Updates to our site's rules for stories!

1

We have rolled out updates to our rules for stories that are submitted to the site!

The biggest update is to our rules around AI stories, so please give those a read in particular if it affects you as an author! But we’ve updated/added a few other rules too. :blush:

Here’s the full list of updates!

UPDATE #1

Our AI-stories rule got an extensive update! The rule now reads:

All AI-created or AI-assisted stories must follow our special rules around AI (including proper tagging, frequency of posting, etc.) and those rules can be found here.

As to why these AI rules changes are happening now…

Our previous rules for AI text on the site were based on rules formulated five years ago, before even ChatGPT existed. We’ve realized those rules no longer matched the present moment. The recent massive influx of untagged (and often low-effort) AI stories to the site was seriously impacting both the reader experience and the workload on the volunteer approver team. So we feel that these better-codified rules, and the clear penalties for breaking them, will help keep the site running smoothly.

UPDATE #2

We’ve updated our wording on our so-called ‘no named drugs’ rule. (The actual rule is a bit more complex than just that, but I’ve found it’s how most people think of the rule anyways…)

Please note that this rule has not changed but we’ve simply updated the phrasing to better match how the rule is intended to work in practice. We also hope this new phrasing better matches how we’ve been enforcing this rule for the past couple of years.

This was the old wording:

Non-consensual aspects must involve fantastical methods of change/control. No references to real-life ‘methods’ or named drugs/substances.

The new wording is as follows:

Non-consensual aspects must involve fantastical methods of change/control. The primary or central method of coercion cannot involve realistic ‘methods’ such as named drugs or substances.

We hope it’s a helpful update!

UPDATE #3

We’ve added a ‘no realistic bestiality’ rule. :sweat_smile: Realistic bestiality is not a trope that comes up often in submitted stories, and that’s the main reason we never really discussed whether there should be a rule for it or not. But after a lot of discussion among approvers, we’ve decided this site is not the right place for those stories.

So the new rule is phrased as follows:

Non-fantastical depictions of bestiality are not permitted. Fantastical contexts (furries, shifters, monsters, aliens, etc.) are permitted by default unless they hew too closely to non-fantastical depictions or contexts.

So do note that the vast majority of stories on the site which are currently tagged with bestiality are still totally fine on the site! This rule only applies to a very specific, limited context of genuinely realistic depictions.

We hope to eventually undertake a clean-up of the bestiality tag, but it may take us some time to do so. For now, please consider this rule to primarily apply to stories posted in 2025 and onward, and do note that not all stories in the archive may currently comply with this rule.

UPDATE #4

Unfortunately we will no longer be able to approve non-English stories unless we have an approver on the team who is fluent (or close enough to fluent) in reading that language. Here is the new rule:

The site cannot approve non-English stories unless one of the approvers on staff is fluent in reading that language. For a current list of languages we can approve, check here.

We went back and forth on this one for a while. In the end, we acknowledged that online translation services such as Google Translate cannot capture nuance (and sometimes mistranslate entire phrases), and we repeatedly ran into issues with non-English stories where we could not tell if the story was breaking the site rules or not. (In a few cases, we inadvertently approved a non-English story that explicitly did break the rules, simply because Google Translate had flubbed some key paragraphs and not translated them accurately.)

As much as we’d like to host all stories in all languages that are submitted to us, we also need to be able to give those stories the same careful approval process we give all our English stories. Thus, we’ve instituted this new rule.

P.S. If you are fluent in a language that is not on our current list and are interested in joining the approvers team as a volunteer to lend us your language skills, please reach out! :blush: I’d be happy to chat.

UPDATE #5

After some popular demand, we’ve added tags for stories that contain images within the story. We’re asking authors to use those tags when submitting their stories too. There are two tags for this now:

Stories containing images should be tagged with contains images. (If the images are AI-generated, use the contains AI images tag instead.)

(And if your story has both kinds of images, you can choose to use both tags too.)

Please note that if you have your images hyperlinked (aka, they don’t appear in the body of the story, but only appear if you click on the link) then you don’t need to use this tag. But you absolutely still can if you want to.

The idea is that these tags will help people avoid opening stories in public which may contain NSFW images… and they will help image-focused readers find those stories that have visual references for them to enjoy.

AND THAT'S ALL THE UPDATES FOR NOW!

11 Likes
2

A bit sad that spanish is not in the list for other languages… I know there aren’t a lot of submissions in spanish, but is always nice when I find some in my born languages.

3

You could offer to join the approver’s team… :slight_smile:

1 Like
4

Not sure where or how to do it… I mean another author already ask me to review his story once before… so I guess I could… but I may need to them to choose me and give me a KT on what to review exactly for the site policies…

5

@Nu-and-the-Nus already stated that he welcomes anyone who’d offer his assistance with approving non-English stories.

So just ask him.

