(Copied from Discord, then original message deleted due to the heavy chatter there right now about site upgrades.)
If I come up with a disclaimer to add to the beginning of my stories, is there any way (either on my end or yours) where that can be added to the beginning of every story and chapter without having to go through each and every one of them?
I never for a moment thought it would be necessary, but after the discussion on H4G, I feel the need to put it out there that my stories are purely fantasy and not in any way something I would practice or condone in reality.
If it’s not possible yet, that might make a good site feature in the user preferences…the ability to have a universal lead-in to your stories. If a user wanted to customize it, they could probably just add a foreword or whatever to the beginning of the story to indicate any changes/additions.
I’m sorry that my frustration is about to hit a random request. But it is as it is.
I’m rather tired of jumping through hoops to implement stuff which ends up being used by two persons max. I feel the site is overly convoluted, blown up, out of proportion, sometimes I think it’s pure self-indulgence on my part.
So, I’m afraid the answer is no, this is not possible. And I don’t see it being implemented. It’s just too special. And I’m probably not going to implement anything for a while.
I thought I’d ask just because I’m likely about to add a disclaimer to literally every single one of my stories and chapters. I figured that a global disclaimer might be a relatively simple thing to implement, since it would just be inserted into the header along with other user-specific stuff. If it’s not, it’s not. I’ll just have to make sure that I’m happy with the wording and that I don’t make any typos so I’m only doing it once.
As for usage, in the brief few minutes the request was posted in Discord, it got a reply in support that said that another site had a similar feature. I know I’ve seen users on this site and others put disclaimers in front of each of their stories, so I figured I might not be the only one to use it. When it comes to uptake, in my own experience, sometimes things can take years to become popular. Working on sites like this can be damned frustrating that way and I understand completely where you’re coming from on that front.
In the end, though, this honestly isn’t a big deal to me. This site doesn’t improve without new ideas, so I’ll continue to throw them out when they come to me. If you feel like working on them, great. If not, that’s fair. They’ll always be here if some day you decide you actually don’t have enough to do.
(Edit: a partial workaround occurs to me here. Instead of using text, add a pic to the top of the file. When the pic is updated, everything is updated without needing to modify the stories after the first time. I’m not sure if this applies to locally hosted images, but it certainly would for external images.)
This is being over-thought. You can get just about what you want simply by putting something like:
Check out my user profile for my standard disclaimer
at the head of the story.
What ought to be discussed is whether there should be a general disclaimer for the whole site(s). I would propose a simple line of text just below the Newsflash area.
I’d actually thought of something similar after I posted, though I like your idea of putting it in my profile even better. The one drawback to that is that it doesn’t put the text right up front on the page, which is ideally what I’m after.
As for general disclaimers for the entire site, how about “This is fiction, you morons, don’t mistake it for reality.” That’s not offensive, is it?
H4G = hypnosisforguys dot com. The site itself is nothing to write home about, but they have (had?) a highly active Discord with a lot of real-life hypnosis. Unfortunately, they’re almost entirely unmoderated and have therefore picked up a lot of what I can only call predators. I believe this has driven a lot of people away, especially lately.
It’s that very unmoderated atmosphere that prompted this, in a way. The TL;DR version is that we were discussing the lack of moderation and several of us were arguing that their Discord needs to have some. During that discussion, we got sidetracked onto blacklists, and the site owner pointed out that I’m on one or more blacklists for the stories I write. Honestly, I think he was lying through his teeth, but it’s not inconceivable, which leads into the fantasy/reality thing.
I’ve occasionally seen people accuse authors and other artistic types of being horrible people just because of the things they write/paint/act/whatever. Someone who writes about racism or homophobia, for example, can be accused of being racist or homophobic, just because they wrote it too well. So, regardless of the truth of the H4G owner’s suggestion that I’m on someone’s list, it brought home to me that maybe I should be doing what so many authors out there already do, and putting a disclaimer at the top of my stories that this is strictly fantasy and doesn’t in any way mean that I condone anything I write about, nor do I think that anything in my stories should be done to anyone in reality (something that’s apparently also been happening and honestly creeps me out more than anything).
I’m still not sure what I want to do, tbh. I may simply start putting disclaimers on stories going forward…I dunno. I’m giving it a bit of time so I can ponder what I think the best course of action is.
Did you confront the H4G owner about that, i.e. that it’s really stupid to project a story’s theme onto its author?
