Comments about comments

[Blue]

Hello @Claire
Regarding comments, I'm close to @KittyUmbrass. Comments are the icing on the cake, so far. But if none come? So what...
I write and post stories whenever I feel like it. Voluntarily! Whether someone actually leaves a comment is secondary to me.

I only comment on stories or sections of them if I like them. Or if there's something really important to criticize.

I don't always read all the stories to the "bitter end." There are parts that don't interest me at all. For example, if the stories are set somewhere and sometime in the distant future. I do enjoy reading fantasy, etc., but not with the idea that they might contain rape scenes. And if I only read some of those stories or not at all, then understandably there are no comments.

But regarding the forum's visibility, I have an idea.
We're supposed to use one of the disclaimers you've prepared when posting new stories, if possible. Couldn't we include the term "Ravishu Academy" in the disclaimer somewhere appropriate? If the disclaimer is placed before a story, search engines can surely find it, right?

[Claire]

@KittyUmbrass I will be honest, when words like "obsession", "extortion" and "policing" are thrown into my face as part of our exchange, I really don't feel inclined to respond to that. But I will try to address what you said nevertheless. So let me start by clarifying by what I said:

My ability and willingness to invest the time, effort and money to run this place without getting much in return from this community is limited. Just as you maintain the right for yourself to say "I don't want to spend my time reading, commenting and rating stories" so do I have the right to say "I don't want to spend my time building a story archive for people to consume but not engage with the stories on it." That is not extortion. That is me drawing a personal boundary so that I don't run head first into a sunk cost fallacy. What I am doing with my announcements here is this: I am letting you know what I think, what I want, what is at stake. From what I understand, the TBV announcement to close the place surprised many users. Before I just shut down this forum one day, I inform you about where we are headed right now. Rather than suddenly one day dropping the hammer on you and putting you in front of closed doors without prior notice, I am giving you agency before it is too late already. What you do with this information and that agency is up to you.

If you don't share the vision I have for this forum that is fine. I truly wish you would realize that the ideas you have communicated in your post are part of the reason why the places you miss so much no longer exist. But if you believe that I am wrong about my assessment of what killed all these communities one by one, fair enough. Let's agree to disagree. However, if you want this place to have a future, then what I am telling you is this: Your voice matters. In a community this small, every person that finds it in them to write 3 comments per week on stories they read makes a difference. It doesn't have to end here like it did on Rape Cage, TBV and RavishU, but I cannot do this alone. And imitating those places that failed will get us nowhere.

Then I would like to say: I never made a secret out of what I wanted this place to be. Every new user receives a welcome PM that says early on:

I would like to encourage you not to stay a passive student but to engage with the stories, the role plays, the authors and other students here. The truth is, forums like these tend to fail because authors lose their motivation to keep writing due to a lack of feedback. That is what we want to do differently here. Whether it's as an author yourself or as a passionate reader, we want to hear your thoughts on the stories you find here.

That is what this place is about, always has been. So you, and everybody else, has literally signed up for this. Nothing I am saying is new.

When you can do without any engagement with your creative work, that is great! Seriously, no sarcasm here. But as you noted yourself: You belong to a small minority of people here.

Then, if you don't find the discussion topics here that you would like to see, create them! There is o disagreement here between you and me. I would love it if somebody created a topic in the book club with the title "What are your three favorite stories on the forum?" or a "This was my most recent D&D campaign" in the Dining Hall. If you want to play some game word game, do so in the Dining Hall. I am not stopping anybody from doing this. What I will not do is create a billion different sub boards for niche topics unrelated to the core of the forum. There is a general purpose board for non erotic-fiction related topics and if it ever turns out that some form of content completely dominates that space, then I would consider creating a sub board for that. But I will not prematurely fragment the forum into a billion sub boards with most of them ending up as islands of inactivity. Because that does tremendous damage to communities.

The best way to train people to comment is to have fun, light-hearted conversations, games, and such.

