Policy for acceptable stories

Speaking of which, tagging should be mandatory, I see tons of stories without tags and inside may have some things I didn’t wanna read but it wasn’t warned beforehand.

4 Likes

Also, I would like if people start to give a better description of what is the story about. What I mean here is directed towards stories which have chapters and all the chapters has the same or almost the same description.

2 Likes

That could be nice, except I really doubt that’s the sort of thing that can be implemented? Mandatory tagging maybe, but writing better descriptions doesn’t seem like something that could be moderated, really.

Fair point, but I maybe not moderated but it can be “flagged”? I mean, not literally, but to notify and ask for a better description.

I feel like that’d personally be up to the author’s discretion, still, honestly–I’d find it odd to require a description to be written to any specific standard. Asking for mandatory tags for certain acts might make sense, though.

Yeah, I was just suggesting. I know it may be impossible and not cool for some people. It’s just, I don’t see the point on having description for chapters if its gonna be the same on each one :stuck_out_tongue:

I’m glad that we’re at least able to discuss these topics reasonably like adults. I know these are touchy issues, and I’ll admit to enjoying a bit of of them myself from time to time, even if I know I’d never act on them in real life.

The line of fantasy is difficult, because it’s not the words of the stories themselves which are dangerous, but the actions people choose to take based on them. I tend to agree with moving away from including real people as actual characters (aside from maybe references), though I am cognisant of the concerns people have about restricting creative endeavours.

I think that as long as it’s as evenly and fairly enforced as possible, then I’ll accept it.

Aw, too bad for no Batman and Robin stories (where Robin would be the Teen Wonder, university-aged, etc).

This.
Vague descriptions I quite like, as I don’t want the main story given away in the description, however the (often complete!) lack of tags, means you have no idea where the story is going to go, and as I posted in another thread, I now rarely read anything with no tags. I’d rather miss a potentially brilliant story, than read about something that does not interest me.

Obviously, a classic “twink” is not the most hairy, masculine guy … and I don’t want authors to describe their protagonist in a certain way just to fit the rules either.

Maybe I have to clarify a bit. What I absolutely don’t want to see, as an example, is a story about a guy being turned into a sex toy, who is just starting to grow his pubic hair and whose voice is about to break. All the protagonist need to be fully developed sexually, i.e. past their puberty.

Batman’s Robin, otoh, is a good example. Who is to say that he’s 16, if the author wouldn’t tell us? He’s basically just a twink, and for all we know from his looks, he could be 22 just as well. (But stories about Batman & Robin fall into the category of trademarked characters, which is a whole different problem).

I understand that there are people who feel uncomfortable when reading stories about teenage characters, especially when sexually involved with older guys. I get it, and even if I don’t share that resentment (My first long time relationship was with someone who was 20 years older than myself), I don’t want them to cringe while ‘accidently’ reading such a story.

So we just need better tags and categories. Then anyone can choose to avoid all stories tagged with “twink” or “teen”. Problem solved. But that’s not just happening over night. There’s a lot of coding involved, and the idea to retagging all the existing stories is just mind blowing (another pun here). But that’s the only way to solve this, I guess.

Would that be something we could consent on?

3 Likes

Martin, that sounds reasonable.

However, I don’t think you’d need to specifically re-tag all the stories. If you could implement something like what the old NCMC used where readers could tag stories, then after x times a tag becomes visible, then all the existing stories would gradually become tagged, without any mammoth project of having only limited people having to read them and apply suitable tags.
I’ve actually just had an idea for a kind of scoring system for tags, but I’ll need to think it over a bit.

An interim solution would be to ensure all new stories have a minimum number of tags added by the author.

2 Likes

This is the most mature and pleasant conversation I’ve ever seen online :smiley:

The superhero/celebrity point is an interesting one and i think that comes more to admin preference. I don’t think it should be a hard and fast rule though like the others.

I agree, especially with the right legal disclaimer like other places have (Nifty ect).

And again a big thank you to the wonderful Martin for rescuing this great website!

2 Likes

I’m not overly concerned about keeping fictional characters like superheroes out of stories. That’s just fictional characters within fictional settings. I think we can ease up on the rules there.

The restrictions on using real life celebrities, however, I strongly feel should remain. I have always found it uncomfortable to read stories about people like Justin Bieber, who - whatever you might think about him personally - is still a real person. I think as long as things stay in the realm of fiction, we can have far more leniency on rules. When real people get involved, it becomes more complicated. I want to read fiction, not fan-fiction.

I’ll weigh in on this one issue at least.

My concern with superhero and other fictional characters is that the site is not properly age-gated. If dgoogle or other search engines index the site (which they shouldn’t, but some still do), any kid searching for Harry Potter or The Avengers or Thor could stumble across some truly horrifying stuff.

