One month after the launch: Headed for closure

[RSlice]

Nah this site is basically the only forum like this that I know of besides literocia.

RU, RBoard, KBoard, TBV all of them gone with no recovery. I can add on my few work in progress storys and if a few fellow writers/readers here will comment than I say this is still successful. I just gotta go in and edit to add the disclaimers.

[Claire]

@RSlice You could just use one of the post models and then copy your text into the template this creates. This adds the disclaimer automatically.

[Claire]

First, let me say that I appreciate the comments saying that hope that the forum continues. I do so, too. Trust me, I spent a lot of time on this forum, not only since the launch but before this forum ever went online, there was a one month and a half long preparation period where I had to learn everything from scratch. I want to give you guys an idea of what went into creating this forum from me so that you understand that I am not making this announcement for the fun of it.


Forum Software

I had to familiarize myself with different forum software beginning with something as simple as: how do you actually install a forum so that you can test things? I had never run any kind of website before. Should I use myBB, phpBB, flarum or SMF like Ravishu did (we're using phpBB)? If these terms mean nothing to you, be happy.


Finding a Host

Then I had to find a host that would actually tolerate this kind of noncon story content (in case you're interested: the host is abelohost, a privacy focused offshore webhosting service in the Netherlands that is known for being tolerant to various different types of content. This is their Acceptable Use Policy).


Adding Extensions to the Forum

After that I had to familiarize myself not only with the forum software itself but with forum extensions that add the type of functionality that I needed for my vision of this place: the reputation system, the tags, the chat, the post models, the topic preview, the post reactions. All of that stuff is not part of the base software. In its current state, the forum runs 33 extensions. Some of these were modified by @Vela Nanashi such that they fit our specific needs.


Sending E-Mails

Most of you have probably no idea how difficult it is to not get blacklisted as spam when you start sending E-Mails from a new domain. As a matter of fact, during the beta test of this forum we were blacklisted by DBL Spamhaus, primarily for being new. And if you wonder what that means: That means that none of the registration confirmation E-Mails would have reached any of you. The mails would not have ended up in your spam folder, no, they would have been completely blocked. I had to learn about DNS and reverse DNS records, about MX, SPF, DKIM and DMARC records. If all of that means nothing to you again, be happy, but if you want your website's mails to actually get delivered you better make sure that you know that stuff.


Search Engine Optimization

Quite a few people here have said by now that they found this forum "by accident". Let me burst that bubble: If you found this place via Google, Bing or DuckDuckGo or any search engine, you are not here by accident. I learned the basics of Search Engine Optimization to make that happen. I have installed two extensions to help with that, one that creates meta descriptions for topics and forums automatically, the other creates a sitemap for the forum. If that means nothing to you, don't worry about it. I've written a robots.txt file that directs the Google [Bot] and Bing [Bot] which index the site for their respective search engines in a way that they don't waste time on irrelevant content. I deliberately named our first contest the RavishU Memorial Contest, had every contest entry link back to it, had the contest entries repeat the name of the contest in the title and had created a board announcement that was visible everywhere that linked back to the contest thread. Why? Because that kind of backlinking tells Google that the thread is important content. And so Google started showing it to you. Put differently, if I had decided to call this contest the Valentine's Day contest, which is what it was called on RavishU, many of you would probably not be here right now. How successful was this? This forum has gotten 30+ clicks from Google per day consistently over the last two weeks. Over the last couple of days, we reached 50+ clicks for the first time. Is this good? From my understanding, a new niche forum can be happy if it gets 5 to 10 clicks per day after several months, so we are doing really good in that regard.


Running the Forum

And then there is of course the time I spent on running the forum itself, organizing the contests, participating with stories myself, commenting on other authors' stories, writing explainers for all the important stuff on the forum. So trust me, I am not making that announcement lightly. But, as I said in the announcement two weeks ago, this forum is currently primarily carried by the activity of three people and as soon as those burn out, which will happen sooner or later, this forum is dead. It might be dead because I take it offline, or I might let it run a while longer in a Zombie state like TBV and RavishU did for a long time. But the forum will be dead either way. So instead of trying to shoot the messenger, I can only encourage you all to think about what can be done differently this time. I'll be blunt here. I don't need you to tell me that you appreciate the work I put into this. I need you to show your appreciation. And I don't need you to tell me that I am wrong. Prove to me that I am wrong. Voting for the Semi-Final of the contest begins soon. This time, there will be only 4 stories that you can read all within 15 minutes. Participate, vote, comment. Prove to me that I am wrong. If you have the time to write in this topic here, you also have the time for that.

[Claire]

@LtBroccoli Your first post is in large parts a straw man argument. I never said that I base my evaluation of the forum's success on the votes in the contest. I said the problem is the lack of engagement in the forum and I used the recent Quarter-Final of the tournament as an example. If the forum had received tons of comments and only the contest had a bad reception, I would never have created this announcement. I only used the contest as an example because the hurdle to participation is so extremely low.

