VGWrites is the campus library for student writing. Stories, poems, essays, fan fiction, playwriting: if you wrote it, this is where it goes, and if you read, this is where you find what people here are working on. It's for Vista Grande, so the audience is the school rather than the whole internet.
Start with reading, because most people do. Browse the reading room by genre or tag, open whatever looks good, and leave kudos when something lands. Comments go straight to the author, and for a lot of writers here that's the first time anyone outside their group chat has said something about their work. If a story is still going, subscribe and you'll get a nudge when the next chapter posts. Bookmark the ones you mean to come back to.
Writing works a chapter at a time. Start a work in the writing console, pick a genre and a rating, tag it so the right readers find it, and add content notes if it needs them. Drafts stay private for as long as you want them to, so you can leave something half-finished for a month and nobody sees it. When a chapter is ready you publish it, it lands in the reading room, and your subscribers hear about it. Nothing goes public until you say so.
There are contests too, run by the English department and student editors around a theme. You enter a work, real judges read it, and pieces that place get featured. Your writing stays yours as well: it's kept school-appropriate and it lives here at Vista Grande, and nobody sells it or hands it on.
The two things it takes after are AO3 and Wattpad. The structure is AO3's: tags and content notes so readers can find what fits them, kudos as a one-click way to say a piece landed, and works that go up a chapter at a time with subscribers told each time. The feel is closer to Wattpad, a reading room you browse and follow along in rather than an archive you search. What's different is the door. Both of those are the whole internet at once. This is one school, so the person leaving kudos on your chapter is somebody you'll see on Monday.