If that was true, then TBV, RapeCage and RavishU would have been thriving communities. They weren't. RavishU I experienced myself. The games and other non-story related content did not create a thriving community that then created spillover back into the story threads. TBV is very to assess. I said this before, I'll say it again: 537 registered accounts after 3 years, barely any discussions and views on story threads: Whatever games people played there and whatever happened there in chat, it did not create a thriving community around the core content of the forum. That leaves RapeCage. I remember visiting RapeCage once or twice as an unregistered user. My only impression of the place was that it looked even more like a barren wasteland than RavishU did. After reading your comment, I wondered whether I misremembered the place, so I took a look at it with the wayback machine.

https://web.archive.org/web/20200123104 ... /index.php

This here is a snapshot of the index page of RapeCage from January 2020. The main content of the forum seems to be the "Rape Fantasy Stories" board in the Fiction section and the "One on One Roleplays" in the RolePlay section. So let's take a closer look at those.

https://web.archive.org/web/20200209094 ... board=13.0

This is a snapshot of the Rape Fantasy Stories board from February 2020. It shows 17 stories on the front page. The most commented on thead has 11 replies. 4 of those stories sit at 0 replies. The last post on the first story thread at the top was created February 7 2020. The story at the bottom of the page, the 17th one, had its last reply January 15 2020. So the difference in last replies at the top and the bottom of the board is roughly three weeks. Let's compare this with the stories here. As of me writing this now, the last reply gap between the first and the 17th story is 21 hours (03 Jun 2025, 15:36 vs. 02 Jun 2025, 18:39). We are doing so much better here already than RapeCage did after it was at least 4 years old.

https://web.archive.org/web/20200209094 ... board=17.0

This is a snapshot of the RapeCage One on One RolePlay board. It has threads with high post counts but relatively low view counts. I can not look inside those threads. But those numbers suggest to me that these threads likely consisted of short roleplay posts by the two partners and very few comments from outsiders. The low view counts suggest that these views are primarily driven by the authors themelves returning to the topics over and over again. You add to that that RapeCage used SMF as its forum software and that therefore quite a few views were generated by Google bot and other bots (phpBB does not count a view by a bot if it recognizes a bot, hence the view count is less inflated here), and you see another sub board with very little engagement.

I don't want to sound mean. But a very quick look at the very community that you hold up as an example for how creating games and a chat generate comments on stories (and roleplays) refutes the very point you are trying to make. And don't get me wrong. If you want to create some word game thread in the Dining Hall, I am not stopping you. But the idea that this will create a more engaged community that then generates feedback for authors? That idea is simply refuted by the evidence. It has worked on none of the three forums I looked at. Unless something drastically changed on RapeCage over the course of its last two years, but I could not find a snapshot of it in the wayback machine from close before it was taken down.

However, if we get this community to work as I intend, then you will get not only more authors and story related discussions. You will get more people to chat, roleplay and play games with than you ever had on any of these other communities. If we make this here a place where authors love to publish their stories because they can be sure that they will get 10+ comments in 24 hours, then there will be no shortage of people here to play games with.

[Vela Nanashi]

I would personally like to have a double layer Publication system:

All authors can post and see their own stories in:
1. Prerelease, for Pillars of the Community forum.
then after X days, or when scheduled to by author (if I figure out the scheduling feature I want to make) the post moves to:
2. Prerelease, for Registered users forum. Then after Y days, or when scheduled to by author (if I figure out the scheduling feature I want to make) it moves to:
3. Public Stories (where guests can see the stories) and the rest works like now.

Prerelease, for Pillars of the Community forum: can be read by Pillars of the Community
Prerelease, for Registered users forum: can be read by registered users.

Then I want authors who have shown they would be pillars of the community by receiving points only from their comments on others stories will be allowed to bypass 1 and 2 entirely to post directly on Public Stories if they want, but they may still post in 1 and 2.

Authors who are pillars of the community for stories and maybe they did a comment too, can choose to bypass 1, but not 2.

X and Y would be minimum days that a story stays in the Prerelease forums, and the scheduling can not override that unless the author could have bypassed the forums by choice.

That is my current idea for how I would like it to work, and yes I really want feedback on this idea and Claire's idea, and hear other ideas, more ideas about how to help get more people motivated to become good commenters would be very nice to see.