1 Like
6

As an animal lover, I’m glad you addressed realistic bestiality. I mean, I’m glad it hasn’t really been an issue, but it’s good it’s finally been addressed. That said, I agree monsters, aliens, mythical creatures, etc. aren’t problematic because they aren’t real. In fact, when I was in school, I used to fantasize about my classmates being satyrs, and I might even write some stories involving satyrs, but I digress. :sweat_smile:

2 Likes
7

Spanish might get added to the list soon! I had someone reach out to me a couple days ago volunteering to join the team as a Spanish reader. Our schedules haven’t aligned yet to talk about the possibility in depth, but we’ll be discussing it very soon, so stay tuned… The list may get updated to include Spanish soon. :blush:

3 Likes
8

I’m happy to approve Portuguese language stories. I have also found that Google Translate does a much better job than it used to (though, perplexingly, not for German).

2 Likes
9

I guess it’s a good thing I never got around to writing anything else in the “Viral Marketing in a Time of Quarantine” universe since it breaks the rules now. Kinda sad to see the first thing I wrote for a story challenge that didn’t completely spiral out of my control go, but I guess that’s just life.

Not sure I’d be able rewrite it to comply even if I had the time for it.

There’s no real reason for guys to not just run for the wilderness if only humans could get infected, and that breaks so much of the worldbuilding and many of the choices characters make.

11

You had a story removed because it broke rules?

12

I mean, if your story breaks the new rules, you’re going have to rewrite or delete it. But I for one think the new rules, especially in regard to realistic bestiality, are a step in the right direction. But unrealistic depictions of bestiality are still allowed as long as they remain unrealistic.

1 Like
13

Not yet.

Sorry if I gave anyone a scare.

14

Now that I’ve had a little sleep it doesn’t seem to break the new rule quite so solidly, but I fear it’ll still be a bit of an edge case. The viral hivemind is a very fantastical component that might save it, but it’s still gonna be close.

If it does break the rule I’ll probably have to delete it. Loosing the “nowhere outdoors is safe” aspect blunts the horror aspect of it quite severely.

Being able to just unplug and disappear into the woods makes the virus becoming digital much less threatening than it is when anything with balls and a spine could be coming for your ass.

15

I haven’t read your work because reading erotic stories featuring animals is a taboo subject for me. I’m not necessarily judging you because I write stories about taboo subjects, too (e.g., incest), but I think the point of this rule, and others like it, is to make these stories so fantastic they don’t emulate real life. In the end, they’re just a harmless fantasies. So, I think as long as your stories are truly fantastic, then there’s nothing to worry about. But furries are still allowed, so maybe you can have people dressed as animals. You might even be able to get away with anthropomorphic animals (i.e., animals that are more human than animals), but I would consult with an admin first. Hopefully, you can just edit your work without deleting it. :slightly_smiling_face::foot:

16

I don’t know your work either because that’s not my kink, but my first instinct would not be for you to have to change the setting or lore to fit the rules. I would imagine that it’s the explicit depictions of real animal bestiality that’s is disallowed. So if real animals are affected by your virus but you don’t have descriptive scenes showing it and don’t put too much emphasis on it except to bring narrative exposition coherence to the events, I’d be surprised if that would be forbidden.

17

Oh that’s very kind of you to offer! Let me send you a message via the forum’s DM system and we can discuss it further. :blush:

1 Like
18

Yeah I remember your story well! I remember I was really impressed with how darkly imaginative and well-paced it was, when I read it in the Pandemic contest. I think I even left it a glowing comment. :blush: It’s very effective as horror and I agree that losing the biological aspect would make it a different (and weaker) story.

Honestly, I’m not sure if it violates the new rule or not. Genuinely it might, but I can’t say for certain without giving it a careful reread. It would be something for the approvers team to discuss. But I am not planning to actively and urgently go through the #bestiality tag to examine past stories one by one. We did have an approver who offered to go through the tag on his own, and I’m happy to have him to do it at his leisure if he’s still up for it. But in the meantime I am okay with letting sleeping dogs lie (heh, bestiality… dogs… sorry, bad joke :sweat_smile: ).

We have a lot of stories in our archives, including stories from the NCMC days, and the site rules have changed from era to era. Generally, I don’t like to go hunting through older stories to delist ones that break current rules, unless someone actively reaches out about one such story, or one of us encounters such a story by chance. Then we look into it and, if needed, we make a decision one way or another. Otherwise the team focuses primarily on new stories submitted to the queue.

John, if you’d like, we can make a point to look into the story for you and make a decision. Maybe that would be preferable to waiting around on the off-chance that, hey, maybe that conversation will happen later, maybe it won’t… But otherwise, I won’t go digging, and will leave it be unless another reader reaches out about it. For now, I’ll repeat myself from the posting and say that I consider the rule to primarily apply to stories posted in 2025 and onward, if that helps.

1 Like
19

I did have some vague ideas for other stories set in that universe that could benefit from knowing exactly where the line is, but with how little I’m getting done on stories that already have something written down due to burnout from dealing with older relatives that seem to have lost any sense of self-preservation the site rules will probably change again before anything could actually happen on that front.

If you guys miraculously get a day with nothing else to do I’d appreciate learning the answer, but it’s not going to really matter to me one way or the other for a few years at the very least.

Don’t go out of your way to deal with this if you’ve got other things that need your time more.

20

I’ll make a point to try to have us look at it down the line if we can! It may not be anytime soon, I have to say, as things are quite busy on the backend right now… But I’ll see if we can do it eventually—just so you’re not in limbo.