Web Conference Camera-Ready

The 2026 notification-to-camera-ready gap was twelve days (January 13 to January 25, 2026) — short enough that de-anonymization, rights forms, registration, and artifact deposit must be prepared before the decision arrives. Everything below is anchored to the 2026 edition; the ACM pipeline steps are the publisher's standard flow and the WWW-specific instructions arrive by email after acceptance, so treat the sequence as fixed and the details as 待核实 until that email lands.

The proceedings budget is a different shape

Accepted papers all receive the same maximum length: 12 pages, of which 8 are content pages, in the ACM Digital Library. Note what did not change from submission: the content allowance. Unlike venues that grant an extra page for addressing reviews, the 2026 Web Conference held content at 8 pages, so every rebuttal promise ("we will add baseline B to Table 2") must be paid for by cutting something. Budget the cuts when writing the rebuttal, not after acceptance.

De-anonymization sweep

Reverse every anonymity edit deliberately; half-reversed papers are the classic failure. Check: author block and ORCIDs (ACM requires ORCIDs for the publishing workflow — have every co-author's ready), acknowledgements, grant numbers, third-person self-citations back to first person where natural, dataset names that were masked ("a large e-commerce platform" → the real name, if the data agreement permits naming it), and repository links now pointing at the real, non-anonymous archive.

# Sanity greps on the de-anonymized LaTeX before TAPS upload
grep -rn "anonymous\|Anonymized\|redacted\|our institution" *.tex   # leftovers
grep -rn "\\\\documentclass" main.tex   # 'anonymous' and 'review' options removed?
grep -c "orcid" main.tex                # one per author expected in acmart
pdfinfo main.pdf | grep -i "author\|title"  # metadata restored, not "anonymous"

ACM production pipeline (e-rights → TAPS → DL)

1. e-rights: the corresponding author receives the ACM rights form. The choice set (copyright transfer, licence, or open access under ACM Open) determines what appears in the copyright block — the \setcopyright{...} and conference metadata commands in the final source must match the form, or TAPS bounces the paper.
2. TAPS (The ACM Publishing System) compiles your source, not your PDF, and emits both PDF and responsive HTML for the Digital Library. Non-standard packages, hand-positioned floats, and bitmap-only figures are the usual casualties; run the source through TAPS early in the window and read the HTML rendering, which is what many readers will actually see.
3. ACM Open exposure: whether an APC applies depends on the corresponding author's institutional agreement with ACM; amounts, waivers, and any subsidy for the 2026 volume were not verifiable when this pack was built — check the acceptance email and https://www.acm.org/publications/openaccess before assuming either "free" or a specific fee.

Registration and presentation

At least one author registering is the norm for ACM proceedings venues, and the 2026 edition's postponement announcement explicitly extended the author registration deadline to March 30, 2026 — evidence that author registration was a tracked obligation. The postponement also promised a format decision (in-person vs. hybrid) "by May," so presentation-mode rules for 2026 were genuinely fluid; whatever edition you are in, get the current attendance rule in writing from the official site rather than from precedent.

The artifact rider

Artifact badging submissions were due together with the camera-ready in 2026. If the paper has a dataset, model, or code artifact, run webconf-artifact-evaluation in parallel with this checklist — the archival deposit (DOI-bearing repository, not a bare GitHub URL) takes longer than the badge form. The final paper should cite the deposited artifact's persistent identifier, which means the deposit must exist before the final PDF freezes.

Edge cases the twelve days do not forgive

• Author corrections after the freeze. The submission-time freeze allowed only spelling and affiliation fixes; a co-author who changed institutions between October and January updates their affiliation now, but a missing contributor cannot be added at camera-ready either — that door closed at the abstract deadline, and pleading at production time fails.
• The masked platform that must stay masked. If the data agreement never permitted naming the platform, the camera-ready keeps the anonymized description permanently. Decide this with the data owner before acceptance; legal review does not fit in twelve days.
• Postponement fallout. The 2026 edition moved its dates after camera-ready closed. Published papers were unaffected, but visa letters, talk scheduling, and registration transfers all reopened. Keep the team's travel plans decoupled from the publication pipeline — the paper is done when TAPS accepts it.
• The rebuttal promise that no longer fits. If a promised addition cannot be honored within 8 content pages, honor its substance in condensed form and note the full version in the artifact. Silently dropping a commitment that reviewers conditioned acceptance on is the one camera-ready sin with reputation cost.

Twelve-day sequence

1. Days 1-2: e-rights form; lock licensing; start registration.
2. Days 3-6: apply rebuttal-promised edits inside the 8-content-page budget; de-anonymization sweep; artifact deposit finalized, DOI cited in the paper.
3. Days 7-9: TAPS upload; fix compile and HTML-rendering issues.
4. Days 10-12: proof-read TAPS output (PDF and HTML), submit badge application, confirm registration receipt.

Output format

[Camera-ready status] on track / blocked
[Budget] content=<n>/8, total=<n>/12; rebuttal promises paid for: yes/no
[De-anonymization] author block / acks / self-citations / data names / metadata
[ACM pipeline] e-rights done? TAPS compiled? HTML proof read?
[Money] registration state; ACM Open status (verified / 待核实)
[Artifact rider] deposit DOI in paper: yes / no / N-A