[KittyUmbrass]

@KittyUmbrass I will be honest, when words like "obsession", "extortion" and "policing" are thrown into my face as part of our exchange, I really don't feel inclined to respond to that.

I didn't say "extortion". I said (mistyped) "exhortation".

"Policing" was directed at the OP, not you.

"Obsession" - yes, that is just me expressing what it feels like from where I'm sitting. I am reflecting the emotions and impressions that I have got as a result of seeing regular posts about not enough comments on stories.

I don't want things to get even more heated, I just wanted to express what this place feels like to me right now. I want it to be better, and I want it to go on existing. (Hey, in the last week I made a point of reading more stories and posting at least short "keep it up" type comments even if I had nothing better to say on the ones I liked!)

Right now, Ravishment Academy seems to be the only show in town, and as long as that's the case, I'll do my best to make it successful, and feel like home. I'm not going to start posting games threads until there's a dedicated games board, because Dining Hall doesn't come across like a place where they belong and my neurodivergence finds that a huge impediment, but you know the other things I've been trying to do, and there's other things I hope to try as well.

So, I am doing my small bit, as best I can.

I hope my honest feedback can be taken in that spirit as well.

[Blue]

@Claire:
For me, it wouldn't matter at all whether a newly published story was visible to all readers immediately or only after a few days. After all, it's up to me whether and when I post a story. And whether feedback would then only be possible after a few days doesn't concern me either. So, I definitely consider this a good suggestion.

[Claire]

Hello @Claire
Regarding comments, I'm close to @KittyUmbrass. Comments are the icing on the cake, so far. But if none come? So what...
I write and post stories whenever I feel like it. Voluntarily! Whether someone actually leaves a comment is secondary to me.

Blue, I tried to tell you and others this before: If you don't care about getting feedback, that is totally fine. It is expected. In a community where feedback is rare, obviously only those remain who can do without it. So that the number of people that claim that they don't need feedback is high here on this forum is obvious: The people who need it have long since left the rape fantasy community behind. I want the vast majority of people that do care to be here, too. And while I don't like to talk about individuals when it comes to reasons for commenting or not commenting, let me say this: If we had something like 10 or 20 people as active as you, the forum would probably be fine. You were never an example of someone who doesn't comment. Maybe you don't remember but I highlighted you specifically in a past announcement as someone who helps carry this forum.

Regarding your suggestion for visibility: That would not change much. People searching for the forum directly already get it shown as the first result on Google. Our next goal has to be to get found for more specific terms like "rape fantasy" or "noncon story" or something like that. But the forum's name directly is already as findable as it gets.

[Claire]

@KittyUmbrass I'm sorry for misinterpreting that word. I never read or heard the word "exhortation" before and even with the correct spelling I had to look up what it means. So, I'm sorry for getting that wrong.

[KittyUmbrass]

Our next goal has to be to get found for more specific terms like "rape fantasy" or "noncon story" or something like that. But the forum's name directly is already as findable as it gets.

Good news:

I've had a tab open in my browser with DuckDuckGo search for "rape fantasy board" basically since TBV went down, and check it regularly.

Today, when I took a look, guess what was the top result?

Ravishment Academy Book Club board!

[RapeU]

Gotta keep in mind that google is somewhat personalized. A quick peak of your profile shows your most active forum is the book club forum, so your google experience will differ based on someone who has never visited this forum before.

Don't ask me how it works, I just know it works like that because I used to have a hobby where, using a throwaway youtube account, I would troll 9/11 truthers and other conspiracy nutjobs with overwhelming evidence and when they would say "do your own research" or "google this" I would tell them about personalized results (which I found out from someone doing the same thing I was doing) and say that they are personalized to their nonsense conspiracy woo and they were too afraid to branch out.

[KittyUmbrass]

Gotta keep in mind that google is somewhat personalized. A quick peak of your profile shows your most active forum is the book club forum, so your google experience will differ based on someone who has never visited this forum before.

If that's directed at me, what Google does is irrelevant. I search using DuckDuckGo, whose main selling point is that they don't track your search history or anything else. So, appearing at the top in a DuckDuckGo search is actually significant!