Does anyone have any suggestions to avoid that? Seems like a legitimate concern to me, and one that none of the readers or writers on the site is going to have deal with, ever. Only the Admin will get grief from some irate parent, if/when this ever happens.

2 Likes

And I guess because I’ve already posted…
The site does currently allow anyone to add any tag they want to any story. You don’t have to be logged in even.

Did no one know about that? Maybe the way it works isn’t easy enough?

The discussion (about tags at least) seems to assume that readers can’t tag stories, and that if readers can tag stories, the community will do a better job at tagging things and we’ll be able to do more stuff based on tags.

Tagging is already possible, and with some few exceptions, most readers don’t tag anything. Same with authors.

My point is that I’d hate for Martin to do a whole bunch of work around using tags, only to find that no one is actually interested in doing the work to tag things.

If tagging becomes much easier, maybe that will change. Forcing authors to select some tags on submission sounds like it will improve things greatly.

It won’t address the massive archive of untagged stories. Tackling that will take a lot of time and effort, from the community as a whole. And not tagging it means that many of the classic stories people love won’t be part of any new system designed around tags. But maybe that is acceptable, considering the amount of work involved.

Something else to keep in mind during any discussion about something like tags is that a sizeable number of authors posting to the site are not technical. They don’t use any social networking sites and don’t get tags. Which means more work for the moderators to add the tags, or less stories posted as those authors don’t learn the new site functionality, give up, and post their story elsewhere.

To comment on the age thing: I’ll start by saying I’m way less stressed about this topic since I’m no longer the one hosting the site. I am no longer as concerned about the site reflecting on my character potentially when I apply for jobs in the tech industry, and when I travel to other countries. So hurray for that, and thanks again to Martin for picking this up.

I have no suggestions for how to change this. I will gently point out that as this discussion shows, the question of age in a story is not black and white and is not objective by any means. Any judgement call made on a story is entirely subjective and will feel to someone like the wrong call.

Please keep in mind that an actual person has to decide to reject a story. Meaning they have to consider if the character in the story feels like the right age. On top of that, they have to consider the author and telling them if they think the story features a character too young. And they’ll possibly reconsider after talking to the author. Or they’ll decide after spending literally two days of back and forth with the author that they give up and will post or not post the story either way, because life is too short to spend it thinking about the age of fictional characters on a porn site they go to in order to get off :slight_smile:

1 Like

I think maybe people just don’t know they can tag any story? Because that just blew my mind, hah–and I’m gonna go start trying to tag some of my faves that don’t have any.

Personally, I also do not want to see stories with real people. Stories that use photo refs are one thing, but stories that are actually about a real person just feel. like something that could cause trouble, and just…are really disrespectful, I suppose, to those real people?

In terms of copyrighted characters, I don’t generally read them, but I agree with @Swizz that it’d make it more likely that kids stumble onto this, and that’s not something we want.

1 Like

I’m all for banning underage characters in a sexual situation. I think that’s fair.

I’m okay with celebrity story banning as real person fiction is problematic as they are real.

Everything else - incest, vore, furry, super hero should be allowed with no restriction.

I think tags should be required and I honestly refuse to read stories whfere zero tags are present.

Also a lot of fanfic sites allow adult content without gates, like AO3. You could be reading Harry Potter and find a fluffy light stiry next to hard core sexual bondage. They don’t restrict and I don’t think we should either.

1 Like

I don’t know if I think tags should be required. The thing is, the only time I think they should be is with very sensitive content warnings–otherwise it’s just preferences, and if the author wants to risk no one reading their story because they didn’t tag it, that’s fine in my opinion.

Of course, because this is mind control, making things be tagged if they include non-con would be…odd, since that’s pretty much the premise of 99% of the stories. Otherwise, the only things I can think of that I’d support in terms of being required tags is things like snuff, bestiality, scat, maybe incest too? Like–the things that are highly likely to make people uncomfortable, but I don’t know how much work that’d be to enforce the authors to tag for those things.

My question to that would be: what’s the downside of requiring at least, say, 1 tag per story? Pluses would be tags increase readership (as this discussion shows, nobody’s saying they don’t like tags but some would avoid stories without them) and readers get to read a wider range of content and make informed decisions about what they’re reading. I’m not sure i see a problem with requiring content tags (as opposed to warning tags which are one way of tackling the age problem).

I’m so glad you posted that, i thought i was going mad or using a completely different version of the site! I find it very easy, but obviously anything to make it more obvious and intuitive would be good. Like i say i find it easy already so I’m not best placed to offer suggestions on changes