I don’t have the time and energy to invest anything in H4G, but since there is an obvious overlap between them and GSS, I feel I should be interested in what’s going on there. Especially if they maintain certain prejudices and negative preconceptions against us or our authors.
What does the owner have to say about the moderation of his server and the general predatory athmosphere there? Does he even see it like that? Is he ok with that?
Since the owner was supposedly just reporting what he’d seen from others, there would be no point in confronting him on the idea of projecting a story’s theme onto its author. As for preconceptions, a couple of other people in the argument saw me as “projecting”, or at least that’s what they called it. I’m not quite sure it’s the right use of the word, but basically, they thought I disliked the stuff I wrote about and was subconsciously trying to accuse others of doing bad things to make myself feel better…which is a load of crap, since I’m quite proud of what I write, but there was no convincing them. So yeah, there’s definitely some ill-conceived notions about writing vs. reality there.
As for the owner of H4G, I don’t think he sees his server as predatory. I obviously can’t speak for him, but he has generally been quiet about any incident reported to him. I know he’s banned some users, but there have been some fairly major public incidents where there’s no question that the person is guilty, yet the owner has done nothing about the perpetrator at all, at least not that anyone can tell. Any mention of creating a mod team gets ignored, quite literally—there will be no response to that message at all.
If you’re looking for the various discussions I’m referring to, they’re almost all down in the ethics room at the very bottom of the list. And yeah, I suspect you’d be welcomed be a lot of people there. You are, after all, a pretty big name in the community.
I had an account on their site for 3 years or so, but I’ve never logged on for ages. Now I found a couple of PMs of people contacting me because of GSS
I joined the site and the discord server just to read through the trainwreck conversation.
It does sound like there are a few vocal people who prefer a wild west approach, and I expect most of the people who would prefer moderation will eventually vacate the server.
I certainly wouldn’t worry about accusations flung at you in that thread, @RobinHood70 people in the former group (wild west appreciators) were clearly behaving defensively.
As for being on someone’s “list”, if that list exists it was clearly written by someone who thinks fantasy porn should be held to the same standards of consent as real life sexual encounters, and those people exist everywhere, including here. They will never be OK with our fiction, and their complaints will always read as unfair because they literally believe that thought crimes are the same as real crimes.
You cannot reason with those people or satisfy them, and you shouldn’t want to.
Frankly, if someone wants to create blacklists for authors who write fiction that crosses certain ethical lines, no amount of disclaimers or arguments are going to assuage them. If someone is fundamentally incapable of understanding how a person can compartmentalize a fetish and only enjoy it in fantasy scenarios, while still maintaining expected ethical and moral ideals in real life, you won’t change their mind.
That said, we should all be aware by now that our fetish sits in a precarious place between what is considered acceptable and what isn’t, and regardless of debates around that, we shouldn’t be surprised by this kind of response from some people. We just have to roll with it. You shouldn’t have to but still you might consider, writing under a pen name and participating in communities with your normal one, just as insurance against the future if this sort of thing worries you.
Specifically with regard to the ban policy in that community, I think part of this has to do with a lot of people not quite being on the same page when it comes to real life hypnosis like the kind H4G is ostensibly for. Namely, how much belief you have in hypnotism versus the ability of the listener to reject it. I won’t wade into that, but I can definitely perceive a sliding scale between “Heightened Consensual Roleplaying” on one end and “Legit Mind Control” on the other, and people into this fetish find themselves in different places on it. That’s going to have an effect on what you think is ban-worthy and what isn’t, especially if you believe none of this can actually harm you against your will.
I’ve seen a post by an actual working hypnotherapist (as in, that is his job, he gets paid for it and runs a practice that helps people quit smoking and other vanilla stuff) that says point blank you can’t hypnotize someone to do something they truly are not OK with, and that furthermore, creating lasting changes with hypnosis requires many sessions, and lots of reinforcement. You have to do it and keep doing it, over and over again. Otherwise any effects of the hypnosis fade within hours.
I’m not a rl hypnotist so I don’t know, but I tend to believe that guy and find him credible. The CIA famously experimented with every form of “mind control” under the sun, with zero ethical constraints chasing the dragon of workable mind control. In the end they concluded it was total bunk, and that simply finding corrupt people and paying them to leak information was eminently superior and directed all their efforts into that. That’s factual.
So I consider mind control to be fantasy, and I do not get worked up about even the possibility of real life mind control because if there were such a thing, the CIA would have found it.
