word 'jilted' in his uncaring, condescending dismissal of of my grievances regarding his terrible website... but this is writing.com and I wouldn't expect anything else :)

. ap