The second point you made about time being an issue: You are making it sound as if I said that people should abandon whatever they have to do to comment here. And if you geuinely have no time to be here, fair enough. I'll be the last person to tell you that you should not go watch your child's football practice to be here instead. This is not the point. The point is: There are people here that seem to have enough time to read the stories here. And if you have half an hour to read a story here, than you also have another 5 minutes to write 5 cohesive sentences about what you read to motivate the author to keep writing more. Don't make it sound as if I have some unrealistic expectation of peoples' time.

Second point is, that this argument is dripping with hypocrisy. I just outlined in the post above how much time and effort I put into this place. But even just running this site costs me more time than it would the average user to comment on, let's say, three stories per week. I am not only an active member of the community, I have to organize things. So necessarily I'm spending more time here than the average user. And all I am saying in my announcement here is: I maintain the right to evaluate after three months whether this forum is worth my time and effort and after 1 month it is not looking good. If I say that, then I am premature in my assessment, then I am hasty, then I should spend this time and effort for a fourth, a fifth, a sixth month to see whether it is worth it. But when you can't bring yourself to write a single comment on at least one story after 1 month, then your time constraint is a valid reason for that behavior. If that isn't hypocrisy, I don't know what is. I never judged anyone here who genuinely said they simply didn't have the time to be here, not once. I would appreciate it if you and the rest of the community extended to me that same courtesy.

Also, not everyone is comfortable making comments. Let's be honest, we're making porn. There's a lot of readers who just want to read, bust a nut, and leave. A thumbs up or kudos is more than a lot of readers will ever give. It's great to get comments and gives us that high to keep us going, but I know that outside of a few people we won't get tons of comments. It's across the entire genre.

And there it is, the reason why every single one of the forums in our niche is gone by now. This internalized narrative is what has destroyed them all. And it is so convenient, because it means that nothing can be done about that anyway if you believe that. What does this narrative do? It fosters a culture of passive consumption, like for porn videos. And that culture reduces the size of the community to the number of authors that are willing to write and post their work despite receiving little to no feedback at all. Those are few and far between. Then, the community only exists in a zombie state for a while, like RavishU or TBV, inactive, little engagement. And the moment some real life problem comes along, the site is shut down because it is just not worth the effort. Read the announcement on TBV that says they are closing the place, it is still online. It says essentially that. What about RavishU? RavishU still exists, I have a backup of it on my home PC. The owner of RavishU, Lois, obviously has one too. She could look for another host anytime if she wanted to. But why should she? She had abandoned RavishU for years at that point and kept it running out of inertia. But when it was taken down this time, it was just not worth the effort. And I get it. Why revive a zombie?

So this is what this is all about. Can we overcome that self-destructive mindset that Broccoli has described there that is ultimately responsible for killing each and every one of those places? If we, like he suggests, accept this as an unchangeable fact, we don't need to wait three months. Then I can shut down this forum right here, right now. There is no point then. Any project that accepts this mindset as unchangeable is doomed to fail from the start. I don't believe that and I don't view my own writing as porn but as erotic fiction. My invitation to all of you is to help me try overcome that mindset, to do it differently this time. This place is designed to sustain itself once it reaches a certain level of activity. But we need to get there first. Make me believe in two months from now that this is possible, and I will keep trying. But if you all tell me right now that you believe wholeheartedly that Broccoli is right and that therefore there is nothing that can be done, then we can end this experiment here tomorrow.

[Vela Nanashi]

As for me, I would like to say, I do not think it is the authors here that are the biggest problem, but we are also the ones who know best how it feels to not get feedback, and how good feedback feels, and I would love to see us form a tight knit writers/authors club/group of sorts where we read each other's stories and comment on them, since we understand and can feel what that means. I hope to at least read one story from each of my fellow authors and comment on them, then I will likely focus mostly on authors who return the favour or engage with my comment in a good way, also I am not really that tightly connected to the main theme of the forum, so there are for me rather few stories that truly capture what I would enjoy (less real world stuff). Still I find some things in many stories that I can angle myself to enjoy on some level sometimes at least.

Now I know there was a good feedback culture on another site that does not exist anymore motherless.mx, that now only lives on as an email list, though it has been silent for a while now, I suppose I did not engage a lot with it... I recall guiding some refugees from RU there, and posting some of my own stories and getting comments on those, and also trying to read and comment as well. There I was in a very tiny niche though, and most of the content was really not for me there either.

Perhaps a few authors from there can find a home here, though I suppose most wanted things we don't have here, and I do not really want that stuff myself, I just find it sad that so many sites end up dying.

I believe if we do put in the effort here to comment on each other's stories, and for you readers out there who don't write stories, know that it really means a lot when we get comments, and you don't have to make some sort of profound enlightened comment, just tell us something you enjoyed, what you would like to see more of maybe, any thoughts provoked by the story, and yes some of us may even enjoy hearing if you had a good time while reading the story, maybe not all of us, but some would enjoy that.

