Before I answer your replies here individually, I would like to say one general thing: This is not about anybody's individual reasons why they don't comment. I know that there are plenty of reasons why someone doesn't want to comment or feel like they shouldn't.
- I'm not qualified to comment on any story.
- I feel ashamed for being into rape fantasy.
- I don't want my criticism to be misunderstood as me not liking the story at all.
- I just want to jerk off.
- I have something to say, but to register on an adult forum for that? I don't know... what if somebody finds out that this is me?
These and a billion other reasons are probably what keep people from commenting. I get it. It's not hard to understand. But here is the point: Those reasons always exist whether the community is small or large. Let's say these reasons turn 9 out of 10 people into passive consumers. Then you would still expect that 5 times as much activity increases the number of people that provide feedback on average because that share of 10% that are willing to engage would grow in absolute numbers, too. And until now, it hasn't except for the momentary spike in activity during the RiaF semi-final and final. We might right now just see another activity spike for the
Gang Rape Galore contest. And it will be interesting to see whether that will persist even after the contest is over.
And then there is the defeatist attitude that many express when discussing this issue. They look at the reasons I've mentioned and others and don't even begin to ask the question whether anything can be done about these reasons. If people feel ashamed about their kink, then how we as a community present ourselves to the outside world is key in addressing this. If someone stumbles over this forum and sees that commenting is normal, that these stories have quickly 5 different people saying something interesting without sounding like total creeps in the process, then this projects that being here and participating is nothing to be ashamed about but normal.
And the resistance to commenting in this community is comically large at this point. I said it in my initial post already, but I can't keep track anymore of the number of people that have thanked me personally. But basically 0 of them have drawn the conclusion that it would maybe be a good idea to show that gratitude by giving some attention to the creative work of the three people running this place. Shortly after the launch, I had a person in chat offer me money to help me cover the costs of running this place. That same person has been online here regularly since. Before the RiaF quarter-final, they told me that they would like to read my quarter-final story but I could not show it to them because I had to stay anonymous for the contest. When I told them that they could read one of my short stories to get a feeling for what my writing is like, they said they didn't want to read it because it might help them identify me in the contest, but that they would read and comment on the quarter-final stories. They didn't, not for the quarter-final, not the semi-final, not the final nor did they read anything I wrote. That person's account still sits at 0 posts. This person has taken the time to chat with me for 30 minutes in private to talk about the financial cost of running the forum, but has in two months not managed to spend 15 minutes of their time to read a short story I wrote and say something encouraging about it. And I know that this is an anecdote. But it is emblematic of the larger point I'm trying to make. What this community needs to understand, is this:
- It needs to motivate the authors who provide the stories they want to read to keep writing.
- It needs to signal to the people running the plattform that the stories are published on that they are not wasting their time, effort and money.
If you look at the first point you need to realize something. The people that keep posting stories here are weird. And I am saying that with great affection and include myself in that statement. The majority of people don't keep writing when nobody engages with their work. The people you saw on RavishU were the ones that were left because they could keep doing this without getting substantial feedback. That is called self-selection bias or survivorship bias. Again and again the rape fantasy community is reduced to the small group of authors that can do without feedback. But that small group is ultimately not enough to sustain the community and inevitably one community after the other dies. When I first made that point on RavishU, I included the following example in my post:
Discouraged authors leave this site which then attracts even less readers which reduces engagement even further. Authors like sleepwalking_daddy, who wrote a massively popular story with 27000+ views, make this point explicitly:
Sadly, my decision to pause the story has been reinforced in the last few days. In less than a week, the last part was clicked about 800 times, and only one reader felt compelled to leave a comment. But that's the way it is these days. People always want everything, but nobody wants to do anything for it, even if it would cost nothing in this case except two minutes of their time.
I've really lost all motivation to continue my story in the foreseeable future.
(Translated from German with DeepL) (There was a link here that obviously no longer works)
And that was not an isolated case on RavishU. On a forum with probably 10+ times our current traffic, authors with 27.000 views on their story left because they saw little to no engagement. That is the normal reaction. We are the weird ones for staying despite this.
That brings us to the second point: The people running the plattform having no reason to keep doing so. RavishU was taken down by its host, yes, but the forum still exists. I know because I have a backup of it on my PC. That is where I pulled that quote from that you just read. Lois has that too. If she wanted to, she could look for a new host anytime and get the forum back up. And we are talking here about a forum with 76,000 posts and 27,000 registered accounts accumulated over 20 years. That is a tremendous history. The data is still there. But why would she? Given the state that RavishU was in: Largely unmoderated, the forum structure a mess, the userbase at large inactive, stories being passively consumed but not commented on. What reason does she have to bring it back online? Let's be real here. Lois for all intents and purposes abandoned the place years ago. She was online like once every 6 months. She kept it running not because she was invested in it, but out of inertia, because she had no reason to take it down on her own. And when it went belly up because of the host, she shrugged and let it die.
RavishU was a zombie forum long before it was officially taken down. Do you have any idea how easy it would have been to get RavishU into an up to date state? RavishU ran on the Simple Machine Forum software version 2.0.17. That was released in 2019. SMF is considered outdated but even its newest version 2.1.4 is from 2023. RavishU could have been converted into a MyBB forum, another more modern forum software that offers much more functionality similar to what you see on the forum here. They could have done this over the course of a weekend. I know, because I did exactly that to get the backup running on my home PC. And I'm not some super tech savvy girl who does this kind of thing easily. Ask Vela, she knows I'm a dumb dumb when it comes to this stuff. You could have had ratings for topics, mentions and a decent reputation system for users for years on RavishU. And it didn't happen because nobody running the place cared.
It was essentially the same on The Black Van. I made this point in the announcement two weeks after launch but I will repeat here:
Claire wrote: Mon Apr 21, 2025 8:56 amThe thread announcing its closure has more views (2,600) than any content on the site. The reason given was:
ZipTiesThatBind wrote:It has been our pleasure to provide you all with a space to indulge in our particular kink for these past few years. Unfortunately, both of us admins have gone through quite a few major life changes during this time, and we’ve come to the sad realization that neither of us can give the forum the time and proper attention it takes to run the place anymore. (Source:
The Black Van - Forum Closure)
Do you think that The Black Van would have gone down if instead of 537 users after three years it would have had 10,000 and story threads with long discussions extending over hundreds of posts? What this quote says is this: This place is not important enough to invest time into it when real life comes knocking on the door with other issues.
And that is it: A host taking down RavishU or the admins of TBV having other issues to attend to might be the proximate causes for these plattforms no longer existing. But the real reason is that the admins came to the conclusion that it was just not worth the time, effort (and money) to keep the place going when some outside force interfered. And make no mistake: This will be the reason when the Ravishment Academy goes down and when the place after this one goes down too. The proximate cause might be the host, real life issues, me being aware about the real reason and not wanting to see that script play out until the end, or whatever the admins of the next place will cite as the reason. But the true cause is: For a community with a feedback culture so poor that it drives away the vast majority of potentially interested authors it is just not worth it to invest the time and effort.
To bring this back to the start of my post: It is not about you and your individual reasons. It is about what can be done about the structural issues that have facilitated that passive consumer culture in the first place. The Ravishment Academy is designed on a structural level to maintain user activity once a base level of activity is established that regularly gets stories promoted to Popular Story level and Community Favorite level. For me, the real launch of the forum will be the moment the first story becomes a Community Favorite. The question is whether we will get there. You can be a part of getting us there by commenting and rating stories and rating the feedback you find valuable on your own stories or others'.
