Unfortunately, Reddit has stopped giving out API keys, making it very difficult to automatically collate all of an author's Writing Prompts stories. Currently, the only simple way to do this is for each author to submit an export request for their own data and comb through it for their stories. Double unfortunately, this exported data does not contain the prompts (i.e., post titles) that inspired the stories.
Fortunately, for the time being, it is still possible to look up the prompts using Reddit's RSS interface. This is a slow process as Reddit only allows one RSS query per minute, but it does work. Double fortunately, I've created a little script that takes care of this process for you.
This makes it much easier to show off all your creative work in one place, and to download it all as a single, complete dataset.
Here's how it works:
- All top-level comments on a /r/WritingPrompts post are assumed to be stories.
- All replies to one's own /r/WritingPrompts comment are assumed to be story continuations and are concatenated together. This is common practice for longer stories to get around Reddit's 10,000 character limit.
- Any comments not in /r/WritingPrompts are ignored.
- Any replies to someone else's comments are ignored.
- Authors may periodically resubmit their exported data to add more stories. In this case, if a story already exists in the database with an identical timestamp, it is assumed to be identical and ignored. This makes processing much faster, but means that new edits to old stories won't be picked up. Contact /u/prompted-writing on reddit if this is an issue for you.
Here's how to do get your stories collated and added to this site.
- Request your reddit data export here.
- Download your data as a zip file when Reddit tells you it's ready.
- Unzip the file.
- Using the form below, please upload only these files:
- comments.csv (contains your stories) and
- statistics.csv (unambiguously contains your username).
Seriously, I don't want to see your private data, send only those files.
- Your data will be added to a processing queue. Depending on how many stories you wrote, and how many other authors are in the queue, it could take a few hours or even a few days.
- Once processed, your stories will appear on this website.
- If you'd like your stories removed from this site or have any other issues, shoot a message to /u/prompted-writing on reddit. Please be patient, this website is a volunteer project that I'm working on in my spare time.
File Upload
Please upload only comments.csv and statistics.csv