Also if you happen to be scared to comment, you can reach here by free vpn from for example proton.me, at least I think they still offer a free tier, you can then create an account with the free email they also provide, and you can then create a user name that is anonymous, and post, thus being rather decently anonymised, also you could go further to get even better anonymity, but I am not quite that much of an expert there.

Also those of you who just read, without registering, know that all servers on the internet, unless the admin goes truly out of their way to not do that, log your ip, and every page you visit, so you are not anonymous unless you take great efforts to gain that. We can't turn that off on our web host, of course we don't use that ourselves, in fact we have avoided adding tracking things to the site so far, some would think we are insane not to have added those though.

Anyway, just please try to add a small comment if you read a story, or a large one if you feel like it, I find I can write more if I do running commentary, it is not a style for most people though. Also if you comment you can get reputation from authors, and will gain access to stories that will end up hidden behind the reputation wall, sure we don't yet have any there, but you may as well start to gain that as I am sure we will get stories there

[LaLia]

So if we know what the problem is on other sites and what failed on sites that have already been closed, then that should be even more of an incentive to do better here. Saying "that's just the way it is and there's nothing we can do about it" is about as bad as "it's always been done this way, so we're not going to change the way it's done."

I think we should give each other much more feedback, especially among ourselves (i.e., authors), as Vela mentioned. Unfortunately, there are still a lot of people here who write their own stories but don't read or comment on other people's stories. It's a shame that people want feedback but don't take the time to comment. At the moment, the number of stories isn't our problem; we're doing quite well in that regard, given the time we've spent so far. But I don't understand what's so difficult about creating a kind of mutual solidarity!? And yes, you don't always have time—no one is asking for it. But: We have about 1,500 posts in the forum so far. Of those, only Claire, Vela, Shocker, and I have written around 1,200 posts. The comparison doesn't fit for me, and in the long run, this general inactivity will become a problem.

Of course, one can hope that things will improve with more members. But as a potential new member, I can see that too and would currently consider whether to post anything here, or I'm in danger of falling into that pattern myself.

Therefore, I'm asking you not to simply accept this "it's just the way it is," but to help make things better. If everyone wrote five posts per week, that would already be progress. A small effort for each of us individually, but a huge gain for the board. And by the way: it's not just the comments; even the rating is weak so far. Most stories have only been rated by three or four people so far.

[RSlice]

I'm sure once there is more members it will help get more feedback on stories.

I know Im more into like home invasion style stories or larger groups that have multiple couples/familys. Thats why I cant really provide much feedback on majority of the stories Ive read or even partially read on here so far. Just havent really gotten one of those members. I know DarlLord is on here and he wrote some banger stories back on RU and bob202 has made his way here aswell so I'm gonna be encouraged to write aswell soon enough again.

Still waitimg to see if a few of the others from RU I was talking about end up finding this place like countmein and hediho (who says he is slimfatter)

If we can pick up more members like that I'll be more active with posting and feedbacking personally

[LaLia]

I'm sure once there is more members it will help get more feedback on stories.

I know Im more into like home invasion style stories or larger groups that have multiple couples/familys. Thats why I cant really provide much feedback on majority of the stories Ive read or even partially read on here so far. Just havent really gotten one of those members. I know DarlLord is on here and he wrote some banger stories back on RU and bob202 has made his way here aswell so I'm gonna be encouraged to write aswell soon enough again.

Still waitimg to see if a few of the others from RU I was talking about end up finding this place like countmein and hediho (who says he is slimfatter)

If we can pick up more members like that I'll be more active with posting and feedbacking personally

I'll let you know when I write a story like this in English

But aside from that, regarding reading and commenting: I also have my own particular preferences, and not every story here fully satisfies them. So, I don't always get totally horny when I read them, but there are also great stories whose sexual content isn't quite to my taste, but they're still damn worth reading.

[boooboo2]

Please don't end it. I just found it by accident after the RU shut down!

[LtBroccoli]

@Claire Here's a big reason why people don't comment on porn stories. Embarrassment. There's been tons of stories I've read over the years that I "enjoyed" but never said a word about. Why? Because I don't want proof that I was turned on by it to come out. Best case scenario, that's a long and awkward conversation with friends and family. Worst case, I lose everything. And I'm not the only person in this boat. That goes double for sites like this one. If I'm making comments on Literotica or AO3 or Pornhub, there's some deniability about the content. But sites like here, TBV and RU there's no doubt what we're into.

I'll give an example. Last year, a politician in the states was running for Governor of North Carolina. He was already having a hard time, but a few weeks before the election his comment history from some porn sites came out and made national news. He got curb stomped at the polls.

I want to bring my library over. Right now I don't have any stories online except for the few from TBV and that's going dark in a few weeks. I just want to make sure this site is going to be here long enough to justify it. I could post one chapter from one of my stories every day for a year and still not have the entire catalog posted. One story alone would be 3 months of posting.

And if people are feeling burned out, ask for help. Running a site is tough, but it's doable with a good team. The hardest part is getting things up and running. Once the site is rolling for a few months, it takes on a life of its own. But getting it out of the nursery is the big hurdle.